Page 42 of A Sea of Unspoken Things

“Autumn?” I struggled to place the name.

“A kid from the high school. Johnny was teaching her some photography stuff. Helped her get into Byron.”

My conversation with Olivia came back to me in broken fragments. She’d said that Johnny had mentored a student there.

“How do you know it’s hers?” I said.

“The drawings—she marked it up like that. She carried that backpack around everywhere.”

“So, what are you saying? That Johnny was out here with that girl?”

“I’m not saying anything.” He was definitely avoiding my gaze now. “I’m just telling you whose backpack it is.”

I shot a glance out the window, to the dense forest that surrounded us. Micah told me that when Johnny shot in the gorge, he always spent the night. And that’s what he’d done on November 9.

“Didn’t you say he spent the night out here that night? That he didn’t come back until the next day?”

“Sometimes he let her help out on his shoots,” he thought aloud.

“But she’s like, what? Eighteen?”

Micah didn’t answer, but I was still confused. “I thought Olivia said she was away at school.”

“She is. She left back in the fall.”

“But he wouldn’t have done that, right? Spent the night all the way out here in the middle of nowhere with a teenager?” I asked.

“No,” he said, dismissively. “No way.”

“Then how do you explain this?”

He sighed, agitated now. “I don’t know, James. I don’t know anything.”

The number of things that didn’t add up here were multiplying by the second. If Johnny was out here on a shoot on November 10, how and why had that girl been with him? And did that mean that she was here when he returned a couple of days later? I didn’t like how that looked. How it felt.

I slipped the photo back into the folder, letting it rest in my lap. The idea was still pricking my thoughts. None of this was sitting well with me.

My hands curled around the folder in my lap and the eyes of the owl in the drawing bored into me, two ink-black pools that made me shiver. There were so many ways that Johnny and I were the same, and this was one of them. Both of us had always been trying to capture moments and keep them. Him with the camera, me with my pen. But in the end, we somehow always saw things differently.

Fourteen

I tapped my phone to wake up the screen, checking to see if Micah had texted. I hadn’t seen or talked to him since he dropped me off at the house after the gorge, and I was beginning to worry that I wouldn’t.

Over the last forty-eight hours, I’d had the list of reasons I shouldn’t have slept with him scrolling through my mind on repeat, and he was probably doing the same. I didn’t know if it was this place or if it was me, but sitting out there in the firelight, the rain falling in the gorge, I’d been sixteen again. Seventeen. Eighteen. I’d been every version of myself that was in love with Micah Rhodes.

I traced the scar that curved up my wrist, remembering the way it had felt when Micah’s fingers had done the same thing. I had seen in his eyes how the memory played out the morning we woke up in the truck.

We were seventeen our first time. The house was empty and our secret was becoming harder to keep. I don’t know which of us first said out loud that we wouldn’t tell Johnny—not yet. But according to Micah, Johnny had known. I suppose I knew that, too.

Things had changed between all three of us, as if the closer we gotto finishing school, the closer we came to nothing ever being the same. It didn’t take long for me to realize I was in love with Micah, but when it came down to it, I was afraid of any feeling of permanence. Any chance that I would be grafted into this forest like my mother, like so many other women who married loggers and had babies and erased themselves. I was even more worried about how Johnny might mess it all up. And in the end, he did.

Micah and I were lying tangled in my sheets when the landline rang, and a few seconds later, I was frantically pulling on my clothes, snatching Micah’s keys from his hand. We spotted the beams of the headlights cast across the road just outside of town, and I was already opening the door before Micah had stopped the car.

Johnny stood almost invisible against the trees, blood snaking down his neck in a sticky stream, but his eyes were strangely vacant, his movements limp under my touch. He was wasted.

The 4Runner’s windshield was busted, the passenger side scraped and one of the mirrors dangling from a single rubber cord. It looked like he’d sideswiped something, and when I looked back to see Micah climbing out of his truck, his eyes were pinned across the road, to the glow of light down in the ditch. Another car.

What scared me, even now, was how quickly I’d done it. How instantly I’d made the decision. One second I was standing on the side of the road, and the next I was climbing into the 4Runner and telling Micah to take Johnny home. Only an hour before, I’d been kissing Micah in the dark, giving my body to him for the very first time, but even that, I couldn’t have. Everything always came back to Johnny.