21.
“But if I had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.”
—“FIRE AND ICE,” 1920
The road to Summit Lake is off the main highway, fifteen minutes or so out of town, and is definitely out of our way, but there’s no other place this trip should begin. If we’re searching for a different ending to Julianna’s story, we need to start where the original version ended. When Trevor makes the turn off the highway, the road narrows as if that’s the only way it can manage to hug the side of the mountain it puts us on. We all kind of go quiet when we round the first turn and the view unfolds in front of us, grand and dramatic, and in my mind, a bit sinister, too.
The edge of the road may as well be the edge of the earth, the drop is so sheer. When I was little, I’d cower in the back with my hands over my eyes on roads like this, scared that the slightest shift of the steering wheel would send us right off the edge. Today I look out my window, first across to the other side of the gorge, which is thick with the green of aspen trees, and then down, down, down to the bottom, where icy snowmelt flows, fast and unforgiving. The sight of it makes me doubt everything I’ve come up with about the possibility of Julianna still being alive. It would take more than a miracle to survive the plunge from the road to the bottom of the gorge.
“I wonder what the hell they were doing out here,” Kat says from the back seat. “You know? This road is scary enough in broad daylight, with no snow on it.”
“Maybe it was an accident they ended up here,” Trevor says. “Everyone’s always said he was drunk when they left. Maybe they were trying to go out to the Grove or something and got confused. Who knows?” He shrugs, but keeps both hands firm on the steering wheel, his eyes never leaving the road as we wind around another curve. There could be a million different reasons, but there’s no one to ask.
We pass a yellow sign that says SCENIC OVERLOOK, with a picture of a camera on it, and then the dirt turnout it refers to. “Maybe they were looking for a place to talk . . . or park,” I say. “Like one of these spots.” It’s not an uncommon thing for kids in our town to go driving out into the boonies to “talk.” There are plenty of awe-inspiring spots with views that people go out to under the pretense of looking at them.
Kat leans forward on my seat. “I bet she told him about Orion that night—at the party, and that’s why they left. And then maybe they got in a fight, and he drove out here. That could happen if you were drunk and pissed off.”
“Yeah.” I nod. “It probably could.” I shiver a little at the thought of Julianna telling Shane on this road. In a snowstorm, when he’d been drinking. Finding out something like that might make it easy, in a moment of hurt or anger, to turn the steering wheel just enough to do something you could never take back.
We round another curve and pass another SCENIC OVERLOOK sign, and the view from this one really is worthy of the title. From this vantage point you can see where the icy water of the river tumbles into the lake and then disperses into the stillness of it almost immediately, like it’s been swallowed by the depth and the cold. Summit Lake is one of the deepest in the country, breathtakingly beautiful, and the quintessential summer image of our town. Every Summit Lakes postcard or calendar has a shot of this lake, a blue-green gem nestled at the base of glacier-carved granite mountains. It’s dramatic, and striking, but to me it’s always been a distant, cold, kind of beautiful. It’s a place with a history of tragedy. Shane and Julianna are just one chapter.
The road begins its descent as it wraps around to the south shore of the lake. We pull into the empty parking lot, and Trevor parks facing the water, then cuts the engine and is quiet a moment. Kat is too for once, and I think it’s because we’re all sitting here looking at the water, half in the shadow, half in the sun, thinking about Julianna Farnetti. I am. I’m wondering whether she’s beneath its surface, deep in the blue water so dark it looks black, together forever with Shane Cruz, like she was supposed to be according to everyone else; or whether she somehow escaped that fate, slipped out of the lake, and found her way to a new life, far away from here and from who she was before.
“Shall we?” Trevor asks.
I nod.
We all open our doors to get out, and when we shut them, the sound echoes off the sharp, sheer ridges of granite, like three muted shots. Then silence. Kat hugs her arms to her chest. “God, this place gives me the creeps.”
“Can’t imagine why,” Trevor says. “Between those kids that fell through the ice and the guys who tried to save them, and Shane and Julianna, it’s got its fair share of ghosts floating around.” He grins. “No pun intended.”
He’s right. It’s one of those places steeped in stories that go back even past our childhoods. There was a girl, probably around Julianna’s age, whose dad drowned in this lake, along with a school bus driver, when they both tried to save four boys who had walked out onto the ice and fallen through. Before that there was a bloody shoot-out between a group of escaped convicts and the sheriffs who’d chased them there—one that ended with the sheriffs being dumped in the lake and supposedly haunting its shores for years after. And long before that there was the legend of a Paiute boy who disrespected the lake’s power and was swallowed by the water, never to be seen again.
“Ha. Ha.” Kat rolls her eyes, then runs them over the surface of the water. “Funny, except nobody floats here. They all sink to the bottom, then slip down the center of the hourglass.” She shivers. “Ugh. You couldn’t pay me all the money in the world to go swimming in this lake. For exactly that reason.”
“Oh, come on,” Trevor says. “The bottom is so far down there, I’m sure they’re all long gone now.”
“Okay, that’s enough.” Kat turns to me. “Why did we need to come here again?”
“I just wanted to see if . . . if there’s anything else here to find out. Or . . . I don’t know.” I look across the glass surface of the water, blue-green around the edges and in the places the sunlight has reached. The rest of the water is a nameless color so dark it gives nothing away. It just reflects all my questions back, sharp and impassive, like a mirror. The stillness of it is unnerving. Like it’s holding its breath, waiting for us to do something.
“Come on,” I say. “Let’s walk. I think there’s a memorial near those trees.” I point to a cluster of aspens at the lake’s edge and we cross the parking lot.
There’s a narrow trail that follows the wavy edge of the lake, dotted with forest service signs detailing the history and geology of it. They’re the types of signs only tourists and old people usually stop to read, but while Kat and Trevor walk on, I linger at the first one. It’s a series of pictures showing how the surrounding mountains burst out of the ground as a result of fiery volcanoes, and then the canyons and gorges between them were carved out and scoured over thousands of years by slow-moving glaciers. Its title is “Fire and Ice.” Like the Frost poem, and a line from Julianna’s journal about the night she and Orion went to the hot springs and kissed under a blanket of stars. I make a mental note to look the actual poem up when we get back to the car. It seems fitting that there’s a reference here. Her world, the one that she knew, with Shane as her constant, ended with fire—the desire for Orion. And then it ended again, here, in the ice of the river and lake. Or maybe it didn’t.
I jog a few steps to catch up to where Kat and Trevor have stopped. I was right about the memorial. Raised up from the ground on a cement platform is one of those oversize, bronze plaques. It has a permanent vase at the top, filled with snowy white flowers, which I’m sure are kept up by the Cruz family, who probably also installed the memorial. The inscription below the vase reads:
In loving memory of
Shane Cruz
and
Julianna Farnetti,
Two stars
Whose light was gone too soon.
I read it over two more times, focusing on the words and wondering if Josh has ever come out here and what he must’ve thought when he looked at those words. I can’t imagine what it must’ve been like for him in the beginning, not to be able to show the depth of his grief for her or what it meant. Not to be acknowledged as someone who lost her. If I were him, I don’t think I would’ve ever come out here. I would’ve stayed away, and then, if I wanted to go somewhere to feel near to her, I’d go to McCloud, which even I thought of now as their special, secret place.
“So what do you think, Frost?” Trevor says. “Is she here? Or are we going to find her?”
“We’re gonna find her,” Kat says. “I know we are.”
I glance down at the plaque, then out over the lake, trying to feel what I really believe. “I don’t know,” I say softly. And it’s the truth. I really can’t say.
“Well then,” Trevor replies, “let’s get on the road and go find out.”
Kat squeezes her arms tighter to her chest and nods. “Yeah. Let’s get going. This is pretty and meaningful and all that crap, but I’ve had enough of this place.”
“You guys go ahead. I’ll be there in a minute,” I say.
“You all right?” Kat asks.
“Yeah, yeah, I just want to stay another minute. I’ll meet you at the car.”
“Whatever you say.”
She and Trevor turn and head back down the trail in the direction we came from. I watch for a moment, half-curious if I’ll see a glance pass between them or her hand on his arm—something that might explain why she invited him to come along, but there’s nothing. I look back over the still surface of the lake like maybe I’ll hear something if I listen close enough. But the only sound comes from the other side where the river meets it in a constant hush. An indistinguishable whisper.
Don’t be here, under the water, I say to her in my mind. Don’t be a lost love for Orion. Be a miracle. Be alive, and living a beautiful life somewhere new, however impossible it seems. Let me find you because I’m supposed to, and because you’re supposed to be with him. Not just a distant memory. Let me find you so that this means something.
Kat’s voice echoes off the granite mountains, interrupting my prayer/plea. “Parker! Come on! We’re losing road time!”
“Coming!” I shout back.
I take one last look at the lake and decide that we’ll find her. That it’s meant to be. And then I turn and run for Trevor’s car where he, Kat, and fate are waiting for me.