Ben slipped from the shed in the shirt and crusty work gloves, a flashlight under his arm and a trowel weighing down the left pocket of his lacrosse shorts. He lifted his bike from its side and mounted it, tires swishing on the night-damp tar. As he coasted down his driveway, something made Ben look right. In the window of the living room that was also his living room, Ben saw a sliver of the den where Mr. Cillo stood, facing the wall, in the same spot Ben had left him.
Ben rode like a demon, bare calves and thighs numbing fast in the wind. They might notice his bike was gone, not a detail the police would check, but a detail his parents would check, were they sure he had stopped home before running away. They might have found the pills he didn’t swallow in the bushes, another fact they’d leave out when sharing their grief with the officers, who’d seen so much from this neighborhood, being as it was nearly three months since the Cillo girls’ drowning. Do you call it a drowning when you put rocks in your pockets? Ben let these thoughts race through his head, because they distracted him from the maddening fact that it was taking so long to get there. Mira wanted him to go to the quarry, like she had, on a warm night when the wind from his bedroom window blew soft across his belly, a tickle or a kiss. Not like this night, when the wind punished him in proportion to the speed with which he rode, drove him backward, made every rotation of his pedals feel like a Sisyphean feat. Camped beside the front door of his enemy, the night had lured him, and now it fought him.
Or maybe it was the drug.
He couldn’t get to the ledge where she stepped, in bare feet, and fell, weightless, her energy spent by her own race to get to the quarry and the labored hike through, drenched with sweat. It would probably be easier to exhaust yourself than to let adrenaline kick in and begin flailing, trying to save yourself as you dropped one hundred feet into the water. His monkey mind tossed this away—it was too visceral—and he focused on his feet, unfeeling now, two clods at the bottom of his legs that needed to press. He stood, forcing his weight into his feet, and cars slowed as they passed him, surprised to see a bicycle on the highway at this hour, cursing him for being young and reckless.
He reached the rotary in twenty-six minutes. He knew that, despite what his parents had decided to tell the police, they still had to have the quarry in the backs of their minds. And there was the fact that the quarry was a dumping ground for everything, from refrigerators to old paint to bodies. The police would come to the quarry. They might even come to their ledge, his ledge, the place where Mira was sending him. And for that reason, he needed to be inhumanly fast.
Ben coasted into Johnny’s Foodmaster. In the lot sat the usual few abandoned cars in the glow of the store’s after-hours low light. Ben rode wide around the cars, behind the store, past the bike cage and to the end of the asphalt until he reached the woods. His pedals resisted, then his wheels caught traction. He rode as far as the underbrush and the incline allowed, about a quarter of a mile, until mud mired his tires and he could go no farther. He slid off his bike and wrapped his chain twice around a young tree and locked it. The moon was large. He pitched the flashlight deep into the scrub, and covered the bright metallic bits of the bike with branches. Up the hill, the trapezoidal shadow that was the top of the quarry loomed, and he ran his hands through his hair until it stuck up in the front. He rubbed his palms together, but they felt disconnected, so he stopped and began to climb. After a while, the aquatic roar of the expressway grew fainter, and he thought he heard laughter. Shivering, he focused on the crunch of his feet on gravel, walking harder. He patted the note in his pocket, reminding himself that this quest was not something he’d constructed, a distraction from reality. Twice, he stopped to place his hand on his belly and breathe. Alone on the hill, his breath sounds were magnified, and he hated the Darth Vader sound, which he was sure made him seem weak to Mira looking down from heaven. Fixing his breath was something he hadn’t had to do since the year after Coach Freck. He was no longer scared that his parents were spiraling with worry, or that he’d broken into a man’s home. He wasn’t even terrified of what he might find.
It was that some element would be off, and he would not experience it the way she had.
When he reached the clearing, his legs buckled and he staggered to the altar, sinking down. Mica stuck to his knees. The exhaustion was sweet, and he let it wash over him.
“This is how she felt,” he said in his most convincing voice.
His vision was hazy, and again, sleepiness crept in. He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands, speckled with mica, and he felt the tiny shards against his eyelids, working their way in, but he was too tired to care. He sat for a moment, rubbing, until he heard a noise. He froze, listening for far-off sirens and the voices of grown men brandishing flashlights and barking dogs.
“Why did you have to touch her?”
Ben palmed the rock and twisted his upper torso. At the edge of the clearing stood a girl in a ragged, loose-weave sweater.
“I’m hallucinating,” he said in his surest tone, meant to ward away mirages and ghosts.
The image shimmered.
“That’s good,” he whispered. “You are a figment of my imagination. Go away.”
The image shimmered again. Ben made fists and dug at his eyes. He stopped and opened them slowly. The image remained.
“Go away!” he yelled, trying to stand but falling, his legs like water.
“Why did you have to touch us?” the girl said as she came closer, not walking exactly, her feet never grazing the ground. Ben fell and scrambled back to his feet, backed up and fell again, his legs sprawled. As he neared the tip of the altar, rocks came loose underneath and tumbled over the lip.
Ben blinked hard, but the image remained a few feet in front of him. Francesca slid her jaw side to side with tiny clicks. Ben realized she was waiting for an answer. A stock image from every cheesy movie he’d ever seen played before his mind, of a man talking to a ghost, then the camera pans back, and he’s talking with no one. That was what this was, he decided. Not real. He had three pills in his body that he’d never taken before and no food. He’d ridden to Johnny’s in twenty-six minutes. He’d spent half the night jammed into a dead girl’s closet. He was a little high, and possibly asleep, and Francesca had invaded his dreams.
Why not Mira? he wondered. Never Mira.
“Listen, I figured out Mira’s notes. I know what your father did to both of you. And I can make it right,” Ben pleaded. “I’m gonna send a letter to the newspaper, and everybody in Bismuth’s gonna know what kind of a guy he really is.”
The mirage laughed, and it was the sound of splintering glass. Ben shielded his face as though shards flew at him through the air.
“You broke us!” it shrieked. “Every single one of you broke us! Look at me!”