Twenty-Three #2
A few hours later, after talking to everyone who might know where Garrett is, our family stands around the island in our kitchen.
We pretend not to be worried, acting like it’s normal for Garrett to leave without telling anyone where he’s going.
It’s only been a few hours, we keep saying. He’s probably with friends.
Yet here we stand, watching one another over the butcher-block countertop, unsure what to do with ourselves.
“He’s not with Tyler,” Dad says, hanging up his phone. “But Tyler’s mom said to let her know if we need help looking.”
Emma swallows. Tyler’s mom is a police officer. This isn’t a big enough deal for the police. This can’t be a big enough deal for the police.
“It’s only been a few hours,” Aunt Liz repeats, trying to hide the worry in her voice. “He could just be out for a walk.”
“That would be a really long walk,” I say, eyeing the cold drizzle beginning to patter against the window. “And he didn’t bring his phone.”
“He can’t be far,” Dad says. “He doesn’t have a car. Maybe we should take a ride around town to look for him. Just to be safe.”
“Great idea,” Aunt Liz agrees, pressing a horrible hopefulness into her voice.
I follow them outside, anxiety twisting at my stomach.
Aunt Liz gets into the driver’s seat of her car, and Emma tucks herself into the passenger seat.
Dad leans over her car door. “How about you stop in at some shops and restaurants. Ask if anyone has seen him. Enzo and I can drive around and check the streets.”
Aunt Liz nods. “We’re really overreacting,” she tells me. “I’m sure he went somewhere and just forgot to tell us.”
“Or he’s out for a walk,” Dad repeats.
Liz backs out of the driveway and Dad hops into the pickup truck. I don’t join him.
“I’m going on foot,” I tell him. “Check some of the trails. Just in case he got lost in the woods or something.”
He examines me for a minute, then nods.
“Dad?” I say, feeling like I did when I was a kid, asking about where Mom went. “Garrett is okay. Right?”
His lips twist into a sad smile. “We’ll find him. But I don’t think he’s okay.”
By the time I arrive at the Caving Grounds, the sky has grown darker, the rain falling in freezing sheets of glass.
I told Dad I would check the walking trails—the ones to the north of town where people bike and tourists take photos of woodland waterfalls—but I knew Garrett wouldn’t be there.
I don’t know if he’s here, either, but an invisible force draws me across the downed oak and the barbed wire and onto the cracked asphalt running through the woods.
The first buds of spring have begun to appear on the fingers of barren tree limbs, small pinpricks of bright green sprayed across the brown-and-gray world. I run through the abandoned streets, my feet and legs soaked, my rain jacket barely holding back the torrent of water.
I don’t know what I’ll do if he’s not here.
The worry I felt when I didn’t find Garrett in his room turned to anxiety as the afternoon hours ticked past, then turned to panic when we set out to look for him.
This is something that happens in stark Scandinavian dramas—troubled teen walks into the woods and never comes out—but not real life.
Not here. Not with Garrett. I knew I would lose him, but not literally. Not like this.
I sprint through streets that last saw traffic when Elvis was alive and teens flocked to drive-in movie theaters on Saturday nights.
I feel the ghosts of houses resting on their foundations, watching me like they’ve been waiting for Garrett and me all along, waiting for us to become displaced and wrecked in this forgotten town.
“It’s like you could lose yourself in here,” he had said, his voice echoing against the walls of the abandoned mine shaft.
The road veers away from the residential grid and into the iron-filled bluffs.
I tear up the gravel path, the walls of rock pressing in closer, my feet slipping on the wet sediment.
I’m out of breath when I reach the tunnel, but I don’t stop.
I pull myself through the hole in the fencing and stumble into the darkness.
As my eyes adjust to the dim light, I can make out water streaming like a curtain over the open exit. I think I see the dark shape of a boy on the other side of the rain curtain. I run faster. I follow the small river that has formed at my feet, flowing toward the pit. Toward Garrett.
“Garrett!” I call, my voice reverberating off the tunnel walls strangely, amplified and distorted to the point where I don’t recognize it.
I’ve almost reached the end of the tunnel and the glassy curtain of rain when my foot strikes a rock.
I tumble forward, hitting the ground hard, ripping the skin on my palms and tearing open the fabric of my joggers.
Then I’m sliding. As if on a perverse waterslide that ends in a fathoms-deep mine shaft filled with rusted equipment and no way out, I skid toward the edge.
I scream, grasping for a handhold, arms and legs flailing, the jagged walls offering nothing. I wash through the curtain of water and onto the small ledge hanging over the pit. The rushing water and rusty rocks disappear beneath me, and then I am falling.
And then I am not.
My hand catches an outcropping and I swing sideways, slamming against the wall of the pit.
My feet frantically search for a hold. One of them is successful, and then I hang, several feet below the ledge, facing the wall, my arm stretched above me, my foot perched on an impossibly small shelf of rock.
Below me looms the pit, machinery and tangles of barbed wire waiting in the murky water to catch my broken body. A screaming dizziness grips me as I try not to fall backward. I press my weight against the stone wall and squeeze my eyes shut. I am paralyzed.
Through the white noise of my panic, a wave of knowledge washes into my consciousness: This is how I will die. The panic rushes from my brain into every corner of my body, and I feel my hands and feet forgetting how to do what they’re supposed to do, feel my fingers loosening around their hold.
Just when I think my grip will give way, I hear my name. It sounds like a French horn being played in a room too far away for anyone to discern a melody or rhythm, muted by rain and terror.
I know I have seconds before I fall. I force all my energy into the small muscles of my fingers, urging them to grip the jagged stone even as it slices into my skin. I take deep breaths, trying to keep my weight centered over the tiny ledge beneath my toes.
And then a warm hand is reaching down and gripping my wrist. I look up, and Garrett is there, wet hair plastered against his forehead, eyes wide and terrified. I can’t help but think that I’m glad I get to see him one more time before I die, glad that he hasn’t already fallen into the pit.
“I need your other hand!” he shouts.
I would have to pivot my body away from the wall to give him my other hand. It would mean relinquishing my foothold and letting go of the rock. Already his grip on my wrist feels uncertain, like it’s slipping away.
“Enzo!” he yells. “Please!”
His voice cuts through the screaming dread in my brain, that French horn, warm and welcoming, close enough to believe, asking me to trust that he’ll catch me.
So I swing away from the wall, my free hand reaching toward him.
For a brief and terrible moment, I feel my body twist into the air with nothing to support it, then his hand catches mine.
He begins to pull, and then I am crawling over the ledge, my body dragged over beautifully solid rock.
And then I am in his arms. We are soaked and freezing, but he’s got me, the two of us lying together in the rain, shaking and exhausted.
I’m trembling from fear and cold as we exit the tunnel and begin descending the gravel road.
The rain has lessened from a downpour to a determined drizzle.
What happened at the pit is already starting to feel fuzzy and distant.
Did Garrett hold me for seconds or hours? Did I almost die in an old mine shaft?
“Where were you?” I eventually manage. “You scared the shit out of us.”
“I was by the stairs. Where we had that snowball fight. Where we first kissed.” He drapes an arm over my shoulders, pulling me against his side as we walk.
“I heard you yelling my name, then I heard a scream. It sounded like it was coming from two different places, and I remembered the story about the drowned girl and her voice echoing in the pit.”
“You saved me. You just saved my life.”
He shoots me his one-third grin. “I run fast and catch things.”
I try to smile at his wide-receiver joke but can’t manage it.
We reach the stairs that lead to nowhere—our stairs—and sit. We’re dirty and exhausted and soaked, and this place just tried to kill me, but none of that matters. It’s the only place that’s entirely ours, the only place that can freeze time, keeping Garrett by my side.
“Enzo,” he says, noticing my palms, “your hands are bleeding.”