“Jesus,” Casey mutters, moving towards the shop’s front windows. “That sounded close.” To Will, as he passes: “You see what it hit?”
“You’re looking for a lightly smoking fencepost, about forty yards to the left,” Will says. The ease of the estimated distance surprises him; he’s famous in his insular scientific community for insisting on double- and triple-checking even the most inconsequential guess before hazarding it. He’s been told many times it’s a sign of his brilliance, but equally often that it’s the single most significant impediment to his brilliance, which Will has always found somewhat annoying, since he’s pretty sure it’s neither.
Once, in his undergrad years, someone had asked Will about it directly, his refusal to risk an estimate. It was, unhappily, before he’d quite gotten a grip on the critically important line between “Normal, relatable anecdote of a regular human childhood” and “A story that makes people look at you as though you have, with the enormity of the bummer you have conveyed unto them, peeled all the paint from their interior walls.” So unthinkingly, laughing about it, he had told the story of the summer he was eleven, when Bill had asked Will to calculate how much lumber they’d need to replace the new fenceposts. He had gotten the math wrong and they’d ordered too much, far too much, enough that it was a significant expense. After he’d explained how Bill had screamed and raged, cycled back to the topic to blow again for months and months, never quite let it go even years on, Will had shaken his head, concluded the story with a shrugging, “Fathers, you know?”
No one had known, though. They’d simply looked embarrassed, and left Will to stand there with a new, unfamiliar shame sitting uncomfortably in the pit of his stomach.
Thunder rolls overhead, and lightning slashes through the sky again, somewhere close—God, what is Willdoing? Standing here with his arms full of pie, staring out into the storm lost in reverie? It doesn’t matter, anyway, about the horrible summer with the extra lumber, and itcertainlydoesn’t matter that Will rattled off an estimate, any estimate, to Casey stupid Reeves. It doesn’t matter at all.
Still: “On second thought, Mrs. B, we’re going to hold on this for a second,” Will says, setting the pies down on the nearest counter. “I think we should give it a minute to calm down out there—not sure you want to drive in that.”
“That last strike hit the big red oak along the access road,” Casey adds tightly, still looking out the window. “Think the whole left side’s going to go, at least.”
Will groans, stepping up to the window next to him without thinking. Sure enough, there’s a harsh, blackened damage line splitting the tree, the left half of it nearly cleaved from the right. A strong enough wind, or enough time for gravity to do its work, and: “Crap. It’ll block the whole road when it does.”
“Do you think—” Casey starts, his voice low and serious, like for some reason he genuinely wants to ask Will’s opinion on something. But before he can finish the thought, his phone rings. As he’s fishing it out of his pocket, Will feels a tap on his shoulder.
He turns. Mrs. Baumcombe is glaring at him. “I must say, young man, you areawfullyfamiliar with me! Taking my pies,refusingto take my pies, referring to ‘Mrs. B.’ Do Iknowyou?”
Far more interestingly, Casey is now saying into the phone “Hel—whoa, hey, slow down. Just—I can help, take a breath and tell me slow.”
“Probably?” Will says to Mrs. B, grimacing slightly. “Or at least, you probably knew my dad, Bill. He was… Noel, what is it?” The teen’s face has gone ashen, and they’re looking down at their phone as though it’s told them the date of their own death.
“I…” Noel says, blinking down at it. When they look up at Will, their eyes are wide, abruptly young in that horrible way of teenagers, who can’t help occasionally throwing into sharp relief the reality of adulthood. One of the harshest lessons of that rocky transition is learning how much of who you are is shaped simply by what you’ve had to deal with. Will doesn’t know Noel very well, but the look on their face is universal, and he can tell that whatever they just saw on that phone, it’s something that is reshaping them right now.
“Mere! Jesus, all right, let me find the keys,” Casey is saying, running towards the back of the market; half of Will is quite urgently tracking on that, ears particularly pricking at Mere’s name. Mrs. Baumcombe is pulling on his sleeve, saying some other stupid, insipid thing—no part of Will is tracking on thatat all, and he really hopes it won’t turn out to have been important. Every spare thought that isn’t wondering what on earth is happening on Casey’s phone call is waiting to see what Noel’s going to say.
Thunder rolls.
“You grew up here, right?” Noel says, in a small voice, eyes back on their phone. “So…so maybe you know. It’s an urban legend, right? About that kid in the ’90s? And the bridge? And the river?” A desperate, dangerous edge has entered their voice, as though they’re holding back tears. “That didn’t happen. A flood couldn’t… It didn’t happen, right? It’s an urban legend? Tell me it didn’t happen, man, okay! It’s an urban legend—sayit.”
“Oh, God,” Will says, drawn back to the hideous summer of the extra lumber for a new, worse, and far more pressing reason. He knows what’s happened, or at least the broad, terrible shape of it, even before he sees Casey run past, keys in his hand, and hurry out the front door.
Will doesn’t think; the cheerful yellow door doesn’t evenhave a chance to land in its frame before he’s grabbing it and following Casey into the storm.
NINE
Will regrets his decision to leave the market more or less immediately.
The wind, first of all, has grown stronger in the last half an hour or so. It throws raindrops directly into Will’s face with sharp, stinging strength, each splash just this side of a pinprick. He can hardly keep his eyes open against the onslaught, and he holds an arm up over his face so he can keep track of Casey, in order to chase him. Will curses the man for pulling on dark jeans and a black-and-gray flannel the last time he’d changed out of wet clothes—it’s an upsettingly good look for him, obviously, but it does make him harder to track against the current landscape of bruise-like navies and threatening grays. Will himself, in candy-apple red, is the easier of the two of them to keep an eye on.
Still, he manages to follow Casey back to the staff garage without losing him, falling on his face, getting struck by lightning, or otherwise humiliating himself. He’s pretty pleased with his efforts, until he swings his way up into the passenger side of the pickup and sees Casey jump.
“Jesus!” Casey snaps, visibly unsettled. “How did you… Oh, never mind, there isn’t time. Get out of the cab!”
“No,” Will says calmly, shutting the door and buckling his seatbelt. He should probably feel a sense of dread, the gut-clenching fear of conflict that always seems to rise any time someone is displeased with him; he finds, instead, that the deep annoyance on Casey’s face is funny. “That was Mere Gunderson, wasn’t it? She’s a friend of mine. I was hanging out with her and her kids a few hours ago—and something’s happened to one of them, right? So, I’m coming. You never know; I might be helpful.” Casey is staring at him, mouth open, so Will, to prove his final point, adds, “For example, you might want to start driving now.”
“You—oh, God, right,” Casey says, seeming to jerk back to himself. He turns the key over in the ignition with more force than necessary, the engine whining at him a little as it rolls to life. He throws the shifter too hard and puts the truck into neutral instead of reverse, and has to correct before he can back up and pull out of the garage. Raising his voice a little to be heard over the abrupt din of rain against roof as he whips across the parking lot, he adds, “Howdid you know it was one of Mere’s kids?”
“Noel,” Will says back, shaking his head. “They asked about Walter Gramlich.” At Casey’s split-second glance of confusion, he clarifies: “There was a kid by that name who died here, when I was ten or eleven. A teenager more than a kid, really, I guess. There was some stupid tradition about jumping off the Glen River Bridge… God, you’d have to ask someone else for the details. All I know is, you got more points—or ‘street cred,’ if you want to call it that—the worse the weather was, or the higher the waterline?—”
Will stops, drawn to an urgent halt by the vision growing nearer by the second through the windshield. The glorious redoak that they’d watched the lightning strike—it’s coming up alongside them on the right, directly next to Will’s spot in the passenger seat. The damage had looked plenty bad from back in the market, but from up close like this, in these more intense winds, the left and right sides of the trees look to be held together by hope more than anything else. Will could swear, as they barrel towards it at a speed he himself would not attempt in this weather, that he hears the wood let out a long, sickening creak.
Will is suddenly intensely aware of several things. These things include, but are not limited to: the inescapability of gravity; the rapidly decreasing distance between his body and the barely standing tree, which is nearly next to them now; the relative difference in size between a person and a centuries-old oak. The bulk of his awareness, however, is occupied by the undeniable fact that his body, like all human bodies, is basically a flesh bag of highly temperamental organic machines that don’t tend to continue functioning after being smashed, crushed, pulped, or otherwise reduced to smithereens.
“Casey,” he says, his tone threaded with barely contained panic, “I think maybe we should?—”
“Yep,” Casey says, grim, and guns it.
