Zoe and Dallas planned the Silver Teardrop trip like it was a military operation. In the gleaming, high-ceilinged halls at school, they passed each other notes about rebelays, cowstails, and carabiners, and about whether they should use 11-millimeter rope, which was the safest, or 9 millimeter, which was lighter to carry. Dallas was the treasurer of a caving club with the unfortunate name of the Grotto of Guys. His enthusiasm reminded Zoe so much of her father that sometimes when Dallas was waving his hands around and babbling excitedly about the trip, she felt her eyes prick with tears.
It was a Friday night now, close to midnight. They were going caving in the morning. Zoe lay on the couch in the living room, a list of supplies and a map of Silver Teardrop in her hands. Her body felt jangly. She couldn’t get her mind to sit still. The moon, bright and big, was blaring through the window next to her. A larch scratched at the window with its skeletal hands.
Silver Teardrop was just a practice run. It was less daunting than Black Teardrop, where her father had died—but still, she had never gone caving in winter. She’d never dealt with snow and ice. She’d never gone without her dad at all.
Her father had treated caves like they were holy ground. Zoe thought some of the graffiti on the walls of the caves was cool, especially the ancient-looking stuff. But it used to make her dad mental. He’d shine his headlamp at a wall where somebody had carved Phineas in the rock, and he’d shake his head: “Even in the 1800s, some people were assholes.” Her dad had shown her caves with amazing domed ceilings, caves with lakes so blue they seemed phosphorescent, caves with enormous, glassy stalagmites that looked like a pipe organ.
“Here’s the deal, Zoe,” he’d tell her. “There are still a million unexplored places on earth—places where no human being has ever set foot. How cool is that? How freakin’ cool is that?! It’s just that they’re all underground.”
Zoe’s father had always been a few feet in front of her, testing the tunnels and drops and underground rivers. He’d always been right there, smiling goofily and shouting over his shoulder, “You’re freakin’ awesome! You can do this! You’re my girl!”
But not anymore. Not ever again.
She took her phone from the coffee table and texted Dallas to psych herself up.
Tomorrow Tomorrow TOMORROW!!!! she wrote.
Dallas texted back instantaneously, as if he’d just been waiting to hit Send.
Pumped! he wrote. Just gotta get out of work. Huns are being HUGE a-holes. Stand by.
WTFF? Zoe texted back. Don’t you dare blow me off!
Never! I’m PUMPED!!! G2G—I’m shaving. (Not my face.)
EWWWW. Tell the Huns if they don’t let you go, I will kick them in the MRGH and shove a spear up their FURG.
Ha!
Too much?
Hells no! LMNO!
N?
Nuts, Zoe. NUTS!
She set her phone on the coffee table and stared at the map of the cave. In the top right corner, there was an inscription:
Silver Teardrop. Bottomed March 2, 2005. Team leaders: Bodenhamer & Balensky. Water temp: 32°–33°.
The map, which had been drawn by hand, looked like an illustration of a digestive tract, like they used to give out in ninth-grade Bio. The entrance to the cave (the mouth) was a narrow crawlway. It was going to be claustrophobic, and they’d have to be roped and harnessed as they crawled, because after 50 feet the passage arrived at a steep, 175-foot drop (the esophagus). Water ran down one of the walls year-round. How much water there would be—a trickle or a waterfall—was the only question mark that nagged at Zoe and Dallas. They hoped the snow outside the cave hadn’t started to melt and flood underground.
Zoe’s eyes drifted down the map. At the bottom of the drop, there was a big, bell-shaped chamber (the stomach), where the waterfall splashed against a giant rock and spilled onto the floor. She and Dallas would be touching down in a freezing lake. They’d have to wear wet suits under their clothes.
The chamber was what the cavers came for. It must have some spectacular ice formations hanging from the ceiling: it was called the Chandelier Room.
Zoe let the map drop to the floor and rubbed her eyes.
She could hear her mother upstairs, pacing around. They hadn’t spoken in days. Zoe still felt angry and hurt, but she missed her mom. She felt disconnected from the world, like she was floating in space without a tether. The fact that X was gone made it worse. Zoe listened as the ceiling creaked under her mother’s step. Every sound made her feel lonelier.
Zoe was going caving because Jonah needed her to—why couldn’t her mom understand that? Did she think she was only doing it to cause trouble? Or because she needed a distraction while she waited for X? Jonah was still in too much pain to step outside the house. He was waiting for Zoe or the police to make it to the bottom of Black Teardrop. He’d become pale and weepy. He gnawed endlessly at his fingers. Every weekday morning, Rufus rumbled up in the truck with the waving bear, but even he—with his vast repertoire of silliness—couldn’t cheer the kid up. When Rufus and Jonah played hide-and-seek, Jonah hid in the old freezer in the basement like he used to with their dad, but even that seemed to upset him. Rufus refused to take any money for caring for him. At first, Zoe assumed this was all part of his one-mile-per-hour courtship of her mother. Then, one afternoon, she saw Rufus holding her brother’s hand and delicately clipping his tiny fingernails—and she realized that he actually just cared about Jonah. That was the day Zoe decided the guy was a saint.
Tonight, before Jonah went to bed, Zoe had dictated some extra supplies she’d need, and—in a rare burst of energy—he’d written it as best he could in a spiral notebook.
Zoe went over the list one more time:
H2O
Proteen bars, 3?
Hair ties for tYing hair
Raisens
Flashlights, 2
Swis ArmY Knife
Battories
Wool socks reallY thick ones
Dish-washing gloves (WIERD!)
Knee pads for knees
Garbig bag for poncho, just in case!
Everything was stuffed into packs now. Zoe let the paper float to the floor. There was nothing left to do but somehow make it to morning.
She was still awake at 2 a.m. She forced herself off the couch. She went to the front hall closet—why hadn’t she thought of it before?—and took out X’s blue overcoat. It shimmered even in the muted light of the hallway. The metal hangers made a tingling sound when they touched.
Zoe pressed her face to the coat. It smelled of wood smoke, pine, and the faint tang of sweat. The memory of colliding with X on the lake, of feeling his body collapse beneath her, of breathing him in for the first time, flooded over her. She squeezed the coat hard, as if he were in it. Dallas was cute. He had a sweet, lopsided grin, but X … X was kind of astounding. Zoe rubbed one of the buttons on the coat. It was made of stone. It warmed in her hand.
She carried the coat to the couch and huddled under it. X was five or six inches taller than Zoe, so the coat engulfed her, cascaded over her, made her feel certain and safe. She imagined X finally returning. She imagined him walking up the steps. He would be too nervous to look at her at first. She would say … What would she say?
She would say, You forgot your coat.
At 3 a.m., she decided to write X a letter, even though she had no way to deliver it and he didn’t know how to read. The pen with the beaded chain that Jonah had taken from the bank lay on the coffee table. She picked it up. She took the supply list off the floor, turned it over, and pressed it against her knee. She didn’t care that X would never see the letter. She just wanted, just needed, to capture some of the thoughts flying in circles in her head.
She wrote without pausing until she’d filled the page. At 3:15, she folded the letter and slipped it into a pocket of X’s coat as if it were some kind of supernatural mail slot. She fell asleep within seconds. The stolen pen was still in her hand. The coat flowed over her like warm water.
At 8:58, Zoe woke to the sound of Dallas blasting his horn. He was two minutes early and, since she had last been in his car, he’d apparently customized the horn to play the first five notes of The Simpsons theme song. Zoe stumbled to the kitchen window. She made a slashing motion across her throat (Stop honking!), spread the fingers on her right hand (I need five minutes!), and then repeated the slashing gesture (Seriously, honk again and you die!). She was exhausted. Her neck ached from sleeping on the couch. She was in no condition to go caving. Adrenaline was going to have to get her through the day.
Upstairs, she pulled on her wet suit and, over that, as many layers as she could handle without walking like a mummy. She did a quick check of her backpack and the duffel bag that held her gear. All good. On the way down the hall, she peeked into Jonah’s room, hoping he’d be awake so she could hug his toasty little body before she left. He was deeply asleep, though—flushed pink and 20,000 leagues under the sea.
Downstairs, her mother hovered like a ghost in the kitchen. She was at the counter, stirring tea.
“I’m going,” said Zoe.
Her mother didn’t answer. Didn’t even turn.
Zoe didn’t want to leave like this.
She could hear Dallas outside, blasting a Kendrick Lamar rap in his 4Runner.
“I’ll be careful,” she said.
She meant it as a kind of peace offering, but her mother wheeled around angrily.
“If you wanted to be careful—if you wanted to respect my wishes—you wouldn’t go at all,” she said.
“Mom, listen—”
“No, Zoe, I’m not listening. Just go, if you’re going.”
Her mother refused to say another word. She picked up the orange box of tea and began reading the back, as if it were interesting.
Zoe was a wreck when she got in the 4Runner. Dallas stumbled around for something to say. Zoe felt bad about it. Dallas was so PUMPED! PUMPED! PUMPED! for the expedition, and here she was like some pathetic chick getting all messy with her feels. She was not this person.
In a surprising flurry of thoughtfulness, Dallas had brought Zoe a cappuccino from Coffee Traders and switched the radio to a country station she liked. Fiddles and acoustic guitars filled the car. Zoe could tell Dallas hated it, but he didn’t say a word. She put a star next to his name in her head.
“The Huns let you come after all,” she said finally. “That’s cool.”
“The Huns suck,” said Dallas, relieved to be talking. “Don’t get me going on how hard they suck.”
He pulled up to a red light.
“Check this out,” he said. “My boss, right? We’re supposed to call him King Rugila, which is stupid and hard to pronounce—his name’s actually Sandy. Anyway, King R gives me a massive, nut-busting guilt trip about the sacred code of the Huns and how they didn’t just abandon their brothers for some chick.” He paused. “You are the chick, by the way.”
“I got that,” said Zoe.
“So I go on Wikipedia, right? I never actually read about the Huns before because I kinda wanted to create my own character. But check this out: the Huns had no code! That was the point—they just attacked stuff!”
The light bloomed green. Dallas let a string of cars turn in front of him before pulling forward. He was a weirdly polite driver.
“Sorry to get all riled,” he said. “King R just makes me insane.”
“I don’t want you to get in trouble because of me,” said Zoe. “You’re not going to get fired, are you?”
“No, I’m definitely not going to get fired,” said Dallas. “Because I quit.”
“Dallas!” said Zoe. “Because of me?!”
“Yeah because of you,” he said shyly. “Shut up.”
She’d embarrassed him. Who knew Dallas could even get embarrassed?
“They’ll be begging me to come back by Monday,” he added. “All those hot moms don’t come in for the food—which I bet isn’t even all that authentically Hunnic. I’m not saying I’m the biggest stud they’ve got. That would be conceited. But I’m definitely in the top three. King R’s got, like, back hair.”
Zoe laughed, grateful that Dallas was so deeply, defiantly … Dallas.
They streamed past Columbia Falls and turned north toward Polebridge. Civilization quickly petered out. All cell and Internet service evaporated, and the last of the stores and restaurants gave way to empty, rutted roads that curved through the woods. Signs saying Private Property and Be Bear Aware were nailed to firs along the roadside. Every so often a log cabin sent up a fat plume of smoke. Otherwise, the world was empty. Zoe felt it in her stomach. The closer they got to Silver Teardrop, the more anxious she felt about going caving again. Dallas must have sensed it.
“You nervous?” he said.
“Yeah,” she said.
“Seriously?” said Dallas. “Because we’re going to crush this cave. We’re both total ballers. Repeat after me: crush, crush, crush!”
“Crush, crush, crush?” said Zoe.
“That was feeble,” said Dallas. “Nothing was ever crushed by anybody who said ‘crush’ like that.”
“It’s not just the cave,” said Zoe.
Dallas frowned.
“Do you want to—do you want to talk about your feelings, or whatever?”
Zoe just stared at him. She couldn’t help it. It was the last thing that the Dallas she’d gone out with would ever have asked.
“Have you been practicing how to talk to girls, dawg?” she said.
“Maybe,” said Dallas. “Maybe with my mom—who’s a therapist. I’m saying maybe.”
“Well, it’s sweet of you to ask,” said Zoe. “But I know you don’t actually want to hear about my feelings.”
They came to a narrow curve in the road. Another car was approaching. Dallas slowed down and drove onto the shoulder so it could pass.
“Here’s the thing that girls don’t understand,” he said.
“Oh my god,” said Zoe. “Please tell me what girls don’t understand—because I’ve always wondered.”
Either Dallas didn’t hear the sarcasm, or decided to ignore it.
“What girls don’t understand,” he began earnestly, “is that guys actually do want to hear about their feelings—they just don’t want to hear about all of their feelings. They want to hear about some of them.”
“How much are we talking?” said Zoe. “Do you want to hear, like, thirty percent of our feelings?”
Dallas mulled this over.
“Maybe fifty percent?” he said. “Depending? We just want there to be time left at the end to talk about something else. But with you guys—with you girls—everything is always connected to everything else, so you start talking about one feeling and that leads to another feeling, which leads to another feeling.” He looked at her with his dimpled, wide-open face. He was absolutely sincere. “You know? There’s never any time left.”
They were just outside Polebridge now. Dallas turned onto the road to town. Polebridge was a tiny, pony express sort of place in the middle of nowhere. There were maybe a dozen buildings—a café, a general store, a cluster of cabins, a red outhouse with a crescent moon on the door. Except for the satellite dishes, it might have been 1912. There was a rail for tying up your horse.
Dallas parked in front of the store, shut off the engine, and turned to Zoe, apparently still waiting for the lowdown on her feelings.
What the heck, she thought.
“Okay, here are the highlights,” she said. “My mom’s pissed at me for going caving. Jonah won’t leave the house. He’s like a crazy person in a play. I haven’t seen X—my boyfriend—I haven’t seen him in days. I’m sorry. I know you don’t want to hear about him. What else? I miss my dad. I’ve never gone caving without him. I don’t even know how to go caving without him.” She made herself stop talking. “So those are my feelings. Which fifty percent do you want to hear more about?”
To Dallas’s credit, he said exactly the right thing: “You need some sugar.”
He disappeared into the general store and returned five minutes later with a bag of pastries, which he dumped onto the seat between them, like a pirate’s treasure. There were chocolate chip cookies, cherry turnovers, and huckleberry bear claws. It was far more food than the two of them could eat. Zoe unwrapped a bear claw and began to devour it, licking the frosting off her fingers. She hadn’t realized how hungry she was.
“When we’re finished with Silver Teardrop, I want to go see Black Teardrop, okay?” she said. “I haven’t seen it since…”
She trailed off, and Dallas finished the sentence for her: “Since we looked for your dad?”
“Yeah,” she said.
“You really ready to see that place again?” said Dallas.
Zoe laughed. She wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was the sugar.
“Who knows,” she said.
They left Polebridge and drove the last ten miles to Silver Teardrop, the car bucking and rattling over the road. The forest in this part of the mountains had recently burned. The trees were stripped and charcoal black, and rose out of the snow naked as needles. They reminded Zoe of the woods near Bert and Betty’s house, of course—and that reminded her of chasing Jonah and the dogs through the blizzard, of meeting X, of meeting Stan. It was just like Dallas said: everything was connected.
Silver Teardrop lay under a frozen creek bed that ran alongside the road. There was nowhere to park. Dallas drove an extra half mile, and finally the road widened enough for him to pull over. For the next five minutes, he blared Kanye West’s song “Monster” at top volume, which seemed to be a pre-caving ritual of his. Zoe stood outside the truck, watching in amusement as Dallas duplicated every move from the video. Finally, the tune ended. Dallas emerged from the truck, red-faced and beaming.
“Woot!” he shouted, not so much to Zoe as to the universe.
He gestured for Zoe to follow him. He walked to the back of the 4Runner and opened it with a flourish.
“Behold!” he said.
Zoe couldn’t speak for a moment: It was a gearhead’s paradise. There were beautiful coils of rope hanging from hooks. There were drills, bolt kits, harnesses, ascenders and descenders, caving packs with holes in the bottom so water could drain out. There were folding shovels and gleaming ice axes. There were whole unopened boxes of Clif Bars and CamelBaks full of water. Everything was meticulously curated and cared for. Everything was shiny. Zoe’s dad always used as little gear as he could get away with: he liked to improvise, and he was kind of a slob. Dallas had four identical orange helmets. He even had a stack of jumpsuits, which were a lighter shade of orange. They appeared to have been ironed.
“Turns out I have a little OCD,” said Dallas.
Zoe didn’t want him to feel self-conscious.
“No more than, like, a serial killer,” she said.
Dallas took a jumpsuit from the pile, popped it open, and stepped into it. The suit used to have a breast pocket, but Dallas had removed it so it wouldn’t fill with mud when he crawled. The front of the suit had tiny holes in the shape of a U where the pocket used to be.
Next, Dallas inspected the row of helmets. Zoe wondered how he could even tell them apart. Finally, he picked one, rigged it with an LED headlamp, and strapped it on. He was square-jawed and handsome in his orange helmet-and-suit ensemble.
“How do I look?” he said.
“Like a Lego,” said Zoe.
She put on her own jumpsuit, which had been crushed in a ball at the bottom of her duffle. It was off-white, and so stained with mud that it looked like an abstract painting. Her helmet came next. Her dad had given it to her when she turned 15. It was dark blue, and scarred from low ceilings and falling rock. It was slightly too big and poorly padded. Whenever she nodded, it did a dance on her head.
For ten minutes, Dallas and Zoe geared up. Everything Dallas owned seemed to have been scientifically engineered—even his gloves looked like something you’d use to repair a space station. Zoe’s stuff was all shabby crap from the land of misfit clothes. But Dallas didn’t judge her, and she didn’t embarrass easily, anyway. She pulled on her yellow dish-washing gloves like they were made of silk.
Zoe and Dallas double-checked their headlamps, their batteries, their backup batteries, their drill. Dallas got pissed when he realized that he’d forgotten to bring walkie-talkies. Fortunately, Zoe had thought to pack a pair. She dug them out of her duffel, and handed him one.
“Please come prepared next time,” she said.
Dallas locked up the 4Runner—cheep! cheep!—and they hiked back down the road, trudging along stiffly under all the layers of clothes. After a few minutes, they came around a bend and saw some deer in the snow up ahead. The deer’s eyes were wet and nervous. Their coats, thin and red in summer, had turned coarse and gray to survive the cold—and hunting season. They stared at Dallas and Zoe, then darted away, jumping high like horses on a carousel.
In the silence, Zoe’s anxiety began to seep back in. She tried to clear her mind, but couldn’t. A story her dad had told her when she was 10 or 11 came back to her and the minute she remembered it, she couldn’t shake it. The story was about British cavers in the ’60s who got caught underground when a freak thunderstorm flooded their cave.
She’d never forgotten the details: Rescuers came running from their pubs. They built a dam, but it kept collapsing so they had to hold it together with their bodies. They worked through the night to pump out the water. Finally, they wriggled into a small tunnel to search for survivors. Deep in the cave, the lead rescuer found the bodies of two dead cavers blocking the way. He had to crawl over them to find the others. They were just corpses now, too. The last of them had squeezed into a tight fissure in a desperate hunt for air. The lead rescuer began his retreat, knowing all was lost. The volunteers behind him were crying and throwing up in the passageway. He said to the first one he saw, “Go back, Jim. They’re dead.”
Dallas noticed that Zoe wasn’t talking.
“What are you thinking about?” he said.
“The British cavers,” she said.
“The dead guys in the tunnel—those British cavers?” he said. There wasn’t a caving legend that Dallas didn’t know. “That’s a horrible thing to think about, dawg. Hit Delete right now. Seriously.”
Zoe shoved the story into the Do Not Open box. It didn’t want to go in—it wrestled with her—but eventually it did. She imagined herself sitting on the box to keep the thing trapped.
But still she felt unsettled as they trudged through the wilderness. Between the silence and the snow and the burned-out forests sliding past, Zoe felt like she and Dallas were characters in some postapocalyptic movie—survivors of a deadly virus that only they were immune to.
Dallas didn’t seem remotely nervous. He never did. He seemed stoked, giddy almost, oblivious. They were within arm’s reach of each other, but still miles apart.
“It’s this way,” said Dallas, who’d been staring down at his GPS. He thrust a fist in the air: “Woot!”
He led her to the side of the road, and down the steep embankment. If there had ever been a trail, it was buried now. The slope was piled with fallen trees, which plows had shoved off the road. Their trunks were charred and blistered.
Zoe struggled to climb over the logs. The weight of her pack kept pulling her off balance.
Getting to the cave was supposed to be the easy part.
Dallas was just ahead of her. She tried to step exactly where he stepped. She started to sweat under her clothes. She was near the bottom of the embankment when her snowshoe landed on a rotten log.
She had a sick feeling, like the ground was disappearing.
It was.
She pitched forward, her arms churning helplessly.
Dallas was still babbling. He had no idea. Zoe fell toward his back, arms outstretched and grabbing at the air. A branch shot past her face. It missed her eye by an inch.
She crashed against Dallas.
He gave a grunt of surprise, then fell forward, too. The whole thing took only an instant. Less than an instant.
The sky spun above Zoe’s head. She landed on her side in the snow. She heard a sharp, dry crack—the sound of a bone splintering—and waited for the pain, but it never came.
Dallas lay in a heap a few feet away. He’d tried to break his fall with his hands. He was clutching his wrist. His mouth was an O, and he was about to scream.
Dallas insisted that Zoe could crush Silver Teardrop without him. He was not going to wreck the day for her. It was too huge. He popped some Advil from his pack, and sat on his butt at the bottom of the embankment, his wrist plunged in the snow to stop the swelling. He swore he was fine—that it was probably just a sprain and that he’d only screamed because of the shock. Zoe argued with him, and lost.
They followed the creek bed awhile, and soon the GPS informed them that they’d arrived at their destination. Zoe saw nothing resembling a cave. The entrance had to be deep under snow.
She and Dallas removed their snowshoes and climbed down to the frozen creek. A couple hundred feet up, it ran into a rocky hill and slipped underground. Zoe helped Dallas off with his pack, took out a folding shovel, and began to clear the mouth of the cave. Dallas insisted on helping. He’d filled a pocket with snow, and he kept his right hand buried in it as he hacked away at the entrance with an ice ax. They worked slowly to conserve their energy. They didn’t talk much, although at one point, Dallas looked at Zoe’s yellow rubber gloves, shook his head, and said, “Can I please give you a better pair? I promise to give yours back if we have to wash any dishes.”
Zoe’s fingers were already so cold they seemed to be burning. She nodded so forcefully that Dallas cracked up.
When they’d cleared the snow, they found a dense wall of ice blocking the mouth of the cave, as if defending it from intruders. They chipped at it for half an hour. Zoe’s arm began to ache. Shards of ice flew up at her face. But as the entrance of the cave emerged from the ice, she found she was grinning like an idiot. She locked eyes with Dallas. Even injured, he had the same loopy, blissed-out expression.
“Right?!” he said happily.
The map hadn’t done justice to how narrow the entrance was. It was shaped roughly like a keyhole, and not much more than two feet wide.
“Man, that’s tight,” said Dallas. “I couldn’t have gotten in there without scraping my junk off.”
“Thank you for that image,” said Zoe.
She and Dallas crouched down, and their headlamps flooded the tunnel. The ceiling was slick with condensation, the floor littered with broken rock and bubbles of calcite that cavers called popcorn. But none of this was as troubling as the fact that the tunnel never seemed to widen. Zoe would have to crawl down a meandering, 50-foot corridor on her side. Neither of them spoke, and while they were not speaking, a giant wood rat wandered into the light and stared up at them indifferently.
“You got this,” said Dallas.
“I know,” said Zoe. She thought of the tattoo on his shoulder. “‘Never don’t stop,’ right?”
“Exactly!” said Dallas. “‘Never, ever don’t stop!’”
He hesitated.
“Unless,” he said.
Zoe had never seen Dallas hesitate.
“Do not mess with my head two seconds before I go in there,” she said. “Or I will scrape your junk off myself.”
“No, no, no, you got this,” said Dallas. “But. If you get in there and there’s a shit-ton of running water, you gotta get out. Promise me you won’t get all intrepid.”
Zoe promised, but they both knew she was lying.
She put on her seat harness and descender. Dallas double-checked them so carefully it actually made her more nervous. He was acting like she was about to jump out of a plane.
Zoe tested her walkie-talkie. All she had to do now was stop stalling.
She took a last breath of fresh air.
The first ten feet of the cave were furry with ice. Her father’s voice popped into her head, like a cartoon bubble: “That’s hoarfrost, Zoe! Also known as white frost. Come on—know your frosts!”
She ducked into the tunnel, and lay down on her side. She shimmied forward like a snake, pushing a fat coil of rope and a small pack in front of her.
The passage was insanely claustrophobic. The walls were like a clamp.
She made it about five feet before the back of her neck was slick with sweat. She could already hear the waterfall pounding up ahead. She thought of the British cavers who drowned—she couldn’t help it—and of the men who rushed from their pubs and tried to save them.
“Go back, Jim. They’re dead.”
She had to focus. That’s the first thing you learned as a caver—you focus or you get hurt. Actually, the first thing you learned was that it was nuts to go caving without at least two other people. That way, if someone got injured, one person could stay with her and the other could run for help.
She twisted her legs so she could push with both feet. She dragged her body over the rubble and calcite. Even through a wet suit and four layers of clothes, she could feel them bite.
When the tunnel grew even narrower, she filled her lungs with air, then released it so her chest would shrink and she could keep crawling. She made it another five or six feet. She had to crane her neck to see where she was going. Her helmet bobbled and scraped along the ground. Every so often it scooped up a stone and she had to shake her head until it tumbled back out. In the distance, the waterfall grew louder. She’d forgotten how ferocious water sounded in an enclosed space—how it got your heart drumming even if you weren’t afraid.
And then it struck her: she didn’t have to be afraid. She was cold, her body was tense as a wire, she felt like she was crawling into an animal’s throat—but she didn’t have to be scared. She knew how to do this. She loved doing this.
And she wasn’t even alone, not really. She had a whole support team in her brain: Dallas, Jonah, X. Even her dad, in a way.
Especially her dad.
“You’re freakin’ awesome! You can do this! You’re my girl!”
She arrived at a bend in the tunnel and wriggled around it. She imagined she was a superhero who could transform into water or molten steel—who could flow through the rock and then reconstitute at will.
Her stupid grin was back.
Suddenly, the walkie-talkie trilled. By the time Zoe finished the laborious task of taking off her glove and fishing the thing out of her pack, it had stopped. Annoyed, she called Dallas back.
“I’m being molten steel!” she said. “What could you possibly want?”
There was a pause during which Dallas presumably tried to figure out what the hell she was talking about. When he answered, his voice was so distorted that she had to work to fill in the missing words.
“Where (you) at?” he said. “You killin’ it? Can you (hear the) water?”
“Of course I’m killin’ it,” she told him. “Go away!”
She slid the walkie-talkie back into her pack, wiped her nose, and put her glove back on. Even in that brief interval, her hand had become stiff with the cold, and she had to flex her fingers to get some life back in them.
Just ahead, a thousand daddy longlegs hung from the ceiling in a clump, their legs packed in such a dense mass that they looked like dirty hair. Zoe was used to spiders, but she was surprised to see them so late in February. She slid under them and squinted up. She heard her father’s voice again: “Daddy longlegs aren’t spiders, Zoe! They’re Opiliones! Come on—this is Insects 101!”
When she was small—five, maybe? six?—her dad gave her an ecstatic lecture about this stuff. There were two things she’d always remembered. The first was how her father’s face glowed with excitement. The second was a gruesome tidbit about how daddy longlegs could play dead by detaching one of their legs to trick predators. They’d leave it behind—still twitching!—while they crawled in the opposite direction. Only her father could have thought that was a cool thing to tell a little kid. And yet it kind of was.
Zoe shook her head and smiled. Her helmet did its dance.
She’d already lost track of how long she’d been in the cave. Time had a way of shattering underground. The waterfall roared even louder now. She kept crawling in the dark, telling herself to focus.
The tunnel finally widened, then stopped at the edge of the giant drop that led down to the Chandelier Room. Zoe rolled onto her stomach. She lowered her head to the ground, and exhaled gratefully, like a swimmer who had just barely made it back to the beach. Her neck ached. The left side of her body felt ravaged. She dreaded looking at the bruises. Were superheroes supposed to get this tired?
She rotated her head slowly, her headlamp sweeping the walls. There were bolts on either side of her that another caver had left in the rock—a primary and a backup. She unspooled her rope and rigged up with loops like bunny ears. She struck the bolts with a buckle and leaned close to hear the solid, reassuring ping.
There were still five feet between Zoe and the giant shaft that plunged down to the Chandelier Room. She pushed herself up into a sort of Gollum-like crouch, and inched toward it, hoping the waterfall wouldn’t be as ferocious as it sounded.
The shaft was roughly circular. Its walls were jagged and embedded with pockets of ice that glinted in the light of Zoe’s headlamp. Off to her right, an underground river burst through an icy hole in the wall, then tumbled down, like Rapunzel’s hair. It wasn’t the trickle that she and Dallas had hoped for. She was glad he wasn’t there to say, Forget it, dawg, this is waaaay too intrepid. She was sure that if she rappelled straight down, she could avoid most of the spray.
She tested the bolts in the wall again, though it didn’t tell her anything definitive: if they were going to pop out, they were going to pop out when she was hanging in midair. She hooked herself onto the rope. She took a deep breath and turned around.
She stepped backward off the edge.
She could have cried with joy when the soles of her boots found the wall. She began to descend. Slowly. Cautiously. Just a couple of feet at a time. Her right hand never left the brake. A cold cloud of mist from the waterfall enveloped her. The noise was immense. Her heart thumped even louder. It was like she was being chased.
She tried to ignore the waterfall, but it was shooting out of the wall with the force of a fire hydrant. Water splashed her boots as she descended. The spray crept up her body, drenching her legs, her arms, her chest. She was grateful for the wet suit beneath her clothes. She fought the impulse to drop faster, to drop farther, to free-fall to the bottom.
The water found her neck now. Her face. It was so frigid it felt like a claw against her skin. She twisted away. She needed a new plan. She needed to get farther away from the falls.
Zoe began inching sideways, away from the torrent. She was descending at an angle now, like a pendulum. The muscles in her legs were objecting, tensing up, sending out warning shots of pain. The rope was scraping against the rocks. Zoe crept five or six feet sideways, but still the spray lashed at her. If she could just make it a couple more feet. She reached out with the toe of her right boot.
It landed on ice.
She slipped. Her heart flew into her mouth.
She felt herself being yanked back toward the falls, her body twirling like a top. She couldn’t stop—couldn’t find anything to grab. Up above her, the rope sawed against the edge of the cliff.
Zoe was swinging so hard she was pulled under the falls. The water pounded her back, furious and cold. It banged on her rickety helmet. It soaked every part of her. She tried to move, to push off the wall, to do something, anything, but her body was rigid with shock, and suddenly there was a terrible flower blooming in her head.
This is how my father died—terrified and swinging on a rope.
At last, the rope pulled her back out of the water, as if it had all been gravity’s way of telling her that the only way down was straight. Zoe hung suspended for a moment, tears clouding her eyes. She felt shaken, stupid, humiliated. The walkie-talkie trilled in her pack. Did Dallas somehow know what had happened? Had she shouted and not known it? Had he heard her? He couldn’t have.
She didn’t answer. Dallas would hear the shakiness in her voice and tell her to come out. She was fine now. She was fine. But for a sliver of a moment it’d felt like the bottom had dropped out of the world and she was hurtling downward.
She took the glove off her right hand, tearing at the Velcro with her teeth. She dropped it into the darkness.
She inspected her harness and her brake. The metal was so cold it seemed electrically charged. She brushed the ice off everything as best she could. Her heart was galloping.
She couldn’t get the thought of her father out of her head.
This is how he died.
She found herself staring at her bare right hand, weirdly fascinated by it, as if it didn’t belong to her.
There’d been blood and skin on her dad’s rope. Was it from his hands? From his neck? Had the rope wound around his throat? Had it choked him—suffocated him—like he was a baby trying to be born?
She was sobbing now. She would have made an awful noise if there hadn’t been a torrent of water spilling along with her tears.
The walkie-talkie rang again, and she answered it angrily: “Can you please leave me alone, please!”
“Can I (what)?” said Dallas.
The explosions of static were worse than ever.
“Can you please leave me alone for a second!” she said.
“Can I what for a what?” said Dallas.
Screw it, she thought.
Zoe dropped the walkie-talkie now, too. She didn’t hear it land, but pictured it smashing on the rock down below, the battery springing out and skittering across the floor of the cave. She turned off her headlamp. She just wanted to hang in the dark a moment. She didn’t care about the spray from the waterfall. She couldn’t get any wetter.
The darkness was absolute. It was as if the water, with its astonishing noise, had decimated all her other senses.
She thought of her dad. She thought of X. She thought of how they’d both be extremely concerned about the borderline-crazy adventure she was embarked on. It was so strange that they would never meet. One had exited her life just as the other entered it. They’d brushed past each other, missing each other by moments.
Zoe twisted slowly on the rope in the dark. She concentrated on the water now. She tried to pick it apart, tried to hear every tiny sound in the middle of the roar. She let the relentlessness of the noise drive all thoughts out of her head—to douse them like fires, one after the other. Her heartbeat began to slow. Her breathing got deeper.
Later—she couldn’t have said how long it had been—she switched her headlamp back on, and continued her descent. The ice in the rock sparkled all the way down.
The Chandelier Room was breathtaking—Zoe’s eyes didn’t know what to devour first. In the middle of the chamber, there was a giant boulder encased in translucent ice. The waterfall struck it dead center, then splashed in every direction like a demented fountain. The walls were coated in ice as well. Here, though, the ice was as thick and wavy as cake frosting, and it glowed with the sleepy, blue-green light of an aquarium. Every 20 feet or so, there were massive, almost melted-looking columns of rock. (Her father wouldn’t shut up today: “They’re not columns of rock, Zoe! They’re limestone pillars! Come on—respect your rocks!”)
Zoe stepped carefully on the frozen floor, running her bare hands along every surface, then shoving them inside her jacket to warm. She was transfixed. Everything in the chamber seemed as ancient as the earth, yet somehow still evolving, still breathing, still being formed. And just when Zoe thought the Chandelier Room couldn’t get any more mesmerizing…
She looked up.
The ceiling was hung with icicles of every conceivable size. It looked like an upside-down forest, like some massive musical instrument that had yet to be invented. It was gorgeous. She swept her eyes along the ice, greedily. Her headlamp made the whole thing glow.
It was only when Zoe felt something crunch under her feet—a shard of plastic from the walkie-talkie—that she remembered Dallas. He’d be up there, pacing around with his injured hand in his pocket, possibly freaking out. The walkie-talkie was busted beyond repair but she collected all the bits she could find and stuffed them in her pack.
She returned to where the rope hung down the shaft. It was covered with ice, so she thwacked it against the wall like she was beating a rug. Looking up, she could see fragments of the water—little jets and beads—catch the light of her headlamp as they fell.
She hooked herself onto the rope once more, and began to rise.
Zoe crawled out of the cave 20 minutes later, dizzy and drenched. The crystals of frost at the entrance floated down on her shoulders like a good-bye present.
She struggled to her feet, dropped her pack in the snow, and gulped in as much air as her lungs could hold. Her legs felt rickety. She wobbled like a newborn colt for the first few steps. Otherwise, she felt lighter in every way. She felt lifted.
Dallas stepped toward her, beaming and offering an orange towel from his pack. He seemed not to know if he should hug her, so Zoe threw her arms around him and squeezed gratefully.
“Thank you for bringing me here,” said Zoe.
She worried it wasn’t sufficient so she added, in his own language, “You’re a full-on baller and a boss—thank you!”
She felt exhilarated. The air was lighting up her blood.
“Okay, okay,” said Dallas, breaking off the hug. “You’re starting to feel attracted to me. I warned you.”
“How long was I down there?” she said. “Half an hour?”
“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:
I WILL COME BACK.