Chapter Ten
Ten
I could hear the old Ford Ranger before I could see it. The rumble of the engine broke the silence of the forest, growing louder until the light reflected off the windshield like a spark in the trees. Smoke’s head lifted from my lap, his ears perking up before the truck pulled into the drive.
I stood from the top porch step and slung my bag over my shoulder as Micah shifted the gear into park, resting one hand at the top of the wheel. His beanie was pulled low over his ears, making the ends of his hair curl along his jaw, and he hadn’t shaved since I last saw him, making him look gruffer than usual. I was still trying to get used to the ways he’d changed. Knowing him at eighteen wasn’t the same as knowing him at thirty-seven. The kind of shifts that happened in that time were more felt than seen, but there were some things, like the width of him or the look of his hands, that were different now. They were details that measured time, and that was something I tried not to think about.
I opened the door and Smoke jumped into the cab, finding a spot where he could look out from between the driver’s and passenger’s seat. The truck was a model from the nineties with a topper on the back, and it was surprisingly well-preserved for its years in the unforgiving landscape. It had been converted into a camper, so the backseat was gone and the entire space all the way to the tailgate had been retrofitted with a pallet bed and several compartments fixed to the inside frame.
“Morning,” Micah said, voice rough with cold and sleep.
“Morning.” I lifted myself inside and he took my bag, setting it in the back. “One of these for me?” I asked, eyeing the two coffees in the cupholders.
“Picked them up at the diner on the way.”
“Thanks.” I lifted one from the holder, curling my cold hands around the warm paper cup, and took a sip.
We sat there for a few seconds, the truck idling with Micah’s hand paused on the gear shift. “Thought it was worth asking one more time if you’re sure you want to do this.”
I could see in the way he was looking at me that he didn’t think it was a good idea. For him or for me, I didn’t know.
I thought about it, keenly aware that I’d asked myself the same question several times throughout the night. But I felt like I’d already made the choice back in San Francisco. The moment I decided to come home. Since I’d arrived in Six Rivers, the connection I had to Johnny had grown like a wild vine, snaking around my existence. I wasn’t only sensing him anymore. I was hearing him. Maybe even seeing him, and there was a part of me that didn’t want to find out where all of this led. But there was also a more desperate part of me that had to know.
“I’m sure,” I answered.
A steady breath filled Micah’s chest and he pushed it out. “Okay.”
He reversed, taking us out onto the road, and I reached for the seatbelt, watching the cabin disappear in the rearview mirror. We were headed away from Six Rivers, back toward the main interstate.
“I hope you didn’t have to shift too much around to do this,” I said.
“It wasn’t a big deal.” He shrugged, but his eyes avoided mine, making me think it was. “Sadie said you were working there all day yesterday.”
“Yeah. I was.”
The image of Johnny in the booth flickered back to life in my mind. That flutter was still in my chest, the anxious anticipation of waiting for him to turn around and look at me. It had been like a splice of film playing on repeat all night as I lay awake in the dark.
Micah turned off the main road, and Smoke’s face came up to rest on the back of the seat between us, eyes fixed on the view out the windshield.
“Micah…I don’t know how to ask this….”
He turned to look at me, waiting.
“Ben—Sadie’s son.” I paused. “He’s not Johnny’s, is he?”
Now Micah was the one who’d fallen quiet. I studied the immediate change in his demeanor, his hands gripping the steering wheel tighter. His eyes focused on the road.
When he finally spoke, it was through a sigh. “Sadie says he isn’t.”
“That’s not really an answer.”
“Then my answer is I don’t know. She’s always said it was a random hookup with a logger who was passing through. It happened after I left, and when I got back, she was pregnant.”
“Johnny never said anything?”
Micah shook his head. “He wondered, sure. But Sadie said the kid wasn’t Johnny’s. She was adamant about it. He asked for a paternity test years ago and she refused.”
I let my weight sink back into the seat, watching the light flit through the trees. “What if he is?” I asked, softly. “What if he is Johnny’s?”
Micah didn’t answer, and I wondered if his mind was turning with the same thing mine was. If Ben was Johnny’s son, that meant I had a nephew. I had family. It also meant that my brother had left something physical—something flesh and bone behind in this world.
“Sadie could be telling the truth,” Micah offered. “I don’t know what reason she has to lie.”
But I did. Johnny had strung Sadie along for years when we were teenagers, and I knew enough to guess that he’d done the same after I left, at least for a time. Sadie wasn’t the kind of girl to get pregnant for the purposes of pinning a guy down. But she was the type to create her own reality. And if she’d decided that Johnny would never want her, I could imagine her cutting her losses and lying about Ben.
“Wait.” My train of thought caught up with me, rewinding back to what Micah had said. “What did you mean after you left?” The truck jerked to the side as the tar gave way to gravel, and I reached up, holding on to the handle over my head. “Left where? Six Rivers?”
“Yeah.”
“You didn’t tell me that you left.”
“You didn’t ask,” he said.
I finally turned to look at him. “I’m asking now, Micah.”
His hand was tightening on the wheel again, eyes catching mine for a fraction of a second before they returned to the road.
“After—” He stopped himself, jaw clenching.
I didn’t know what he was about to say, but there were several things that could finish that sentence. After you had left. After what happened to Griffin. After everything changed. Apparently, he didn’t want to go there any more than I did because he didn’t finish.
“I packed up and I used the money I had saved to buy this truck. And I just…started driving.”
“Where’d you go?”
He shrugged. “All over. Drove up the West Coast first and didn’t stop until I got to Seattle, then started east. Stopped in Montana for a while, and that’s where I learned to fly-fish. Spent a month in Colorado, then Texas. Over time I started outfitting the truck into a camper, and after that, I really didn’t have a reason to stop driving.”
A reason. The choice of words haunted me. I couldn’t help but wonder if he was thinking that I hadn’t given him one.
“Johnny didn’t go with you?”
“No.”
The single word felt incomplete. Like there was a longer explanation he didn’t want to give me. But when I left Six Rivers, I’d thought I was leaving Johnny with Micah. That after I was gone, he’d take over. It was the only way I’d been able to stomach the thought of going to Byron. If I’d known that Micah wasn’t here, that he’d left Johnny, too, I would have come back. Something told me that both Johnny and Micah knew that.
“By the time I made it to New Mexico, I’d been on the road for more than a year. Then I just couldn’t stop thinking about coming home. I realized it was the only place I didn’t want to leave. Or maybe just the only place I felt like I had to leave,” he amended.
I tried to analyze the tone of his voice, looking for any hint of his meaning. Did he feel like he had to leave because of me? Or because of Griffin?
“When I got back, I started picking up odd jobs, trying to avoid having to take work at one of the logging companies. And then one day someone came into the diner asking about a fly-fishing guide and Sadie gave him my number. Just kind of accidentally started doing it and never stopped.”
“I didn’t…” I searched for the words, unsure what to say. “Johnny never told me.”
The fact that Johnny never mentioned Micah was intentional for a number of reasons. I didn’t have to hear it from Johnny to know that. He’d never liked the idea of me and Micah being together and he didn’t want me to have any reason to stay in Six Rivers. He definitely didn’t want me to have a reason to come back.
“You think you’ll ever leave again?” I asked.
Micah shook his head. “No. I’m made of this place.”
It was such a simple way of saying it, but the meaning was anything but. That’s what Johnny had always believed, too. That we were made in the dark. Forged from the shadows of this forest as creatures that were created to survive only here. I’d felt that, too. In fact, I was sure that was what was wrong with me. Why I’d never been able to feel like I belonged anywhere else.
“I haven’t asked you…” I hesitated, fumbling over the question.
“What?”
“If you’re with anyone. If you have anyone, I mean.”
He smirked, side-eyeing me.
“I know it’s not any of my business. I’m just curious.” I rubbed at the place between my eyes, embarrassed now.
“I’m not with anyone,” he said.
I didn’t know what kind of reply wouldn’t sound strange, but before I could manage to say anything, Micah was already talking again.
“There aren’t exactly a lot of options in a town this small,” he said, setting the cup back into its holder. “And trust me, no one wants this baggage.”
He gave me a knowing look, like I knew firsthand what he was talking about. But we were already much too close to wading into the unknown waters of a conversation like that.
“I’m not judging you, Micah. It was just a question.” I impressed myself with how true it sounded. I knew I had no right to jealousy, but it was still festering. I’d never liked the idea of Micah with someone else.
“When do you have to be back in the city?” He tried to ask the question nonchalantly, but I could hear an undercurrent of tension.
“Next week. There’s a thing I have to be back for.”
“A thing,” he repeated.
“A show,” I clarified. “There’s a show coming up featuring some of my work.”
“Why didn’t you just say that?”
I ran a hand through my hair, casting my gaze out the window. “I don’t know. I guess it just feels kind of stupid.”
“Stupid how?”
I shrugged. “Just, everything is different there, you know? What people do, how they act, what they think is important.”
“It’s not stupid, James,” he said, sounding serious. He waited for me to look at him, and when I did, he said it again. “It’s not.”
I didn’t say anything because there was nothing to say. Trying to save me from my own embarrassment was a kindness I wasn’t sure he owed me.
“You like it? The shows and all of that?”
“Yeah, I mean, it was my dream, right?”
He nodded slowly. “Right.”
For a moment, it felt as if everything that happened before San Francisco blinked out like a dying star. There was a comfort in the familiarity of just existing in the same place at the same time. If I was being honest, that’s one of the reasons I’d texted him. But then my smile fell a little. Eventually, that fading light would reignite. Too much had happened for it all to just…disappear. And I’d learned the hard way that wishing things were different only drove deeper how unfair it was that they weren’t.
“So, what exactly are we looking for out in the gorge?”
I let my head fall back to the headrest, shooting him a look. I’d wondered if he was going to let me off the hook, but he wasn’t. “I just…need to see it. I need to try and understand what he was doing out there.”
Micah gave me a perplexed look. “He was working.”
“I don’t know,” I said, softly. “I’ve been through all the negatives, and the last photos I have from the gorge were taken on November tenth.”
“Yeah?” It sounded like a question.
“But there aren’t any from the day he died. Why?”
Micah shrugged. “Maybe he was just doing more observation. He wasn’t always shooting.”
“But there aren’t any entries in his field journal for that day at Trentham Gorge, either. And wouldn’t he have at least taken his camera?”
The set of his mouth straightened. He was thinking through it.
“He didn’t mention anything about what he was doing out there to you?” I asked.
“No.”
“Nothing seemed…different?”
“Not that I remember.”
“You said it seemed like he was dreading the project being over. Was he stressed about the CAS deadline?” I tried again.
“I would think so.”
The rapid-fire, vague answers made me study him more closely. “You would think so?” I repeated the words so that he could hear how incomplete they sounded.
He was annoyed now. “It’s not like we sat around talking about this stuff all the time. We were both busy, and especially in the fall I was booked so much I was almost never home. You had to really know what questions to ask if you wanted answers from Johnny. You know that.”
I did know. Sometimes it felt like having a conversation with a Rubik’s cube.
Micah’s hand drummed on the steering wheel as he thought. “Honestly, I don’t know. It was always hard to tell with him.”
“Yeah, I guess,” I admitted.
We fell into a pensive silence, and for the thousandth time, I tried to think back to my last conversation with my brother, replaying it in my head over and over and trying to sift the last words he ever spoke to me from the broken memories.
“Can I ask you something else?” My hands tightened around the coffee cup, but I could hardly feel its heat anymore.
Micah pulled his gaze from the road again, eyes running over my face. Like he was trying to guess what I was about to say. “Yeah, sure.”
“What happened that day?”
I watched as, inch by inch, Micah’s shoulders went rigid, the tension traveling down his arms, into his hands. His knuckles paled as his grip on the wheel clenched again.
“When Johnny went missing,” I said, more softly. “When you found him.”
He took one hand from the wheel, propping his elbow in the window of the driver’s side door. His fingers brushed over his mouth like he was thinking. Maybe remembering. I could see a flush blooming beneath his skin.
“A couple of days before he died, he borrowed the truck to go out to the gorge.”
“November tenth,” I said, looking for confirmation.
“It was the ninth, actually. He only shot at dawn, before the sun was up, because that’s when the owls are still active. But the gorge is so remote that he’d leave the night before and camp.”
I waited.
“So, he went out that day and I was expecting him to return late the next night, but then he was back a lot earlier than usual. He dropped the truck off and picked up Smoke, then the next day, he showed up at my place again saying he needed to go back. He was in a hurry, so he just grabbed my keys and went.”
“Did he usually do that? Just show up last minute and go?”
Micah hesitated. “No, it was usually a planned thing. But I think he was just behind schedule and trying to fit it in.”
“When exactly was that?”
“The day before he died. He left that afternoon, and when he didn’t come back the next day I started getting worried, but I figured maybe he’d had to stay an extra night or go out to one of the other locations. I couldn’t call him because there’s no cell service out there. Amelia was out of town, but she got back that next day, and when Johnny still hadn’t shown up, I called her. We drove out together to check on him, and we found the truck, but no sign of Johnny.” He paused, swallowing. “We split up to start looking for him, and”—he exhaled—“Ifound him across the ravine, halfway up the ridge.”
The flush in his skin deepened, and I wanted to reach for him, but I couldn’t make myself do it. The small thread that was holding me together was about to break. I could see that was true for Micah, too.
“He was gone. Had been gone since the day before,” he said.
I tried to breathe through the tight feeling in my chest. That vision of the treetops, sunlight blinking through the leaves, was there again, stretching wide over my mind.
Micah cleared his throat, as if trying to squelch the emotion in his voice. “I know what you’re thinking.”
“What?” I blinked.
“That I should have gone sooner. That first day that he didn’t come back, I should have gone to look for him then.”
My mouth dropped open wordlessly for several seconds before I could speak. “Micah, I don’t think that.”
His jaw clenched.
“Micah.” I did reach out for him then, taking a firm hold of his arm.
He looked down at my hand.
“I don’t think that,” I said again.
“Then what are you thinking?”
“I was thinking that I’m sorry,” I whispered.
I wasn’t sure he could hear me over the roar of the truck, but he looked at me, his expression saying what he couldn’t. I could guess that it had been the worst moment of his life. And somehow, I was still glad that it had been him. That after Johnny had lain there alone for an entire day, it had been Micah who’d found him.
If there was fault to be had, I knew where it would land. Johnny never would have been out there if he hadn’t been working on the CAS project. He never would have been on the project if I hadn’t gone to San Francisco. And I wouldn’t have left Six Rivers if that night with Griffin Walker hadn’t happened.
It didn’t matter how we divvied up the blame. In the end, it landed on me.