Chapter Nineteen
NINETEEN
Those words haunt you when it’s time to sleep.
Not because of climate change—which, you’ll admit, is a much bigger problem than yours—but because when Troy said them, you immediately thought of your own last good day.
The funny thing is, though, that, looking back, it maybe wasn’t the best day overall.
But it started off good. The last good-ish day?
And it was the last time you remember feeling happy with your brother.
It was after Sean’s spiritual awakening.
After he’d imprisoned himself in the house for weeks, reading self-help books and dipping his toes into the world’s major religions.
It was after he had unknowingly destroyed your friendship with Diana.
You’d been wondering if he was maybe going to join a monastery when one morning he woke up and came into your room fresh from the shower.
“Get dressed, Case!” he said. “I have planned an outing.”
He said the last word in an accent of some kind, and you immediately thought of something New Agey.
So you were surprised when he told you to grab the cobweb-covered cooler from under the basement stairs.
You went down and excavated it, and when you brought it up, he started loading it with sandwiches and sodas from the fridge.
He didn’t tell you where you were going, or that Diana was coming.
And when he picked her up, he didn’t tell her anything either.
He only said that it would be memorable.
You got on the highway going north, and for maybe an hour or two, you lost track of time.
You were in charge of changing the radio station when the song went bad, and you surfed the frequencies with precision, turning the knob whenever something felt like a mood killer.
This job helped keep your mind off Diana, who sat quietly in the back seat, hiding behind an enormous pair of old-lady sunglasses she’d borrowed from her baba.
It had been two weeks since she asked you to go to Perkins and you turned her down.
Two weeks since you’d had a normal conversation when you ran into each other in the kitchen, or outside Sean’s room in the morning.
Sean had started taking her out again, so they were gone more often.
But now the three of you were back in the Corolla, pretending that everything was normal.
And for the drive, at least, it almost was.
Sean told a story about the time a guy at the ice cream shop spilled a whole milkshake on himself right before a job interview, and his impression of the guy’s face had Diana giggling in the back seat, in spite of herself.
And then he reminded you of this game you used to play when you were young called “escape artist,” where one of you would tie the other one up using anything you could find: toy handcuffs, scarves, ropes, a blindfold.
Then the captured person would have to escape in a room with all the lights off.
You remembered this game as being genuinely scary, but the worst thing in the world was if you had to admit defeat and scream for your captor to come set you free.
On the other hand, if you managed to escape, there was no better feeling.
When you saw the light of the hallway and your brother’s disappointed face, the victory filled your entire body.
“So, basically, you guys were into bondage,” said Diana.
“Har har,” said Sean, reaching over and slapping a palm on your neck. “Nice try, but you’ll never understand our bro-lationship.”
And for the first time in a while, the contact didn’t feel weird.
Sean drove straight through to his destination, only stopping when he got to the parking lot of what appeared to be a nature preserve.
There were lots of hiking trails and signs for different numbered quarries, which you didn’t totally understand.
He looked at them carefully and then chose number two.
He walked ahead of you and Diana with the cooler.
Once he was on the right path, a childlike excitement seemed to enter him. He turned back and smiled.
“C’mon,” he said, and started to jog.
You and Diana quickened your pace, but it was hard to keep up with him, and because the sun was high and it was getting hot, neither of you wanted to run.
So that left you alone, side by side. You hadn’t spoken a direct word to each other all day.
You felt the urge to apologize to her, but for what exactly?
For turning down an offer to go to Perkins?
Just for being weird? It seemed like if you got started on a proper apology, you would have to explain yourself, and to explain yourself would be to do the unthinkable.
Still, you had trouble even looking at her, so you stared straight ahead when you spoke.
“Do you know what this place is?”
Diana looked surprised to hear your voice, and you thought, for a moment, that she wasn’t going to respond. But then she sighed and said:
“Not really. Some kind of old mining place?”
Around you were rows of aspens, their thin white trunks slicing the blue sky into narrow rectangles.
The light filtering through the leaves made long shadows on the trail that moved up and over your body when you walked through them.
It was so quiet you could hear the sound of the gravel crunching beneath the soles of your shoes.
Your familiar anxious urge to fill the silence came back to you quickly.
“Did you know the Japanese have a word for light scattered through the trees?”
She looked at you, mildly curious.
“Komorebi,” you said. “There isn’t really a direct English translation. But it’s basically … you know … this.”
You waved your arms toward the light and stole a quick glance at your brother, who was even farther away now. He also appeared to be taking his shirt off, which was odd, but not entirely out of character. You looked back to Diana.
“Do they have a word for an awkward attempt at conversation?” she asked.
You couldn’t see her eyes through her sunglasses, so it was hard to tell what her expression was.
“I don’t know. I don’t really speak Japanese,” you said. “I just like untranslatable words. There is this one in German, Verschlimmbessern, which basically means the more you try to fix something, the worse it gets. Is that what you’re thinking of?”
She stopped then and took off her sunglasses, her pupils retracting in the sunlight. Her face looked genuine for a moment, open. She said your name.
“Case.”
And that’s when you heard Sean’s scream.
You both turned in time for him to take the last couple of steps before jumping into the air over the edge of an enormous cliff. His scream faded as he dropped out of sight.
Your breath stopped.
There was barely a moment’s pause before both of you were sprinting.
Already, the adrenaline was pouring through you, and you couldn’t remember the last time you had run so hard.
Your head was buzzing, and your whole body was boiling.
Halfway there, you heard the splash, and you felt a small relief.
But you still didn’t know how safe he was, or what was really down there.
It wasn’t until you and Diana reached the end of the path and looked down the sheer face of a granite cliff so high that it made you dizzy that you exhaled.
There he was, floating in the dark blue water.
He wasn’t even looking at you. He was on his back, face to the sun, and with what looked to be a serene smile on his lips.
In the shock of the moment, you couldn’t even conjure a sentence.
All you could do was watch him drift. Beyond his body, there were disparate groups of teenagers floating on inner tubes, splashing, and laughing with one another.
If any of them had watched his leap from out of nowhere, they were over it now.
The anger came to you then, as you took a single shaky step back from the cliff, and you wanted to yell down to him, strings of profanity from the core of your being.
Instead, you just said a single sentence out loud to yourself.
“I thought you were gone.”
Diana didn’t seem to hear you. She was staring fixedly at the water below.
Then, in a matter of seconds, she did something you never would have considered: She took off her shirt and jean shorts and jumped in after him.
She landed feetfirst in the water with an incredible splash, and when she surfaced, she swam directly over to Sean and dunked him under the water.
For a moment, you thought she was actually going to kill him.
They were under the water for a long time.
But when they finally emerged, they were both laughing and Sean had her bra in his outstretched hand.
You wanted her to punch him. You could almost feel what it would be like for her fist to connect with his jaw.
But instead, she put her arms around him and bit him on the ear.
He shrieked, but in a kind of delight, and then kissed her, while some nearby teens whooped at them.
“I thought you were gone,” you said again, to yourself.
Of course, you couldn’t bring yourself to jump.
You were too scared. Plain and simple. But Sean climbed back to the top and executed a heart-stopping array of dives that almost gave you a vicarious panic attack.
Each one brought him so close to the rock face of the cliff, you were sure he was going to scrape against it.
Diana cheered him on below, fully converted to the strange turn this day had taken.
According to Sean, his diving career was over now—there was no point anymore if he couldn’t go all the way—but you wouldn’t have known it by how sharp and fluid his movements were as he spun and flipped through the air.
You weren’t sure if he was even supposed to be diving since his concussion, but by the end of the afternoon, he was putting on a one-man show for the whole quarry, soaking up the attention like his old self.
You eventually found a path down to the water and waded in from the rocky shore.
The water was freezing, and when you dove under, it was surprisingly clear.
You could see at least twenty feet below you, but the quarry must have been deep, because there was no sign of the bottom.
You felt so many things at the same time, it was hard to separate them.
Anger. Jealousy. Pride. Relief. So you weren’t sure what to do when he swam over to you and dove under the water.
When he rose again, it was under your legs so that you were sitting awkwardly on his shoulders, while he stood on a rocky outcropping near the shore, water up to his armpits.
It felt good to be up there, the wind blowing against the cold water on your skin, but the sun still heating you. You hammed it up for a moment, the way he expected, waving your arms and saying you were going to fall.
“I’ve got you,” he said. “Don’t forget that I’m amazingly strong.”
“Oh right,” you said. “How could I forget?”
A breeze kicked up and gave you goose bumps, so you folded your arms.
“Not feeling the diving today?” he asked.
“Or any day,” you said.
He laughed.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I should have known this wouldn’t really be your thing. But I just had to do it one more time. It feels like … it’s hard to describe.”
He wobbled a little before holding you tighter.
“It feels like I’m leaving my body. Like I’m no longer part of my own body, but pure energy or something.”
“Sounds like a panic attack,” you said.
“I think it’s better than that. Like I momentarily disappear. But then I come back. And the coming back is the good part because I feel so clear-eyed. And I know what to do.”
Diana had climbed up to a smaller cliff, and she stood there now, poised at the edge with her arms raised.
Her curly hair lay flat down her back, and she apparently had no shame about being in her underwear in front of a crowd of local high schoolers.
She pointed her hands into the sky and then dove sideways into the water like someone in a musical number from an old movie.
“People don’t get married young anymore,” said Sean. “But I’m thinking that’s the right move for me. I think that’s going to be the next trend. Early monogamy.”
Diana popped up out of the water and kicked her way to the shore.
She climbed up on a rock and lay back to sun herself like a lizard.
You both stared like idiots. She was beautiful.
That was obvious. But she was also just so wholly herself sometimes that you always felt steadier being around her. You knew that Sean did too.
“Sean,” you said. “You have to tell her.”
You could feel his shoulders tense under your legs.
He stood absolutely still for a couple of seconds.
You thought maybe he was going to drop you on the rocks.
Or maybe just yell at you. But he didn’t drop you.
And he didn’t say a word. He ducked down into the water, submerging himself slowly like a submarine.
For a moment, you were still attached. And you thought of the way he would always escape during your old games, no matter how tight you tied him up.
He could always seem to wriggle free from the hardest knots or the trickiest toy handcuffs.
Now, in the cold water of the quarry, you kept your legs clenched over his shoulders, trying to hang on to him.
But he went deeper. Then deeper. And instead of pulling you down with him, he just kind of slipped your grasp.
And was free.