Page 9 of A Sea of Unspoken Things

I took them out and set them in my lap, thumbing through the one on top. It looked like Johnny had one dedicated to every subject in the study, with dates and times that labeled each observation. They were Johnny’s field notes.

Smoke whined from down the hall, a high-pitched sound that made me lean forward to see the dog standing at the front door. I ignored him, setting the notebooks aside and reaching back into the drawer for several leather-bound notebooks that didn’t match the others. It took only seconds for me to recognize them.

JGwas imprinted at the top corner of the first cover—the initials I shared with Johnny. But these notebooks were mine. The last time I’d seen them was before I’d left Six Rivers for school in San Francisco.

Promise.

That’s what the adviser who’d awarded the scholarship had said about me. That I showedpromise.

I never went anywhere without one of my notebooks when I was a teenager, compulsively pulling out my pencils any time I had more than a few minutes to myself. And even when I didn’t. By the time I made it to high school, my drawings had caught several teachers’ attention. When I got to junior year, I was doing something I never dreamed possible—applying to art schools up and down the West Coast. I didn’t really believe it could happen until I got the acceptance letter from Byron School of the Arts. But by then, I had a choice to make. One that felt impossible until the night Griffin Walker died.

I flipped through the pages of sketches, the smell of ink and lead swirling in the air. But my hands froze when I reached one that made my stomach drop.

It was a sketch of Trentham Gorge.

The gorge was deep in the heart of Six Rivers, at the end of a series of cliffside roads that were only drivable in the daylight. More than anything, it was just a steep, forested valley wedged between twosmall mountains, carved down through the rock over millennia by the twisting ravine at the bottom. But there was a stretch that was deep enough to dive into, and despite warnings from our parents and the people in town, most of the kids we knew hung out there on the weekends.

There was something both wild and protected about the place, created through the natural but unforgiving forces of persistent erosion. Even the meaning of the wordgorgeitself felt severe—it was French forthroat.

My fingers ran over the drawing slowly, my eyes following the jagged lines. I’d sketched out the cliffs with lazy strokes, the ink smearing where the edge of my hand had brushed the paper before it had dried. It was probably the last time I’d drawn the place because after what happened there, I’d wanted to pretend it didn’t exist. We all did. Which is why it never sat well with me that Johnny had chosen it as one of his research locations. And why it was too coincidental that it was the place he died.

Smoke’s whimpering erupted into barking that reverberated between the walls, making me wince. When the sound gave way to howling, I shifted the notebooks to the floor.

“Cut it out, Smoke.”

His shadow flitted across the wooden floor again, and I stood, coming around the corner. He let out another frantic string of yelps, and I realized his attention wasn’t on the front door, like I’d thought. His eyes were pinned on the closed hallway closet.

I walked toward him, throwing a glance toward the living room before I looked between Smoke and the closet door, my gaze tracing its outline before I pulled it open. He instantly quieted, pacing back and forth behind me as it swung wide.

“What?” I looked at him, as if expecting him to answer.

It was just a coat closet, filled with pairs of boots, a few hats, and coats on hangers. The blue and black plaid jacket I’d hung there last night was among them, bullet hole and all. I stood still, listening tosee if Smoke had heard something like the scamper of a mouse in the walls, but there was nothing.

He whined again, and I shifted some of the coats to the side, peering into the back. Johnny’s neon-orange safety vest was hung on a hook, and I stiffened, my vision blurring just a little. I reached up, pulling the little string that hung from a bulb fixed to the wall, and the corners of the closet illuminated. The light gleamed on something glossy and black in the back, and I moved the safety vest aside.

It was a gun. A long barrel with a wooden stock and grip was propped in the corner behind the jackets, and my jaw tensed as I let go of the vest and it fell back in place. I didn’t recognize the rifle as one of the ones Dad left behind when he went to Oregon. I’d grown up around guns, but I hadn’t actually seen one in years, and they held a different kind of meaning to me now. There was no erasing that phantom pain that still throbbed in my chest. No way to unknow that a bullet had been the thing that stopped Johnny’s heart.

I closed the door, pressing my back to it before I turned to face Smoke. He was panting, eyes still fixed on the closet with his head dipped low like he was hunting what lay inside.

“Come on.”

I scratched behind his ear and took him by the collar, leading him back down the hallway. He stretched out on the floor when I sat back down at Johnny’s desk. I returned my old notebooks to the drawer and closed it harder than necessary. The desk shook, making the pens in the tin cup rattle, and I rubbed at my temples.

Again, my eyes skipped over the contents of the desk, just as chaotic and cluttered as it had been an hour ago. I didn’t know what I’d expected to find. I didn’t even know what I was looking for. But that whisper at the back of my mind was still there.

My gaze lifted to the corkboard again, scanning the bits of Johnny’s world that hung like a collage over the desk. I reached up, lifting the trimmings of a contact sheet, reading the page beneath it. It was a series of dates scribbled down on an envelope. But when I spotted apiece of ruled paper half hidden at the bottom corner of the board, I lifted the overlapping page to read it.

You changed my life.

The unfamiliar handwriting wasn’t Johnny’s, scrawled in a hurried script on a page that looked like it had been torn from a notebook. The scribbled star that followed the words was almost unfinished, one of the corners barely connected. My fingers slipped from the paper, and it tucked itself back beneath the others. It suddenly sank in that I’d been gone for twenty years. In that time, there was no telling how many people had drifted through Johnny’s life in Six Rivers or had crossed his path through the conservation study. I was more than out of my depth. The truth was, I knew almost nothing about Johnny anymore. Nothing that really mattered.

The air around me suddenly seemed so stagnant and suffocating, that oppressive feeling only growing heavier. As if at any moment, Iwould look over my shoulder and see Johnny standing right behindme.

I’d underestimated what it would be like to be closed up in the cabin with all of his things, the imprint of him touching everything around me. I wasn’t sure how many days of that I could take.

I closed the laptop and slipped it into my bag, getting back to my feet. I was suddenly desperate for the fresh air, eager to escape the skin-tingling sense that my brother was breathing the same air I was.

Smoke followed on my heels as I made my way up the hall, and I couldn’t help but glance back at the closet as I passed, remembering the gun inside. I pulled on my jacket, and as soon as I was through the door, my lungs inflated, fully expanding behind my ribs for the first time since I’d woken. I could finally breathe.