Page 28 of A Sea of Unspoken Things

I watched the light in his eyes shift with the tone of his voice. “Yeah.”

“Thank you.” He set the photo down on the end of the table, making a concerted effort not to look at it. The warmth and humor that had made him feel so familiar to me a moment ago was gone now. The thought that maybe the photo would graze the surface of something in him that still hurt too badly to be touched hadn’t crossed my mind, and now I wondered if it should have.

I studied him, watching the tendons in his neck flex beneath the collar of his sweater. “What’s wrong?”

He shook his head. “Nothing.”

I hesitated before I set a hand on his arm, and immediately his hand closed into a fist. “Tell me.”

“It’s just hard to think about.”

“What is?”

His face flushed a little. “Just, sometimes when I think about him, I can’t forget seeing him like that—when we found him.”

I froze.

Found.

That word was like an expanding pinprick, conjuring that image of the sun-spotted treetops from the forest floor. The one that had been branded into my mind. Immediately, that pain in my chest was back, an echo of the rib-splitting hole that had ripped through me. Ireached up, pressing two fingertips there and trying to push the feeling down.

“What do you mean,we?” I said.

Micah’s hand dropped from the table and he turned toward me. There was a question in his eyes.

“You were there when they found him?” I rasped.

Micah nodded, confused. “Yeah, I thought you knew.”

I leaned back in the chair. Amelia had never mentioned it.

He rubbed at his brow. “He’d been gone a couple of days, and I was worried when he didn’t come back. Amelia and I went to look for him.”

I shifted the stack of photos until I found the one I’d enlarged of Trentham Gorge. My gaze traced the shape of the rocks, following the white diagonal sediment lines until they disappeared into the lush green. The picture I had of those treetops in my mind flickered back to life. That window of light through the branches—what I imagined was the last thing Johnny saw as blood pooled on his chest. I could feel the heat of it on my own skin, beneath my shirt.

“James?” Micah’s voice was like a fading light.

I stared at the contact sheet, eyes on the thumbnails. That buzzing in the air was back—the same one I’d felt in the truck. At the cabin. Anywhere Johnny had left his trace. Is that what I’d find in Trentham Gorge, too?

I’d been looking for evidence that there was more to all of this. I’d come all this way, back to Six Rivers, because I needed to make sense of the fact that Johnny wasn’t gone. And now, I suddenly had the overwhelming need to see it for myself. To stand on that circle of earth where Johnny took his last breaths.

A bone-chilling, stomach-turning thought snaked through my mind. That if I could find the exact place he’d been, the exact spot they’d found him, maybe I’d be able to connect with the part of Johnny that had refused to leave. Maybe there, in the gorge, there was something to find.

“James?” Micah tried again, and this time his hand came down on my arm, his fingers lightly resting on my wrist, where my pulse was racing.

My eyes lifted from the table, finding him. “Micah, I need you to take me there.”

Nine

It had taken some convincing, but Micah agreed to go with me to Trentham Gorge.

He was booked for a guide trip on the Klamath River that would last the entire day, and in the meantime, I’d set myself up at a small booth in the back of the diner. The morning rush was clearing out by the time I arrived, with the exception of Harold, the red-bearded man who’d been seated on the same stool every time I’d come in. His bulky build hunched over the counter as he sipped his coffee, a ring of keys dangling from his pocket, and I listened in to the meandering trails of conversation between him and the other customers who came in throughout the morning.

I’d had an email from Rhia waiting when I opened my inbox, going over the details for the show that was opening when I got back. I was the only female artist in the lineup, and there was a magazine that wanted to interview me for a profile on working women artists in the city. It was the kind of thing that had once excited me. When I was fresh out of art school, any spotlight on my work felt like an opportunity to be seen and discovered. A way to become known. But I’d been aworking artistlong enough now to know just how quickly artwas consumed and forgotten. The glimmer of being a Byron graduate had all but faded, my own idealistic view of my work whittled down to the nubs. Now, I mostly painted what people wanted.

Unfortunately, I’m unavailable. Please politely decline.

I typed the reply and hit send, dedicating the rest of the day to Johnny’s field notes. I’d made my way through only about half of them, and it was evident that he’d taken the work seriously. There was special attention given to the accuracy and details he was relaying and there were times that I almost couldn’t believe the writing in the notebooks was his. He sounded so…scientific. So specific and technical. I imagined his voice speaking as I skimmed his notes, but I struggled to hear it.