“I called Emily,” Rosanna’s voice cuts into his thoughts.
Cole is grateful. He doesn’t have the energy now to explain why he needs to get to the cabin, or why he doesn’t want Rosanna there, too. He’s grateful that, for whatever reason, his sister has arranged for him to get what he needs without him having to fight for it.
“Thank you,” he says, and he sits. And he waits.
“Rosanna says that you might have been trying to kill yourself,” Emily says.
She’s gripping the wheel with both hands, one at the two and one at the ten, just the way their high school driving instructor taught them both. Her knuckles are white. But she’s looking at him instead of the road.
Cole waves a hand dismissively. “No. I wouldn’t do that.”
That’s mostly true.
“Are you sure?” Emily asks. “Because I don’t think I could handle it—”
“You won’t have to handle it, Emily,” Cole says, and he looks right at her so that she can see how serious he is. They’ve been friends since sixth grade when he came out to her about his crush on bucktoothed Joey Taylor. “I wouldn’t…I don’t even want…” He sighs. This part is harder. It’s a little less true. “I wish Rosanna hadn’t said that to you. I don’t want to die.”
“So, what happened out there?” Emily asks. “Really?”
“I don’t know. I don’t want to talk about it.”
She gives him one of her exasperated faces. He’s so familiar with every variation of that expression from years of being her friend.
Even though she respects how much he’s grieved for Damon, he also knows she thinks he’s let this pain go too deep and last too long. He knows she wishes she could tell him something like, “Get up! Get over it! Go out with a hot guy! Kiss him! Do whatever it is you didn’t do with Damon and tear the Band-Aid off! You only knew him for a year and a few months, for heaven’s sake. Get over it.”
She’s as patient as a saint to never say those things, Cole thinks. More patient than he might be if the roles were reversed.
Cole watches the trees flash by the windows of the moving car, and they’re coming up to the corner where it happened. “Emily, pull over.”
“Why?” she asks.
“Just pull the car over,” he says, and he starts to open the door, which seems to scare her. So she does as he says, jerking off the road a bit and almost ending up in the ditch.
“What are you doing?” she yells, as he climbs out of the car and jogs across the road.
He hears her car door slam and knows she’s following, but he doesn’t wait for her to catch up. He skids down into the ditch, slipping and sliding along the steep bank, until he reaches the bottom.
The night before, he was carried up the embankment on a stretcher, alone, and the EMTs had sworn there was no one there when they arrived. But Cole’s mind supplies him with something different: memories of hands, a voice, and the scent of something familiar and gone too long. Something he’d barely known before it was taken from his life. Fragile, fleeting, and Cole finds himself sniffing the air for it now, like a dog, like an animal hunting his way home.
“Cole!” Emily calls from above.
“Don’t come down here!” Cole calls back. “I just…I think I lost something here. I need to—I need to look. Just give me a minute.”
Emily stands with her arms crossed over her chest, her hip thrust out in annoyance.
He turns back to the ground around him. It’s disturbed all over, the marks of the EMTs shoes, the scuffs from where the rocks were knocked loose and tumbled, down, and Cole gets on his hands and knees, pawing through the earth looking for it, running his fingers over the sharp edges of rocks that aren’t the one he’s trying to find.
There’s the sound of more falling rock, and Cole glances up to see Emily skidding down the side of the embankment.
“Fine,” she says. “Let me help. What are you looking for?”
Cole swallows. He doesn’t want to say. “Just…this…thing. It’s important to me. It’s just…”
“Um, a little more information, please,” Emily says, rolling her eyes at him.
“Never mind,” Cole says, standing up. “It’s not here. I don’t know. Let’s go.”
Emily throws her hands up. “Are you kidding me? I messed up my new manicure to help you!” She waves toward the ground. “Come on, let’s look some more.”
“No,” Cole says, starting up the embankment, slowly, having to use his hands to climb and getting them filthy with dirt. “It’s not here.”
“What’s not here?” Emily insists.
Cole ignores her.
Riding toward the cabin, Cole studies his nails. There’s dirt caked under them, and his hands are grubby. A grave digger, he thinks. And he doesn’t know why. But it’s true. He’s filthy like he’s been out digging graves, and he tilts his head back against the head rest, as exhaustion overwhelms him.
“Don’t sleep,” Emily says. “Just rest, but don’t sleep.”
Her voice is gentle, and Cole knows what a bad sign that is. That means she believes he’s really gone around the bend again. And it’s true that he’s not supposed to sleep, but he closes his eyes and lets it claim him.
If he dies, Damon won’t meet him at the gates of heaven to tell him it counts as suicide, will he? He won’t accuse him of killing himself, will he? And even if he does, Damon will still welcome him into his arms, right?
He sleeps until the car stops and he’s at his father’s house.
The waterfall is restorative. He sits by the edge, watching the roaring slash of the water, feeling the mist against his face. The birds land in the trees around him and then take flight, black, undulating waves of them headed south.
At first, he does what he used to do to get by. He thinks of nothing. He makes himself focus on the blades of golden autumn grass, and he concentrates on making sure that he doesn’t allow any threat of thought to run through him. Observation, he can handle. Thinking often hurts too much.
Finally, as he feels his body acclimate, adjusts down from the heightened state that he’s been in since the prior night, and he lets himself turn his mind onto the subject itself.
There is a man. Or he believes there is. A man who pushed him out the path of the car. A man who sounds like Damon, and smells like Damon, and—no, I don’t believe you—looks like Damon.
“Damon is dead,” Cole says aloud. He’s said it before, and he’ll say it again. “Damon is dead.” The water spills from the height of the waterfall, and he rubs his eyes with his fingers. “You imagined it,” he says.
The emotionless sky stares down at him without comment. The pine trees shuffle in the breeze, their needles rubbing out strange, whispered disagreement. A crow screams from across the mountain.
“Who called the ambulance, then?” he asks, and the crow caws again.
“Who’re you talking to, son?”
Cole stiffens, before turning to face his father, the autumn sun backlighting him through the canopy of trees, so that his father is a shadow of blue jeans and a flannel shirt emerging from the trail.