Nowhere

This the third and final installment of our ongoing mystery series. In the second installment of “Nowhere,” Hannah runs to Cade’s apartment after Levi says that Cade was not with them when they walked on the lake the night before. While in the apartment, Cade’s voice speaks to her and tells her to find Levi and take him to the lake.
                                                                                         Chapter the Third: Now Here         
...The call from Cade bursts into static.“Hannah,” I hear his voice again, not over the static, but over the train barreling toward the crossing by Union South.
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.
What was it he tried to tell me to do? How will I save him? Get Levi, I think, the lake.
I cross the tracks, but there’s nothing left of Cade. He’s nowhere. No, what did he say, not nowhere—Now Here. I think of the memory of him sitting in his apartment, how he was there and there again, a loop, stuck in the same moment. The memory wasn’t repeated, it was relived.
“Now Here,” I think of him saying. Here. He doesn’t mean a place, he means a time.
It’s late, maybe midnight, closer to one. I cross Dayton, cutting through the empty intersections onto Johnson. I’m going back to the lake, back to where Cade went through the ice.
I call Levi, it’s late, but I know he’s still awake—he can never sleep when he’s upset. The call rings then is answered with a dull silence and Levi’s tired voice, “Hannah?” he says.
“Levi, I know where Cade is,” I say. “He’s in the lake.”
“What are you talking about? Did the police say something to—”
“No Levi, the police are wrong. He’s trapped in the lake. He was … he still is. We have to help.” I can’t explain completely, but I need Levi to trust me. He doesn’t.
“Some of us are trying to help, and I don’t know where you’ve been all day, but it hasn’t been helping Hannah! When the police were asking questions, when the divers were in the lake, while I was there thinking Cade was dead—”
“Levi, I need your help—” There’s a long pause over the line. “Cade needs your help.” I say. “Meet me by the lake,” I say with finality and try to hang up.
He tries to say my name in clear frustration as the call cuts him off. I turn down Park Street. The yellow police tape flutters slightly in the wind coming off the lake, bright yellow against the dark sheen of the now-open water. Memorial Union Theater remains illuminated. Its four vertical bars casting the shallow water awash in the soft, yellow glow. The lake reflects stray beams of light in oranges, yellows and bright reds. I duck under the police tape and stand at the water’s edge beyond the terrace. I stop and stare out at the water. I don’t know what I’m doing here.
I thought that I’d know what to do once I got here, that I would be struck with a revelation, a set of guiding instructions, but I’m not. I’m confused and cold and standing empty-handed with no way to help. I try to suppress the swelling feeling in my stomach that I can’t help and that I had lied to Cade. He trusted me; he had been completely, unflinchingly honest, and I promised more than I could do.
I stare at the water. I close my eyes.
“Hold on,” I say. It’s what I had said when I saw him looped in my memory, what I had said when I walked him home. And I mean it. “Hold on,” I say again.
“Hannah,” Cade says in that distant waterlogged way that I heard him in my memory. I open my eyes and see a figure standing on the end of the Goodspeed pier. The lights of the union behind me flare and flicker then suddenly burst as the figure disappears. Cade.
I run to the end of the pier, and stare into the dark water. “Cade!” I say. The wind coming off the lake is stronger. In the deafening howl of it I hear a low, unsteady voice.
“Hannah,” I say. I close my eyes. I think I hear a cracking sound: thin ice.
I remember the way Cade yelled last night, and then went silent. The dark glare of open water against the thick, white ice. The moment plays over and over in my mind, just like that other memory of Cade, not repeated, re-lived. He’s in a loop of time, the same moment—him falling in the lake—over and over again.
“Hannah!” I hear in his distant voice, “Where’s Levi?” I can’t answer. I don’t know, Levi doesn’t trust me like Cade does. I don’t know where Levi is, I don’t know if he is going to come help me. “Need Levi!” Cade’s voice sounds frantic, “Need light!”
“I—” I stutter, I don’t know what to say.
I remember Cade, face upturned, eyes wide and terrified, fists clenched against the cold and his body slowly marbling a waterlogged blue, gently sinking.
“Hannah!” Someone yells. It’s not Cade; it’s Levi. I open my eyes and see him running past the union theater toward the pier. He is here, either because he trusted me or he didn’t, but it doesn’t matter. He’s here.
I look back to the water just beyond the pier. There’s a light, white and hazy, somewhere deep below the surface, and Cade’s there. I see him, eyes wide and terrified, in the lake. “Now Here,” I hear Cade say in the wind. I turn to see Levi running down the pier. “Now Here,” Cade says. He means Now.
I turn and dive into the frigid water.
I swim down toward the white light I saw glowing there. As I get closer, everything’s pulled harder into focus. Cade’s here, floating just as I had seen him before, against the White Wall as he called it. The sound of footsteps crunch on the other side of the barrier, two maybe three sets. I come up beside Cade and press my hand against the barrier; it’s ice. It’s the ice of the lake. Cade’s under the ice and now I am too.
The footsteps sound again. “It’s us,” Cade says, “We’re here again. Now here.”
When we were on the ice, it was Cade underneath. The pounding above the ice was Cade, and that response, that pounding from beneath, was Cade too. He’s been here stuck in this moment, both sides of the ice, watching the scene play out again and again. Multiple timelines, converging on this event.
Maybe that was it, why Levi thought Cade wasn’t on the ice. I was in a timeline where Cade was on the ice, and Levi was in a timeline where Cade was beneath the ice; this moment simultaneously existing in both.
From the above side of the ice, Cade and I hear the pounding. We frantically beat on the ice. The other side illuminates; that’s when Levi and I pulled out the flashlights on our phones. We hit the ice more frantically. Need Light, Need Levi.
Suddenly, Levi comes up beside us. He must have followed me into the lake, diving and swimming toward us. He presses his hands to the ice, and a burst of white light spreads, enveloping the three of us, then goes suddenly black.
Cade, Levi and myself stay in that black moment for what feels like forever, but slowly light starts to edge its way through. First small, shimmering pinpricks, then the signature four vertical bars of light on the union theater and their reflection on the ice.
We’re on the ice again, as we were last night, exactly as if all the events of tomorrow haven’t even happened yet. Levi looks baffled, but he understands now. “Cade!” he says.
Levi helps him up, then me. He looks urgently around, like he knows something we don’t. “We have to get off the lake,” he says and we take off running, all three of us close together.
We hear a cracking sound. Thin ice.
Levi knows about it, knows that’s how Cade got trapped in the lake. He grabs Cade’s arm and pulls him sharply back from the edge of the ice, safely keeping him from the open water, safely keeping him from the lake.
We look at him in disbelief. This is where the loop is broken; this moment isn’t re-lived because Levi stopped it from ever happening. Levi saved Cade. “Cade wasn’t there.”

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