There is a boy standing on the bridge when Officer David Wayland turns onto the gravel road that leads out of the tiny town that he's lived his whole life in. Evan's bridge some of the locals called it.
Wayland just called it the Jumper's bridge and hated every time he had to drive over it; it was worse at night.
The boy hadn't even moved when the lights of Wayland's car landed on him. Just stood there, staring down into the dark murky waters of the creek below.
Wayland shivers but resolutely set the car to park and got out of the vehicle.
He's walked the beat for nearly thirty years and he's seen far too many people die on his watch.
"Hey kid," he calls when he's close enough to get a read on the boy's face. "You alright?"
"If I was, I wouldn't be standing on this bridge, now would I?" the boy says, and Wayland mentally revises his calculation of the boy's age. He'd thought him to be around fourteen, but the voice was deeper, more like someone at the tail end of puberty than anything else.
At least seventeen.
Old as Evan then. Wayland pushes aside the familiar old grief and the haunted look of Evan's face.
"What's your name, son?" he tries again.
"Kalav," the boy says.
"Kalav," Wayland says. "Got a last name?"
The boy snorts. "Why? Going to call my parents? Have them come pick me up, drag me home?"
"I'm just here to help, Kalav," Wayland says. "Why are you here?"
"Why do you think, officer?" Kalav asks, stepping up to the edge as Wayland tries to inch closer. "What's the point of it all?"
"The point of what?" Wayland asks, stalling for time.
"Life, the grand design of it all," Kalav says, "Why are we here? Humanity, what's the point?"
"Experience, I'd guess," Wayland says. "Try everything the world has to offer?"
Kalav laughs, the sound sharp, cutting through the quiet chirping of the crickets and the soft rushing of the creek below.
"Please, like humanity doesn't kill those who express ideas different from the flock," Kalav scoffs. "A man may not lie with another man, a woman with another woman, they may be stoned to death- "
"Is that why you're here?" Wayland cuts in, "Because you're afraid of your parents' reactions to you being gay?"
Kalav tilts his head up to gaze at the stars, half-hidden by clouds. "What does it matter, officer? You can't save me, just like you couldn't save Evan."
"Evan?" Wayland asks, confused.
"Your son," Kalav says softly. "A child on the edge of eighteen, driven to suicide on this very bridge, this very day, seventeen years ago."
"How do you know that?" Wayland asks.
Kalav's lips curl into a smile, "Everyone knows that, everyone who has grown up here knows the story of how Evan Wayland threw himself off this bridge because he was bullied. Unnatural they called him, a spawn of the devil-"
"He wasn't unnatural!" Wayland yells. "He was just a kid, and he may have been a little strange, but there wasn't anything wrong with him! He was a good kid, and you shouldn't say such things!" he broke off in a sob. "He was just a kid," Wayland mutters.
"And did you tell him that?" Kalav asks. "Did you support him? Tell him you loved him no matter what sex he preferred?"
"I-"Wayland falters. He had, hadn't he?
"When he came to you, weeping and fearful, did you talk down to him?" Kalav spits, "Tell him that a man doesn't cry, that he is firm and strong in the face of adversity? Or did you tell him that he should keep a stiff upper lip and ignore the hateful words spewed at him, the beatings that others would give him when the teachers turned their gazes away?"
"I was just trying to help!" Wayland cries.
"Help! Help?" Kalav says, incredulous, turning towards Wayland so that he may see the young man's face.
It is a slender face with delicate features. Pale lips are twisted in a scowl, piercing green eyes lined with shadow above fine cheekbones. Black hair curls about his face, and Wayland can see the faint glimmer of an earring in Kalav's right ear.
He's dressed in black slacks and a dark shirt, and surprisingly, is barefoot. Wayland wonders at how he didn't notice it before. It's rather cool, but Kalav shows no sign of discomfort.
"A fat lot of good your help did him, didn't it?" Kalav hisses. "He looked to you for help and you turned away, ashamed!"
"I wasn't ashamed!" Wayland yells.
Kalav laughs, low and dark. "Lies, such lies you tell yourself, and those you call friends. You serve the town that killed your son and yet you tell yourself all is well. Your son called out to you- "Tell Mama I'm sorry." And you just watched."
Wayland can see Evan's face, the sudden calm that had swept over his distraught features. The blank relief in his blue eyes before he had just so calmly taken one step off the edge and dropped like a stone to the creek below.
"And your ex-wife, who loved her son, as any mother with a heart would, who supported him, loved him as you would not, accepted him as he was, could not look at you, knowing what you did."
"How do you know all this?" Wayland asks, horror-struck.
"You killed your son just as surely as this town did, as the creek did," Kalav hisses, his words sharp, syllables slithering over his pale lips to bite at Wayland.
"No," Wayland says, shaking his head. "No, I didn't!"
"You did," Kalav says solemnly. "You know you did. Your rejection of him, never voiced, might as well have been the stone that killed him. It's still down there, you know, in the creek, still red with his blood that's never been washed away. Waiting all these years…for you."
"What?" Wayland asks.
Kalav smiles, green eyes wide and guileless.
"Why don't you come and see?" he says, long fingers beckoning Wayland closer. Against his will, Wayland finds himself beside Kalav, staring down into the darkness below.
The moon is a waning crescent and its weak light barely glimmers on the surface of the creek as it gurgles past.
But the light catches on a stone that sticks just above the water, gleaming wet from the splashing water. Wayland squints and remembers with sudden, sickening clarity how Evan's body had looked, crumpled on the stone, blood tinting the water red, eyes blank and staring at a noonday sky.
"Do give him my regards," Kalav whispers in his ear and then he is falling, down, down, down.
The lights on the squad car flicker and die, the engine sputtering into silence. The bridge is dark once more. Two bright eyes stare down into the creek, fixed on the still form that lies there.
David Wayland had found his peace.