IT WAS A SATURDAY AFTERNOON WHEN EVERYTHING changed forever.
Quinn was seventeen, and for as long as he could remember he wanted to see more than the farms and the woods of northern Minnesota. He wanted to be someplace where there were people, lots and lots of people. There was a whole world out there, a world he could reach only through the books he read. And as interesting as reading about everywhere else was, it wasn’t enough. He wanted to experience it all with his own senses.
His closest friend was probably Liz, only nine at the time. Sure, there were a couple of kids he hung out with sometimes, but their dreams weren’t the same as his. They thought about taking over their parents’ farms, or hitting it rich at the Indian casino, or playing hockey all winter long. It wasn’t that he thought his dreams were better, just different.
Liz was the only one who would listen to him without giving him that funny, you’re-crazy look. He would tell her about Istanbul and Tokyo and Mecca and Prague. He would describe as best he could the mountains in Nepal, the caste system of India, the carnival celebrations in Rio de Janeiro, and the Grand Canyon in Arizona. He would show her the world atlas that he’d let no one else see, a cheap, cardboard-covered booklet with continental maps and ones of a few of the larger countries. On each he had marked in blue the places he wanted to go, circling in red those that were first priority.
Liz would listen intently, her face often reflecting his own excitement. But the place that she had fallen in love with just from his descriptions was Paris. That last summer before he left home, he read to her the whole of Victor Hugo’s
“I don’t ever want to see anyone I love die,” she had said. “Not Mom or Dad. Not you.”
“Everyone dies someday, Liz.”
“I don’t want to see it. I never want to see it.”
The end of one life and the start of another began with an argument Jake had with his father about something he could no longer remember. His relationship with his father was strained, often formal, and most times nonexistent. At least, that’s how the teenage Jake perceived it. Looking back … well, looking back, who knew? They didn’t fight often, but when they did, Jake would be so agitated it sometimes took days for him to calm down. One of the things he did to help was take a long hike in the woods. He was about to do just that when Liz had found him and reminded him about his promise to take her fishing.
So he did. And that had been the mistake.
They’d borrowed the boat from a friend in town, and gone out on the Lake of the Woods. It was a vast body of water, the kind where if you were in the middle, you’d lose sight of shore. On a map it was easy to find. It filled most of the little bump at the top of Minnesota that jutted into Canada.
The boat was a twelve-foot aluminum V-hull with a 9.9-horsepower outboard motor, more than enough power for the lightweight vessel.
Liz tried to engage him several times, but Jake just wasn’t interested in talking. So after a while she gave up, and the only sounds came from the lapping of the water against the hull, and the whiz of their reels as they cast out their lines.
But the argument from that morning was still heavy on Jake’s mind, and he had no patience for sitting in an aluminum tub. After an hour that seemed like a year, he said, “Reel it in. We’re done.”
“But … but we’ve just started,” Liz said.
“We’ve been here long enough.”
“You promised me!”
“Yeah,” he said. “And I kept it. We’re going home. I have things to do.”
He never snapped at her, but he had then. He knew it was wrong at the time, but he was just too worked up to worry about it.
He got his line in first, and stared at her until she secured hers, but he didn’t wait for her to put her pole down before he started the engine and turned the boat for the harbor. He quickly took the motor up to full speed, pushing the small, light boat at quite a clip across the lake.
Liz gripped the edge of the hull. “Slow down!”
But the speed helped release some of the tension that had been burning away at Jake since the fight, so he paid her no attention.
“Jake! Please! You’re scaring me.”
“We’re fine,” he started to say.
But he only got the first word out before Liz shrieked.
The next thing he knew, they were airborne, the boat twisting sideways as it first rose, then fell sharply back toward the lake. Jake, thrown free, hit the water hard, then skimmed across the top before going under.
When he poked his head back up, he was surprised by the silence. He swiveled his head around from side to side. The boat was capsized about twenty feet to his left. Floating behind it was the cooler Liz had brought along, Jake’s fishing pole, the empty fish bucket, and the bright orange life vest Jake had not been wearing.
“Liz!” he yelled.
He didn’t see her. He whipped around in a full three-sixty, but she wasn’t there.
“Liz!”
Unlike Jake, she had been wearing her life vest, so she should have been visible.
“Liz! Where are you?”
