Grave (28 page)

“Like you would know,” I said. A stranger. That’s all she was. I was seeing things, like Tina and her pathetic angel-wing stardust fantasy she called religion. “Like any human being anywhere, knows anything—”

“No,” said another voice. A woman’s. One single, fragile word, a china egg cracked along its side. “You don’t.”

She hadn’t been there in front of us, she hadn’t been anywhere at all, but then she was: swaying barefoot back and forth in the dirt, a thin dark-haired woman in a torn yellow nightgown stained with long streaks of dirt and blood. The blood, the dirt were caked on her pipe-cleaner legs, her mouth was drawn up in a too-sweet, too-friendly television smile, her eyes were so big and dark and deep that they were like pits, twin wells in the ground, oozing the sad amiability of madness. Except behind all that, behind the bright-eyed crazy that had eaten up whoever this woman was when she was alive, you could see the glint and gleam of something else. Someone else, living inside her, using her hurt little legs to walk around on like he could use the body of anything dead. It smiled at me. He smiled at me. He’d come.

Tina, beside me, drew in her breath. Stephen made a wordless sound that told me all along he hadn’t believed it, hadn’t really believed Amy at all when she told him what she’d seen and how she’d got to the lab, and now here it was in front of him and Mr. Cool almost moaning in fear and I should’ve laughed in his face, I wanted to, but I couldn’t laugh. I couldn’t move. This was the moment, and I couldn’t move. She, he, in that filthy yellow nightgown, stood there looking at the ground beneath its feet, the little bits of rock I still clutched in my hand.

“That won’t help you,” he said. “Nothing will.”

It, he, glanced toward the sky. There was a long drawn-out sound, like Stephen’s throat magnified, like something huge and heavy being slowly pulled apart, and then the sun vanished and the sky went out.

SIXTEEN

AMY

T
he waves go in. The waves go out. Not like ocean waves, great crashing cresting things I saw for myself when I was little, but quiet-strong currents that slip in more softly, rush instead of crash, and pull you under before you even realize they’ve got you. Their strength all contained in a sort of internal weight, no big white-capped heights, holding itself close like the fingers of a grim, bruised fist. The fingers straighten out, and the water streams over the sand. They draw back toward the palm, the water heads out.

This had all been happening since before any of us were born. And still was, now that we were all almost gone. The lake didn’t need us, the seagulls, the trees, I felt like that should be all the real hint anyone needed. We weren’t the center of anything, except in our own heads. Except the problem was that inside our own heads was where everyone was trapped. Including me.

After Stephen left, Florian—the remnants of Florian—just curled up quietly on his log, withering in slow degrees where he sat. Jessie cradled him in her arms with a ferocious expression, like she could somehow shield him from whatever was pulling him to pieces; Linc and Renee paced around them both, a team of doctors confronted with some bewildering new disease. Naomi cried and cried at the sight of her angel falling apart and Lisa finally had to pick her up, carry her bodily back to the cabins, Naomi screaming and donkey-kicking in the first genuine tantrum I’d ever seen her throw.

I was so glad my mother raised me agnostic. And that I didn’t have any kids, or foster kids, of my own. It wouldn’t work out anyway, if I did. I wasn’t any good with people, including the ones I loved.

As I watched the water, I reached into my jacket pocket and took out a lake stone, the greenish-brown one Florian had relinquished back in the woods. Back when he’d still had hands. I’d picked it up, from where it lay on the ground at his feet, and he didn’t protest, nobody tried to stop me: I couldn’t explain why, but I wanted it, wanted it badly, more than any of the other stones scattered around and embedded in the sands even though many of them were bigger, smoother, prettier. It felt weird in my grasp, almost hot and twitchy as I passed it from palm to palm, and finally I put it away again. It seemed to press itself into my side, a whole pincushion of heated needles poking and prodding, but I didn’t want to throw it away.

People have drowned here, from the undertow, storms. Folks heard “lake” and thought of a placid smear of blue crayon in a drawing. They had no idea.

I missed Stephen. But what good did that do either of us?

Nick who’d reattached himself to my side after Stephen left pressed his muzzle against my leg, stared lamplike at the water. After Stephen left, and after Florian started fading away, drawing away from the old ghostly man as if he really were diseased, contagious... was he? He said right out, Florian did, that Nick wasn’t supposed to be here in the flesh any more than he was—was Nick going to come apart next? Fade back into oblivion, into the here-now-gone-again specter he’d been when I first knew him? I reached out in fright and hugged Nick to my chest, feeling good hard solid muscle and cold wet nose and warm thick shaggy fur. All four paws, all accounted for. And forget Florian, forget everything he said, it was Nick I really trusted to tell me the truth, but he still hadn’t explained what was happening, the dead things, the blind spots, he still hadn’t shown me—

Sometimes, and I wouldn’t have told anyone this if they tortured me, I felt like Nick always knew what I was thinking, like he was thinking over my exact same thoughts at the very same time and mulling them and then I could almost hear him inside my head going
But I can’t. Not yet.
I didn’t actually hear anything but myself, it’s just, I felt like I
should
be hearing him. Not like we could speak to each other—whatever his thoughts were, they seemed just as wordless and nebulous as any ordinary dog’s—but we still reflected and mirrored each other so perfectly that I knew what those wordless nebulous floating things translated to.

I knew what he was thinking, really thinking, because it was always what I was thinking. Nick hadn’t shown me what was really happening because, just like Florian, he couldn’t. He didn’t know. I knew that before he “told” me, but his telling me was my telling myself.

Or maybe I was just crazy. How would I know how any animal thinks, anyway? Presumption. Didn’t even know my own mind.

Soft sounds behind me, the faint
swoosh
noises of sand displaced by human feet, then firmer louder sounds as the sand became more solid near the shoreline and I knew without looking that it wasn’t Lisa, she couldn’t ever manage to be this quiet when she was nervous. My mother sat down beside me, on the opposite side from Nick, and stared out with me at the choppy gray-tinged waters.

“How is Naomi?” I asked.

“Better.” My mother reached over and worked her fingertips against Nick’s forehead, a little massage. He suffered it in silence. “Part of it’s that she’s flat worn out. We all are. Lisa finally got her to take a nap.”

Right after Naomi got done crying over that Florian, she started crying all over again because Nick still wouldn’t be her best friend. Couldn’t he humor her a little bit, at least? Dogs were supposed to love little kids. “I’m glad you didn’t raise me to believe in all that stuff,” I told my mother. “That church of hers. Or in any of Lisa’s.”

My mother made a little noise that wasn’t quite a laugh. “No comment,” she said.

None of that growing up, but now I saw things that weren’t real, weren’t solid, then suddenly became real, everywhere I went. Like Nick. And now, things that seemed solid but melted into air, into nothing, everywhere I went. Like the man in black. Like the man he used to answer to, that we all answer to in the end. The boss of us. Just like that Jessie does, apparently, except right now she’s trying to pretend we’re not even here.

“Do you remember when I was little,” I said, “five or six, and you had that conference or whatever it was and we flew to Massachusetts? And saw the ocean at Cape Cod?”

My mother smiled. “You were seven. You kept asking, but what if the plane crashes? It was my first time on an airplane, too, but I could hardly look scared about it, not in front of you—”

“And when I ate the seaweed?”

She laughed. “The look on your face, I wish I’d had a camera. But when I tried some myself, I almost saw the point—it was foul, but something about the texture, it was this thick rubbery bright green stuff, it never quite broke down under your teeth so there was something satisfying about chewing it. Like how a rawhide bone must feel, right, Nick?” Nick who’d never chewed a bone in his life—this life, anyway—looked politely up at her. “Remember that little restaurant you liked, the clam shack?”

Plump little fried clams, still with their bellies attached like they didn’t make them out here, and thin crumbly onion rings, thick airy vanilla soft-serve. I remembered. That was my favorite thing about the trip, but that’s how you think when you’re seven. That and the ocean.

“I wish we’d stayed out there,” I said.

“There wasn’t any way to do that.”

“I know.”

Because the lab kept drawing her back. Because the lab was her true birthplace, whatever her birth certificate—wherever that was—said otherwise. Her true home, Natalie’s, Stephen’s. And now mine.

My mother reached out to the thick wet streak of shore-sand just past us, smooth and even as a tile, and pressed her fingers to its surface. Dug in. “In a couple of days,” she said, “when everyone’s calmed down, I’ll go talk to Stephen. See what we all want to—”

“I don’t think we have a couple of days,” I said. “Not if Jessie’s friend is right.”

My mother didn’t answer. A seagull strutted, contemptuous, inches from her digging fingers, daring her to send him fluttering back over the waters.

“And I think Stephen is right,” she said at last. A muscle at the side of her jaw drew tense. “Whatever’s happening to the world—if it’s really true—we can’t just sit here waiting around for our own doomsday like a lot of—”

“And what the hell kind of magic trick are we supposed to pull to make it stop?”

My mother’s profile, as she sat there resolutely not looking at me, was sharp and obstinate and why was there so much gray in her hair? In the two years she’d been away, it was like she’d aged twenty. “Because we’re in it already, Mom, and you know it. We’re in over our heads. And that Natalie’s in over her head too, I can feel it, and now, whatever we do, the whole world is about to... I don’t know what, something that might kill us, might kill lots of things, but—”

“We don’t know that. We don’t know there’s
nothing
we can do.”

“And if there is something, how the hell are we supposed to figure it out?” I wanted to grab her, shake the truth into her, it was staring her in the face and sitting cold-nosed and quiet by her side. “I’m not kidding, how exactly would we do that? And why would it be
us
who did? Something’s happening that’s way beyond us stopping it, it’s happening and I don’t think Natalie knows what it is either, just like the lab didn’t know why everyone starting getting sick back last—” I shook my head, on the verge of saying something truly reckless, and then I said it anyway. “And seriously, why do you care anyway? You and Stephen? The whole world ending is just what you should want, right, since you’re so sick of living? Like I guess it’s just an accident, that when you left me you didn’t kill yourself after all?”

My throat was tight and hot, saying it out loud. The thing I really feared. My mother turned her head toward me, her eyes still young like they were supposed to be but when my mother had been young like me, that’s when she’d been saddest of all.

“Don’t hold against me,” she said without anger, “what I did when I was sick in the head. I realize that’s asking a lot, maybe, but it’s not fair.”

I laughed. I couldn’t help it. “You think I’m holding things against you,” I said. “Me. You think I think
you’re
the one sick in the head. You just don’t get it, do you? Or do you think I was lying about what I—”

“Of course I don’t,” she said, sharp and sorrowful. “After all this? Don’t be stupid. Of course I don’t. And it’s on my own conscience forever, that woman’s death. Just as much as yours.”

But I didn’t have to do it, Mom. Your going away so we couldn’t try and survive together, it’s got nothing to do with what I chose to do to Ms. Acosta. But at least she was taking her own advice, refusing to go after someone sick in the head. She sighed.

“If I’d raised you with some sort of faith,” she said, “even just the outlines of one, maybe you’d feel like there was more hope. Like Tina does. I can tell she’s lived through all this by barreling through everything, shoveling through one pile of shit after another, she’s so convinced that if she keeps going long enough she’ll find a pony in her stable. Jesus in the manger. If I’d—”

“That’s got nothing to do with anything,” I said. Short and sharp.

“Amy—”