Chapter 15
BY THE TIME I ARRIVE at the Martin farm the following morning, the sun is already blazing hot, hanging from a cloudless blue sky. I pull out my phone and send my mom a text.
Hey, I made it. Only took out two kids.
The only way she would let me drive myself to Nora’s today was if I updated her on my whereabouts, which… I would’ve done anyway. Well, except for why I’m here.
Not funny, she replies.
I juggle two iced vanilla lattes in one hand as I step out of my car and spot Nora on the other side of a few beat-up pickup trucks.
She’s sitting on a fence, facing the fields, her legs dangling over the other side.
My shoulders relax a little—I’m thankful that I didn’t have to park outside the meat shop and risk running into her mom again.
Maybe Nora was thinking the same thing when she told me to pull all the way back here in between two gigantic grain silos.
As I approach from behind, I notice that the green cutoff Class of 2023 shirt she’s wearing is from Wyatt High. She must’ve graduated this year too.
I lean against the fence beside her and she looks down at me.
“To make up for the other day. It’s oat, so it’s vegan.” I hand her one of the drinks and she lifts the lid to give it a precautionary sniff. “I didn’t make them,” I say, rolling my eyes.
“Had to be sure.” She grins, taking a sip. “Well, you ready?” She flicks her head to some far-off point across the field.
Am I ready to see the place where I almost died?
I’m not exactly sure. I mean, is it even safe?
I fell once, so I don’t think it’s out of the realm of possibility that it could happen again.
But I take a deep breath and nod anyway, because I’m still holding out hope that when I see it, I’ll remember why I was even there in the first place.
Besides, this time I won’t be alone. I’ll be with Nora.
We walk side by side, away from the road and along the split-rail fence, which soon turns into welded wire laced around thick wooden posts.
I try my best not to make eye contact with the hundreds of cows that lift their heads to look in our direction as we pass by.
Our local grocery store stocks Martin’s meat, so I’d say about 100 percent of the beef I’ve consumed in my life is probably from this farm, and unlike Nora, I don’t have any plans to go vegan, so I’d prefer not to look my food in the eye.
“So what exactly is it that you do on the farm?” I ask as we walk past a couple of grain silos.
She shrugs. “Whatever my mom asks. Right now I’m putting up a new fence along the eastern field.
So that’ll probably take me another two months or so.
Sometimes I work the shop when they need a fill-in, but I prefer to be out here if I can.
” She squints at me, holding her hand to her forehead to block the sun, and I notice a couple of bruises on the inside of her forearm.
“Hey, what happened there?” I ask.
“What?” She turns her arm to inspect it. “Oh. Just one of the perks of the job.” She shrugs and tucks her hand into her pocket. “How’d the rest of your shift go?”
“A bit better. They let me stay on register the rest of the time. Thanks for… uhh…” I’m actually not sure what she did to make me feel so much better, so I don’t know what to thank her for.
“Sure thing,” she replies anyway. I swipe my arm across my brow to mop away the sweat. It feels like the temperature has gone up about twenty degrees since we left the parking lot, and it’s got me wishing I had brought water instead of lattes.
I watch my feet as we wade through the tall grass; then I come to a stop, recognizing something sticking out of the dirt.
“What is this?” I ask, bending down to pick up a small orange-striped rock, just like the one I found on my desk. I drop it into Nora’s outstretched hand.
“Granite. There’s a whole bunch of it under the dirt all over the farm. Sometimes the rototillers pull it up.” She underhands it back to me. “Why do you ask?”
“No reason,” I reply, but really I’m wondering how it made its way onto my desk and if it means I’ve been here more than just that one time.
“Come on, we’re almost there,” she says, and I let the rock fall back into the grass.
I let out a big sigh of relief as we make it to the tree line, beyond thankful for the beautiful, beautiful shade.
Nora laughs, shaking her head as she takes a few more steps, using her boot to stomp down a jagger bush for me.
I hop over it and then drop back behind her, letting her lead me through the trees.
Soon the leaves are so thick overhead that barely a single ray of sun breaks through.
How could I have found myself all the way out here alone?
Under the sounds of birds whistling and crickets chirping, I begin to hear the rush of water.
It grows louder as we head deeper into the woods, sounding more like a river than a crick, until finally, we break through an opening.
Nora looks back at me hesitantly and then steps to the side to reveal a massive tree lying across a ravine that I can’t even see the bottom of from this angle.
I carefully step closer to the bank, my heart jumping up into my throat as I look over the edge.
“Oh my God, Nora. How did I end up down there? What the… It’s gotta be fifteen, twenty feet to the bottom. How the hell did you get me out of there?” I ask as she steps up beside me.
“I, uh… I don’t know how it happened. But given the placement, it seems like maybe you tried to walk across the tree trunk and fell.
Like I told your parents and the paramedics, though, I just heard you scream and when I got here, you were at the bottom, unconscious.
So I used those to climb down.” She points at some scattered tree roots poking out of the wall of dirt and creeping down toward the water.
“By the time I got down there, you were completely underwater. I—I thought you were…” She looks away, clearing her throat as she digs the toe of her right boot into the mud.
Her eyes are slightly glassy when she looks back at me.
Dead. She thought I was dead.
“You really don’t recognize any of this?” she asks.
I look all around us, then close my eyes and breathe in as I listen to the sounds of the birds chirping overhead, the wind rustling through the trees.
“I thought once I got here, maybe I would, maybe I’d know why I was here, but…”
Goddammit. I really thought this would work.
“I’ve been doing everything I can to get back to my routine, but nothing is working.
It felt like if anything was going to work, it was going to be coming here, seeing where it all started, but I’m here and…
nothing.” Tears press against my eyes as I look back at Nora, and something inside me crumples.
“What are the other things you’ve been doing to try to remember?” she asks.
“Starting back at the coffee shop, hanging out with my best friends. Although apparently I wasn’t even doing that much anymore so maybe it’s not a surprise that didn’t work.
They told me I’m always working and barely have time for them anymore, so I don’t even know.
” I shrug. “I even went to see my dad at his garage, but we barely had anything to talk about. So I guess I’ve mostly just been hanging out with my mom and going to our favorite spots. ”
“Oh. Are you two close?” she asks.
“My mom and I? Yeah, we’re like…” I cross my middle and pointer fingers. Nora furrows her brow at me and does one slow nod. Instantly I feel bad saying that, when she can’t even stand to be around hers.
She looks away at an animal rustling in some brush, and then she gets real quiet. Mental note: Don’t bring up moms.
“You want to get out of here?” I ask. But as I turn to take my first step away, my foot catches on a branch and it pulls me down until my knee collides with a rock. “Son of a—!” I yell as blood begins to seep through my scraped skin.
“Stevie. Oh my God.” Nora crouches down in front of me as I plop my butt down on the ground, a laugh already escaping my lips. “I will straight-up bubble-wrap your ass. Jesus Christ.” She wipes a hand down her face, trying and failing to hide a smile as she sits back on the rock.
“Sorry,” I say. “Ow.” I pluck a few pieces of dirt out of my knee.
“Come on. We have a first aid kit up at the house,” she says, pulling me up off the ground.
Before we go I look back down at the water and the near-vertical wall of mud on the other side, keeping my feet safely planted where they are.
What she did seems almost impossible.
I can’t even imagine being able to pull myself out of there, let alone someone else.
It must have almost killed her.
I don’t think many people would do that for a complete stranger.
I can’t believe she did it for me.
I always pictured farmhouses as big and cozy. Lots of family photos lining the walls of every room and heaps of antiques cluttering old wooden hutches.
Nora’s house isn’t anything like that. It’s big but… empty, lacking any sort of warmth.
“Okay, hop up and swing your leg over the sink,” she says, smacking the countertop as she rifles through a metal first aid kit. I do as she says, watching her pull out what seems like way too many things for just a scraped-up knee, but I don’t say anything.
She unscrews the white cap off a brown bottle and moves to pour it over my knee. All of a sudden I’m transported back to my mom holding the same bottle over a cut when I was real little.
“Wait, is that the one that bur—Oh my—Nora!” I clutch my knee as the clear liquid sizzles over my scrape.
“Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry.” She winces up at me. “I thought it would be better if you didn’t know it was coming.” She dabs a paper towel over it and then finishes up by carefully spreading Neosporin over a rectangular Band-Aid and sticking it onto my knee. “There.”
“Ow,” I moan as I inspect my knee.