Page 47 of A Sea of Unspoken Things

I picked up the tote and crossed the room, my steps slowing as I passed Autumn’s series on the wall. The fluorescent lights bounced off the glass, distorting my reflection. I looked at each of the photographs once more, eyes lingering on the dead, gnarled branches.

When I started for the hallway again, Olivia’s voice stopped me.

“He really helped her find her voice, you know. Encouraged her to pursue this series she was doing with the trees.” She gestured to the mounted images on the wall. “It’s pretty rare to have a mentorship opportunity like that, particularly at that age.”

You changed my life.

I smiled, but it was heavy. “Yeah, it is.”

I pushed through the double doors that led to the parking lot, starting the walk back toward town. But my curiosity about Autumn had only intensified now. I only made it a few blocks before I couldn’t resist the urge any longer. When I had enough bars of service, I ducked into the little alleyway behind Main Street, leaning my back against the brick wall as I pulled out my phone. I opened the Instagram app, finding Johnny’s account, and his photos populated in the grid.

I clicked on his followers and the list of handles popped up, all34,000 of them. When I typed the nameAutumninto the search, only one was filtered out. I tapped it.

The screen loaded and I stared at the profile picture at the top. A girl with wide, round eyes looked into the camera, the waves of her chestnut hair falling over one shoulder. Beneath it, only a few words were written in the description.

Give me donuts or give me death!

I bit down on my bottom lip, scrolling down to the grid. The photos were a mix of artistic and candid, a few of them featuring dead trees similar to the series I’d seen displayed in Olivia’s classroom. Others featured ordinary things like coffee cups or an ice cream cone. There were really none of people, which I thought strange for a teenage girl. Where were the selfies or pictures from parties? Where were the group photos with friends?

The posts were inconsistent, some of them months apart, with the last one being a kind of farewell post before college. It was a photo of her reflection in the window of a car, but the phone was lifted up, hiding her face. The caption read,Last party in Six Rivers. At dawn, we ride.

There were only a few comments.

@g4life231 Gonna miss you girlie

@firstfrostchronicle Bright and early!

The last one from @marimarimayhem was just a motorcycle emoji followed by a fire emoji.

Only a few of the posts featured Autumn herself. I clicked on one of them and it filled the phone screen. She was sitting on a curb with her hands in her lap, legs extended out into the street. The background was only partially visible, but it looked like the downtown strip. Her long hair was in a thick, messy braid and the gleam in her eyes was bright. She was beautiful. A sweet kind of beautiful. Therewas no denying that. The curve of her cheek was sharp, the angle of her jaw severe, but it balanced the softness of her face perfectly. She had a mysterious look, like there were secrets folded behind those eyes.

There were twelve likes on the picture, and I couldn’t help myself. I clicked on them, looking for Johnny’s handle, but it wasn’t there. When I went to the next, I didn’t find his name on that one, either. Of the several I randomly chose from the grid, many of the same handles appeared in the likes and comments. @firstfrostchronicle, a @sooziekyoo, and @marimarimayhem were among them, but Johnny hadn’t liked or commented on any of the posts.

When I went back to Johnny’s page, the opposite was true. Autumn’s handle showed up on the likes of every photo I clicked on.

I let out a breath, ashamed of the relief I felt. Like somehow, I’d been afraid that Johnny was about to let me down in a way that I didn’t think I could come back from. But if there was anything going on between Autumn and my brother, it could have been no more than the infatuation of a young girl, cast on an older man. I remembered what it was like to be on the edge of adulthood. How tiny the steps were between one thing and another. You could just wake up one day and be standing on the other side of a line you didn’t remember crossing. For Johnny, I’d done it many times.

Sixteen

I leaned back in the booth, nervously biting down on my thumbnail as I stared at Johnny’s phone. It sat on the table in front of me as I talked myself through what I needed to do, but that feeling of guilt was growing into a heavy thing inside my chest.

He was there across the diner again, in the booth against the window. His back was to me, his face turned toward the street, and I waited, heart pounding, for him to turn and look at me. The vision of him was so clear now. Less like a painting, more like a photograph. His shadow moved over the tile floor beside the table, the sunlight catching his hair. He looked so real. So…alive.

Look at me.

I willed him to turn his head. To cast his gaze over his shoulder and warn me to stop. To stop digging. Stop asking questions. But Johnny didn’t move.

Slowly, my eyes dropped to the dark screen of the phone again.

There was no question that it was an invasion of his privacy, even if he was gone. But the unknown variable of it was like a monster hiding in the dark. I could feel it, but I couldn’t see it. And I needed to turn on the light.

As soon as I made up my mind, I pulled the charger from the bag and plugged it in. The battery icon illuminated on the screen a few seconds later, and I turned my attention back to the laptop.

I opened Johnny’s email inbox while I waited for the phone to turn on, typing the nameAutumn Fischerin the search field. Only one email address auto populated, [email protected] clicked it, bracing myself as the results loaded, but it came up empty. There wasn’t a single message.

I was struck by the unnerving thought that it wasn’t quite believable. If Johnny’s email had the address saved, it meant that at some point, he’d either sent her a message or received one. And if the conversations were archived, they would still come up in a search. The only reason there wouldn’t be any found was that they’d been deliberately deleted.

I pulled up Johnny’s bank account next, but this time I wasn’t looking at the abbreviated records that appeared on his statements. I went line by line, inspecting every transaction going back from the day before he died, opening each one for the vendor’s information and location. I couldn’t prove whether or not Autumn had been back to visit Johnny, but I could get a sense of whether he’d been to see her in San Francisco if I was looking in the right places.