Grave (40 page)

I would have asked what things were named, who everyone was, but I didn’t seem able to speak. I wasn’t upset or afraid, because it wasn’t like I’d lost my voice: it was more like I’d just been confused, before, and made a mistake thinking I’d ever had a voice at all. I still had eyes, though. So I watched. Jessie had me by the arm again, an encircling proprietary touch I couldn’t feel, and she glared at the nice girl like whatever was bothering them both was all her fault.

“Naomi’s going too,” Jessie said, jerking her head toward the sleeping little girl. “You see?”

“Then it’s better for Lisa, this way,” the nice girl said. She was wiping her eyes. “Because that would just kill her.”

What was going on? I felt almost relieved that I couldn’t ask. I couldn’t speak for this Lisa person, but I had almost died once, almost died of grief and loss for a little girl who wasn’t called Naomi, a long time ago. I couldn’t remember any more than that, but I still felt it inside, stabbing me with a pain Jessie’s dug-in nails could never have managed. I stretched out my free hand to stay the nice girl’s tears—that might be her child, lying there, possibly dying—and she smiled at me like she was in pain, gently pushed my fingers away.

“Amy,” Jessie said to the nice girl, quietly. She was staring at the others, who were wandering farther away. “Your mom.”

Amy didn’t turn to look. She just shook her head. “It’s too late for her,” she said. “I could see it back in the movie theater, or... whatever that was. It was already too late then. She didn’t know me.” Her eyes were leaking again. “She didn’t know me.”

“Then pull yourself together,” Jessie said. “If it already was too late, then that’s that and it’s done. We can’t lie around crying now.”

Her eyes, though, weren’t nearly as hard and sharp as her voice.

Amy didn’t answer. She squatted down, running a palm almost tenderly over the empty spot at our feet, and then stood up again with a handful of that oddly crumbled-up ground. She put some of it in her pocket, letting the rest drift back through her fingers and fall.

“It doesn’t hurt, anyway,” she said. “At least, it didn’t look like Stephen was in pain, or Florian—for God’s sake, why isn’t it happening to us, you and me? Why aren’t we forgetting everything, like the others...”

She trailed off all of a sudden and her eyes widened, full of a newfound apprehension I couldn’t understand, and she slipped her hand back into her pocket. The same one where she’d put that bit of pale earth.

“Jessie,” she said. In a low, urgent voice. Then she pulled from that pocket a slim, flat, hard thing, a dull greenish color with striations of brown. A stone.

Jessie let me go, and reached into her own pocket, and pulled out another stone, a different color. A color whose name wouldn’t come to me. She and Amy stared at each other, like something had just happened they couldn’t believe for even a minute, and then they were laughing, hard and helplessly, like they might never stop.

“I took it from Florian,” Amy managed, when she got her breath back. “He left it on the ground, back in the woods at your beach, and I took it. I just wanted it. I didn’t steal it, or at least I didn’t mean to, he never—”

“I should have known,” Jessie said, eyes still shining from all that laughing, like she hadn’t heard a word from Amy’s mouth. She was pacing back and forth, agitated, delighted discovery and fearful confusion lighting up and darkening her expression all at once. “I bet that’s why we can still remember Florian too, and all the ones who don’t exist anymore—I should’ve
known.
I’m a fucking fool, of all people in the whole goddamned world I should’ve—did your mother ever pick up any of the lake stones? Or Lisa? Lisa, these things. Do you have any of them?” She was shouting again, so slowly and loudly that I grimaced, her hand with the stone in it shoved in my face. “Do you? Just nod or shake your head!”

I didn’t understand what she was asking me, so I didn’t do anything. She made an impatient sound and grabbed my hand, prying it open; she stuck the stone on my palm and curled my fingers back around it, around that hard thing that had pressure and yet at the same time, no weight. It dropped straight through the flesh and bones of my closed-up hand, and onto the ground at my feet.

Jessie’s face, her eyes, clouded over. Then she picked up the stone and turned back to Amy.

“That answers that question,” she said, much more softly. “They’re keeping us together, somehow. And I should’ve known it. After everything that happened during the plague, I should’ve known.”

She put the stone back in her... clothes. The place in clothes where you keep things. All at once the word wouldn’t come to me. “That’s what he meant,” she said. “When he called us all thieves. It has to be.”

Amy frowned.

“It has to be,” Jessie kept saying, walking around so fast now that the ground was spitting excited little puffs of itself all around her feet. She ignored me now, avoided looking at me, like just the sight of me somehow hurt. “Remember what I said, about the stones helping us when we got sick? Me and Linc and Renee, and Lisa too? We were supposed to die, but because we had these, we didn’t. We lived. You and Stephen, your mother,
you
were supposed to be dead, but you lived. You came back. That lunatic kid you told me about from the lab, she fucked with all this stuff and—”

“But we didn’t mean to come back!” Amy was clutching her own stone two-handed, like she was scared it would grow legs and leap away. “Me and my mom and Stephen—and Natalie too, when they were still experimenting on her—none of us did it on purpose.”

“And I didn’t know what the hell I was doing either, with the stones. It was all just an accident. And I only ever knew the lab was trying to get rid of us, of undeads—I had no clue they were gunning for life everlasting.” Jessie stomped her feet and laughed. “Doesn’t matter, obviously. We all fucked up, so we all need punishing.”

She grabbed a stick, a lumpy uneven thing, from where it lay and trailed it over the ground. It crumbled and fell apart right there in her hand, and as she dropped the stick again, its soft little fragments disintegrated completely, not leaving even a trace of dust. Or that other stuff, the kind of dust that happened when something burned in a fire. It had a name. Fire and things burning, did that feel hot, or cold? I couldn’t remember.

The two girls, Jessie and the other one whose name had escaped me again, had stopped marching around and stood staring at each other. Maybe they’d forgotten what came next, like me. The quiet was heavy, thick, like air before... that thing that sometimes happened, with flashing light and water pouring from overhead.

“But we didn’t mean it,” the red-haired girl kept saying. “We weren’t trying to steal anything. Natalie even invited us to join her, in more experiments, and we said—”

“I bet you didn’t mean to kill someone,” the other girl spat. “Did you? But that doesn’t matter, either. Too late. You did it. And believe me, if I’d known what I was doing myself, if I’d known what it was like being...” Her voice faltered. “If I’d understood what it would be like, walking around in a human body again, barely feeling anything like I did before, not
hearing
anything at all like—I’d never have done it.” She tilted her head back, shouting at nothing. “Did you hear me? I’d never have done it, I promise! I didn’t wanna cause trouble! I’d have just let us all die!” Silence. “That crazy old fucker Billy was right, I admit it! We should’ve all just been good little boys and girls, and laid down and died!”

Her words echoed around us. Nobody answered.

The shouting girl shook her head. “See?” she said. “It doesn’t matter, and it never will. Regret never matters for shit.”

Beyond us, I saw the light-haired one wandering around and around in ever-widening circles, drifting slowly out of our sight. The dark-haired one now lay motionless in the sand, beside the little girl. The third one was missing. One. Two. Three. What comes after that?

“Stephen,” the bright-haired girl said. “Before he... Stephen said Death told him that he was once alive too. Death was, I mean. Alive. And he, Death, said he couldn’t escape all this either. You remember? We all heard that. So is Death just, I mean is he—”

“Dying?” the other girl said. “You mean, is even Death just another undead, a cranky old dusty crumbling into ash?” She was starting to laugh again. “And so he decided fuck it, all living things ever did was bitch and complain about him anyway, so if he’s gotta go, he’s gonna take us all with him? Yeah, that sounds like him, all right.” She dug a heel into the ground, turning slowly on her foot. “I guess maybe that means this was all gonna happen anyway, sooner or later? Maybe. And even with all that power, all that everything, he just can’t help it. He can’t stick around forever either, he just let us think he could. Kind of humiliating when you think about it, huh?”

I couldn’t stand anymore. I fell down, and landed on my side. On the thing that lay below. Looking into the thing that lay above. The voices were still talking, but it was harder to hear them.

“Then why not just end things
fast
?” the first one asked. “Why bother with all of this? Why make us watch?”

“Because it’s like I said,” answered the other. “All of this is just like him. Because Death’s a sadistic son of a bitch.”

The sounds drifted over me where I lay. They made no sense. But inside, in the last part of me still left, I knew it didn’t matter. Because nothing, not since the second I was born, had ever really made any sense. It never did, not for anyone, ever. We just liked to pretend that it did.

“She’s going,” someone said. “So are the others.”

“Hey, Lisa,” someone else said. A soft voice. Sad. “You annoyed the shit out of me, but you were a good sister. Most of the time. So thanks.”

“I don’t want this,” said the first voice. It was stretched and thin, like it wanted to tear in two and let a scream come out. “I don’t—”

“Well, we’re both still here,” said the second. “At least, we are now. Nothing to do but keep going.”

Nothing to do but keep going. Those words, those sounds, made no sense. And yet they did, somehow, inside, in the last disappearing part of me I still had left.

Another sound rose up, a great loud buzz. It swelled up and grew bigger and louder, pushing its way into what was still left of me, and broke me all apart.

TWENTY-FIVE

AMY

“K
eep going?” I asked. I was laughing and I couldn’t seem to stop, because now my mother and Lisa and Stephen were gone for good, and only the lake stones were letting me remember they’d ever been, and the only other option was to scream. “Keep going? Aren’t you the one who just said you might as well have just laid down and—”

“Too damned late for that, isn’t it?” Jessie shook the sand from her shoes. “It’s always too late, no matter what—I told you, regret means shit. This is all we’ve got left, and he hasn’t done us in yet, so I want to find him before he does. I want to find him. We need to have... words.” Her voice rose up into the sky, the bright blue beautiful unreal sky that wasn’t anything but another mockery, shrill and raucous as a gull. “We’ve got
words
!”

Renee was gone too, and Linc, and poor Naomi who withered away and vanished all alone. And Nick, who I’d so blindly thought would be here, he was my guide and my friend and just the thought of his reproachful eyes and quietly thumping tail made me want to start crying again, I wanted Stephen and Nick and Lisa and my mother—words. They were every bit as shit as regret, and Jessie knew it. And they were all we had left, them and a false sky and sea and sand into which we too would surely soon disappear. And our feet, to let us walk in endless circles seeking the biggest of big nothings until we fell apart, fell down, disappeared.

As we all went through the false movie screen, the floor beneath our feet had softened and shifted and before we had time to lose our balance, it became sand. The fragrant cool air became heavier and thicker, full of the constant possibility of rain, but instead of blankness and blindness there was sunlight, everywhere, and blueness overhead diminishing to grays and violets at the edge of the horizon. Far off at the bottom of the dune where we now stood was a great expanse of choppy dark blue water and out on the horizon itself, its perfectly straight ruler-line separating dark blue from light, the faint shadowy outline of something that looked like what had once been Chicago. The way it always looked from across Lake Michigan and the Illinois state line, like a far-off, overbuilt island smoldering with smoke.

All false. All delusion, just like that movie theater spinning random reels of a few final, happy memories before we all waved bye-bye. Like everyone but Jessie and me had begun to do, bare seconds after our feet found the sands, eaten up and blown away. Like the terrible shoreline from where we’d all started. I loved this place, this place I had so suddenly and desperately wanted to save, but that was just more mockery too, more delusion. More sadism, a little taste of everything I’d missed. What I loved, all of it, was already lost.

I’d never meant to steal anything. I’d never meant to reject Death’s gift: my own inevitable death, the ticket to this place that, before the lab’s meddling, before the strange interceding mercy of these lake stones, I could never have refunded. That little seed of himself that he offered to, pressed on, everything that lived. Without ever intending it, I’d thrown that in his face. Which was the greater unknowing crime—the theft of life, or the ingratitude for life beyond? Both of them, now, lost.