Page 36 of A Sea of Unspoken Things

Micah started up the trail without a word, and I couldn’t tell if he was afraid for me or for himself. Smoke stuck close to my side as I followed, and we walked down into the open mouth of the gorge until we reached the water. We took the trail that ran alongside it, crossing the ravine at the enormous skeleton of a great fallen redwood. All around us, the brilliant greens glowed bright where they were interspersed with red bark and jet-black rock. I found my hands instinctively reaching toward them as I passed, pressing a palm to the rigid skin of an ancient tree or letting my fingers graze the delicate fronds of a fern. Everything was so…alive,making it feel impossible that anything could ever die here. But maybe, in a way, nothing did.

Johnny was steeped in the descending haze, gathering like a storm in the narrow valley as we walked. As soon as the black-and-white marbled cliff face appeared, my heartbeat picked up. My feet stopped midstride, eyes following the veins of brilliant color. At the top, a gnarled oak tree was growing, roots exposed, into the crevice of stone. Small clusters of leaves adorned the dwindling branches like last, gasping breaths.

The longer I stood there, the smaller I became, until the vision of them cracked and shifted, replacing the memory of the first day the channel between me and my brother broke open. I could still see Johnny up on those cliffs, dropping down to the ravine below as thesteep walls of the gorge flew past. I could still feel my pulse sync with his, the stomach-dropping feeling pulling me beneath the surface of the water.

The sweet smell of earth filled my lungs and then I exhaled, breath fogging in the cold. With it, the memory faded, but I could feel Johnny so close now that at any second, I was sure that I’d catch another glimpse of him in the trees.

Micah turned with the ravine once, then again, before he parted from the trail. The rush of water grew dim as I climbed the slope after him, and his steps finally slowed. My feet stopped a few paces behind his, and the icy air seemed to suddenly rush beneath the rain jacket, finding my skin.

Micah reached up, rubbing his face before he cleared his throat. He kept his back to me. “This is it.”

I stepped around him carefully, my gaze falling on a patch of sagebrush that stretched through the trees.

“This is where I found him.”

That single word punched a hole in my chest again, breathing back to life the gaping cavern within me. They’dfoundhim. Because he’d been lost. Alone. Because he was gone. The singular, all-consuming gravity of the fact that Johnny was dead came rushing back, like a wave that had pulled far, far from shore.

My eyes moved over the trees, the sound swelling in my ears. From this position, there didn’t seem to be a good vantage point of the gorge, and if anything, it was heavily obstructed. It might make sense if there was a specific subject that nested in this area, and it would be difficult for me to locate with my own naked eye, not knowing what to look for. But Johnny hadn’t had his camera or his field notes that day. That was still the thing that didn’t add up.

Maybe he’d gotten into an argument with a hunter out here. Maybe he’d stumbled upon someone poaching or won a hand of poker against the wrong group of loggers. The scenarios had been running through my mind for months, like flipping through a deck of cards.There had to be more to all of this. There had to be some kind of explanation.

“Can I have a minute?” I said, hoarsely.

Micah didn’t look sure that he should leave me, but his arm brushed mine as he turned back toward the trail. I waited for his steps to get farther away, and when I couldn’t hear them anymore, I walked toward the tangled underbrush, eyes fixed to the spot Micah had pointed to. There was an almost indiscernible shape there, like the forest had grown back over the imprint of footsteps and cracked twigs and crushed ferns.

I knew the exact place that Johnny had lain, because the earth under my feet was drumming with it. Like the steady but quickening beat of my heart. I could almost hear it.

Slowly, I sank down to my knees, finding the soft, damp soil. My hands pressed into it, the smell of sagebrush breaking open in the air.Thiswas where my brother’s soul had been loosed from his broken body.

I lowered down in the shallow depression, chest rising and falling as I turned onto my back and let my gaze lift to the towering treetops. It was the same. The same image that had blinked open in my mind the day he died. A patchwork of swaying light breaking through the canopy. I hadn’t imagined it. It was real. That flicker of sun beyond the branches was the last thing Johnny saw. And somehow, it had traveled through time and space to find me.

Slowly, the rest of the picture was filling in. The pressure in my chest, the sound of footsteps. A distinct, metallic click. I could hear breathing. Deep, labored breaths as the feeling of warmth pooled on my skin. And when I heard the voice, it was threaded in the wind.

Johnny.

The warped, distant tenor of a woman’s voice sounded in my ears as my body became heavier. And that was all. The crunch of footsteps trailed away, the light above blurring, and my hand found the phantom hole in my chest. I pressed my fingers there, feeling the exactplace the bullet had struck him. How long had he lain here? How long had it taken for his heart to stop? For his vision to go dark?

A hot tear slid down my cold temple, disappearing into my hair. I could feel him in the dirt. The wind. The piney scent of the trees. Johnny was gone, but he hadn’t left this place. He hadn’t leftme.Not yet.

Twelve

I pulled the collar of my sweater up beneath my jacket, watching Micah set another piece of wood on the fire. The stone outcropping at the trailhead was curved enough to provide shelter from the rain and wind, and with Smoke curled up beside me, the trembling in my body had begun to slow.

He was doing his best not to be obvious about it, but every few minutes, Micah’s gaze found me in the darkness. I’d returned from the other side of the ravine with my eyes swollen, so cold that I couldn’t feel my fingers. Micah had pulled off his gloves and handed them to me without a word, taking a blanket from the truck and wrapping it around me.

He’d already started a fire, resigned to the fact that we wouldn’t make it out of the gorge in the rain. Looking at the cascade of water coming down the slope and spilling into the ravine far below, I was glad we weren’t going to attempt it. I didn’t have the energy to climb out of this hole in the earth. I didn’t know if I ever would.

Micah stoked the flames until the heat was hovering in the air again, and he sat down beside me, propping his feet up on his pack. He looked so at home in the consuming darkness, relaxed in a way thatreminded me of all those nights we’d spent out here. But the memories inevitably led to the one that I couldn’t stomach revisiting—the night Griffin died.

That single moment hung like a black cloud over everything that came before and after. We’d all lied about what happened that night, a choice that had haunted me since. We’d never discussed it again, never rehashed the events or tried to talk it through. We’d made a decision, we’d stuck to it, and we’d done it for Johnny. Looking back, everything we did was for him.

I looked up at the dark treetops, where I could still feel his presence hovering over us. Coming to the gorge had been another twisted kind of experiment—a way to test the live-wire connection between me and Johnny. I didn’t know what I had expected to happen when I lay down on the earth where he’d died, but he seemed to be even more tightly coiled around me now.

That voice I’d heard saying my brother’s name was still echoing inside my head. Too deformed to be recognizable, but it had definitely belonged to a woman. My mind had been jumping back to the November 10 photographs for the last hour. The pink backpack. The blank images that followed. Now I was convinced the voice belonged to whomever had been out here with Johnny that day.

“Do you want to talk about what happened out there?” Micah asked.

I swallowed. “No.”