“Two and a half hours,” he said.
“Two and a half hours?” said Zoe. “I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be, dawg,” said Dallas. “Shit like this is special.”
Zoe took a picture of them in front of the entrance to the cave so she could Snapchat it to Val when she had a signal again. She scrawled a caption across the top in yellow:
Cave: Silver Teardrop! Crushed by: Zoe!
Dallas’s wrist was still buried in his pocket. He wouldn’t show it to Zoe, so she assumed it was swollen and purple. He promised he was fine. He insisted they still go check out Black Teardrop. Maybe she was being selfish, but Zoe needed to see the place her father died, no matter how wet she was—she needed to see it right now, while the adrenaline was still racing around in her blood.
“We’re just going to look today, right?” said Dallas. “We’re just gonna say hello, or whatever? You’re not gonna trick me, and rig up?”
“No tricks,” said Zoe. “But you have to promise that we’ll come back if the police won’t do their job.”
“With a blanket,” said Dallas. “For Jonah. I remember.”
“Was that a promise?” said Zoe.
“That was a promise,” said Dallas.
“Because now you know I’m not scared of any cave,” said Zoe.
Dallas’s snowshoes thumped softly behind her.
“I knew that already,” he said.
The hike to Black Teardrop was short, but exhausting. The snow rose in front of them in huge, untouched swells. Zoe could feel her back and legs complaining to each other, ready to mutiny.
Her body recognized the cave before she did. She felt the storm gathering again in her stomach as they clomped over a final snowy rise, and looked down to see the rocky gash in the earth. Black Teardrop was ringed with a chain-link fence now, and hung with warning signs. The fence was about eight feet tall—but more or less useless. The wind had blown it back and forth, so that whole sections tilted crazily, like loose teeth.
Zoe was surprised by how ordinary the cave appeared. It was just a hole in the ground. Still, the longer she stared at it, the more it seemed to be surrounded, not just by a fence, but by some kind of force field. She stared at it longer than she should have.
Dallas had caught up, and stood silently beside her. The cave lay a couple hundred feet in front of them. Zoe found it hard to move forward.
“I’d go with you,” said Dallas, “but I can’t get over that fence with one hand.”
“No worries,” she said. “I got this.”
Zoe clomped down the hill. The snow was powdery and deep. She paused at the fence. She didn’t know what she was supposed to feel, but what she did feel was a confused rush of emotions, each of them struggling to get to the front of the line: sadness, fury, fear.
Zoe tried to give each of the emotions a moment in her heart. Wisps of warm air, which had been trapped inside the cave for months, slipped out the entrance. It looked like a mouth exhaling smoke. It was as if there were a dragon in there, rather than her father’s body.
She dropped her pack, unstrapped her snowshoes, and climbed the fence. Once again, she could tell that the muscles in her legs hated the idea. Still, they obeyed, and soon she was dropping over the other side. Now the only problem was that she didn’t know why she had come, or what she intended to do.
She forced herself forward. On the ground, close to the entrance, there were two objects just barely peeking out of the snow. She knelt and brushed them off.
A stone crucifix. A stone Buddha. They were lying on their backs, staring up at the sky.
Someone had been there since the search for her dad’s body. Someone had visited. Someone had left the statues as a gift.
Her mother.
Only her mother would have brought a Buddha and a cross. When she said she’d never stopped loving Zoe’s father, she’d been telling the truth. Then why wouldn’t she let the police bring his body home?
The statues seemed to have fallen from an outcropping of rock above the entrance to the cave. Zoe picked up the crucifix, shocked by the weight of it. She wiped it clean, then climbed up the rocks, and set it back on its shelf. She did the same with the Buddha.
The statues radiated calm, and seemed to be urging Zoe to find some peace of her own. She wanted to say something. But what? She was still angry that her father had been so reckless. When he fell into the cave, it was like he’d pulled all of them down with him. But she did love him. Maybe there was a way to say all that?
She closed her eyes, and tried to find the words.
“I love you for everything you were, Dad,” she said finally. “I forgive you for everything you weren’t.”
“PS,” she added. “Jonah is going nuts without you, and I’m in love with somebody from out of town.”
She opened her eyes, wishing she could do more.
An idea lit up her brain. She searched the ground and found a piece of bark in the snow. She asked Dallas to toss her the multi-tool knife from her pack.
Zoe scratched and gouged at the bark for five minutes. By the time she was finished, she was sweating, her arm was aching, and she’d started to lose the feeling in her hands. But she was proud of her handiwork. She set it on the ledge with the statues, and took a selfie to text to Jonah later. She’d even put it on Instagram so the police would see it and know how serious she was about going into the cave, if she had to.
She’d carved a message to her father into wood: