Page 4 of A Sea of Unspoken Things
“Olivia?”
“Olivia Shaw.”
I wished I could pretend I hadn’t thought about Olivia in years, but that wasn’t true. Proximity in a town like this meant that your friends were chosen for you, and Olivia Shaw had been in our same year at school. By the time we were teenagers, a natural distinction had formed around us. There was me and Olivia, and Johnny and Micah. Then there was Johnny’s girlfriend Sadie, and Griffin Walker.
As soon as that last name flitted through my mind, I felt instantly colder.
“I can give you her number,” Micah continued. “She’s the art teacher over at the high school now. Johnny was using their darkroom for the project, and some of his stuff is still there. You should be able to set up a time with her to go by.”
I nodded slowly, trying to recall the details of Olivia’s face so that I could reconstruct them into how I imagined she would look now. We hadn’t kept in touch after I left, and I’d always wanted to believe that had been a mutual decision. But the truth was, it wasn’t.
After a few long seconds, Micah exhaled. “Are you okay, James?”
I blinked, unsure if I’d heard him right. Was Iokay?
“We don’t need to do this, Micah.” My voice was a tightrope.
That stiffness in his shoulders resurfaced, his lips pressing into a line like he was biting back what he wanted to say. We were both good at that. At least, we had been. I hadn’t answered his call after I got the news about Johnny for this very reason. I didn’t want to fall apart with Micah, because I couldn’t.
“Fine. Just call me if you need anything,” he said.
He went back to the door, and I didn’t let myself breathe until it was closed behind him. I stared at the floor as the truck’s engine roared back to life and listened as it backed down the drive. By the time he was gone, my knuckles ached, fingernails like knives against my palms.
I leaned into the wall and sank down, back sliding along the wood panels until I was sitting on the floor. That’s when it really hit me—the enormity of Johnny’s presence that lived between these walls. The bits of him that clung to the objects around me hadn’t dimmed. There was no indication of them fading away or flickering out.
Down the hall, Smoke was watching me. His focused golden eyes bored directly into mine with an intensity that seemed much too human to be real, like he could feel it, too. Like he could sense Johnny in the still air between us.
We watched each other for a long time before he inched his way across the rug. When he reached me, his nose found my hair and he whimpered again. That was the thing that finally undid it—all those bound-up tears that I hadn’t been able to let fall. The tightly spooled grief pulled taut behind my ribs, unclenching just enough for me to feel the ocean of pain inside me.
I pressed my forehead to Smoke’s, breathing through the emptiness that filled the cabin around us. A place where Johnny shouldn’t be anymore. But somehow, he was.
He was there the first time my heart beat, the first time air entered my lungs, the first time the sun touched my face. But now, he’d gone back to the dark without me.
Two
I could have walked the distance to town in about as much time as it had taken me to get in the car and drive. After several miles of nothing but wilderness on the old highway that cut through the national forest, the town of Six Rivers appeared, flanking each side of the road with a string of buildings.
Main Street was nestled in an area that had been hollowed out back when the gold rush brought people west, but in every direction, the trees thickened like a protective membrane, concealing it from the rest of the world. As a kid, it had felt to me like a shifting maze you were never meant to escape from.
I stood on the curb with Amelia Travis’s note clutched in my hand, staring at the green decal of the U.S. Forest Service crest pressed onto the glass door of the office. The last time I’d walked through that door, I’d been an eighteen-year-old girl with rehearsed words on my lips, only minutes from telling a lie that would change my entire life.
I pulled the door open and the warmth inside the office instantly sent chills over my skin. A single desk sat at the back of the small room, and the cramped space was made narrower by the filing cabinets and a Formica counter at the back that housed a coffeepot. NationalForest Service posters with curling edges and faded, vintage-style artwork depicting fire safety slogans and office policies were pinned to the walls. They were the same ones that had been there years ago. But all evidence of Timothy Branson, the ranger who used to be stationed here, was gone.
Within seconds of the door closing behind me, the patter of footsteps knocked overhead. I looked up, eyes following the sound across the water-stained ceiling tiles until it was coming down a staircase on the other side of the wall.
A woman in a uniform appeared with what looked like a ream of unopened printer paper beneath one arm. She stopped short, a look of surprise widening her eyes when she spotted me. Her dark hair was streaked with gray at the temples, and it was pulled back into a lazy ponytail that revealed the soft wrinkles framing her oval, sun-worn face. The arm of the tan button-up she wore displayed the same crest that was on the door.
“Hi there.” She came around the desk, setting down the paper. There was a polite smile on her lips, but the question in her eyes was assertive. Direct. “How can I help?”
I stared at the engraved letters on the badge pinned to her chest. The name readTravis. When my eyes traveled back up to meet hers, I tried to place the sound of her voice as the one that had called me that day. The one that had told me Johnny was gone.
I glanced down at the note still clutched in my hand before lifting it into the air. “I’m James. James Golden?”
Understanding slowly settled into her expression, her dark brows lifting just slightly. “Oh, yes. I’m sorry.” She rubbed at her temple. “I must have gotten my days mixed up. I thought you were getting in tomorrow.” She took a step forward, extending a hand. “It’s nice to meet you, James.”
I shook it as her eyes ran over me. She was probably thinking that I looked like Johnny, which I did, if you were looking in the right places. There was always a beat of silence when people learned that we were twins, as if they were trying to connect those dots between us.Johnny had a brawny, tall frame that towered over mine, but our coloring was an exact match from eyes, to hair, to skin tone.
“I tell you, out here time is a slippery thing. But I hope your journey was all right?” She attempted a more genuine smile. “Can I get you anything? Tea, perhaps?”