Grave (16 page)

“Because you’re not listening to me!” Yelling back, yelling like we were all alone and nobody else watching us mattered, the scars on his neck dark red and throbbing. “Because it happens right in front of everyone, plain as the fucking sunshine, and you don’t
want
to see it! You don’t want to listen to a goddamned thing except what you want to hear!”

My mother put a hand on his shoulder. “Stephen—”

He yanked himself free and stalked off toward the beach, not slowing down even when he stumbled and nearly fell over a thick protruding tree root, never looking back. Nick’s infuriated echoes still reverberated from the woods; as we stood there listening they grew farther and farther away, still frantic, ever fainter, and then nothing.

Everything was quiet, for a moment, then Jessie shook her head and picked up a bucket sitting pitside. “Congratulations, ma’am,” she said, without too much malice, as she doused the fire. “You certainly know how to pick ‘em.”

“So did you,” Renee said, quite calmly, as she started stacking plates. “Once.”

Jessie glanced at Renee like she wanted to yell, but there was sadness in her eyes, sadness and a peculiar embarrassment I knew didn’t come from any of us hearing this. “Exactly,” she said.

Linc reached out and rubbed her arm, casual little intimacy that made a pang go through me:
Stephen, goddammit, you fucking fool.
Didn’t he realize that even though he was wrong about this, about Nick, that I still understood, that we both together felt how strange and wrong everything had become? Just like Nick, just now? Lisa and my mother both glanced at me, apologetic like this was somehow their fault.

“Don’t ask me,” I said, wiping my fingers on one of the bandannas Linc had been passing around for napkins. There was a quaver in my voice and that just made me feel angrier. “I mean, seriously, nobody ever ask me another—”

“Nick will get lost,” Naomi said, tearful. “We have to go look for him.”

“He’ll be fine,” Lisa soothed, wadding up another bandanna and dipping it in the bucket to scrub Naomi’s face clean. “He’ll come back, just let him run around alone for a while. Away from people.” She glanced over at me, apprehensive, confused: she knew Nick hadn’t tried to attack me, would never countenance his coming back if she thought he’d attack any of us, but he’d had still spooked her. Like he had since first she’d seen him. “It might be better that way.”

“He got scared, that’s why he ran away!” Naomi was now crying in earnest. “Just like Amy said! He’s scared and all by himself and we have to find him!”

Nothing was going to dissuade her so Lisa sighed, took her hand and they went off together into the trees, following what they could of Nick’s path. Russell, who’d been quietly sitting there taking all this in, gave me a sympathetic attempt at a smile.

“We’re all spooked, too,” he confirmed. “Can’t put my finger on it. Last few days, especially, I keep waking up at night and even though I can feel the air going in and out of me, it’s still like I ain’t breathing anymore—”

“We don’t know what to think,” Tina said. Her stubborn good cheer wavered, faltered just a little bit, as she wiped out the frying pan and repacked her basket. “I just worry that maybe it’s some new sickness, or—I’m trying to put my trust in the Lord, I really am. Though sometimes that’s hard. But I don’t know what to think.”

Everybody was staring at me and I wished they’d stop. I edged closer to my mother’s side. “Don’t get mad at Lisa,” I told Tina, though why I even cared about that I couldn’t have said. Just sick of yelling, sick of sniping, never mind who or what set it off. “It’s not the Catholic thing, she just gets jealous about Naomi—don’t get pissed at her about it.” I shrugged. “I mean, Naomi is all she’ll have left.”

It took me a moment to realize what I’d just said and they were all staring at me harder, Jessie, my mother, all their faces ranging from puzzlement to open alarm.
All she’s got left
, I opened my mouth to say,
that’s what I meant
, but the words seemed to stick and falter in my throat like a dry little wad of paper scrawled with lies and I couldn’t say them, something inside me actually refused to say them. Because what I’d said the first time was right, and I knew it was right. Naomi was all Lisa
would
have left.

I didn’t know why I said it. But I knew it was true. Feeling all through me like when Nick was first following me, that feeling of being truly seen for what I was for the first time in my nothing invisible life (though they were watching me all along, all that time I thought my mother and I had no friends, it turned out we had acquaintances and observers around us, everywhere). Everything in me, laid bare under the light.

“Amy,” my mother said. The fear in her that I’d elicited without trying gave me an unwelcome surge of guilt. “What do you—”

“So where’d that come from?” Jessie cut in. “What you just said?”

Jessie, Lisa’s sister, who saw things other people didn’t, Lisa said. She was looking at me with sharp, matter-of-fact eyes, no surprise in her, and her ex friends were too.

“I don’t know,” I told her. “I really don’t.” I glanced at my mother. In for a penny. “It’s like—something told me to say it, before I realized I hadn’t thought of it myself, because it’s true.” I swallowed. That spotlit feeling, again, that feeling of being X-rayed in public and everyone seeing the plastered-over hollows where my bones should’ve been. And another feeling too, compulsion. “It’s something that’s going to happen, no matter what we do.”

Birds called out overhead, the insistent exuberant cheeping of hungry chicks. I hoped their mother hadn’t dropped to the ground, somewhere, falling in mid-flight for no reason whatsoever. Jessie nodded at me, then turned to Russell and Tina.

“Go back to Cowleston,” she said. Sharp and commanding, but not angry. “Might be better that way.”

“Might be needed there either way.” Russell took up Tina’s basket, glanced at her with a stubborn flash of habitual amusement. “If Reverend Kim here’s gonna insist I’m the mayor—”

“We all picked you, didn’t we?” Tina slid her arms into the jacket she’d spread on the ground as a seat-cushion. “I’m sorry we had to meet like this, but you’re all welcome to come to us if you want to. We’ve got a sign out by the roadside. There’s only about thirty of us and plenty of foraged supplies. Down around what used to be the Convent of St. Ignatius, you can’t miss it.” She glanced at Jessie. “Stay safe, all of you. Let us know what’s going on when you can. And God bless.”

They headed through the trees and toward the road without looking back. Jessie waited until they were out of sight or earshot, then turned to me.

“I don’t know what’s going on here,” she said. Her eyes flared up, the last remnant of something predatory and merciless that’d once been all inside her, eating her alive, but now was just an ember, an echo. No less frightening for it. “If you do, you’d better spill it right now.”

“Or what?” My mother’s words were quiet but her face was grim. “Or what then? Are you threatening—”

“She doesn’t need to threaten,” Linc said. That rumbling, almost guttural voice, a man’s voice with all the wear and tear of age, though he looked no older than me. “We’re all threatened—we might not know how, or why, but we are. That’s the point.” He turned to Jessie like of course she would know, like she’d known too much before this to let them down now. “So what do we do?”

I expected her to snap back at him but her shoulders sagged, she seemed to huddle into herself, and she was so small, so thin, a child swimming in a sea of grownup’s clothes. She gazed at the ground, squeezed hard on a stone she’d pulled from her pocket, then looked up with a sort of weary, old-woman resignation.

“I don’t have a fucking clue,” she said. “But the kiddie, the one Lisa dragged in? I have a feeling she was right. We have to go find that dog.”

NINE

STEPHEN

T
hey were all just seeing what they wanted to see, hearing what they wanted to hear, and I was the rotten branch on the tree for trying to warn them. To keep us halfway safe. Didn’t I try and look out for Naomi, back in Paradise City, when Billy and Mags would make her cry every day just for fun? And for poor crazy Janey, who even before she got to Paradise went through things nobody wanted to think about, who even when her “husband” Don scolded her still kept forgetting to eat? I know it didn’t do us much good, all my looking-out. It didn’t do Amy any good at all—dragged off to the lab, her throat cut, made one of us and I’d have let them do anything to me, I didn’t care what more they did to me, if only they’d stayed away from her.

Did she understand that? That what happened to her—stolen away, throat slit, Billy and all the rest of them after her in the woods—that was
my fault
for not looking after her, and I wasn’t going to fuck it up again? For her or anyone else? Nick, that thing just barely masquerading as a dog, it had Naomi out in the lake up to her waist, a fast rip current surging toward them both to drag her under. I
saw
it, right here, last night, from this same spot on the dune ridge where I was standing now. Standing right here, I saw Nick splash around the shoreline and then paddle further and further out. A long, thin, frothing plume of lake water approached them both from the side, moving faster than any wave should ever move, while Nick stared hard and long at it like he was pulling it in by invisible reins. Naomi laughed and waded after Nick happy as anything because she was just a kid and didn’t understand, past the waist, up to the chest, as I tried to outrun the current and grab her before she was pulled in and drowned—

But then something happened and we weren’t in the water, we were back on shore without my knowing how we got there, and Naomi couldn’t have been out in the lake like I’d thought because everything but her sneakers was perfectly dry. Just like Nick’s fur, not even a stray droplet of water to betray him. But I
saw him do it.
Just like I saw him knock Amy to the ground and sink his teeth into her cheek, ripping and tearing down to the bone, Lucy’s screams just making him bite deeper—but then there wasn’t any blood, and Nick was somehow gone, and everyone thought I’d gone crazy with hating him. I saw it! I saw him do it! Amy had been the only person alive who could see and hear Nick, once, before we ever even met, and that didn’t make what she saw of him untrue—but now she thought I was crazy too, she thought I was just making up stories too. Why would I do that? Why couldn’t anyone trust my own eyes... not even me?

I keep seeing things everyone else tells me didn’t happen, and for a few minutes when I woke up this morning, I couldn’t see anything at all. I stared into the darkness, waiting for my eyes to adjust and thinking it must still be the middle of the night, and then I realized that this was something else entirely. Nighttime had shapes, nebulous and disorienting but still visible in the shadows, and faint moonlight trickling through our cabin window that had no curtains. This, though, this was a formless colorless blank, an absence, not just a lack of light and vision but the impossibility of such things ever even existing. As if I had gone to sleep normal, and somehow woken up not merely blind, but with no eyes at all.

My hands flew to my face in a panic, seeking to assure myself my eyes were still in their sockets, and I blinked and blinked frantically but nothing happened, nothing was there at all, and I opened my mouth to shout for help—who could have helped me?—and then, all of a sudden, the world was there again. The light was deep gray and pale pink against the cabin wall, the first full light of sunrise. Lucy was curled into a ball next to me, an arm flung over her face, still fast asleep; Amy was already up and gone. Nick was there too, a coarse hot weight against my shoulder, gazing straight at me. His eyes just inches from mine, unblinking and expressionless. Blank. His teeth bared, ready to bite, ready to—

Except that he can’t have been there, next to me, because even as I stared back at him I heard him outside the cabin, heard his barking and Amy’s voice shushing him through the open window. I turned to the window, sitting upright looking for him and Amy outside, and when I turned back again there was no Nick beside me. Gone. Which had been the real him? Both of them? Did I dream him, dream the void and the blankness that preceded him, and only think I’d woken up?

I already have voids and absences, huge blank spots in my brain, thanks to what they did to me all those years in the lab over and over again. Memory holes, ridiculous trivial shit sometimes like what I used to eat for breakfast or how to get to places I’d already been dozens of times, but bigger ones too, whole months and years just wiped out. Gone. Maybe all this was another side effect, another way for my brain to misfire. I hoped to God not. Amnesia was embarrassing, but hallucinations—if that’s what they were—were humiliating. Even Amy, the way she looked at me. I’d thought she would understand. Maybe she did, inside, but didn’t want to. I knew that feeling.