One

Cole drove with his left elbow out the window, which Dad had mentioned twice on the highway and given up on somewhere past the state forest sign.

I watched him from the back seat. The way his right hand sat loose on the wheel at seven o’clock, relaxed in a way it hadn’t been the last time I’d seen him drive — last August, when he still held the wheel at ten and two like the test examiner was still in the car. Something had loosened in him.

He caught me watching in the rearview. Grinned.

“What.”

“Nothing,” I said.

He’d been gone almost a year. I’d cried when we dropped him off in August — the ugly kind, in the back seat on the way home, that I’d tried to do quietly and hadn’t managed. Mom had said nothing. Dad had turned the radio up. I’d started eighth grade without him and finished it the same way. Thanksgiving had been twenty people in my grandmother’s house and I’d barely gotten him for an hour. Christmas the same. This was the first time since August it felt like having him back.

Mom was asleep against the window. Dad had the map open on his lap even though Cole didn’t need it — had pulled up the campground on his phone before we left and memorized the route, which was also new. Last August he would have just asked Dad.

“Left at the junction,” Dad said, studying the map.

“I know, Dad.”

“Just saying.”

Cole looked at me in the rearview again, a brief conspiratorial thing, and I looked out my window before he could see me smile.

The campground came up on the right after another twenty minutes — a wooden sign with a ranger kiosk below it, a teenager in a green uniform leaning out to take Dad’s confirmation number. Past the kiosk the road opened into a network of gravel lanes, numbered sites on both sides, and the place was already half-full even at noon. A family across from the kiosk had their whole setup out — EZ-up canopy, folding table with a checkered cloth, kids running between the trees. A silver Airstream two sites down reflected the sun hard enough to make me squint. Someone’s Lab mix stood in the road watching our Winnebago pull in and didn’t move until Cole stopped and honked lightly and it wandered off.

Our site was at the far end of the loop, backed up against the tree line. Cole backed the Winnebago in on the first try, which made Dad nod at nothing in particular.

“Trail’s that way,” Dad said, pointing toward a gap in the trees at the edge of our site. A brown post with a yellow blaze. “Cave’s off it. Twenty minutes in, maybe.”

“I’ll take Alicia through it tomorrow,” Cole said. He was already out, checking the leveling. “Morning, before it gets hot.”

“I can go myself,” I said.

“You could,” he said. He crouched and looked under the frame. “We’ll go together anyway.”

Mom read in a folding chair. Dad and Cole assembled the awning with the focused energy of a project that didn’t strictly need two people but benefited from it. Cole’s tent was already up at the edge of the site, staked near the tree line — a small dome he’d been bringing on camping trips since middle school, worn at the seams. I walked the perimeter of the site and watched a family two spots over playing cornhole and listened to someone’s radio three sites down playing something country and slightly staticky.

The trail post had boot tracks dried in the mud around it — plenty of them, different sizes, coming and going. A couple emerged from the trees while I stood there, guy and girl, college-aged, packs on, the guy pointing back over his shoulder at something in the distance and the girl laughing at whatever he was saying. They nodded at me as they passed.

A man was sitting in a folding chair outside the site next to ours, coffee mug in both hands, watching me walk back. Older — forties, maybe, heavy around the middle, the kind of sunburn that comes from a full day outside. He didn’t look away when I noticed him looking. Just held my eyes for a second too long before dropping them back to his mug.

I walked faster.

Popular trail. I noted it without deciding anything.

Cole had gotten his shirt off to deal with something in the awning mechanism and I stopped walking for a moment before I remembered how to keep walking. He’d always been lean — that hadn’t changed — but the shape of his back had, the definition across the shoulders, some reordering of proportion that had happened between August and now somewhere I hadn’t been able to watch.

He looked up and saw me standing there.

“Hand me that wrench,” he said, nodding at the toolbox.

I got it and held it out. When he took it our fingers didn’t touch and I was aware that they hadn’t.

He was already focused back on the bracket.

At the campfire that night Cole made s’mores.

He was methodical about it in a way that always made Dad call him ridiculous and made me call it nothing because I was the one who got the results. He rotated the marshmallow by millimeters, slow quarter-turns above the coals, watching for the moment the whole outer surface shifted from white to uniformly gold. Not a single dark spot. He’d done it this way since we were kids and the patience required for it was something he’d apparently brought back from college intact.

He passed the first one to Mom, assembled but not pressed — she liked the components separate.

The second one to me. Assembled and pressed and cut of course because I’d had it the same way since I was six.

“You’re ridiculous,” Dad said.

“He’s wrong,” Cole said, nodding at me. “Al’s right. This is exactly how you do it.”

I ate it and watched the fire and listened to the family two sites over getting their kids in for bed, the progressive lowering of small voices, someone’s dad doing a countdown. From further in the campground, beyond the tree line, the sound of another fire going, other people’s low conversation carrying through the dark in that unintelligible way of outdoor sound.

“Trail junction has a sign for the cave,” Dad said. He had the campground guide on his knee, reading it under the firelight. “Says it’s a through-passage. Maybe thirty minutes start to finish.”

“Fifteen if you move,” Cole said.

“Ranger said mornings are busy out there,” Dad said. “Popular with the early hikers.” He closed the guide. “You two should go before the heat.”

“That’s the plan,” Cole said.

I poked the fire with a stick and watched the sparks go up.

Sometime after my parents had gone in, Cole and I sat at the dying fire and didn’t say much. The campground had gone mostly quiet. Occasionally the sound of something moving in the trees, once a raccoon that came to the edge of our site and considered us and retreated.

The fire going down, no one else around, him just sitting there. We used to do this in the backyard on summer nights when we were kids, before he got old enough for it to be uncool and then old enough again for it not to matter. I’d missed it in a way I hadn’t told anyone.

When I was nine I’d had my tonsils out and woken up in the recovery room before my parents got back. Cole had been fifteen. He’d come with them, waited, and when I opened my eyes he was the one who was there. He talked to me until I stopped crying. I don’t remember what he said. I remember his voice.

He was looking at me when I came back to the fire. By the time I turned toward him he was watching the coals.

“You okay?” Cole said eventually.

“Fine.”

“You’ve been quiet.”

“I’m always quiet.”

He looked at me sideways. “You’re loud, actually.”

“Okay.”

“What’s wrong.”

“Nothing’s wrong,” I said. “I was just thinking about the cave.”

“You and me should get out there early,” he said. “Before the trail fills up.”

I poked the fire. I’d been thinking about going before he was up — finding it myself first, knowing something he didn’t, bringing him to it instead of following him through. That was different from what he was saying.

“I was thinking I might go alone, actually. Before you’re up.”

He was quiet for a moment. “Dad said there are a lot of people on that trail in the mornings. You’d be fine either way.” He stretched his arms above his head, vertebrae popping, and I was aware of how close we were sitting. “But we can go at six if you want. I’ll set an alarm.”

“That’s not what I — I said I might go alone.”

“Yeah.” He lowered his arms, looked at me. “Six o’clock. We’ll go together.”

I threw my stick into the coals. He watched it catch.

“Six,” I said.

“Six,” he agreed.

Inside the Winnebago, in my sleeping bag, I lay on my back in the dark and listened to my parents’ breathing settle and thought about the cave. Twenty minutes down the trail. Fifteen if you moved.

The campground was never fully quiet — there was always someone’s generator, someone’s dog, the sounds of several dozen people existing in proximity. I lay in the noise of it and watched the ceiling and thought about how in eight weeks he’d go back and it would be another year of holidays with everyone there and him in small pieces. The cave was something I could do just with him. Just us, before the day got going and Mom wanted to do the nature walk and Dad wanted to find the camp store.

I thought about going in first — alone, early, before anyone was up. Coming back and telling Cole I’d found it. Taking him in after, showing him the way through, being the one who knew something he didn’t for once. That felt like something.

Then I thought: or I could just go now and do exactly that.

Two

Gray when I slipped out. The air cold enough that I could see my breath.