Page 73 of Holding On

Chapter Seventeen

Travis Russo

Maya insists on coming to the crash site and I relent, though now I think it was a terrible idea.

We take two cars, Chloe’s VW and a Colton company Lexus, and I make sure Maya is in one of my sweatshirts with the hood up. It’s all white and her skin is beautiful, lustrous, next to it. Devon gives her a pair of red sweatpants. It looks like she’s too warm, but she seems to like being cozy.

Even though we all drive down this road every day to get to Route 1, I’ve never once stopped at the precise spot my parents died.

Others have, though.

Right after the accident, wreaths, crosses, beads, teacups, bits of sea glass, and even a potted plant or two were laid at the place where they died. Even George placed a token here: a small black ocean-tumbled stone for my mother and three eggs from a set of bird eggs they had collected over the years.

But to me, the shrine only served as a garish reminder of something that had permanently altered my life and the lives of my sisters.

Because they died, we were orphaned—me for the second time. Because they died, Chloe ran away. Because they died, Claire had to take over raising us, barely making it through vet school. Because they died, I will never have the responsibility of caring for them in old age or holding their hands when they pass.

In another way, it’s because of their death that we are who we are. Claire is so strong, Devon so brave, Chloe so determined, and Laurel so evenhanded that she can channel our mother and father and be both for her son.

We all gained a second father as well. And we learned from him what responsibility looks like.

But to be in the field right now, and to look at the ground and see the gully where the car rolled . . . well, it’s a lot.

I don’t think it’s a good idea to leave the cars parked on the side of the road. It’s too obvious. Instead, we drop Claire, Chloe, Laurel, Devon, and Maya at the spot, and Jackson and I park down the road at Molly’s and then hike the third of a mile back to where everyone is waiting.

We all know exactly where it happened. There’s a huge sugar maple right there and along the bottom, a gash that didn’t exist before that night. The grass is soft and green along the side of the road, and the ditch that the car landed in is no more than a gentle slope.

I can’t help it when a shiver overtakes me.

“I’ve never been here, right at this spot,” I say. The next moment, a thin arm slips around my hips, and I know Maya is standing right beside me.

“This is weird,” says Laurel.

Chloe puts an around her. Laurel left Cory with Edna and the recuperating cat, knowing it would be too much for her to have to deal with him and this place at the same time.

“Did you pull up stats?” I ask Jackson.

“Hell yeah, we got him right here,” he says, tapping his phone. “It’s amazing what shit they digitalize now.”

It was a stretch, a long shot, but Oliver “Tank” Barr threw an average of twenty-eight yards. A beer bottle weighs about half of what a football does.

“He’d be flinging as far as he could, right?” says Laurel.

Claire’s tape measure is a hundred-footer. We would start looking for anything he would want to hide in a fifteen-foot-wide range between seventy and eighty-five feet from the accident site.

He was older, though, and intoxicated and probably panicked. So, not in top form.

“Let’s do this,” I say. I hold the tape and Jackson goes first, tagging an outside circle eight-five feet out with fluorescent tape.

Halfway, Devon seems to wake up. “I’ll mark the inside perimeter,” she says, but I put a hand on her arm.

“This is going to be hard.”

As an explanation, she says, “We’ve got two hours left of good sunlight. It will save time.”

Claire keeps pushing at her long bangs, which are loose in the breeze. She’s stiff and licking her lips. This is hard on all of us. Knowing her, she’s probably agonizing, caught between hoping we find something and guilt that if we do, it’ll be her fault for not finding a piece of evidence the first time.

I squeeze Maya’s hand. She lets me go, and I reach out to Claire. She turns and buries her head on my shoulder.