“Have you looked into getting a contractor’s license? Or asked the foreman if you can be the head of your crew? Have you done anything?”
He saw a lifeline and reached for it. “Well, with James dying—”
“No,” she said, stomping her foot. “You’ve been hiding behind that for too long. James is dead. He’s not coming back. You should be as loyal to those of us who are still alive as you are to him.” She shook her head. “God knows he wasn’t as loyal to you.”
Hundreds of images of Cali spun through Ford’s mind, too fast to be clear, as if he was running through their entire history trying to make sense of what was happening. Finally they slowed without giving him any answer, and he said, “All those times you said you loved me, did you ever mean it?” There was raw pain in his voice, and also fear.
“Of course I did.” Cali’s eyes looked sad. “I’m just tired of waiting for you to become the person you said you wanted to be.”
He nodded, letting that sink in. After a long minute of silence he said, “I guess I should go.”
Cali nodded. “Yeah.”
He picked up the picnic basket. “Just so you know. The place tonight has chairs and a table. I built them for you. Because I thought it would make you happy.” Sadie’s chest felt tight, and she was having trouble breathing.
At the bottom of the stairs he turned around to look at Cali standing above him. His mind was still stormy but he strove not to show it. “You look really beautiful,” he said. “Good luck with the new job. And thank you for everything, California. I—I really enjoyed our three years together. Or three years minus a week.”
Red, white, and blue dots in Ford’s head became fireworks during a party, a younger Cali setting a roasted marshmallow between two graham crackers, saying, “I’ve never met anyone else who likes s’mores without chocolate before,” and then kissing, more fireworks, a number in a phone.
The Fourth of July was their anniversary.
Cali’s shoulders sagged. “Me too. Next week is going to be weird.”
“Yeah,” he agreed.
Tears hovered at the corners of Cali’s eyes, and her lower lip began to tremble. “Ford,” she said, reaching toward him.
Remarkable, Sadie thought. That one simple gesture, that show of ambivalence, had calmed the turbulence inside of Ford. “Don’t,” he told her, on solid ground at last. “It’s better this way.”
As he went, Sadie thought she smelled pine needles.
Like a man on autopilot Ford continued on his preprogrammed route, riding his bike from Cali’s to the tree house. His mind was beyond quiet, it was absent. Frozen. Numb, Sadie thought. Nature’s antidote to the pain of being alive.
He hauled the picnic basket up into the tree house but didn’t unpack it, just left it on the table, his phone next to it, and collapsed into one of the chairs he’d built specially for Cali.
Goddamn chair, Sadie heard him think, and she laughed, feeling the prickle of tears in her eyes at the same time.
That’s not objective, she chided herself.
Goddamn objectivity, she answered back.
His numbness started to chafe at Sadie, making her feel isolated and out of sorts. Ford closed his eyes and drifted into a penumbra state between sleeping and being awake. His mind was filled with milky white light, and now, set against it, she saw dots dancing into an image of James’s face. It wasn’t the James of the graduation photo, it was five or six years younger, and Sadie noticed the image seemed sort of stylized, as though James had been polished like a trophy.
The dots shifted, showing James with a young Ford, probably around twelve, the golden rope Sadie recognized from his other memories now stretched between them. James lifting one end and saying to Ford, “Got it?”
Ford answering, “Got it,” and holding up the other end.
James checking, “You’re sure you’re ready?”
“Ready.” Ford nodding, but nervous.
James putting out a white winter glove and Ford putting out a black one and the two of them shaking. James, serious, saying, “I’m counting on you. Don’t let me down.”
Twelve-year-old Ford solemnly promising, “Never.”
James, his handsome face lighting up, saying, “Okay. Let’s go get rich!”
Sadie’s heart began to pound with excitement as she watched. This was what had happened in the icehouse.
The next moment, Ford opened his eyes and reached for his phone, and the memory vanished. Sadie had no idea who he was calling when he dialed, until an automated voice answered, saying, “You have one saved message. Message saved for one hundred twenty-four days. Press one to play, two to delete.”
One hundred twenty-four days was a little more than four months, Sadie calculated, which meant this message must be from around the time of James’s murder. Was this the message Ford’s subconscious had wanted him to hear?
Ford took a deep breath and pushed one.
“Thursday, six thirty-nine P.M., from: private number,” the computer voice said. There was a pause, the sound of a throat being cleared, and then a guy saying, “What’s up, Ford? It’s me, James. Listen, my meeting is running a little long, so I was wondering if you could do dinner. Lulu wants lasagna. You know how to make that. If it’s too hard just do mac and cheese.”
The message was slow, each sentence punctuated by a long silent pause as though James were distracted. Or on something, Sadie thought. But she felt her heartbeat slowing to keep time with its rhythm. “Sometimes I add those tiny meatballs if you can find them at the store. Mostly the key is the sauce, that’s the part she likes. Really pretty much any noodles will do.”
Finally the speed picked up, and the words began to come out in a rush.
“Probably this is way too much detail, I promise if you help me out you’ll be glad—more than glad because I’m doing this for you as much as anyone. Everything is going to change after this, it’s going to be you and me, brother, the way it used to be. What the… oh god, I’ve… shot… hel—”
The message ended.
Sadie’s heart dropped, and she gasped in disbelief. She had just heard James’s murder. He’d been leaving Ford a message when he was killed. Oh, Ford, she thought, oh, you poor boy. No wonder he felt guilty.
There wasn’t anything he could have done, but to have to listen to that cry for help over and over had to be excruciating.
The numbness deepened then, his mind becoming a solid monolith. She wanted to wrap her arms around him, hold him, make him know that he wasn’t alone. She wished she could sit with him and tell him that it wasn’t his fault until he believed it. Do anything to shatter the stone-like silence that had settled over his mind.
But there was nothing she could do, no way to touch him. This was the powerlessness Curtis had talked about, and it was terrible.
The tree house was filled with dark shadows when his mind began to whir with sounds again. They began low, indecipherable, but one of them came into focus, James’s voice from the memory in the icehouse saying, “I’m counting on you. Don’t let me down.” Initially it repeated every few seconds, but it sped up, cycling faster and faster until it was overlapping, as though there were two Jameses, then four, then ten, all saying it at just slightly different times, like an echo chamber. As it reverberated, the phrase eroded, becoming “you don’t let me down,” “don’t let me down,” “let me down,” “down,” “drow—”
Ford’s phone buzzed with a message, loud and startling in the silence, yanking him from his thoughts. Sadie heard him think Cali, and for a split second she glimpsed a crack in the numbness.