Excerpt
A Sea of Unspoken Things
One We were made in the dark. I used to hate it when Johnny said that, but now I know it’s true.
Sunlight flickered on the windshield as I turned the wheel and the road curved, tightening. Trees pressed in like a wall on both sides of the cracked asphalt, making the old highway that snaked through the Six Rivers National Forest look impossibly narrower. I could feel that cinching in my lungs, too, the air squeezing from them just a little more the deeper into the forest I drove. I’d expected that.
From above, the little blue car would look like an insect between the giant, towering redwoods, and even just imagining it made me uneasy. I’d never liked the feeling that I couldn’t see into the distance, like the whole world might have ended on the other side of those trees and I wouldn’t know it. I guess, really, it had.
There was no world without Johnny.
The thought made the ache rising in my throat travel down my arms, into the fingers that curled around the smooth leather of the steering wheel. It had been three and a half months since I got the call that my brother was gone, but I’d known at least a day before that. The part of me that wasn’t constructed of bone and blood had just . . . known. Maybe even down to the minute.
I glanced at the duffel bag on the passenger seat, the only luggage I’d brought for the two weeks I’d be in Six Rivers. I couldn’t remember now what I’d even packed. In fact, I hadn’t even been able to think of what I might need. In the twenty years since I’d seen the tiny, claustrophobic logging town, I’d done my best to forget it. I’d avoided these winding mountain roads, using every excuse I could think of to keep from coming back to this place. But there was no denying that leaving Six Rivers and never looking back had come at a cost.
Only days after I turned eighteen, I left and never returned. I’d spent my youth hidden in the labyrinth-like forest before I’d all but clawed my way out into the light. Now, my life in San Francisco was exactly what I’d made it, as if I’d painted it onto a canvas and conjured it to life. The days that made up that version of me were filled with gallery openings, poetry readings, and cocktail hours—things that made me forget the sun-starved, evergreen-scented life I’d left behind.
But that cost—the unexpected conditions for that disentanglement—wasn’t just the home I knew or the memories I’d made there. In the end, the price I’d paid had been giving up Johnny. There was a time when I thought we could never truly be separated, because we weren’t just siblings. We were twins. For half of my life, there was nowhere I existed without him, and it didn’t feel like we were knit together by only blood and genetics. We were connected in places that no one could see, in ways that I still didn’t understand.
There had always been a kind of blur that existed between us. The anecdotal stories about twins portrayed on viral social media posts and afternoon talk shows weren’t just entertaining tales that skirted the line of the supernatural. For me, they’d always been real. Sometimes, terrifyingly so.
It wasn’t until I left that I felt some semblance of separation from Johnny. In a way, it felt like he had slowly been scraped from the cracks of my life, just like Six Rivers. In the beginning, he would make the trip down to the city on visits that were hardly ever planned. I would come home to find him cooking in my kitchen or standing fully clothed in the shower with a wrench to tighten the dripping faucet. He would just appear out of nowhere before vanishing like a ghost, and he never stayed long. He was a creature of quiet, unnerved by the buzz of the city and the twinkling lights it cast on the bay. The visits became less and less frequent, and he hadn’t shown up like that in years now.
Johnny wasn’t one for phone calls or emails. Half the time, he didn’t even respond to text messages. So, my only window into his quiet life in Northern California was the Instagram account he kept updated. From 349 miles away, the bits I got to see of my brother’s existence in the redwoods were through the lens of the old analog camera we’d found sitting on top of a neighbor’s garbage can when we were six-teen years old. Twenty years later, he had still refused to switch to digital, and after he started the Instagram account, it soon became filled with those little bits of the world that only Johnny seemed to notice. Sunlight gleaming on dewdrops. A swath of lace-like frost clinging to a pane of glass. The owls.
Always, the owls.
Even when we were kids, I knew that Johnny was different. He’d always found comfort in places that most deemed lonely, disappearing for hours without a word, and I would feel him go quiet. That stillness would settle right between my ribs, and when I couldn’t stand it anymore, I’d go and find him lying on the hot roof of our cabin or tangled high in the branches of a sixty-foot tree. He’d been pulling away from the world for as long as I could remember, but when the photographs of the owls started popping up on his feed, I remember the cold sensation that filled me. He was drawn to them—the secretive creatures that only came out in the darkness. And deep down I knew that it was because he was one of them.
If you’d have told me when we were kids that Johnny would end up a photographer, I probably would have thought it was both surprising and not at all. Growing up, I was the artist. My hands itched for pencils and paintbrushes the way Johnny’s mind itched for the quiet. In the end, both Johnny and I wound up trying to capture moments and people and places. Me with my canvas, him with his camera. But eventually, the drawings that filled my notebooks felt like the blueprints of a prison—a way for me to plan my escape. And eventually, I did.
Johnny had spent the last two years working remotely for a conservation project documenting five different owls in and around Six Rivers National Forest. The opportunity had seemed so serendipitous that I should have known there was something wrong with it. Johnny had never been lucky. Stars didn’t align for him and opportunities didn’t just drop into his lap. So, when I heard that Quinn Fraser, director of biology at California Academy of Sciences, was looking for someone to cover the Six Rivers area, it should have felt off. But only two weeks after I’d sent Johnny’s work to Quinn, Johnny was hired.
I hadn’t been able to shake the feeling that in a way, that made all of this my fault. The project was the first job Johnny ever had that wasn’t logging, and at the time I’d thought that maybe, finally, it would be the thing that got him out of Six Rivers. But only weeks away from the study’s end, Johnny was out on a shoot in Trentham Gorge when a rogue bullet from a hunter’s gun slammed into his chest.
My fingers slipped from the steering wheel, instinctively finding the place two and a half inches below my collarbone, where I could still feel it. I rubbed at the phantom ache, pressing the heel of my hand there until the throb began to recede.
The image unfurled, replacing the view of the forest outside the windshield. In my mind’s eye, tree limbs bent and swayed, creating blurred shapes of light that punched through the forest canopy high above—a flashing glimpse of the last thing Johnny had seen as he lay there on the forest floor. The rendering had been cast across my mind on a loop, making the connection between me and my brother more than just a sense or a feeling. Now, it was something that felt tangible and tactile. Now, it was too real.
Accidental firearm deaths weren’t unheard of in the wilderness that surrounded Six Rivers, especially during the elk season that brought hunters from all over the country to town. I could remember more than one that happened when me and Johnny were kids. But I also knew that accidents didn’t happen in that forest. Not really. There was almost nothing that was random or by chance because the place was alive—intentional.
It was that feeling that had compelled me to pack my bag and drive to Six Rivers. It had rooted down into my gut, twisting so tightly that it made it almost impossible to breathe. Because the link between me and Johnny wasn’t just intuition or some cosmic connection. I’d felt the white-hot heat of that bullet pierce between my ribs. I’d seen the forest canopy swaying in the wind. I’d also felt that bone-deep sense that had been coursing through Johnny’s veins. That despite what the investigation had uncovered about what Johnny was doing out in the gorge that day, he wasn’t alone. More than that, he was afraid.
I returned my hand to the steering wheel, watching the blur of emerald green fly past the window. I’d grown up feeling like the trees had eyes, each tangle of roots like a brain that held memories. I could feel, even now, that they remembered me.
I read once, years after I left, that they could actually speak to one another. That they had the ability to communicate through the network of fungi in the ground over miles and miles of forest. And I believed it. They knew what happened the day my brother died. They’d watched as he grew cold, his blood soaking the earth. And that wasn’t all they knew.
