Alive (37 page)

“What should we do?” Henry asks.

“Find Brynn.”

Finding Brynn proves to be harder than expected. A tangle of nerves, I won’t let Henry speak, turn on the radio, or even hum until we’re pulling up to the
McDaniels’ home.

Brynn lives in a red, wood-sided home with a pointy farmhouse roof. When I see that her car isn’t in the driveway, I feel my stomach drop out of my butt and onto the seat. It’s after
midnight now. None of the lights in the house are on. I open the door and step onto the curb.

“What are you doing?” Henry leans over the center console. “Her car’s not even in the driveway.”

I duck so that I can see him. “It could be around back.”

“Hold on, hold on.” I hear the click of a seat belt. “I’m coming, too.”

He catches up. I hike the sweatshirt hood over my head again, tuck my hands into the front pockets, and trudge across the lawn toward the side of the house.

How many hours after I envisioned Tess in the forest before he got to her? Impossible to say, but within twelve, she was gone.

A floodlight clicks to life. I jump back. “Motion detected,” Henry mutters beside me. We continue skirting the outer edge of the lot.

On more than one occasion I’d heard Mrs. McDaniel use the words
positive influence
and
one of the good kids
attached to my name. I wonder what she’d think now.

We check the back, near the garage. No sign. It could be parked inside, I tell myself, but there’s an unmistakable sick feeling pushing up the back of my throat.

Our shoes swish in the mowed grass. We slink through the space between the McDaniels’ and their neighbors’ as I count the windows back to the third. Brynn’s.

I cup my hands and peer through the glass.

“Anything?” Henry’s breath is hot against my ear.

“Nope.” My palms leave smudges on the window. I tap my nail. “Brynn,” I say as loudly as I dare. “Brynn!” Henry uses his knuckles to knock.

We wait, but after a tense minute, there’s no answer. I curl my fingers into my hair and tug. I kick the side of the house. “Where is she?”

Henry wraps his arm around my shoulder and begins guiding me back to the car. “Don’t freak out. She’s probably with Connor.”

“Connor?” My mind flashes back to the night of the party. Connor rustling around in the bedsheets. “What makes you say that?”

He shrugs. “They’ve been dating for a few weeks.” I can’t believe what a monumental idiot I’ve been. My best friend has been dating someone and I’ve been too
self-involved to notice. “You’ve been a little preoccupied,” Henry adds, reading my mind.

Back in his Volvo, I sink my head into my hands. I hardly notice when the car rolls forward or when it comes to a stop a short distance down the block.

If anything happens to Brynn, I won’t be able to forgive myself. She’s not going to die because of me.

“Stella?” Henry taps my shoulder. I jump. I’d almost forgotten he was in the car. “I think I have something.”

From the backseat, Henry pulls out a book. There’s no plastic slip over the cover. This one is a paperback. It’s thick with torn edges from library patrons thumbing through it. It
has the weight of a book you would buy in the grocery-store checkout line, but the cover is plain and tan, the color of a fancy envelope. Red block letters adorn the front. Biting his tongue
between his front teeth, Henry flips to a dog-eared page a quarter of the way in and begins to read:

“‘Under certain circumstances, a malignant spirit may be banished through the process of binding, a technique whereby a living person places the apparition in a secure, confined area
such as a bottle or a black box. There, the incapacitated spirit will linger, safe from human interaction so long as the container remains locked.’” Henry thumps the book with his
pointer finger. “This. We can do this.”

I frown. “Levi isn’t an apparition. He’s real. And he won’t fit into a bottle.”

“No.” Henry’s eyes gleam. “But he’ll fit into a coffin.”

I leave these items to the people I love:

To my parents—my complete collection of Stephen King novels; a lifetime of scares that have nothing to do with your daughter for once.

To Elsie—my room; it has a better closet and is farther from Mom and Dad, so they won’t hear you sneak out when you get older.

To Brynn—my yearbooks and photo albums; thanks for never letting me fall too far behind. All my craziest memories are with you.

To Henry—the past week to remember me by.

While Henry digs in the garage for supplies, I sign the sheet of paper and tuck it in his glove compartment. In the event that I need to resort to plan B, I have to hope that
someday somebody will find it.

The crunch of shoes in the dark. Henry appears, white teeth glinting in the night. He’s smiling. In the past hour, his mood has buoyed upward into the stratosphere. “You ready to do
this?” he says like we’re a team readying ourselves to make a push for the playoffs. I shrug back into his old zip-up hoodie.

My intestines shrivel. I force my lips into a smile. I push my hands through the sleeves and am swathed again in the innocent smell of him. Sweet Henry. I told him I would try and I will, but I
have a secret, and he would never let me go with him now if he knew.

When the church comes into sight, I hold my breath, just like I did when I was little and we drove past a graveyard—breath held, feet up. I have to remind myself to
breathe again, but even as oxygen returns to my lungs, it feels as if I’m still holding it. Heart thumping. Pulse pounding in my wrists.

The deep, velvety night acts as our cover as we unload the trunk for part one of The Plan. According to Henry’s book, Levi can be bound to the spot where his body was laid to rest.

Starting between a massive stone cross and a square tombstone the color of dusty red dirt, we tread between the makeshift aisle, through row upon row of the consecrated dead. Everything is quiet
except for the dragging of metal along soil that comes from the two shovels in tow.

I count the rows back from the church steps until we reach the fourteenth. Levi’s row. From there, it doesn’t take long to locate the thick white headstone that seems to match the
color of the moon.
LEVI MICHAEL ZIN
. The letters carved into stone look angular and confrontational. We tiptoe around the edge of the area leading out from the stone,
tracing the line where his body must lie beneath the grass.

If anyone were to ask what events led me to this present moment, there’d be no explanation that would make me sound anything but crazy. And not crazy like a girl who calls a guy fifteen
times without leaving a voice mail. Like full-on, straitjacket crazy. Even with a shovel pointed at the ground, I wonder if maybe I really am insane and have only convinced Henry to carry out a
delusion that started manifesting itself way back in anatomy class that day.

I balance the weight of the handle and drive the metal tip into the hollow earth. I try to stay focused, energy trained on churning up the ground, but I sneak glances at Henry. A curl falls over
his forehead every time he buries the blade in the dirt.

A lump rises in my throat. I wonder if they’ll bury me in this cemetery if I don’t return.

The shovel slides in, making the sound of a pail through wet sand. The next thrust buries the shovel up to the shaft. I jerk my elbows to yank it out. It takes some maneuvering to tear out the
first divot of mud and cast it off to the side. The earth wants to slurp the shovel up and not let go, as if hands are holding the shovelhead from underneath. It’s only when I can wrestle it
away that I’m able to widen the hole.

Before long, my triceps and shoulders are heavy and sore. I have only a small crater about as deep as the distance between my foot and my ankle to show for it. A fraction of Henry’s
progress. I’ve never known whether it’s true that bodies are buried six feet under, but God, I hope not. I wipe the first drop of sweat from behind my ear.

Over and over, I plunge the shovel down, and each time another prickle works its way up the back of my neck. The breeze picks up, rustling the leaves on the trees above and changing the dappled
shadows below. As another clump of dirt slides off the point of my shovel, some of the drier bits are carried off in a thin tail of dust.

It takes over an hour to retrieve the bones of Levi Zin. Both of us have to use all of our weight to pry open the coffin lid. Across his skeleton, mummy skin stretches with gaping tears like wet
toilet paper. But I can still make out the threads of dark hair on his scalp and a fully intact Nirvana T-shirt draped over his carcass.

“Send it,” Henry says. And with that, the cogs that push us into part two of the plan are set in motion.
Rest in Peace, Levi,
I think dryly.

I turn away as Henry loads the remains into a large fertilizer bag.

Soon the momentum will build. Neither of us will be able to stop it. And what Henry doesn’t know is the one thing that would kill him if he did.

I’m capable of ending this on my own.

I wish I could talk to Brynn one last time. I wish I could know that she’s safe and that she’s okay, but of course I can’t know any of those things. Sweating,
breath shallow, I punch in the letters on my keypad to type out the ransom note. In this case, though, what’s being ransomed is me.

“It’ll be okay.” Henry squeezes my shoulder. “It’ll be over soon.” He hadn’t liked the idea of me acting as bait, but unless we’re willing to
serve up someone else’s heart on a silver platter, neither of us can think of anything else.

He’s right, of course. It’ll be over soon. It’ll all be over. I take a deep breath.

Leave her alone,
I write,
or neither of us will have what we want.
Enter. I give the time. I give the place. A different time and a different place than I’ve told Henry, but
still. I hit enter again. And for good measure, I include a final threat—
I’ll destroy it
.

Now we wait.

“It’s done.” I look to Henry. He nods at me, suddenly solemn. “We should have an hour.” I can’t look him in the eye. I make a mental note. The last thing I
say to him shouldn’t be a lie.

Dirt stacks up on either side of Levi’s grave. A sleek mahogany coffin lies open underneath. If Henry’s plan is successful, the physical manifestation of Levi’s soul will be
confined to his casket for eternity. Except I know that it won’t work, because I still have part of it beating inside me.

“Come on.” Henry reaches for my hand. I take it, warm and damp and unmistakably living. I crane my neck and stare up at the stars. When did I become too old to make wishes?

I pick the brightest and send a positive thought up to the universe, hoping that I will leave my mark in some way on the world, even if it’s just a feeling, an invisible imprint.

Henry and I cross the remainder of the cemetery with its scraping branches that cast shadow puppets on the ground and the plush grass beneath our feet rendered colorless in the night. Henry
loads the remains into the trunk.

As we drive to the drop-off point, I’m reminded of a Bible story I learned in kindergarten. There once were two women who lived in the same house and who both had infant sons. One had
accidentally smothered her own son and so had swapped the child with the other mother’s living one to make it look as though the second woman possessed the dead child. When the second woman
denied that the dead child was her own, the pair went to King Solomon for a judgment. After thinking on the problem, King Solomon called for a sword to be brought before him. He decreed that the
baby would be split in two and each woman would receive her half of the child. Upon hearing the judgment, the true mother threw herself at the king’s mercy and begged him to let the imposter
have the child, but to please not kill him. On the other hand, the pretender, bitter with jealousy, screamed that it should be neither hers nor the other woman’s—“Divide
it!” she said.

The tires crunch along gravel and an old railroad bridge comes into view. I’m ready to play the imposter. If I can’t have the heart to myself, then neither of us should have it.