I’ve found it. After a full three hours of digging and searching in the same one foot vicinity, the sun is slowly beginning to sink down behind the rolling hills that make up the horizon. It doesn’t look like much—a weather-beaten plastic zip-lock bag so encrusted with dirt and caked with mud that its contents are masked completely. After wiping my own dry, cracked and filthy hands carelessly on the black skirt which I had stood in, sobbing silently, at this morning’s funeral, I picked the bag up gingerly, ignoring the shower of soil and little black beetles it deposited as I lifted it out of its shallow grave and placed it on my lap. Its contents made jingling and clinking noises—with shaky, dirt-encrusted fingernails I pinched it together and snapped it open.

I’ve got to hide these, Jake had said with a conniving smirk, holding the bulging zip-lock bag in one hand, and a little garden shovel in the other, I’ve got to put them somewhere safe, where they won’t find them and try and take em from me! He handed me the shovel and took my small, dimpled hand in his, dragging me down the grassy hills and past the pasture where our two twin mares grazed lazily. They came into my room just last night, he had said with frightful passion, his eyes glinting with a touch of anger, they came into my room and searched my drawers and my closet, and almost found my collection! He held the bag up in front of my face and shook them till he could hear the jingling, the clinking, and smiled with satisfaction. But they’ll never find my little stones all the way out here.
I had smiled eagerly at the adventure, warmed at the pressure his hand lent to mine, and followed him into the valley where the grass came up to our thighs and quivering rabbits darted between our legs and made narrow paths for us to follow. I didn’t have much of an understanding as to who they were, or what they could possibly want with the prized collection he had clasped tightly in his closed fist, but I was young then—I didn’t have much of an understanding for anything.

Now as the sun dipped behind the hills that Jake and I had once raced down with youthful excitement, I overturned the muddy zip-lock bag and let the contents pour out onto the pile of uprooted grass and overturned soil. Round, colorful, smooth and clean, mottled, freckled, shiny or matte, the gemstones slipped onto the ground. I ran my fingers through them, feeling their cool touch against my clammy skin, letting them flood over my palms just as the memories flooded through my mind and the tears began to leak down my face.

The first time Jake went to the hospital he was eleven years old, and I was ten. He insisted that I come with him, to be there to convince the doctors that what he was seeing was real—that he was in danger and that they—whoever they were—were truly after him and his belongings. He saw them with his own eyes, he told me, he heard their heavy footsteps before they came and felt the touch of their cold hands as they scratched his skin. That’s when he pulled out his arm from a striped sleeve and showed me the long scratches on his pale, greenish arm. Try and explain that, he had said. And I believed him—I didn’t know any better.

I picked up the gemstones and clasped them in my palm, and let them slip through the cracks in my fingers. I held them to my face and rolled them on my cheeks. These were the stones that Jake had picked out meticulously—off the ground, out of the sand, at museums; at the little gift-shop my uncle owned and ran at the state park not far away. He had an eye for them—he could catch the glimmer of crystal from far away, and he would spend hours polishing them with the machine that our mothers had pooled their money together to buy him for his seventh birthday. I remember we would take them out and lay them on the carpet in little columns, arranging them so that they formed a gradient in color. But that was a long time ago.

The day he left there were a lot of tears—Jake threw a fit. I don’t want to go, he had screamed, You can’t make me go. And his mother had shaken her head and held him to her with tears and heartbreak in her eyes as his father loaded the small car with shabby suitcases, his stature hunched, dejected. The medicines aren’t working, the doctors had said with serious courtesy, the treatment isn’t working. And then they had shut the door on Jake and me and told his parents that their son had to be under constant psychiatric supervision lest he try to hurt himself.
The day Jake left he made me promise him several things. I gave him my word that I would take care of his little mare, that I would make sure to watch out for myself—to protect myself from them. He also made me promise to go out and find the little bag of stones he had buried when I missed him the most—with a ghost of a smile he told me there was a little part of his soul in them for me to hold onto forever. With tearful kisses and hugs, I let him go, and I never saw him again.

And now as the sky changed in color from red-violet to deep purple, and a gentle spring breeze wafted the grass so that it tickled my neck, I held the stones close and tried to feel Jake through them—his laugh, his touch, his sneaky artifice. But all I could feel was the cold lifelessness of gemstones.