For a moment, he didn’t say anything. Then, “I’ll take you wherever you want to go.”
After cleaning up our teacups, we thanked Moonbeam and took off around the lake. I checked my phone to make sure I didn’t have any texts—I was a little paranoid to be out. Not sure why. No one seemed to notice I was gone. And why would they? It wasn’t quite eleven, not terribly late, especially for a warm summer night, and there was still a little traffic on the Strip when weheaded back through town. I spotted the place where Moonbeam used to work, Anchor, and could hear live music from another tiny pub down the block.
Not too much else was open: a diner until midnight, the gas station out by the freeway, and a couple of restaurants. But when I gave Fen directions where I wanted him to go, and we turned off the Strip, chugging up a dark road that ran up Blue Snake River, away from the lights of town, the one thing that wasn’t open came into view up ahead.
The Condor Dam.
“Can you pull over and park?” I asked.
“Are you serious?”
I nodded. “I just want to see it.”
“It’s closed to the public,” he said, slowing down. “You can walk around in the park next to the dam, but you can’t walk across it until morning.”
“Dad told me. But maybe we could just sit on one of the benches in the park? I need to. Please, Fen. You said you wanted to ghost hunt with me. Well…?”
He idled, making up his mind, and then drove farther up the road and pulled the Jeep into a parking space in a small empty lot that visitors used during the day. There wasn’t so much a park on this side of the dam, more of a small green space with some trees and grass for walking your dog or getting out and stretching your legs to look at the dam and take photos. Couple benches and a trash can. If you crossed over the dam, then you’d be on a wooded point of land between the river andthe lake—affectionately nicknamed Neverland—with flowers, a place to fish, and a meandering walking path that led to the Condor Visitors Center.
But crossing the dam to the Neverland area meant using the wooden walkway.
The one that was now gated.
The one from which I’d fallen.
Fen cut the engine. I held on to Frida, who wanted to bound out of the Jeep. We stared at the back of the dam, which was connected to a quaint Arts and Crafts–style control building with a roof, ten square windows across. Just a hundred feet or so—very picturesque and sweet, not some big Hoover Dam, or anything. Tourists loved to take photos of it, and there was a permanent stone chessboard and two stone bench chairs that sat near the railing here, where locals could come listen to the calm, flowing water and play a game.
Now it was dark and silent.
“Have you been back here?” I asked, trying to ignore Frida’s soft whimpers to be let down and explore.
“So,somany times,” Fen said in a low voice. He sighed deeply. “Come on. There’s a place near the railing. I’ll show you.”
We were alone. Traffic sped in the distance over the auto bridge that crossed the river a quarter mile or so up. In the opposite direction, toward the lake, if I listened hard, I could hear music across the water from the Strip. No band at Betty’s tonight, just music from some of the smaller bars. But I didn’t really want to hear any of it, so I just concentrated on the soothing sound of the dam.
Fen and I walked together across dewy shorn grass, Frida sniffing in the dark as I looped the handle of her leash on my wrist. He stopped by the railing that looked down over the water that flowed softly from one of the dozen small floodgates that sat under the wooden walkway. The dam could raise or lower the lake by ten feet, depending on how many gates were open. The town gave free tours of how it worked, and Dad took me on one when I was a kid.
“Is it what you remembered?” Fen asked.
Yes and no.
The last time I was here, my chest didn’t feel as if it were being held by a vise. But it looked prettier than it did in my mind. A peaceful spot to rest. An in-between place. Liminal.
It was not supposed to be a place for drunk parties and rude kids to run around like wild things, screaming for the bands that they could hear across the water while their friends snuck off across the walkway to the dark of Neverland and had sex in the woods, leaving empty beer cans and used condoms for the park service people to clean up the next day.
“I was there,” I said, pointing at the end of the dam’s walkway. “Sitting on the railing. That’s where I fell. That’s it, huh?” It wasn’t very far.
“Ten feet,” he said. “You hit those rocks there, and you floated out toward the lake.”
“Where did you dive in?”
He scrubbed his face with his hand. “There, in the middle of the walkway. I swam… to about somewhere down there.” Hepointed farther down from where we were. “I couldn’t find you at first. I was worried you’d floated out into the lake. It was dark and confusing, and one of the floodgates was open, so there was a little flow? Not much. But you got stuck on the rocks.”
Stuck on the rocks. Because I was unconscious.
“How did you get me out of the water?” I asked.
“Carried you… tried to keep your head above the surface, and pulled you up those rocks there, onto the island. It was the only place that didn’t have a railing.”
