I’m maybe eight or nine, and I’m scared, but I don’t want him to know it. But still, he can tell. He fastens it for me, tugging on the straps. Look, you have a life jacket, he says, same as his. I remember not stepping any closer to the edge, the feeling that my feet were too heavy to move, connected to the earth.
And then Liam reaches out and grabs on to my hand. He’s ten or eleven and had long stopped holding my hand. But he does it then, and says, Turn around.
I stand beside him, our hands interlocked, my feet at the edge, but looking off into the trees instead. Three, he says, and I join him for the rest. Two, in perfect unison. One, and we’re flying. No, we’re falling.
I remember now: We fell together, children who could still hold hands. I saw the sky falling away from us, and it felt like I was sinking into a black hole.
He didn’t let go the whole way down, until the cold water welcomed us and my life jacket pushed me back up to the surface.
Liam popped up beside me, smiling, shaking his hair out. “Again?” he asked.
I scrambled up the bank after him, took the dirt path up and up, to the top of the quarry. Over and over we jumped. Counting down together every time.
Three. Two. One.
I open my eyes.
* * *
—
The room is emptying out. Kennedy stands, alongside Joe. I try to smile at her, but I feel nauseated. Disoriented, like I’m both here and somewhere else at the same time.
“Thanks for staying,” she says, and I nod, heading toward my car. “Nolan?” she calls after me. “Is everything okay?”
I shake my head, and she stares at me, then pivots in the other direction, at something Joe says instead. I can’t hear him through the buzzing in my ears. I keep hearing Liam’s voice in my head; I keep picturing that scene. The trees. The path.
And suddenly Joe is beside us, repeating something. “Is that okay with you, Nolan?”
“Hmm?”
“He’s going to see Elliot, and the lawyers. To ask Elliot about Hunter, and to find out if there’s something he remembers that he’s not telling us. Can I go back with you instead?” she asks.
I nod. “Yeah, of course.”
“Be back by eight tonight, Kennedy,” he says. “And bring your phone. Leave it on, and please, Kennedy, answer it. I’m trusting you here. Both of you.”
She pulls me by the arm to the car, then says, “What happened?”
I shake my head, thinking it’s impossible. I can’t explain it—who would believe it? But then I think: She would. It’s possible. All of this is possible.
“I don’t know,” I say. “You were talking, about the count of three, and…I remembered something.”
“What did you remember?”
I close my eyes. “I remember being somewhere. Some quarry, like a family park? Somewhere my family used to go together, when we were kids. I remember jumping with Liam. I remember him counting down, from three. Just like you said. And…I keep thinking of that picture. The picture in the email.”
Her eyes widen.
“I think I know where the picture was taken,” I say. “I think I know where he wants me to go.”
She takes out her phone, starts searching for things like quarry and park, but we’re coming up empty.
“Come on,” I say. I want to see that picture again, enlarged on the living room table. I’m not sure if my parents are there, if the police are there, if they’re all looking for me, waiting to bring me in for questioning—but I have to try. It feels like Liam is right there, right on the other side of something, like the memory of his fingers linking through my own—like I can just about reach out and touch him.
* * *
—
There are no cars out front when I pull up to the house. Still, we sit in the car alone for a bit, making sure no one is just waiting around the corner, watching for this moment. I step outside, and nothing. Kennedy follows me to the front door—more nothing.
I start to wonder if maybe I’ve been cleared. If anyone has noticed that, once again, I’ve disappeared. If they’ve forgotten about me. Or whether I’ll go inside and find my photo already up on the wall of the missing.
“Hello?” I call, once we’re inside. The house is deserted; it feels deserted, like no one’s been here all day. No leftover scent of food, or dishes in the sink; no mess from Clara or Dave or the other volunteers; no papers left out on the table. It’s like stepping into another dimension.
The only thing with presence here is Liam.
His picture is still sitting on the table, enlarged, so you can’t miss it when you walk through the room. He’s everywhere. He always has been.
Leaning over it, I look closely at the trees, at the trail beyond him. I run my hand over the edges, as if that will tell me something. It seems familiar, in that way of a dream, a premonition. But I’m not sure if I’m projecting here. If I just want to believe, if I want it to be real.
I need to see images from the same location, to compare. The only computer remaining in this house is a new laptop on the dining room table. All the other electronic equipment has been cleared away, as potential evidence, to see whether I was storing the photo elsewhere—if they can trace it back to the source.
I hope the password is the same from when I’ve had to help out my parents, and it is.
Kennedy leans over me as I type. I search for granite quarries plus swimming plus Virginia, and eventually find a link to a place that was shut down several years ago, after a drought. It’s called Old Granite Quarry, and it used to be an open park with a registration hut and a lifeguard station, with a shed for equipment. The article says that the water seeped out over time, drying it out. When I search for Old Granite Quarry, there’s a relatively new article about the land surrounding it recently being purchased by a developer.
The article shows the map overview, from above. Under the image tab on the main search page, there are a few old family pictures of kids jumping into the water or swimming. It’s definitely the place I remember; I just don’t know if it’s the place in the photo.
But I have this feeling. I need to know before the police come back. Before they start prying at my story once more.
I hear a car out front, and I shut the laptop.
“Go. Through the back,” I tell Kennedy.
She heads toward the kitchen, then stops. “Aren’t you coming?”
“They’ve already seen my car. If it’s my parents or the police, I can’t just run, Kennedy. But you don’t have to get sucked into it.”
“I don’t—”
“Go,” I say, and I suddenly understand why she said the same to me, outside the college. There are things you want to protect from each other. Pieces of you that you’d rather not let them see.
I hold my breath when the key in the lock turns, but it’s Mike who pushes open the door. “Nolan?” he calls.
I exhale slowly. “Hey, Mike. Sorry. You scared me.”
He enters the house slowly, closing the door behind him, looking confused. “Uh, your parents have been looking for you.” He looks away, then back. “Everyone’s been looking for you.”
Meaning: the police. Meaning: I’m in trouble, even if I don’t understand why or how.
“I’ve been worried about you, Nolan.”
“Mike, I have to go. I’ll be back. Just, please don’t tell them I was here?”
He shakes his head, then stops. I wonder if he’s remembering his own sister, how she disappeared. If he remembers how it feels to lose someone; if he remembers the desperation to find them.
He walks to the dining room, sits in front of the sole computer, and pretends not to notice me. “The others will be pulling up within the next five minutes,” he says.
“Thank you.” And with that, I’m gone.
* * *
—
It takes an hour and a half to make it to the quarry parking lot, as navigated by the familiar tone of Kennedy’s cell phone.
“Is this it?” she asks, leaning around me.
There’s no sign at the turnoff, and the road is blocked by an old, rusty metal gate.
“I think so.”
She gets out of the car and pushes the gate, which swings open slowly. It looks stiff and heavy, from the way she digs her heels in, leaning her weight into the metal. I inch the car forward and she hops back in.
The road from here is dirt, and it all comes back to me. Bouncing in the backseat with Liam as the car drove over the uneven ground, littered with bumps and potholes. Up ahead is a parking lot, now abandoned. Just a circle of dirt now, surrounded by trees.
The dirt settles when we exit the car, the path ahead leading the way through the trees. I think there used to be a sign here for the quarry ahead, but it’s been replaced with one that instead says: WARNING. NO TRESPASSING.
We take the path, which is only wide enough for one of us at a time, and eventually it opens up at the old ticket counter. The open window area is surrounded by rotted wood from being left uncovered, and it breaks off at the corner when I lean my hand on it. Around back, there’s a storage area, with a locked door.
I push my hip into it, and the door gives with a gust of stale air, like it’s been holding its breath all this time.
Inside is dark and dust-streaked, but there’s a pile of old forgotten furniture—some chairs I can remember my family renting—and there’s a desk with a mini-television on it.