This is the second installment in our ongoing mystery series. In the first installment of Nowhere, three friends, Hannah, Cade, and Levi walk across a frozen lake Mendota in the middle of the night. As they explore they hear a strange pounding noise and Cade falls through the ice. Hannah saves him from the ice and walks him home. The next morning, on her way to College Library, Hannah sees police searching the lake for a body. Near the police she spots Levi who tells her that Cade was not with them the night before. If you want to catch up on the story in more detail you can click here.
…Levi’s face draws itself tight in a succession of indecipherable micro-expressions. He stares at me a long, ugly moment, then his lips break in words spoken through a tight frown.
“Cade wasn’t there,” he says, “Hannah, you and I were alone on the ice.”
The crowd thickens behind us, people gathering to see the rescue team breaking the ice and searching the open water behind Memorial Union on the un-seasonally bright morning. I stare in disbelief at Levi; if he had said it any other way I would have suspected a cruel joke, but with such genuine disbelief lacing his voice there’s no way his confusion could be anything but honest.
“What are you talking about,” I protest, “Of course Cade was there. We were on the ice, and there was that sound, and we ran back, and he fell through.” That’s where I know I’ve lost Levi. He doesn’t seem to understand the first part of what I’m saying, but he tilts his head and takes a shy step back at the last words.
“You saw Cade go through the ice?” Levi goes white and looks out to the open water.
“No! I pulled him out. I… I pulled him out. I walked him home!” I say. I pulled him out, wet fabric bunched in my hand, the ends of his hair freezing on the way home; how could I imagine that? How could Levi not remember it? But Levi won’t listen, he stares out at the open water, the chunks of ice rising and falling in the freezing water. The blood’s gone from Levi’s face, he expects the divers to be surfacing with Cade’s body.
“...he was there, he…” I start, but then stop myself. I take out my phone and try to pull up the pictures I took on the ice, but they’re dark and hazy apart from the blurred lights of Memorial Union. I can make out one dark shape in the foreground, but even I can’t be sure there is a second.
I try to call Cade. Levi keeps his eyes trained on the open water expectantly. The phone pressed to my ear, I hear the empty ringing then nothing. “Cade pick up your phone,” I say with a sinking feeling. Levi turns to me at mention of Cade’s name. He tries calling Cade too, and I listen, waiting for Cade to answer, for Levi to believe me. He doesn’t.
I panic. I run. I pass University, Johnson, down Dayton, Union South, the train tracks, until I get to Cade’s apartment. He didn’t lock the door behind me when I left last night, and I let myself in. I freeze when greeted with an eerie silence.
“Cade?” I say first quietly, then louder “Cade?” I search the small apartment for him. He’s nowhere. There’s the bunched towels on the couch. His keys on the table, beside them Cade’s phone, blinking with the missed calls from earlier. His Carhartt draped over one of the chairs. I reach out and run my fingers over the fabric, still damp with lake water.
I hear Cade’s voice last night on the ice, “Hannah, this is a bad idea,” but it’s far away and sounds almost underwater. I try to shake the voice, and the unease of Cade’s disappearance that comes with it. The pounding on the ice, that’s where it started, that knot in the pit of my stomach that something was wrong. Cade knew it too, he had tried to tell me, to warn me last night as we walked home. And I wasn’t listening. Honest people are the hardest to hear sometimes.
I hear the voice again, “Hannah” in the same waterlogged way, but this one isn’t distant at all, it’s right behind me.
I turn around to an empty room. I remember the nights I couldn’t reach Cade, the nights he sat in the middle of the dark living room too terrified to move and would call me to say it’s bad again, and I would come over and sit beside him and try to reach him through the panic attack.
I think of the memory in as much detail as I can. The chill of the floorboards. Cade thinking about somewhere else-where. How many times had I walked into the apartment to find his dark shape sitting on the floor, quiet, and unsettled. The memory plays over in my mind, but it jumps and skitters over itself, the same moment repeated over and over, like a record stuck on a single track. Everything about the memory feels uneasy, like a flaw in something so familiar that it sits just below the threshold of notice.
Each repetition of the memory is just a shy breath different than the others; the way Cade turns, the way his hair falls in his face, the way he looks at me. It is the same moment but it’s not being repeated, it’s being re-lived. Over and over again.
I hear the voice again, “Hannah.”
“Cade?” I say, but the voice isn’t from the empty apartment, it’s from the memory.
I sit on the floor, where I had on the nights Cade was having panic attacks, and close my eyes thinking back. The memory plays over itself and I force myself to focus on a single iteration of the Cades vying for my attention. “Cade?”
“Hannah?” the memory answers in its distant drone. I keep my eyes closed and can almost feel Cade sitting beside me on the floor. He’s cold; he looks tired. “Hannah, I don’t want to be here,” he says. “I don’t want to stay in the lake.”
“Where are you?” I ask.
“The Nowhere,” he says, “the White Wall, the Now Here.”
The memory goes dark around the edges, the background blurs until it is white and solid. I hear footsteps, two maybe three pairs, but they’re muffled, crunching like on snow or ice. Cade’s floating up against a massive white barrier, his hair drifting slowly around his face, bubbling clinging lightly to his skin; he’s underwater. “Cade?” I ask. He doesn’t answer.
I keep my eyes closed, reaching farther into my memory for the voice, but the only thing that surfaces is the image of Cade under the water of the lake after he fell through the ice, sinking slowly, marbling blue. “I’ve been here before,” the voice says, “I’ve been here so many times, again and again.”
“Where is here?” I ask.
“Hannah.” The voice is unflinchingly honest. He’s still scared. My heart sinks, there’s no way that this isn’t Cade and I don’t know what to say.
I don’t know where he is, or what’s going on, or if I’ll be able to save him, but I find myself saying, “Hold on.”
The footsteps are back in their distorted sounds that rise from beyond the white barrier, the White Wall as Cade called it. Suddenly there’s a beating sound, like the beating we heard on the ice. Cade looks at me from that space next to the white wall, “We’re here again,” he says. He becomes frantic, thrashing in the water, a desperately pounding on the white wall. “Need light! Need Levi!” he yells, “Get Levi!”
In a burst, he’s gone. I open my eyes and realize I’m still alone, sitting on the floor of the silent apartment. I have to get Levi.
I can hear the night train blaring it’s horn in the distance. How long had I been sitting on the floor? Hours? Maybe all day? The exceptionally sunny day is dark beyond the windows, given up to another freezing night. I grab Cade’s phone off the table and stuff it in my pocket. The night train rumbles toward the intersection just down the street, the crossing flashes and the bell rings out sharp and metallic. I stop at the tracks. This is where I stopped with Cade when I was walking him home. I hear him again from last night, “I’ve been here so many times, and you’ll be here again too.”
Is this what he meant? Right now, me being here again now?
My phone starts ringing. I pull it out of my pocket and stare at the screen, it’s a call from Cade. That’s not possible. I pull his phone out of my other pocket, its screen dark and unresponsive.
My phone rings again.
The lights above me flare and flicker. My phone keeps ringing. I answer it. The call is static, but Cade’s voice burst through suddenly, “The lake. Hannah help me.”
I can’t make out anything else he says over the sound of the train just feet from the crossing. The street lights above me flare and burst as the call leaps into a blaze of static. “Hannah,” I hear his voice again, not over the static, but over the train.
I look across the train tracks. Cade’s standing there, staring at me.
“Cade!” I scream, but the train cuts in front of me before I can cross the tracks. When the train passes, he’s gone as if he was never really there. Get Levi, I think, the lake.
I’m going to bring Cade back.
What do you think the White Wall is? Do you think Hannah's going to be able to save Cade? Will she find Levi in time? Send any comments, questions, or theories to almanac@dailycardinal.com
