Grave (27 page)

“You were in juvie,” I said. “I saw the file, I read it. I read everybody’s file who was left. They were in a special room, I found the key.” I laughed. “You don’t want to know what Amy’s mother did.”

Prostitution, that’s all Amy’s mother did. A few “solicitation” arrests. But he wouldn’t know that. Amy’s file, nothing criminal in it at all. Little Miss Saintly. “You attacked another kid,” I continued. “He was blasting his car radio too loud, or something like that, and you dragged him straight out of his car and nearly killed him. All because he made too much noise. He had to have surgery on his eye. And you hurt animals too. For fun.” I pulled the knots on my righthand laces as tight as I could. “And you stole things. It’s all right there, in your file.”

I bet he would’ve done stuff like that, for real, if he’d ever had the chance. And he
did
steal something, so it wasn’t a total lie. I sat there waiting, hoping for him to sag in cut-string shame and defeat, like Billy, for his face to distort and drag itself down in the knowledge of what he thought he really was. Instead he just sat there, almost delicately contemplative with chin on hand and hair falling into his eyes to veil them, gazing at the oak tree with its big welcoming sign. There was a creak of wood behind us and when I looked around, there was Janey, still bruised and unsteady but out of bed, her face lighting up with incongruous pleasure when she realized who was sitting beside me. Stephen didn’t bother turning to see.

“Oh, good,” Janey said. She sat down between us, in the empty space filled with tension and dislike. “Now everyone’s coming back again. I was sure that would happen but not just when.”

“That old man,” said Stephen. I couldn’t tell if he were talking to me, Janey, himself. “Ghostly old man following us. He told us this whole story about the world breaking up and disappearing, how we’d all—like there was nothing we could do about it, just sit and wait. I don’t believe that. It’s not true.” His free hand, by his side, slowly contracted to a fist. “None of that is true.”

There was movement on another of the front porches: a woman, the bent-over elderly one who’d watched us arrive, she was out there again staring at us from the other side of the oak. I guess that’s something that never changes either, how old people have nothing better to do ever than stare at everyone else living their lives. Janey rubbed her forehead, angled her chin toward Stephen with a fond look like you give a little kid, a baby brother.

“He has a dark coat,” she said. Her old Janey-voice, so pat and cheerful like she’d gotten it pre-packaged from a box, but there was an undercurrent of real longing beneath, a wind just barely rustling a tree’s thinnest, lowest branches. “And white hair, and pale blue eyes that look at you like they see everything inside, but even if you have a terrible secret you think you’re hiding, it’s all right. Because he killed somebody. Once.”

That got Stephen to look at her, astonished. She smiled at him, wide happy smile even without her red lipstick. “You’ve seen him,” Stephen said.

Janey shook her head. “But I dreamed about him. Sometimes, lately, ever since Don—” She gnawed at her lip. “Lately, it’s like there’s this weight on my eyes, my chest, and it pushes down so hard I can’t think. Or breathe. But when I think about him, I feel a little better. I don’t know how I know he’s real, when I only had him in my head, but I do.” She reached over and patted Stephen’s hand, slow thought-out pat like she was rehearsing choreography. The Dance of the Big Sister. “So you can talk about him as much as you want.”

I bit my own lip to keep from laughing. Another thing that never changes, Janey being completely insane. Stephen was always nice to her back at Paradise, more patient with all that than I ever felt, and now he just nodded and patted her hand back and sat there not talking anymore. The old woman across the way was walking toward us now, slow and hesitant, stopping to rest when she reached the oak tree.

“Janey?” Tina’s voice, calling from inside before she poked her head out the doorway. “There you are. Do you want some cheese crackers?”

Janey smiled up at Tina and shook her head. Tina came shuffling onto the porch, her big stupid cross still bouncing on her big stupid chest, and offered the little plastic-wrapped cracker pack to Stephen in silence, like a consolation prize; he took them, split the wrapping down the seam, stuck the tiny red plastic paddle in the cheese tub with the same frowning concentration he gave everything. Cheese crackers to dog fights.

Of course, nobody even thought to offer me any.

“Russell said you came here by yourself,” Tina said to him. All casual, like she didn’t already have his name written down in one of her notebooks. Miss Social Worker. “Are you okay?”

Stephen shook his head.

Of course, nobody thought to ask after me.

The old woman by the oak tree was coming toward us again, stumbling a little on the uneven ground; Russell, the man with the red hair nearly gone gray, he’d come walking across the green and now he was helping her cross like it were a busy city street. Shouldn’t they be shunning me, like the rest of them were? Because somehow Billy was all my fault? I reached into my pocket and pulled out the lake stones I’d carried with me, their weight and flat smoothness in my hand and the memories they carried with them an instant comfort; they felt hot, like they sometimes did, hot and almost humming like something inside them vibrated but maybe it was just me, just that nervous, flushed skin and tremors in my hands. Even Sukie where she was pressed secret against my side felt warm through the jacket cloth, like she was a real baby.

“Are you sure you don’t want any lunch?” Tina was saying. “At least some cheese crackers?”

It took me a second to realize Tina was talking to me. So I existed all of a sudden? Don’t do me any favors.

Russell and the old lady came and sat on the lower step and I ignored Tina just like everyone else ignored me, toying with the stones hand to hand, gripping one hard and still in my fist to try and see if it really were it trembling from inside, and not me.

“You can’t be angry with us forever, you know,” Tina said. Never shut up, just like the shiny overenthused new lab recruits, you could tell the woman just never shut up. “I’m sorry about the circumstances of how you got here, but—”

“Leave her be,” Russell said. “She’s not hurting anyone.” He looked up at Janey. “You all right? Get something to eat?”

Janey nodded. “I’m not sure it’s what Don would have wanted me to eat,” she said, “but he always said, Jeanette Isabella, starvation is simply not permitted. So I tried my best.” A little cloud crossed her face and she sighed. “I just wish I knew when I was going to see him again.”

Stephen glanced at her and his eyes were troubled, almost fearful even, but he didn’t say anything. Just shoved the empty cracker pack into his pocket.

The stones in my hands were growing hotter. I could feel the old woman looking at me but I ignored her, we had nothing to say to each other and she looked ready to keel over in two hours anyway. The old man in the back room, maybe she was his wife. Maybe Russell had brought her for a hospital visit.

Tina kept watching me too, like she was waiting for me to cry and hug her and make friends forever. “The stones will sing,” she mused aloud. “That Bible verse, do you know it?”

“I’m not a Christian,” I said. I just knew she’d be trying that next. “So forget it.”

“My church’s founder, a hundred and... forty-seven years ago? Forty-eight?” Off to the races. Billy should’ve hit her harder when he had the chance. “Now that’s just sad, I was on the board’s sesquicentennial committee at one point and now I don’t even remember—Mother Anne Brown, our first prophet, she said, that verse wasn’t just poetics, that stones have life inside them, they pulse, they sing—”

“Like bones,” Janey said.

We all looked at her, surprised, because she actually sounded like she was right here and not somewhere planets removed. “A skeleton’s a symbol of death,” she said. “Bones look like white stones, or dead branches, like they prop you up inside and that’s all. But they have marrow inside them, blood vessels. While we’re alive, they’re living too.” She stuck out her forearm, examined the bumps and divots of elbow, wristbones, knuckles. “Like a piece of those rocks, inside us. Or like the rocks are living tissue too. We just haven’t gotten to their marrow.”

Was she trying to tell us something? Trying to say she’d always known more than she ever let on? I stared at her hard, trying the silent intimidation that sometimes worked with her back in Paradise, I couldn’t say right out what I was thinking because there were too many humans here to hear it, but those others buoyed her up and circled her protectively without realizing they did it, their presence guarded her and gave her ammunition against me. Like Stephen, Lucy, Lisa kept me away from Amy, if it’d been just the two of us it would’ve been so different. Tina was smiling and smiling at Janey like she’d just found some extra Jesus behind the pickles in the pantry.

“You’ve read her work!” Tina said. “
Meditations Upon the Illusion We Call Death.
You never said.”

Janey shook her head. “But I haven’t. Don always said—”

“The stones sing,” Tina kept on, oblivious, excited, “when they start to show their life, when they grow hot as human skin and tremble in a person’s hand. When you can start feeling the presence of that marrow.” Two little spots of color showed on her cheeks, beneath the long streaking bruise Billy had left behind. “But the true song is only sung when they split open, when they spill their marrow onto the—”

“Ow! Dammit!”

It was like the stones in my palm had been listening to Tina, like everything everywhere was in on its own joke and ignoring me—they’d grown hot as my blood while Tina jabbered and babbled, and then hotter, until I was holding live coals and my fingers flew open of their own accord, the stones clattering to the ground beneath all our feet. Stephen reached down and snatched one up before I could stop him, dropped it again swearing, and I dove into the dirt—neck hurt, back hurt, even my bones felt spongy and horrible—and snatched them both back up before I could think about it, before I could hesitate because my nerves remembered pain. I wasn’t afraid of pain, not after all the times they’d given it to me. My fingers, my whole hand curled up tense and tight with the effort of not dropping them again, sweat broke out on my forehead and just as I couldn’t stand it anymore, as I was shaking and feeling like I’d be sick or scream, both the lake stones split open there in my palm.

The stone pieces were cool again, as though great gusts of steam building up inside them had been released, and something sticky and sugary was oozing from them, a warm little stream of ink or tar. The color turned to molasses as it hit the air, blackstrap, then sorghum, and then it dried up and went grainy within seconds so I was holding a handful of brown sugar, gritty yet soft. Brown sugar, or sand. It almost seemed to hum to itself, the stuff in my hand, and the skin it touched was soothed, cooled, quietly humming too.

The singing sand streamed from between my fingers, like it were water flowing through the cracks, and scattered on the ground. The hollow stone shells were all I had left.

The old woman, the one I wouldn’t look in the eye because I was sure she was just here to spy for the neighbors, maybe check on the old man who might be her husband if she could spare five seconds, she put a hand to her mouth and made a sound full of dismay, but not surprise. Maybe she was in Tina’s crazy cult too. Stephen and Russell, they just looked confused, but Tina’s eyes were hard and suspicious in a way I’d never seen before, that made me want to laugh. Didn’t take much for you to drop the mask, did it, Sister Superior? I know your kind. Everybody knows your kind.

“Is this a joke?” she demanded.

Janey and the old woman kept staring, staring at me, until I could’ve slapped them both, and Russell reached over and patted Tina’s shoulder with a calm I could tell he didn’t feel. “Let it go, Tina,” he said. “This isn’t the worst stunt by far anyone who’s come here ever pulled—”

“I don’t think this is funny.” Tina had recovered herself, a little, she’d jammed that mask of willful good cheer firmly back in place, but the flush-spots were back on her cheeks and her mouth kept giving her away, twisting and curling into angrier shapes. “I don’t expect you to share my beliefs, we’ve never proselytized—Russell’s an atheist, you can ask him—but a little simple respect isn’t too much to—”

“
Is
it a trick?” Stephen had left his perch and was squatting in the dirt, fascinated, a chicken trying to scratch up some elusive, marvelous species of grub. His fingers sifted through the earth, prospecting, but he couldn’t retrieve any of the stony singing sand. He looked up at Tina, frowning, like she’d been holding out on us all. “So if you’re me and you never believed any of that, and just saw it happen anyway, what does it mean?”

“It’s not a trick.” The old woman was on her feet, painfully, struggling upright with the help of a splintering porch pillar and waving off Russell as he jumped up to help. “It’s not a trick, or a joke. Is it, Natalie?”

I hadn’t told her my name. Someone else, Russell, he must’ve, but I somehow felt like he hadn’t and nobody had and the old woman’s voice was such a ruined thing, rasping and ill, like it was a delicate rare metal and just to be vicious someone had pounded it thin, twisted it into an ugly shape, left it out in the heat and rain to corrode. And it was familiar. Familiar like the parody, the shell of something that had worked itself into every corner of my childhood and—was this a joke? I glared at her, her ruined face, her sad thin sunken curve of a mouth.