Beyond The Horizon

Chapter One: Full Moon, September

"I keep the photograph because some days it is the only proof that any of it was real."

The photograph is small.

It fits in the palm of my hand, which is probably why I've carried it for twelve years without losing it — tucked into the inner pocket of whatever jacket I'm wearing, close to my ribs, the way you'd carry something you couldn't afford to leave behind.

The edges are soft now. Worn down by handling, by the years, by the number of times I've taken it out in the dark and put it away again without looking at it. I know what's in it. I don't need to look.

But tonight I look.

The photograph was taken at 8:09 PM on a September evening twelve years ago. I know the exact time because there is a clock on the wall behind us, caught in the frame by accident, its hands frozen at that precise moment — the last moment before everything changed.

In the photograph, there is a full moon through the window.

There is a birthday cake on the table with seven candles, all still lit.

And there are two children — a boy and a girl, seven years old — sitting side by side at the edge of the frame, holding hands.

The boy is me.

The girl —

I close my hand around the photograph.

The girl is why I'm here.

I'm sitting in my car outside Westfield University's east residential building when I take the photograph out. It's just past midnight. The campus is quiet — a few lit windows, a security guard making his slow round, the sound of someone's music bleeding through a dorm wall three floors up.

I've been parked here for forty minutes.

I could go in. I have the building code. I have the floor number. I have the room number. I have spent two years tracking down a girl who doesn't know I exist — or doesn't remember that she does — and she is currently sleeping approximately sixty feet away from where I'm sitting, and I could go in right now and knock on her door and say: Aria. It's me. I found you.

I don't move.

The thing they don't tell you about searching for something — truly searching, the kind that becomes the organizing principle of your entire life — is what happens when you find it. No one tells you about that part. I spent twelve years planning how to look. I spent no time at all thinking about what to do when the looking was over.

I put the photograph back.

I start the car.

I drive around the block once and park again.

I'm going to need more time.

The night it happened, I was wearing a blue shirt.

I remember this because Aria had told me, very seriously, that blue was the best color and that I should wear it to her birthday party so that she would know I agreed with her. I was seven years old. I thought this was a reasonable request. I wore the blue shirt.

The party was at her house — her family's house on a quiet street in Atlanta, the kind of neighborhood where people had gardens and knew each other's names and where nothing bad was supposed to happen. My father and her father were not the kind of men who lived in quiet neighborhoods by accident. They lived that way on purpose. They were very good at being invisible.

Don Romano, my father, was the kind of man who could walk into a room and make every other man in it feel slightly less than they were — and he did it without trying, which was the part they could never forgive him for. But with Cosimo Moretti, it was different. With Moretti, my father was just himself. Loud at dinner. Terrible at card games. The kind of friend you didn't know you needed until you'd had him.

I didn't understand any of that at seven. I just knew that when we went to the Moretti house, my father laughed more.

And when my father laughed more, everything felt safer.

The drive to the Moretti house that evening took forty-three minutes. I know this because I counted — I was going through a phase of counting things, the way some children do when the world feels too large and numbers make it smaller. I sat in the back seat of my father's car in my blue shirt and counted streetlights and telephone poles and the number of times my mother checked her lipstick in the visor mirror.

Three times.

My father caught her on the third and said, "You look beautiful," without looking up from the road.

She said, "You're not even looking."

He said, "I don't need to."

I didn't understand why she smiled at that. I filed it away.

We pulled up to the Moretti house at 7:46 PM. I remember the light — gold and warm, spilling from every window, the kind of light that meant a house was full of people. There were cars along both sides of the street. Someone had put paper lanterns in the garden. The moon was already up, though it was barely dark, hanging low and heavy over the roofline like it had come specifically for the occasion.

I got out of the car and I could already hear Aria.

She was laughing at something — that particular laugh she had, bright and unguarded, the kind you could pick out of a crowd. I had known Aria Moretti my entire life. Our fathers had been friends long before we were born, which meant that she and I had grown up in and out of each other's houses, at each other's birthday parties, fighting over the last bread roll at Sunday dinners. She was my earliest memory of another person.

I heard her laugh and I straightened my collar.

My mother saw me do it and pressed her lips together in a way that meant she was not going to say anything but was storing it.

"Come on," my father said, and opened the gate.

The house was full.

Both families, which meant cousins and uncles and men who worked for our fathers and their wives, all crammed into the Moretti house which was, by the standards of what our families were worth, a modest house — Cosimo Moretti had always liked things quiet. He said that money that advertised itself was money that invited problems. My father had agreed, in the way he agreed with most of Moretti's opinions, which was to say he agreed and then bought a slightly larger car.

I found Aria in the kitchen.

She was standing on a chair — her mother was trying to get her to stand on the chair and not on the counter, which was where Aria was actually standing — wearing a white dress with small red roses on it, her dark chestnut hair loose down her back, very seriously supervising the positioning of the seven candles on her birthday cake.

"That one is crooked," she said, pointing.

"Aria, sweetheart, they're all straight," her mother said, with the patience of a woman who had been having this conversation for twenty minutes.

"That one," Aria said, pointing more emphatically at what appeared to me, from the doorway, to be a perfectly placed candle, "is crooked."

I leaned against the doorframe and watched her argue about a candle's geometry with the focused intensity of a seven-year-old who was entirely correct and knew it.

She looked up and saw me.

"Eli!" she said, and got off the counter — not the chair, the counter — in a way that made her mother close her eyes.

She crossed the kitchen at speed and stopped directly in front of me and looked at my shirt with great seriousness.

"Blue," she said.

"Blue," I confirmed.

She smiled the way she only smiled when something had gone according to her exact plan. It was, at seven years old, a deeply alarming smile to receive. It meant she had been right about something, which she usually had.

"Come look at the moon," she said, and grabbed my hand and pulled me toward the back door without asking if I wanted to come.

I wanted to come.

We stood on the back step together in the warm September dark.

The moon was enormous. Full and white and so low it seemed like something you could reach — if you got high enough, if you found the right hill, if you just went far enough in the right direction.

"It's a birthday moon," Aria said. She said this with complete authority, the way she said most things.

"What's a birthday moon?"

"When the moon comes out full on your birthday." She looked at me sideways. "It means the year is going to be good."

I looked at the moon.

"How do you know that?"

"I just know."

I accepted this. Aria just knew a great many things. It was easier to believe her than to argue.

We stood there for a while, looking at the moon over the garden, while the noise of the party moved behind us — voices and music and the distant sound of someone, probably my father, laughing too loudly at his own joke.

I was seven years old and I didn't have words for what I felt standing there beside her. I just knew that when she was there, things were better. Quieter in my head. Like all the counting I did — the streetlights and the telephone poles and the seconds between things — slowed down and didn't feel necessary anymore.

She bumped her shoulder against mine.

"I'm glad you came," she said.

I looked at the moon so she wouldn't see my face.

"Yeah," I said. "Me too."

Inside, someone called us back for cake.

We went in.

The candles were lit — all seven of them, including the crooked one, which, now that I looked at it in the candlelight, was in fact very slightly crooked. Aria had been right.

She was always right.

Everyone gathered around the table. Our fathers stood side by side — Romano and Moretti, two men who between them controlled more of Atlanta's underworld than anyone outside their circle had ever confirmed — and they looked like what they were in that moment: two fathers at their daughter's birthday, proud and tired and happy, with no idea how little time they had left.

My father looked at me across the cake and winked.

I rolled my eyes, because I was seven and too old for winking fathers.

He grinned.

"Make a wish," someone said to Aria.

She closed her eyes.

I watched her face in the candlelight — serious, concentrating, the way she did everything.

I wondered what she was wishing for.

The clock on the wall behind us read 8:09 PM.

I remember because I counted.

I always counted.