Meanwhile, your boat has stopped. And when you hop out into the ankle-deep water, the fog is patchier. You look around, and the land seems to curve around you until it meets water on both sides.
“It’s an island,” you say.
“No way,” says Will.
And he stumbles across the water, landing eventually on his butt in the sand. The other three are still in their boat, unmoving, all facing forward. You step back toward the water and heft your boat up the shore, cutting a furrow in the gray sand. You look inside, but it doesn’t appear to be damaged.
“Do you guys smell that?” says Diana, climbing out of her boat.
You cock your head and take a deep inhalation. The carbon reaches your nose in an instant.
“Woodsmoke,” you say.
You start running then, onto the island proper, through brush and over gnarled roots and leaves. You can hear the water so clearly from all sides. The island can’t be too big. The smell of the campfire is getting closer, and you can hear the sounds of your fellow travelers’ boots pounding behind you. Diana races ahead, but not for long. Soon enough, she comes to a stop.
“Hey, Case,” she says. “Come over here. I need to show you something.”
Her phrasing sounds familiar, and you can’t pinpoint it at first. But the thought scatters when you see the embers, glowing through the mist like magma. The coals are red, blinking when the breeze kicks up. And after you see them, you immediately see what’s next to them. And so does everyone else who has finally caught up.
It’s a tent that looks remarkably like Silas’s.
TWENTY-NINE
You should be screaming. Or rushing the tent. But instead, you’re standing there, lost in your thoughts. And that’s because you finally remember why those words sounded so familiar. They’re almost exactly the same ones she sent you in a text after she and Sean broke up. You hadn’t seen her for a week after that. Not at school, where she left every day for lunch and often failed to make it back for the afternoon. And not at Perkins, where you circled the parking lot like the world’s most obvious detective, peering in windows and scanning your old corner booth. Then one evening, you got a text from a number you didn’t recognize.
Come over. I need to tell u something.
At first you thought it was a wrong number, and you were about to ignore it when something clicked and you fired off a response.
When did you get a new phone?
There was a substantial pause, the three dots flashing so long that you were expecting a novel when you got the next message. Instead you saw:
When I mastered enough Serbian vocab.
It was late, almost eleven on a Saturday, and Sean had been gone most of the day. He was, you figured, either out riding or hanging out at the bike co-op with his new crew of pierced waifs.He spent a lot of time there lately, and most nights, he was out bombing through the city, finding new ways to hurl his body through space. Since the breakup, it felt like he was always in motion. Unable to sit down. He’d leave in the afternoon and come back near dawn, drenched in sweat, barely able to move or speak.
On the night you got the text from Diana, Sean had left at four o’clock that afternoon and still wasn’t back. Unlike some of his new bike shop pals, he did have lights and reflective gear, but you were planning on waiting until he returned before you went to bed, just to make sure he was safe. Now you weren’t sure what to do.
Part of you felt like it was your responsibility to help him through this time, since you had played a part in the end of his relationship, but he didn’t seem to want your help. He’d rejected your offer to go back to the quarry a few days ago—and you knew it was probably time just to tell him what had happened. But then there was Diana. Until this message, you weren’t sure if you’d ever see her again. Now you had a chance to say an actual goodbye.
In the end, you grabbed your keys and told yourself you’d be back soon.
Your mom was out working a night shift, but your dad had fallen asleep waiting for Sean, so you were extra quiet leaving the house. And you tried to go slow backing the Corolla out of the driveway to keep your bad muffler to a light wheeze. You looked down the street in both directions before you left, hoping you might see the blinking strobe of Sean’s LED coming down the road, but there was nothing but darkness in either direction. So you tapped Diana’s address into your phone and took off into the night.
You’d never actually been in her house before. And you were pretty sure Sean hadn’t either. The place, she always said, was in a gentrifying neighborhood that was gentrifying very slowly on account of the snakes. The urban legend was that a pet escaped its terrarium in the eighties, but it was probably the proximity to the river. Once, when Diana was young, she watched her baba casually grab a garter snake from the washing machine and toss it into the open mouth of her dog (who gagged and spit it out).
The drive took ten minutes or so, but eventually you pulled up to her light blue rambler with overstuffed gutters and an attached garage. Though you had dropped her off here a few nights after Perkins, you’d only ever seen the place from afar, so it still felt unfamiliar, like the house of a distant relative. Tonight, the driveway was blocked by an enormous Buick, so you parked on the street. And when you made it to the front steps, a motion detector popped on and you froze in place like a thief. In the light, you noticed all the bird feeders, hanging around you like a floating city. You had to duck to get under one, and when you made it to the door, there was a single Post-it note on the screen that saidENTER.
You opened it up and stepped into a living room with wall-to-wall green carpeting and immaculate, dated furniture. Through a narrow hallway, you could see Diana unloading a small dishwasher and carefully stacking glasses in a cabinet. You walked down the hall, lined with formal pictures of Diana and her grandmother posing in cheesy photo studios over the years. From the pictures, it seemed like Baba wasn’t a big smiler, and her glasses were the biggest you’d ever seen.
“Stop right there!”
You turned to find the woman herself only inches away, holding tightly to a Louisville Slugger. She was much shorter in person—barely over five feet if you had to guess—and she had sneaked up on you like a ninja and taken aim at your head. You stuck your hands straight up and took a step backward. She grimaced at you, and her upturned lip revealed a single gold tooth.
“Why you are in this house right now so late? Eh?!”
She gripped the bat tighter, and now that you had a chance to get a better look, she appeared to be wearing a kimono and some compression socks, and little else.
