She checked WeatherBug again. It was 15 below.
All she could see out the window was a riot of white. Everything was shapeless and heavy with snow: her spectacularly crappy red car, the compost bin, even the big wooden bear that her mom’s hippie-dippy artist friend, Rufus, had carved for the driveway. The thought of having to bundle up and trudge around in the storm just to drag Jonah’s butt inside made Zoe so angry that her face started to get hot. And she wouldn’t be able to complain to her mom because she shouldn’t have let him outside in the first place. Jonah always found a way to win. He was nuts, but he was clever.
She yelled for Spock and Uhura. No answer. Spock was two years younger and a big-time coward. Zoe figured he was hiding under the tractor in the pole barn, quivering. But Uhura was a daredevil and scared of nothing. She should have come running.
Zoe sighed. She had to go find Jonah. She had no choice.
She threw on a scarf, gloves, boots, a puffy blue coat, and a tasseled hat that Jonah had knitted for her when their dad died (actually, Uhura had eaten the tassel and in its place there was just a hole that kept getting bigger and bigger). Zoe didn’t bother with snowshoes because she was only going to be out as long as it took to march Jonah back inside. Five minutes. Maybe ten. Tops.
Zoe knew it was pointless to wish that her dad were around to help her track down Jonah. She wished it anyway. Memories of her father swept over her so suddenly it made her whole body clench.
Zoe’s dad had been goofy, excitable—and completely, infuriatingly unreliable. He was obsessed with everything about caves, down to bats and flatworms. He was even bizarrely into cave mud, which he insisted held the secret to a great complexion. He used to bring Ziploc bags of it home and try to dab it on Zoe’s mother’s face. Her mom would shriek with laughter and run away in mock horror. Then her dad would smear it all over his own cheeks, and chase Jonah and Zoe around the house, making monster noises.
So, yes: her dad was weird, as you pretty much have to be to go caving in the first place. But he was weird in a good way. In fact, he was kind of amazingly weird. He was superskinny and flexible, and if he put his arms over his head like Superman, he could crawl through incredibly narrow passageways. He used to practice by bending a wire hanger into an oval and wriggling through—or by crawling back and forth under the car. Literally, he’d be doing this stuff in plain sight when Val or Dallas came over. Dallas was a caver, too, and thought it was all deeply awesome. Val would avert her eyes from whatever bizarre thing Zoe’s father was doing and say, “I’m not even noticing—this is me not noticing.”
Zoe started caving with her dad when she turned 15. (Nobody called it “spelunking”—because why would they?) They caved religiously every summer and fall, until the snow blocked the entrances and ice made the tunnels treacherous. Zoe was only semi into it at first, but she needed time with her father that she knew she could count on. Unless you were going caving, you just couldn’t trust the guy to show up.
Zoe had gotten used to his disappearances, just as she’d gotten used to the fact that there were things he never talked about. (His parents, his hometown in Virginia, anything at all that happened when he was young: those parts of the map were never colored in.) Her father specialized in grand gestures—he’d changed his last name to Bissell instead of asking Zoe’s mom to change hers—and he could be the coolest dad in the world for weeks on end. He’d make her feel warm and watched-over, like there was a candle or a lantern by her bed. But then the air in the house would change somehow. It’d lose its charge. Her dad’s SUV would disappear, and for weeks she wouldn’t even get a text.
Zoe eventually stopped listening to her father’s excuses. They usually had to do with some weird business he was trying to get off the ground—something about “drumming up the freakin’ financing.” When she was younger, Zoe blamed herself for the fact that her dad never stuck around for more than a few months at a time. Maybe she wasn’t interesting enough. Maybe she wasn’t lovable enough. Jonah was still so young that he worshipped their father unconditionally. He called him Daddy Man, and treated every glimpse of him like a celebrity sighting.
Zoe knew that she and her dad would always have their treks up to the caves, and she stopped expecting anything else. So that day in November when she’d woken to find that he’d gone caving without her felt like a betrayal.
The cops led the search for his body. Zoe had invented the Do Not Open box to hold back the memories.
*