And then I am alone again.
I found him, and lost him again, but things are not the same.
I’m alone in the dark, but I feel the shape of his Swiss Army knife in my pocket, and it gives me comfort. I keep it in my hand as I walk; as I run.
I arrive back at the river. The light still shines, faintly in the distance. I’m almost numbed now, and I remember how I felt that day in the subway, at the ball game. I feel like that again. Like I am alone.
And, like then, I also know that someone is coming. Max will be here soon. And I can’t leave him alone, to find a backpack and a flashlight and my phone and a raging river. With no one showing up but Eve, to ask what he’s doing there. Eve, who might think he’s somehow involved in Caleb’s disappearance, if he suddenly shows up here looking for me.
I make it halfway across the river by momentum alone, my feet grappling below. And I’m just finding my footing on the other side of Nowhere, when I see her.
She’s standing beside the light, watching me.
She’s in jeans, a raincoat, sneakers. She must’ve found my car, and followed her gut, if nothing more. And now, she’s watching me. I stop moving for a moment, but the water keeps moving past me, and I have to keep going one way or the other, or it will eventually push me over. I keep walking toward her. What are my other options—swim away and run blind through the forest?
“So, you found him,” she says, when I am firmly on solid ground. She doesn’t hand me my coat. She doesn’t come any closer. She has my phone in her hand, but she’s locked out. I wonder what she was looking for.
“I didn’t,” I say, coughing into my fist. I am shaking so hard I can’t feel my toes. Everything numbs. But, I think, shaking is good. I remember this from science—if you’re still shivering, you’re fine. Maybe not fine. Maybe just okay. Still, I’m okay.
“You’re a terrible liar,” she says.
The rain has let up to a drizzle, but it coats everything, and I’m soaked through anyway, and the river continues to rage behind me.
Finally, her voice tears through the silence. “Caleb!” she yells.
But only the river answers.
“Is he over there, then?”
I want to tell her she’s too late, that he’s gone, that she’s lost her hold on him, but I also want to give him time. I don’t know whether she’ll call the police, set up a roadblock. I don’t know what she really wants, underneath it all.
“I’ve done everything for you,” she calls, but there’s no one to hear. “And you would just leave us?”
“I know what you did,” I say, stepping closer, taking my jacket from the ground. “It wasn’t for him.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says.
I think of what I told Caleb earlier, that there was another way, if only he would risk it. “I know that perjury is a crime,” I say. “I know that lying under oath, and sending an innocent person to jail, is punishable with jail time.”
She stares at me, her eyes wide. She does not know her son discovered this. She doesn’t realize the field is even now.
Her eyes drift behind her, to everything circling around us. I know what she sees. Slippery rocks, a raging river, a girl reeking of desperation. “You look so cold,” she says. “You shouldn’t be in that water, Jessa.” Except her words carry the weight of a threat.
But I stare into her eyes, hold her gaze. We are almost exactly the same size. “This time,” I say, “it wouldn’t be an accident.”
And I see the coiled anger come to the surface and then sink back down. I don’t believe she’s evil. I want to believe she is not a psychopath, or a killer of teenagers. She is, however, protecting something. Her son, yes, but also herself. And if I threaten that, really threaten it, I’m not entirely certain what she’ll do.
But neither of us will get the chance to find out. Because I hear my name. I hear him yelling it. And my heart flips, my body turns to the sound.
But at the last minute, just as I’m opening my mouth to call back—Max, I’m here—I feel the world begin to tip. As if I’m leaning too far, because she’s got me in a grip, and she’s pushing me back, holding me so I’m practically leaning over the river, close to the waterfall. “You let him leave,” she says, and the loss is agony, written across her face. And I think that maybe I am wrong, after all. That there is nothing more potent than the power to grasp for something just as you feel it slipping away from your grip. That it’s an impulse in all of us, to fight for the thing that we are losing, even if we’ve already lost.
She lets go.
And I fall.
It only takes me a moment to get my bearings, to think Just plant your feet down, like you did before. Except something’s wrong. The current keeps forcing me down. This is not just a moving current, but a violent one. The current from the waterfall churns the water around me, and though I poke my head through the surface, I cannot catch my breath.
I picture her on the shoreline, saying, as Max comes into view:
I got here, and she was gone.
I found her things.
Too long in the water.
She’s gone.
So I stop fighting so hard against what the current is trying to do. I let go. I let it take me. And after some time, I find my footing downstream, and am able to push my head above water, suck in a breath, just as the current knocks my feet out from under me again. I try once more, standing, and reaching the blade of Caleb’s knife to the shore, wedging it into the surrounding roots before I lose my balance. Locking myself in place as I grip onto a low branch with my other hand. I suck in a gulp of air, then turn to see the light in the corner of my eye.
It’s not only Max on the shore, now, beside Eve. He’s led some people my way. A few rangers, with radios, one lowering himself into the water already upstream, while Eve looks on.
I call Max’s name. Everyone freezes. And when the world starts up again, he’s running.
The first thing I feel, when I’m capable of feeling again, is the warmth of another, sitting beside me in the back of an ambulance. The first words I process, from the person sitting beside me, with his arms around me, trying to transfer more heat: “Somehow,” he says, “I knew you wouldn’t wait.”
They’re telling Max he has to leave the ambulance, but he isn’t having it, and eventually, they relent. The doors close.
When I’m sure no one is listening, I press my face close to his, and I tell him the secret. “I found him,” I say.