“This whole life thing.”
I closed my eyes. You could hear, muffled, the gentle cars, and far off the shouts and laughter of the kids in the yard at the high school. There was nobody in the kiddie playground but us, teenagers way too big for it, and the air smelled of wet earth and cold metal. For a second I thought that maybe when I opened my eyes, she’d be there, rocking on the springed purple pony down below, knees to her chin, smiling wide. But I realized that Cassie in my mind’s eye wasn’t the girl of now but the girl of then, pure figment, gone.
Just then, Nancy, our egret, that unlikely vision that Cassie and I had named the summer before everything changed—or maybe it was Nancy’s cousin—came to remind me of the quarry. There wasn’t any logic to it, not when Cassie had last been seen getting into a car on the highway. If she was looking to fly, it wouldn’t be a flight away but a flight back, almost time travel. But it was the strangest thing, in April, in Massachusetts, in the barely relieved damp of early spring, to see behind Peter’s shoulder, in the distance, the slow, prehistoric ascent of an egret from the half-empty, leaf-sodden ornamental pond at the park’s far end. The waving of those thin, dark, vast wings bothered my peripheral vision and I turned, at speed—was it a ghost? I wondered fleetingly—to see her deliberate, inexorable rise, that S-bend neck tucked, the webby feet retracting like an airplane’s wheels. And I thought, It’s April—I can’t be seeing this: Nancy, in Royston, now, and I reached without thinking to grab Peter’s arm—I could tell he was surprised; he flinched a little, or his forearm did, beneath my hand; because we didn’t touch much, Peter and I, by which I mean, we never touched, an awkwardness I could interpret in various ways, both flattering and unflattering, and which I had chosen for a long while simply not to think about. “Look,” I whispered. “Nancy.”
“Who’s Nancy?” I could hear in his voice that he was smiling, but I didn’t look at him, because I couldn’t look away from the bird, black and graceful and awkward against the ominous sky. I pointed, and could hear Peter’s intake of breath. “What’s she doing here?” he asked. “Wrong season, right?”
“It’s like she isn’t even real,” I said, by which time she was gone into the tree shadows beyond the park.
“Who’s Nancy then?” Peter asked after a minute, standing and swinging himself down the pole to the ground. “My butt is freezing.”
“Yeah. It’s still cold.” I slid down the slide instead. When I put my hands on my rear end I could feel the refrigerated flesh through my jeans. I explained to Peter about Nancy, about the inside joke she’d been between Cassie and me in our last twinned summer, when we could never have imagined coming unstuck, and expected to be friends always.
“I haven’t seen a Nancy bird in a long time. Like, maybe she sent her.”
“Never say never, I guess. Which leads you to what, exactly? What’s the message, if there is one?”
I said that we should go to the quarry.
“You’re kidding, right?” he pointed at the sky. “This weather? And it’s five o’clock already. What are you hoping to find? Why in God’s name would she go there? Like, she’s made a Girl Scout tent out of broken fir branches and is building a fire to roast fiddleheads?”
“Like, maybe,” I said. Ordinarily, I might have worried that Peter would laugh at me, but finding Cassie was the most important thing. “Trust me,” I said, and all but involuntarily I touched his arm again. It wasn’t flirting, it was urgency, and he understood this. He didn’t flinch that time.
The walk took longer than I remembered. Neither of us spoke much. The late sun tried without success to break through the woolly gray, the soft gravel shoulder beneath our feet was still sodden, and, once we passed the Barkers’ house, the endless wall of evergreens pressed mournful and darkly moist alongside us. The turn-off to the quarry was overgrown after the winter months’ disuse, and the undergrowth seemed to hover between last winter’s death and spring’s coming life, a combination of slimy leaf piles and tightly nubbed boughs, on their surfaces juicy green buttons ready to burst. The rutted dirt path dissolved in places into puddles, but the way ahead was clear. The parking lot lay empty, of course. Just the occasional scurrying squirrel; an early bird or two, rustling and chirruping. The quarry was silent, its surface black and glassy.
“You’re joking, J, right?” Peter’s chin tucked into the neck of his sweatshirt. His red nostrils glistened.
“It’s just a feeling. Let’s walk the perimeter, okay? Just in case?”
“The roaring fiddlehead fire, right?”
“Or something.”
“A bird is not a sign, you know.”
“How can we be sure?”
Peter, irritated, rolled mucus in his throat; but he didn’t walk away. We couldn’t afford not to look. We set off together around the quarry. The path proved more treacherous than I expected. There was no straightforward circuit around the water’s edge; the glinting rocks were slick underfoot and the bushes wild, their thorny fingers clawing at our necks and wrists.
“What are we looking for exactly?” Peter asked, arms akimbo on a high outcrop over the still water, as far from the parking lot as we could be. His breath made smoky whorls in the chill. “Because this feels as futile as anything I’ve ever done.”
I couldn’t contradict him. “I thought there’d be some trace of her. I thought she might have come here.”
“Because?”
I shrugged. I couldn’t say because it was a place that mattered to us, to her and me; because when we were here, we were happy, and happy together, and had homes and parents and believed we always would. That wasn’t a reason for anything.
“Julia,” Peter touched me this time, his hand on my shoulder. His voice was low and almost harsh. “You think she might be here because this is where you lost her. But it’s a long time ago.” Then he let go of me, and turned away.