Page 2 of A Sea of Unspoken Things

My stomach turned a little as I let my eyes drift to the next house up the road. Set back in the trees, at the end of a long blacktop drive, was the Walkers’ place. The windows were dark, the drive empty, but it still looked lived in. Looking at it almost made me feel like I was right back there again—eighteen years old and no idea that everything was about to change.

I forced my gaze back to our cabin, but it took a few seconds formy foot to lift and touch down on the ground. It took much longer for me to actually get out. Almost immediately, I could feel my brother spilling from inside the walls of the house we grew up in, thickening in the air around me.

“I’m here, Johnny,” I breathed.

My hand clenched painfully around my keys as I rounded the car and got my bag, slinging it over my shoulder. My reflection moved over the windows of the 4Runner, and flashes of my younger self were there, behind the glass. Riding in the passenger seat with Johnny driving and Micah in the back. Flying down the highway sipping a lukewarm soda with music blaring from the only speaker that wasn’t busted. I could see my bare feet propped up on the dash and catch the scent of burning oil leaking through the air vents.

I stepped up onto the porch, eyeing a fluttering square of white behind the screen door where something was taped to the window. I pulled the handle, and the springs creaked and popped as the door opened. It was a folded piece of paper with my name written on the front.

I opened it, reading the handwritten script.

James, welcome home. Please come by the office when you get a chance.

—Amelia Travis

My spine straightened when I saw the name. Amelia Travis was one of the rangers stationed in the national forest, a replacement for the decades-long tenure of Timothy Branson, who’d had the position in our town when I was growing up. The purview of the ranger who occupied the U.S. National Forest office mostly entailed things like permits and protections and land management. But they were also the closest thing we’d had to law enforcement, which meant that Johnny’s death ultimately had fallen into Amelia Travis’s jurisdiction.

She’d been the one to call me that day. I could still clearly remember the nothingness that had seized my body as the woman’s wordsbuzzed against my ear. Like every inch of empty space in the universe had hollowed me out. It was still there, a chasm that had no end, no edges.

I refolded the paper and lifted the mat, finding the rusted key that had been kept there for decades. It took a few tries to turn it in the lock, and I had to shove my shoulder into the door to get it open. But when it did, that chasm within me stretched so wide the whole earth could fall into it.

The presence that had hovered around the cabin was so heavy on the other side of the door that it knocked the wind from my lungs. My brother was like a gathering smoke in the air, choking out the oxygen. Like at any second, I’d hear him call my name from the other room.

James?

His voice echoed inside of me and I pinched my eyes closed, trying to push the overwhelming feeling down. I’d waited for that tether between me and Johnny to dim after I got the news that he was gone. I was sure that at some point, it would grow thin as he pulled away from this world. But the hope I’d held on to that I would walk through that door and finally begin to sense his absence was a point of fading light now. He was still here. He was still everywhere.

Growing up, my connection with Johnny was something that had always just existed, like the color of the sunlight when it came through the kitchen window or the familiar sounds of the forest at night. When I left home for the city, I finally experienced what it was like for that connection between us to stretch. He was still there—always there—and I didn’t realize how grafted into me it was until there were miles between us. But long before that, I’d begun to recognize when that feeling settled into my gut, telling me that something was wrong. I’d learned the hard way to listen when that happened.

For months before he died, I’d had the nagging sense that something was going on with Johnny. He was harder to get ahold of than usual. Less responsive to my texts. When I tried to press, tugging at the thread of that unsettled instinct, he’d pulled away even farther.Maybe farther than he’d ever been from me. But then he was gone, and now I was convinced that all of it had been some kind of premonition of what was coming.

When I opened my eyes again, the saturated colors of the space came into focus, painting a scene that made my heart come up into my throat. The navy checkered sofa and corduroy armchair were still set neatly on a fraying Turkish rug that half covered the scratched wooden floor. The fireplace was stacked with large, misshapen stones, and a shelf on one wall was filled with dozens of books. One corner of the rectangular room was carved out as a small kitchen with an old green stove and a window that looked out into the forest. Even the mismatched pottery dishes on the shelves had a humble charm to them, glazed in shades of brown and cream.

I let my hand slide over the tops of the books, reading their spines. With just Johnny, me, and Dad living here, the place had always been distinctly masculine in a way that hadn’t changed at all. Every detail was the same, as if it hadn’t been years since I’d left. As if I’d walked out that door only days ago.

We were seventeen when Dad took a temporary logging job up in Oregon that turned out to be mostly permanent, and our mother had left long before that, extricating herself from the hungry forest after years of being trapped here. Pregnant only three months after high school graduation, she’d married our father for no other reason than the fact that that’s what you did. He got a job with the logging company, and she gave birth to not one but two babies. She named us James and Johnny, and I couldn’t help but wonder if that’s because she wished we’d both been boys. Like maybe she could somehow spare me her own fate if I wasn’t a girl.

Only a few years later, she was gone. If I had any memories of the woman, they were folded so deep in my mind that they couldn’t be summoned, and the ones I did have of my father were like faded pictures that blurred at the edges. It was this place I remembered most. The cabin, and Johnny. But my mother’s story had been a kind of cautionary tale for me as a kid. One that haunted me through adolescence,all the way up to the day I left. I’d spent all those years trying not to become her, but when I got on that bus to San Francisco, it wasn’t just to dig myself out of the hole my mother had trapped herself in. I was running from more than that.

An engine rumbled outside, growing loud before it was interrupted by the screech of brakes. Through the window, I could see the red truck pulling into the dirt drive, and even from this distance, with only the shape of his shadowed profile visible, I recognized him.

Micah Rhodes.

I let the duffel slide from my shoulder and hit the ground by my feet as I took a step closer to the window. Instantly, I started counting the years since the last time I’d laid eyes on him, but I already knew the answer: twenty. It had been twenty years, and somehow, I could still feel that rush of blood beneath my skin.

Smoke, the wolflike dog that had shown up on our doorstep when Johnny and I were teenagers, was in the cab beside him, and at first glance, a shiver snaked up between my shoulder blades. The dog should have died years ago, but he looked exactly the same. Just like the cabin. As if he was part of the immortal landscape that was this life.

The engine cut off, and for nearly a minute Micah just sat there. I could already see his nerves, and something about that made me feel just a little less crazy. I wasn’t the only one dreading this moment. I’d hoped there was a way to avoid it altogether, but for all its miles of trees and trails and ravines, Six Rivers was much too small for that.

He raked a hand through his hair before he got out, and when I could finally see his face properly, my stomach dropped just a little more. His denim-blue button-up was opened over an old T-shirt, his jeans faded. This was a version of him that was achingly familiar, always a bit thrown together, everything about him worn in and frayed.

His not quite blond, not quite brown hair had been the same shade since we were kids, but it was much longer now. It waved at the ends where he had it tucked behind his ears, and the scruff along his jaw was the same color. His face was different, less youthful than ithadbeen all those years ago, of course. But the light in his eyes had changed, too. There was less light in them now.

Smoke was whining the moment he jumped out of the truck, pacing the drive with his sharp, tawny eyes on the cabin. His ears were back, his head ducked low, like he could feel it, too—Johnny. He was tall enough that the tips of his ears reached my waist, with huge paws at the end of his long, lanky legs. Wide, uneven paint strokes of varying shades of gray covered him from head to toe.

Micah’s gaze dropped from the top of the roof to the front door, and I was suddenly overcome with the hope that he wouldn’t knock. That he would just turn around and leave, sparing us both the tidal wave of heartache that was seconds from running ashore.

Johnny and Micah had been friends since we were kids, and he was the only person I could think of that might know even a fraction of what it felt like to lose Johnny. They’d been inseparable for most of our lives. All three of us were.