Lockdown

The grocery run took longer than twenty minutes. The little town store was the kind that only had one of everything, and Mae had opinions, and Theo had the patience to hear all of them, and so we wandered. We got cereal, the right kind. We got bread and eggs and two kinds of chips and a bottle of cheap wine none of us were old enough to buy but the clerk didn't care. We got marshmallows. Theo found a bag of cherries and bought them without asking and ate them in the parking lot, spitting the pits into his palm, and the sky was orange by then, the sun down behind the trees, and I said we should go.

We should have gone sooner.

The road back was dark and the headlights were the only thing for long stretches, the gravel showing in two white cones ahead of us, and I was in the back seat with the groceries shifting every time Mae took a curve, and I was texting Eli, and he wasn't answering, and I told myself it was the signal, the lake road had bad signal, Eli's phone was always dying, and I told myself that again and again as the road got darker and the messages stayed on delivered.

Then we came around the last bend before the lane to the cottage, and there were lights where there hadn't been lights before. A lot of them. The red and the blue kind that move.

Mae slowed the car to a crawl. "What the hell," she said, quiet.

There was a barricade across the lane. Not a real one, just a car pulled across it, an SUV with its flashers going, and a man in a dark jacket standing in front of it with his hand up, palm out, and behind him more lights, down toward the water, more cars, and the dark between them full of moving shapes.

Mae stopped. We all sat there, engine idling. The man walked to her window.

"Lane's closed," he said. Not harsh. Tired. Like he'd said it a hundred times already tonight. "You folks live down there?"

"We're staying at the cottage," I said, leaning forward from the back. "My friend's there. 14 Lake Lane. He stayed behind. Can we - is he -"

The man looked at me. The red and blue moved across his face. "Ma'am, the whole area's under lockdown. There's been an incident."

Incident. The word sat in the car like a stone.

"What kind of incident," Mae said, and her voice had gone flat in the way it did when she was scared and refusing to be, and Theo put his hand over hers on the wheel.

The man hesitated. You could see him weighing what he could say to a car full of teenagers at night. He picked the version that was true and not the worst part. "A body was discovered a few hours ago, on the lake road. Homicide. Until we know what we're dealing with, no one goes in or out. Stay clear."

I think I said something. I think I said his name. I remember Mae grabbing my arm, hard, and I remember Theo turning fully around in his seat to look at me, and I remember understanding two things at exactly the same time, so fast they felt like one thing: that someone was dead on the road where we'd just been, and that Eli was alone on the other side of that barricade, in the dark, in the cottage whose locks he had checked, and I couldn't get to him.

Mae said, "He's at the cottage. He's fine. The cottage is the safest place, that's what they're protecting." She said it to me, but also to herself, and also to the dark.

Theo said, "We should do what the officer says." His voice was steady. It was always steady. Later I would think about how steady it was.

We couldn't get to the cottage. We couldn't get to Eli. They turned us back toward town, and we drove in silence to the little motor lodge on the highway and got a room, the three of us, because there was nowhere else, and I sat on the edge of the bed and called Eli and called Eli and called Eli, and the phone rang and rang and then went to voicemail, his voice on the recording, easy and warm, Hey it's Eli leave it, and I left it, again, please, please call me, and the cherries from the parking lot were still in the paper bag on the floor and they smelled like something sweet rotting, and I didn't sleep.