The Counting Is Over

I've never told anyone about the counting. Not my mother, who would worry. Not my friends, who would laugh. Not the school counselor with her soft voice and her box of tissues and her diploma from a university I've never heard of. The counting is mine, and it has been mine since March, and it is the only thing that makes the days move forward instead of sideways.

Today the number is forty-seven.

I am walking home from school through the ravine path, which adds eleven minutes but avoids Summit Street entirely. Avoiding Summit Street is worth eleven minutes. Avoiding Summit Street is worth any number of minutes. The ravine path runs along the creek, and the creek is low this time of year, just a trickle over stones that look like bones. The trees hang down their branches like they're tired. I count my steps, because steps are countable. One, two, three. My backpack is heavy and the left strap digs into my shoulder and I don't adjust it. Four, five, six.

Forty-seven days since Leo stopped coming to school.

Forty-seven days since Ms. Halverson pulled me into the hallway during third-period biology and said, "Mara, I need to talk to you about Leonardo," and I knew, before she opened her mouth again, that something had gone wrong. Something that couldn't be fixed. The way you know a storm is coming before the clouds even gather, because the air changes, because your skin prickles, because the birds go quiet.

I count my steps. I count the days. I count the number of times I've replayed the last conversation we had — not a real conversation, just a text thread, his thumbs moving on a screen somewhere I couldn't see. u ever think about just leaving, he wrote. And I wrote back, leaving where. And he wrote, idk. anywhere. everywhere. And I sent a laughing emoji. A yellow face with tears coming out of its eyes, because I thought — I thought he was being dramatic. Leo was always being dramatic. Leo once wrote a four-page essay for English about the symbolism of a dead bird he found in his driveway, and Mrs. Patterson gave him a B-plus and wrote a bit overwrought in red pen, and Leo laughed about it for a week.

I didn't know.

I didn't know, and that's the thing I count most. The number of times I could have known, if I had been paying attention. If I had asked a different question. If I had called instead of texting. If I had noticed that anywhere and everywhere were not destinations but directions, and the direction was away.

The path curves left. I step over a root, and my number resets. One.

The house is empty when I get home. Mom's car isn't in the driveway, and the kitchen light is off, and the answering machine blinks red in the dim hallway. I drop my backpack by the door and don't pick it up. I go to my room and close the curtains and sit on the floor with my back against the bed. The carpet is beige and rough and I press my palms into it until it hurts. Grounding technique, the counselor calls it. Find five things you can see, four things you can feel, three things you can hear. I can feel the carpet. I can feel the cold coming through the window. I can feel my heart beating, which is more than Leo can say.

The phone buzzes. I don't look at it. The phone buzzes again, and again, and I pick it up because three buzzes means someone wants something, and if someone wants something then I have to be a person who responds.

It's Elena. did you see the news

No.

what news

mara check the news

what channel

any channel

I turn on the TV in the living room, which is the only TV, which means Mom could walk in and find me watching it, which means I'll have to explain, which means I'll have to talk. But I turn it on anyway because Elena doesn't say any channel unless something is everywhere. And it is.

"—body of a teenage male discovered this morning in the old quarry off County Road 12—"

The quarry.

That's not anywhere. That's not everywhere. That's two miles from my house. That's the place Leo and I went last summer to watch the stars, because the quarry is a bowl cut into the earth and the light pollution from town doesn't reach the bottom, and we lay on our backs on the cold stone and he pointed out Orion and Cassiopeia and said, "What if we just stayed here forever," and I said, "We'd starve," and he said, "No I mean like, what if we just didn't go back." And I said, "We have school tomorrow." And he laughed. He laughed, and I laughed, and we went home, and I didn't think about it again until just now, this moment, with the news anchor's voice filling the living room and my hands shaking so badly I drop the remote, and the batteries fall out and roll under the couch, and I don't pick them up. I don't pick them up because I can't pick them up, because I can't move, because the number forty-seven has stopped meaning anything, because the counting has stopped meaning anything, because the counting was supposed to mean days until he comes back and now it means days since I saw him alive and the difference between those two things is the quarry, the cold stone, Orion's belt rising over the rim of the world while I worried about being tired for first period.

The phone buzzes. Elena. Elena. Elena.

I answer.

"Did you see," she says. Not a question.

"Quarry," I say. My voice doesn't sound like my voice.

"They're not saying it's him. They're not saying who it is. They said they haven't identified the—" She stops. The word is body. She can't say it. I can't say it either. Nobody can say it, and that's how you know the word has power. That's how you know the word is a stone, and if you pick it up, you'll have to carry it.

"Where was he," I say. Not a question either. More like a demand. More like tell me the thing I already know.

"The quarry. The old one, off County Road 12. They found—" Her voice cracks. "They found him this morning. Some hikers. They were just walking, they didn't—"

"Elena. Was it him."

Silence.

"Elena."

"They haven't said. But his mom—my mom called his mom, and she—" Silence again, but worse. A silence with sound in it. A silence with someone crying on the other end of the line, and it takes me a moment to realize it's not Elena. It's me. I'm the one crying. I am crying on the floor of the living room with the remote control in pieces and the news anchor still talking, still saying words I can't hear, and Elena is saying my name over and over like a spell, like if she says it enough times I'll come back to myself, I'll be the person I was forty-seven days ago, I'll be someone who knows what to do.

But I don't know what to do. I knew what to do when he was missing. I counted. I waited. I checked his social media and I texted his number even though the texts didn't deliver and I looked for his face in crowds and I made bargains with God, the universe, whoever was listening. Bring him back and I'll be better. Bring him back and I'll pay attention. Bring him back and I'll never send a laughing emoji again.

The bargains don't work. They never work. That's the thing about bargains — you make them because you think someone's listening. But nobody's listening. The quarry was listening. The stars were listening. Orion, Cassiopeia, the cold indifferent wheeling of the galaxy. They saw him go. They saw him. They didn't do anything.

I hang up the phone. Or maybe Elena hangs up. One of us stops talking, and the line goes dead, and I'm alone.

Forty-seven.

The number doesn't do anything anymore. It doesn't protect me. It doesn't make the days move forward. It's just a number. It's just the space between him leaving and him being found, and the space is empty, and the space will always be empty, because he's not coming back, and I knew that, I think I always knew that, I just didn't want to know it. But now I know it. The quarry gave him back, and knowing is the price.

I pick up the batteries from under the couch. I put the remote back together. I turn off the TV. The screen goes black and I see my reflection, a ghost girl in a dark room, and I don't look away, because looking away was the problem, looking away was what I did, looking away was why I sent a laughing emoji when I should have said stay, please stay, please don't go anywhere without me.

Mom's car pulls into the driveway. The headlights sweep across the living room wall, and I hear the engine cut off, the door open, the door close. Footsteps. Keys in the lock.

She'll know as soon as she sees me. She'll know that something happened. She'll know, and she'll ask, and I'll have to say it out loud. I'll have to make it real with my mouth.

I want to run. I want to go to the quarry. I want to stand where he stood and look up at the same stars and ask them what they saw. But it's not dark yet, and the quarry is a crime scene, and I'm fourteen years old, and none of that matters, none of it, because wanting doesn't bring anyone back.

The door opens.

"Mara?"

I don't answer. I can't answer. The word is still a stone, and I'm still holding it. And when Mom comes into the living room and sees my face, she drops her bag. Not slowly, not carefully. She drops it like the weight of it was too much, like she's been carrying something heavy for a long time and my face was the last straw.

"Mara, what—"

"Mom." My voice is a whisper. My voice is a ghost. "They found Leo."

And then I say it. I say the word I've been holding. I say it to her, and to myself, and to the empty room, and to the stars that are already coming out even though I can't see them yet, even though the light from Orion won't reach us for a thousand years.

"They found his body."

And the word is out. And the word is real. And I am still alive, and Leo is not, and the counting is over, and nothing else begins.