Candy fluttered around him for a few more minutes, and finally Elias rose to stand, taking unsteady steps toward the path as Cade draped his arm around his brother’s shoulders. I watched them until they vanished beyond the trees.
“All right, enough of that drama,” shouted Dodge. He snapped the buck knife closed and patted his son on the back, sending him running back to the food table. “Who’s up next?”
“Apparently he just doesn’t like the sight of zip ties,” said Cade. We were speeding down the road toward Liberty Gorge, a spontaneous excursion Cade had announced as soon as I walked in the door from the gun-club get-together. I understood exactly why: tonight he couldn’t abide another family dinner, sitting across the table from Dodge as he offered a postgame analysis of the gathering. I’d offered to go with him, gladly.
“That’s a little strange,” I said.
“Sounded like he had to use them on people before, so it really bugged him to see his nephew bound up like that. I only ever saw him like that once before, over Christmas. We drove into town to see a movie, and once we got there he saw a piece of trash in the parking lot and freaked out. We ended up going back to the car and driving home.”
“Over a piece of
He flipped his visor down against the lowering sun. “Yeah, well, apparently over there people hide IEDs under pieces of trash along the roadways. And he’d just gotten back, so I understood he was still in soldier mode and all that.”
“Yeah, but I don’t think freaking out at trash is ‘soldier mode.’”
“Maybe not. I dunno. Makes more sense now why he never wants to leave the house, though. I figured he was over all that.” We approached a turnoff marked by a mailbox—a simple dirt path that led through a field. “You know what, let’s go to the quarry. I’ve been wanting to show it to you anyway.”
I braced myself for the sharp turn. “So are you going to talk to him about going back to the doctor now?”
“Yeah, I suppose so. That’s got to be embarrassing, what happened to him today. If it was me, I wouldn’t want to be going around like that.” He parked on the scrubby grass beneath a tree. “This is it. Our old parking spot and everything. Hasn’t changed a bit, except there’s no water. Which was kind of the whole point.”
I looked out over the jagged expanse of rock. It was a long way down. Cade left his sunglasses in the car, and as we approached the gaping, empty space, he stopped and peered up at the sky, squinting. High cirrus clouds marked the clear and solid blue, and the sunlight shone down through the trees as sharply as if thrown. He said, “I haven’t been back here since they drained it. It’s disorienting.”
“Sounds kind of like it was an old swimming hole, like in
“Yeah, and in the winter you could skate on it. We used to come out here all the time—winter, summer, anytime except when it was raining. Every year at Christmastime all the kids who’d gone away to school would have a reunion up here. Me and Elias and a lot of the other guys, we’d play hockey here once it was good and frozen. You see that spot?” He gestured toward the center of the empty space. “That was the no-go zone. It didn’t freeze hard enough over there, so if your puck went that way you were just screwed. One winter we lost so many pucks, we took to making them out of firewood dipped in beeswax just so they wouldn’t be worth anything. It didn’t work very well. We thought the beeswax would make them slicker, but it knocked off real fast once we started banging on them with the sticks.”
“So why’d they drain it?”
“Somebody drowned. One of the Vogels’ daughters from the next farm over. It was during the winter.”
I looked out over the canyon the rock formed, at all its precipitous ledges and sharp, loose boulders. Filled with water it must have been idyllic, but beneath the surface, dangerous as hell. “That’s awful.”
He kicked a few rocks over the edge. “Yeah. She was a friend of Candy’s. She’d been at one of the reunion games but nobody else knew her real well, so we were all just…talking to each other and not much to her, I guess. She must have been skating like everybody else, and at some point she went through the ice and nobody noticed. I didn’t hear anything about all that until later. Me and Elias had already left, so we missed the whole thing.”
“Candy must have been devastated.”
“She was in shock about it, I guess. Candy’s funny about stuff like that. It’s hard to say her faith comforts her. It’s more like she uses it to work out the logic of why everything happens. If something good happens she goes on about how it’s a reward for obedience or an answer to a prayer, and if things go wrong she says it’s a test of faith or a punishment. It’s almost like karma with her. I think it drives my mom nuts.” He sat down on a smooth stretch of rock. “This is the old sunbathing stone. In August, anytime you came here, there’d be a bunch of girls in their swimsuits stretched out here trying to get a tan.”
I moved to sit down beside him, and he reached for my arm to ease my way down. “I can’t stand it when people try to explain random tragedies. You wouldn’t believe how many people have said to me that small planes are dangerous and my mom never should have been in one in the first place. As if I’m going to say, ‘Oh, I feel much better about losing her now that you’ve explained why it was her own fault.’”
“Yeah, you and Candy are going to be the best of friends.”
I laughed and turned onto my back, resting my head in Cade’s lap. The sky was a more appealing sight than the jagged gap of the quarry; the high clouds moved through it slowly, their trailing edges thin as contrails. Cade stroked my hair back from my forehead in an idle way, and said, “I wish you could see this place the way it was before. I feel like there’s this part of me I can’t even show you because it doesn’t exist anymore.”
“It’s pretty much the same, though, right? It’s just the water that’s missing.”
“It’s just the people that’re missing,” he said.
I turned sideways so I could look out at what he was seeing: the ledges where his friends had once stood, the knotted yellow rope hanging from a tree, the scrubby and pebble-strewn grass that must have been the site of a hundred tailgate parties. I wondered if Elias missed it the same way. The Olmstead home seemed riddled with broken connections—to their extended family, to their way to gather as a community and even to each other, for the atmosphere of the house felt heavy with brooding thoughts that nobody talked about. It was no wonder Cade hated coming home. I had never imagined, in all my time growing up with just my mother, how hard it might be to live in a family. From the outside it had looked like the easiest and most natural thing.
Chapter 12
The first blow came with the letter from the university, telling Cade that he had been cut from the work-study program due to a missed filing deadline. He started out bewildered, then grew angrier and angrier as he paced the back porch with his phone against his ear, pleading with the people in Financial Aid. I sat in the chair beside Elias and folded the freshly washed hand-me-down baby clothes slowly into a basket, lying low but listening in. At last he came in and slapped the phone down on the table in disgust.
“April 25,” he barked. “That was the deadline. You know what I had going on April 25?”
“I can’t remember.”
He jabbed the air with his index finger, gesturing toward my belly. “Junior there. School during the day, work in the afternoon, Stan’s in the evening, five hours of sleep. Bylina’s office any spare minute I got. You puking your guts out until they had to stick an IV in you. Like I’m supposed to remember financial aid paperwork in the middle of
“I don’t know what to tell you, Cade.”
