All things seen and unse.., p.21
All Things Seen and Unseen, page 21
“That’s so cool,” Mel says mournfully. “I wish I could swim.”
Amara stands up. “What are you talking about? You can swim just fine.”
“I guess I should say I wish I was a more confident swimmer. Obviously I can swim. Who can’t swim? But I definitely don’t feel good enough about my swimming skills to go all the way out to the lily pads by myself.”
“Isn’t that dangerous?” Tristan says.
“What do you mean? It’s only like a hundred feet.”
“No, I mean, Alex, you have to take your glasses off to swim, right? Kind of dangerous to go out in open water, with all those roots, not only alone but blind.”
Alex is about to answer, but Amara cuts them off. “Dude, it’s fine. Alex is an amazing swimmer. You should see them in the ocean.”
“Yeah, Tristan, come on,” Mel chimes in. “This is Jock Alex we’re talking about. The person who, like, runs up mountains.”
Even though the reminder hurts, Alex feels a little surge of pride. Yes, that was them: the person who ran up mountains, the person who now swims blind and alone.
“Speaking of mountains,” Amara says, beginning to slosh back up to the shore, “we should probably head back over that one now. I’m kind of getting tired, and I do have to cook us dinner.”
“Aww, but we just got here!”
“Do you want to cook dinner, Mel?”
“No.”
“Then get out of the water.”
“Yes, chef,” Tristan says, already grabbing a towel off the blanket and drying himself off. Amara follows. Mel gives the water one final splash before she, too, heads back up.
The four of them work in near-silence as they pack up the picnic. Amara was right to want to leave now: not only does the weather seem to be changing for the worse, but he clearly sensed the group reaching an energy threshold. It’s been so long since Alex spent any time in a group of friends that they had forgotten how comforting it was to be around people who know each other, who knew how to read each other without needing to explain and could let the conversation rest when it needed to.
They pile into the car, and as they pull out of the dirt road to the lake, Alex rolls the window down. They stick their head out like a golden retriever, the wind pushing their hair back off their face. This isn’t bad, they think. Even though they didn’t contribute much to the conversation, even though they freaked out and ran away, and even though their body hurts. These people, this day: this hasn’t been bad at all.
A flash of light sears into their eyelids. When they open their eyes, they see their own face in the passenger-side mirror. The sky has become dark behind them. The light is from a pair of headlights, huge and with their high beams on, on a silver pickup truck.
“Oh, fuck,” they say, rolling the window up.
“What?” Amara peers at them in the rearview mirror. “Oh, did you wake up? Tristan and Mel are asleep, too.” And it’s true: Tristan is slumped over across the middle seat, and Alex sees the floppy brim of Mel’s hat drooping.
“It’s the fucking guys,” Alex says, struggling to form words through the tension in their chest. “The guys.”
“What guys?”
“Behind us. The pickup truck.”
“Oh, yeah. These idiots have been riding my ass for like ten minutes.”
“You have to speed up.” Alex is leaning forward, and the hard edge is creeping into their voice.
“What? No. I’m not giving them the satisfaction. Besides, this road is a thirty, and—”
“You have to speed up,” Alex says, “or pull onto a different road or something.”
“I didn’t know you were such a backseat driver,” Amara says, and though his tone is bright, there’s a pressure behind his words.
The lights in the mirror are bright and cold and empty. Alex can’t tell where on the island they are. It’s all darkness, tall trees, a sky that says nothing.
“Amara, you have to fucking pull over.”
“I don’t have to do anything,” he says, and there is now the same flatness in his voice that there was when he found them on the road. “You have to calm down. I’m driving. There’s a truck behind us, there’s nowhere good to pull over, and there’s no other road to turn on. We’ll be back at the cottage in five minutes. Calm down.”
“I can’t calm down.” Alex is frantic. “It’s the fucking guys. They’ve seen us—”
“Of course they see us, they’re literally driving right behind us.”
They want to scream. Does he need them to elaborate? A chill has descended over him, the freezing, glassy energy that they have sometimes observed in him over these weeks: first when they arrived by his house after their run-in with these men, and sometimes after, when certain topics were broached, or when they inadvertently spoke in a way that conveyed panic. There would be no use explaining further, no point in explaining the source of their fear to him. He was somewhere else, and the more paranoid they seem now, the less likely they are to be understood.
“These guys aren’t driving like normal people. They’re going to fucking run us off the road or something. Please pull over.” Alex tries to level their voice. “Please just pull over.”
Amara’s eyes in the rearview stay facing forward. Alex can tell he wants to speak, can hear the catch in his throat. But he doesn’t say anything. Silently, he slows the car and pulls carefully onto the narrow shoulder. He turns the engine off.
“Thank you,” Alex says, their voice small. Amara doesn’t respond.
The truck revs its engine, accelerating rapidly. It goes by so quickly that Alex can’t make out who is driving it, whether there’s a person behind the open passenger-side window. They could swear they hear the voices again: the horrible, indiscernible yelling, the mocking laughter. Then the truck disappears around a bend.
Mel startles awake. “Huh?” she says, half-yawning. “Are we back? Why are we stopped?”
“Almost back,” Amara says, turning the engine back on.
“Thank god,” Mel says, and Alex sees her hat droop again.
Amara doesn’t look back at them.
* * *
“Hey,” Amara says, “Alex.”
Alex opens their eyes, expecting to see the little house. Instead, they are in the trailhead parking lot.
“We’re here,” he says.
“Oh.”
“I figured you’d want to go home. It’s been a long day, and it’ll probably be pretty cramped back at the cottage with all of us. And once these two wake up, it’ll get pretty loud again.”
He’s leaving them here to be alone. He doesn’t want them around anymore.
“Oh,” they say again. They don’t want to sound as fragile as they feel. They unbuckle their seatbelt. “Okay. Thanks.”
“It was really fun having you hang out with everyone,” Amara says as they open the door.
“Yeah,” Alex says, turning their back to him. They are so tired, and so cold, and every step is so painful.
“Text me if you want to hang out tomorrow,” he calls as they walk away.
“Yeah,” they say, and don’t look back.
When they finally arrive back at the house, they are afraid, for some reason, to go inside. They have gotten so accustomed to Amara’s cozy house, the clutter and the bright colours and close quarters, that the coldness and austerity of 709 seem even more hostile than when they first stepped inside. The lights turn on without a sound, revealing an environment completely unchanged from when Alex left it. There are buns going stale on the counter, pots and pans unclean — a mess they should probably deal with. Not today, and certainly not right now. There is nothing they want more than to go upstairs and be unconscious.
But they can barely stay on their feet. If they were to attempt the stairs in this state, they would probably just fall right back down and get injured in the process. They consider the elevator, then decide against it: now doesn’t seem like the best time to be attempting previously untried and forbidden house exploration.
They curl up uncomfortably on the grey couch. Every mental image they shove away begets a new image. Ella, Amara’s friends, the running. The place in the woods and the person in the window. The lights of the truck and the roar of the engine as it went by. The flatness in Amara’s voice. When they finally fall asleep, they dream about an emptiness on the horizon, creeping ever closer as they watch, unmoving.
* * *
A buzzing rouses Alex from their sleep. They are freezing cold, and there is shooting pain in their arms, pain resulting from the vice-like grip with which they have crossed their arms over their chest in their sleep. They also fell asleep with their glasses on, making the lenses even smudgier and blurrier than they had been.
The buzzing rattles their skull again. Is the house’s generator failing? Is an explosion imminent? They are weighing what the safest course of action is — to go check the security room, or run out the door, or simply stay inanimate on this couch — when a fuzzy voice echoes through the room.
It’s Amara. “Alex?” he says, crackly. “Helloooooo?”
Of course it’s a buzzer. Why would this house not have a buzzer? Alex rises as quickly as they can, checking their phone as they hobble over to the door. Not only have they missed a bunch of calls, it’s the early afternoon. No wonder they are so withered: sleeping too much is the second-worst thing to not sleeping at all.
Amara is there on the screen, wearing sunglasses and Mel’s floppy hat, tapping his foot and presumably humming. There’s no time to do anything, no time even to figure out how to operate the buzzer. There is no choice other than to simply go outside and meet him.
Amara seems at first thrilled to see them stepping out the door. It doesn’t take long, though, before his face falls. “Did you sleep in these?” he says.
“Yeah.” They need an excuse, a reason why a normal person would choose to sleep in someone else’s sweaty, dirty, lake-watered clothes, but they can’t come up with one. “I was too tired,” they say regretfully, “to make it up the stairs.”
“Jesus.” Amara takes his sunglasses off. He is worried. “I’m so sorry. If I’d known it was that difficult, I would have at least taken you back to the house to give you some clothes.”
“No,” Alex says, “it’s fine.”
“How are you feeling now?”
“Fine. How are Mel and Tristan?” they ask, diverting the topic of conversation away from themself.
“Oh, they’re gone. They caught the noon ferry. Actually,” he says, sounding nervous, “I’m also going back to the city tonight.”
Alex doesn’t say anything, but their face must betray them.
“Not forever!” Amara clarifies. “Just for tonight. I’m really running out of food. I was planning to go tonight, then stay with Mel tomorrow, and then come back in the afternoon the next day. So I thought, you know, maybe we could do something fun today. I called you a few times, but you didn’t pick up, so that’s why I showed up here.” His cadence is hurried. “Only if you’re feeling up to it, though, I don’t want to—”
“Yeah, sure,” Alex says. “I’m good. Let’s do it.”
“Do you want to get some clothes first?”
“No,” they say, “I’m fine.”
“Are you sure? We have to walk back to the car anyway—”
“Let’s just go,” Alex says, already walking away.
* * *
The little car weaves along an unfamiliar road in silence. There are thick, heavy clouds in the sky, even though they seem to emanate a kind of hot light. Alex keeps their eyes firmly planted on the blurry outside world, the vague shapes of trees speeding by. Amara drums his fingers on the wheel in random bursts of chaotic rhythm. Occasionally he half-hums a tune, then stops. Every so often, Alex senses the pricking of his eyes on the back of their neck.
“I just want to say,” he says, “I’m sorry if it was kind of uncomfortable for you yesterday. I should have thought about — like, I was just really excited to see my friends, and I didn’t really think about how it would be for you.”
“It’s okay,” Alex says, trying to conceal that they’re for some reason on the verge of crying, struggling to keep their voice level and calm. “It’s my fault for being so weird. Running away and stuff. The truck.”
“No, it’s not your fault,” Amara says, a little frustration creeping into his voice. “Really. Just let me know if you’re ever uncomfortable with anything. I promise I won’t get offended. I get up my own ass sometimes and lose track of other people. It’s good for me to get reality-checked.”
Alex wipes their eyes with the back of their hand.
“Mel and Tristan,” Amara continues, “really liked hanging out with you.”
This makes Alex want to cry even more. They have to get a grip. They remember the excitement in Mel’s voice when she talked about Fen’s parties, the old house, meeting Alex before, and the grimace and stiffness when she brought up Adam. The dark shape in the window, the dark spaces in their memory and at the corners of the world. How can Alex face anyone who knows?
“Anyway,” Amara says with a studied brightness, “I thought we could do some tourist shit before we go.”
Alex finally turns to look at him. “We?”
“Oh, fuck! I forgot to ask you. I thought maybe we could both go back to the city. Only if you want to, obviously.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“Okay!” The car slows. “Awesome. Just let me know. I’m not leaving until the second-last ferry, so you have lots of time to decide.”
They are stopped in a crowded parking lot. There is a trailhead just up ahead of them: not a trailhead like the one leading to 709, but a fancy trailhead, with a shiny wooden kiosk covered in colourful signs and diagrams and a bulletin board. There are more people here than Alex has seen in her entire time on the island, people who are clearly tourists, with suspiciously pristine summer clothes and huge fancy cameras.
“Where are we?” Alex asks.
“Well,” Amara says, “I figured you might be tired after yesterday, and this is a tourist place, so all the trails are really short and accessible. It’s the galleries.”
The galleries. Alex read about them in the tourist guides: waves carved out of the ancient sandstone by the ocean, a beach sculpted by water and time. As they step out of the car, they can hear the ocean just nearby. Amara takes their unsteady arm as they walk forward, and they lean on him gratefully.
“Thanks,” they say, as they make their way along the tidy, level trail.
“Thank you,” he says. “I kept forgetting to go here until I was trying to think of stuff for us to do. If not for you, I might have neglected the most obvious, well-known cool place for us to visit.”
The trail is indeed short, and in no time at all they are looking out over the ocean, sparkling blue even in the haze. Gnarled red trees with glossy green leaves lean out over the carved shore, whose crags and curves lean up in the air. Some tourists are standing inside the galleries, running their fingers on the stone. Most are taking pictures.
Amara gestures to a bench on the viewpoint. “Do you want to sit?”
They sit, a few inches between them, listening to the unharmonious chorus of sounds: the chattering of the people, the dulled, quiet voices of the ocean and the trees.
“It’s beautiful,” Amara observes after a while.
“Yeah,” Alex says. “I see why this place is famous.”
Amara seems to be struggling to find words.
“You know,” he says eventually. “The guy Mel mentioned yesterday. Was that the guy you told me about?”
Alex’s body is brittle board. They watch the gentle waves, the happy people, and they are angry — angry that Amara would bring them to this beautiful place and ruin it by bringing up Adam. Angry that he knows about Adam at all, that he thinks he’s entitled to ask them about their relationship. It was a mistake to have said anything. It was a mistake to think any of this was a good idea. They grip the bench, hard, their fingers reddening.
“I don’t want to pry,” Amara says, and Alex almost laughs: he doesn’t want to pry, but he’s going to anyway. And sure enough, he continues. “But what you told me before — obviously, it sounded kind of bad. But I got the sense that there was more going on there. And then what Mel said, about how your friends and your ex felt about him, how he showed up outside their house. She said you kind of dropped off the face of the earth. And the way you reacted after that.”
“So?” Alex says, unable to keep the bite out of their voice.
“So, I just want to make sure you know that if you’re scared of anyone, or if you feel like you’re in danger, then you can—”
“I’m fine, thanks.”
A long silence.
“Okay,” Amara says.
Neither of them look at each other as they walk back to the car, Alex leaning on Amara, their footsteps perfectly synchronized.
* * *
When they reach the trailhead, Alex stops. Amara nearly trips over their feet. “Are you okay?” he asks.
“Yeah,” Alex says. “You can go ahead to the car. I just want to take a quick look at the bulletin boards.”
They wait until Amara is out of view, shielded by the walls of SUVs and Jeeps, before they turn to the board. There are shiny placards about the local flora and fauna, about how the sea and stone and winds created the galleries. But that’s not what they’re here to look at. They run their eyes instead over the bulletin board, whose posters are largely more recent than the ones that had been in the decrepit kiosk outside the café. Their eye had caught on something as they walked up the trail to the beach, a variation in the many shiny, laminated posters of missing dogs. It is right there, beaten-down and faded almost beyond legibility, the photo bleeding past the point of resembling anything. But the number is there, the number remains, and as soon as they see the four digits, Alex grabs the paper off the board and shoves it in their pocket. They walk back to the car with their heart hammering. There it was, the memory that they had lost: 4736. Please come home.
