Page 10 of A Sea of Unspoken Things
I’d told myself for a long time that the past was the past. That there was no coming back from it. That had been an easy lie to believe when I was hundreds of miles away, but here, in Six Rivers, the past was still living and breathing.
Four
Town was busier than the night before, with cars parked along the curb and the doors of the shops propped open. Smoke walked out ahead of me, knowing exactly where we were headed.
The signs that hung over the sidewalk identified the businesses that made up the little town of Six Rivers. The market was tiny, with produce stands out front that were filled with winter squashes, root vegetables, and bundles of fresh greens. It shared a roof with a tackle and bait shop to the right and the post office to its left, where aCougar Landbanner hung in the window.
The town’s residents were fit into the scene perfectly, with their wool and canvas coats and lace-up boots. They were right out of the pages of one of the oldField & Streammagazines Dad used to have piled in the living room.
Two men standing beside one of the light posts on the street reached out to give Smoke a pat on the head as he passed, but their conversation was cut short when they saw me following behind him. Their heads tipped politely, gazes lingering on my face a beat too long, as if they were trying to place me. There was exactly one way into Six Rivers, and it was also the only way out, so seeing a new facein town wasn’t usual unless you’d come for the hunting or fishing, or you’d taken a job at one of the logging outfits. It didn’t take more than a glance at me to guess that I wasn’t here for any of those things. And as soon as word got out that James Golden was back, I’d find more than one set of eyes following me.
I gave the men a polite smile as I passed, following Smoke until he reached the door of the diner. A metal bowl of water was set outside the entrance, and a thin crust of broken ice floated on the surface as he lapped it up. He plopped down, his long legs crowding the width of the sidewalk, forcing a passerby to step over him.
I caught my reflection in the diner’s window, which had been fogged over the night before. It was clear now, and inside, most of the tables were full. Upholstered stools lined the long counter that stretched down one side of the stall-shaped restaurant, and old glass pendants hung from the ceiling. The place had always been alive in a way the rest of Six Rivers wasn’t, buzzing with an energy that made it feel like the beating heart of the sleepy town, if it was possible for it to have one.
I pulled open the door and the bell on the other side jingled, making a few people turn in my direction. That same question was cast in their expressions, but this time there was recognition in some of the lingering gazes. Maybe word had started getting around quicker than I thought.
Many of them were faces I knew, though they were older now and their placement in my own memory was fuzzy, like they couldn’t quite come into focus. The librarian from the middle school, the woman who ran the food pantry, and Harold, the only name I could readily pull from the ether of my mind because he’d worked with my dad as a logger. He sat at the end of the counter on the last stool, fork dangling from his fingertips as he chewed. He was the only one not outright staring at me. But the facebehindthe counter was easy to recognize.
Sadie Cross greeted me with a smile, but there was still a visiblecoldness to her that lay just beneath the surface. It had always been that way between us, a natural consequence of the cliché dynamics that often existed between a teenage girl and her boyfriend’s sister.
“James Golden.” Sadie said my name, wiping down the glass dome of a cake stand as she watched me. “You’re maybe the last person I expected to see walk through that door today.”
“Hey, Sadie.” Even her name sounded strange as I spoke it.
She set the lid back down over a perfectly golden pie with a lattice crust missing a single piece. Her dark hair fell long over the shoulders of her blue sweater, covering the embroidered logo on her apron.
She glanced to the window behind me. “Saw Smoke out there, but figured he was with Micah.”
She looked like the same girl I’d known all those years, but there was something just slightly hard-edged in her face now. Her on-again, off-again relationship with my brother had made her a constant in our lives in the years before I left. In some version of events, we’d technically been friends, but it wasn’t until years after I left that I could see that my protectiveness of Johnny had made most of my friendships difficult. I’d never trusted anyone with him. The only exception there’d ever been was Micah.
I looked around me, searching for a spot along the counter to sit. The place was loud, filled with conversation, music, and the noise of the kitchen. Through the long opening in the back wall, I could see a man and another woman working back-to-back over the rising steam of a cooktop.
“I wondered if we’d see you after…” Sadie didn’t finish, gesturing to the only empty stool. “But Micah said you were handling things from San Francisco.”
I took the seat, wedging myself between two brawny men clad in flannel. I couldn’t tell if Sadie was asking for an explanation or just talking in the nervous way people did after someone died.
“Just a few things to deal with up here,” I said. “I’ll only be in town a couple of weeks.”
“Weeks,” Sadie repeated, as if the idea didn’t sit well with her. But the tone of her voice was quickly replaced by the smile returning to her lips. “Well, it’s nice to see you. You look good, James.”
“You too,” I said, thinking that it was true. There was still a distinct look about her that was somehow compounded by the soft wrinkles that framed her eyes and the fullness of her figure.
“What can I get you?” She tucked the rag into the ties of her apron.
“Just a coffee.”
I was glad she was willing to forgo the obligatory catch-up that I’d spent the entire drive to Six Rivers dreading. I didn’t want to talk about life in San Francisco or anything else that had filled the time since I’d left this place. There had been an almost paranoid stirring in me that squelched the safe distance the miles between the city and Six Rivers gave me. I also didn’t want to step too closely to the conversation about the fact that Sadie was still here, working in the diner and living the same life our mothers had, or the fact that I wasn’t at all surprised by it.
She filled a mug from the full, steaming pot of coffee on the hot plate, and I let my eyes wander to the sea of framed photographs that covered almost every square inch of the wall behind her. The ones I’d seen a thousand times were still there—like a scrapbook of the idealized life in Six Rivers. There were pictures of the diner’s regulars, kids at a picnic with balloons, a few people huddled around a fire on the beach. There were also several of hunting groups lined up beside rows of limp-bodied ducks or holding up the horned rack of a stag. Faces of every age looked back at me, some of the images posed and others candid.
Out of habit, my gaze found the one with me in it. It was a photo of a crowd of people standing out on Main Street, smiles wide in a sea of pale blue uniforms and team merch. What I remembered about that day was in splices of sound and light. The soccer team had just won regionals at a tournament in the Bay Area, and those who hadn’t made the trip down to the game had gathered out in front of the diner to listen on the radio. The picture was snapped just after thewinning goal was scored. I was fifteen years old, beaming at the camera, and I could see Olivia’s and Micah’s faces in the crowd beside me.
I purposefully didn’t let my eyes fall on the photograph of Griffin Walker that still hung only a few feet away. He was handsome in an all-American kind of way. Perfectly symmetrical and charming. He’d been the town’s golden boy, beloved and revered. That was never more true than after he died.
The small bundle of dried roses that had been tied on the frame after the funeral twenty years ago was still there, the petals now wrinkled and missing their color. There was a time when it wasn’t possible to go anywhere without seeing similar shrines, and that constant reminder had been the last thing to run me out of this town.
Growing up down the road from the Walkers had put Griffin into our orbit at a young age, and when he became the star of the high school’s soccer team, it made him something like a god in this town. That attention had changed him, and not for the better. There wasn’t anyone in Six Rivers who wasn’t shaken by his death, and he was folded into countless memories, some of them all but lost now. But there was one I’d tried and failed to forget. I still remembered the crunch of ice beneath my boots that night. The smell of woodsmoke and melting snow. The way the firelight had gleamed in his open, empty eyes.