Grave (44 page)

“Dissolved to powder,” I said. “Her mother. So why hasn’t she?”

Ms. Acosta smiled, a little crook of one corner of her mouth. “Because she and I will always have unfinished business between us,” she said. “Just like you and me. I can’t put her down that easily.”

No. She certainly couldn’t. I should know. It wasn’t such a bad burden, though, not when it came to meet you halfway.

“We can’t be the only ones with unfinished business,” I said. “There must have been billions of them, trillions. So why are we the only ones left?”

Ms. Acosta laughed, the sneezelike nasal honk we used to make fun of back in school, ten thousand years ago. “Why does one exact leaf fall off one exact tree, onto the roof of one exact passing car? Why does one raindrop splash into one exact gutter? Why does one atom, in one breath of air, find its way into any one set of lungs?” She shifted the baby up towards her shoulder, shook the frowsy hair from her eyes with the old stern, Amy-you’ve-done-it-again look. “Why was your mother—by the way, it was her who gave you that book—in the wrong place at the wrong time, to let the lab first take notice of her? Why did you never die in the plague? Why did your friend over there”—she nodded toward Jessie—”live too, when every part of her wishes she hadn’t? Everything, everywhere, it’s all just so eternally random.”

Her voice—his voice, its voice—was thin and reedy and every syllable seemed to vanish on the wind, rising up toward the endlessly wheeling gulls who never descended to feed. I put my hand to the back of the baby’s head, felt the same heat and steady pulsations as I had in the lake stone still resting, undisturbed, in my pocket. I willed that sensation to strengthen me. To dispel terror.

“You’re dying,” I said. “The shell of you, I mean.”

“I’m
tired
,” she said. “I’m weary. I’m sick unto myself of all of you. I have had enough.”

I gazed into the semblance of Ms. Acosta’s gray eyes, their washed-out watercolor. “I didn’t mean to take anything from you,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

She pressed her cheek to the baby’s skull. “You and your friend,” she said, “know what that all counts for.”

Nothing. Less than nothing. It was still the truth and I was still glad to have said it.

“It can’t have always been you,” I said. “Can it? I mean, whoever you were, once, back when you were just an ordinary human being—you can’t have been the only one in all of history who ever... contained all this.”

She smiled. “Incubated this contagion.”

Jessie, unable to contain herself, crept closer.

I stroked the baby’s hair, sparse and soft. Its flesh was as real as mine. Its bones as solid as mine. I got it wrong, I thought, believing Death’s appearing before me as Ms. Acosta, as myself, as anyone else was some mere disguise: Death
was
everyone else, was all of us together, and we burst out of it, him, in ways and at times, perhaps, even he scarcely could control. Brimming over with everything, with the sum of all existence. What would that feel like? If I was right, if Jessie was right, if this angry god that contained all and everything was also and at the very same time encased in flesh just as real, bones just as solid, breath just as vital as ours...

“What happened?” I asked as Jessie came up beside me. “Were you forced? Tricked? Did youÖ inherit having to do it, or something?” My face flushed, my own thickheaded toddler questions embarrassed me, but we’d found Death and we’d found so much more and I couldn’t stop now, I couldn’t stop even knowing the next stop would surely be nowhere and nothing. “Or is it just like you were saying before, about everything being eternally random?”

No answer.

“So are we both crazy?” Jessie demanded. “Or is it true? Is any of it true?”

The words burst from her, she couldn’t contain them, but she sounded a way I’d never heard her before: humble, that was what she seemed. Awed. Almost timid. As perhaps she’d been the very first time she met Death, saw what we had been calling his true face—not understanding, any more than I had, that
all
of it was his true face. All sides of him were just as real. All was all.

“Is it true?” Jessie repeated. “Is she right?”

Ms. Acosta’s smile deepened. It was far too broad, far too wide, for any mere human face to contain, but in that unnatural mouth and those washed-out, colorless eyes there was no anger, no wrathful rapacity, only a sort of weird delight. She ran a finger over the baby’s tiny ear, its full round cheek, as it ignored us all and slept the deep, profound sleep of oblivion.

“I can’t help it,” she said. “I mean, it’s absurd of me, I know that, but I like a good laugh as much as anyone. Even if it’s on myself. So I always get such a kick out of accidentally tipping my hand.”

A small dark shape was running over the sands, running like he’d never be out of breath and like the sharp hurting stones were just more padding for his paws. A speck, near the shoreline. Over the ridge. Up the duneface toward the grasses and trees and us. A sound came out of my throat like joy and I went running to meet him midway, and as Nick jumped at my legs and I wrapped my arms around his good solid weight, the beach itself dissolved, vanished as suddenly as had my ghosts; vanished with the calling gulls, the sunlight, as we emerged into a somewhere that was all dark, milky-thick fog. Then sunlit, and green.

TWENTY-EIGHT

STEPHEN

“A
my?”

I could hear. I couldn’t see, but I could hear a woman’s voice, a woman I knew, rising in disbelief. Sobbing laughter. “Amy? Jessie! How did you—Stephen? Oh, Christ!”

A weight, something both soft and sharp, flung itself on me and I shouted, then was shocked to realize that meant I had a voice. Then shocked all over again that I had arms to held onto the weight, fingers to clutch it, a memory to know once again who it was. Lisa. That was who spoke.

Lisa. Amy. Jessie. I’d forgotten them all, I’d forgotten everything, I’d felt my own body falling into nothingness but somehow, now, I existed again. This wasn’t like what had happened all those years at the lab, being shoved headfirst into death over and over again and then frogmarched back into some parody of life—I was reborn, in earnest. I was nothing become something. I was life and death surging together in a single exuberant high tide, the waters bottled up and contained and crashing inside my own flesh. My pulse thudded so hard and fast and out of control that I should’ve been scared, I should’ve felt like I was dying, but wasn’t it all the same, in the end? Wasn’t it? Dead or living, I
existed.
I
was.
I was
here.

I started to laugh, and it was with joy. I was blind, I was seized up with a heart attack, I had no idea where I was or who was with me but dammit, I was here!

Then my heart slowed down, and joy gave way to simple relief, and by slow degrees my vision came back. Lisa was still holding onto me, grinning and with eyes so shiny I knew she felt just what I’d been feeling, that the waters were crashing inside her too. Inside all of us. Renee was laughing and crying and kissing Lucy, Naomi, any and all of us in reach. Linc grabbed hold of Jessie and held on tight, his arms trembling and eyes wide as a cat’s who’d pounced on a rabbit, then just as quickly, he released her. Nick trotted in a circle around us, sniffing, taking his canine notes on what had become of us. I grabbed Amy and didn’t let go.

“I remember forgetting everything,” I said, and laughed with the last remnants of my weird reborn bliss. And disbelief. “And then, I... something happened, and I was gone. And then I was back.”

“We—” Amy trembled from head to foot. I tried to steady her, even though I still didn’t know what had happened or what would happen now. “Jessie and me. We didn’t fade away when you did, before. Those lake stones, they—we saw—”

She could barely speak. Jessie, buffeted like an old newspaper in a windstorm from Lisa to Linc to Renee and back again, couldn’t either. Had they found Death, faced him down somehow like Jessie had been crazy to do? Was all this, right here, some sort of unexpected reprieve? It couldn’t be, I knew it couldn’t. Nothing was ever that easy.

“Where are we?” I asked. “Are we still... dead? Do you know this place?”

It was some sort of park, it looked like, not a tiny contained city park but somewhere big and wild and overgrown: a nature preserve, with picnic tables. Except the tables were nestled in grass so tall and thick, the blades were like long, thin, decaying teeth eagerly chewing and swallowing them up. A handkerchief-sized parking lot, its asphalt cracked and spitting up weeds, lay behind us; up head, beyond the picnic tables, was a riverbank almost hidden by clusters of trees in full summer leaf, a crumbling wooden watermill, a white-painted hexagonal gazebo on the summit of a small, gently sloping hill. The front of the gazebo was open, two or three nearly rotted-out steps leading inside; an angled plank bench lined the other five sides. Someone was sitting inside it, watching us, a skinny little woman I was certain I didn’t remember from this or any lifetime. She had black hair even wilder and more snarled than Linc’s, sallow skin, and, I saw when she raised a hand in mock greeting, fingers covered nearly to the knuckle in jangling gold and silver rings. Just like the ones Renee had on her own hands.

Nick walked up closer to me, wagging his tail; I petted him, a silent apology, and felt a heavy, quiet sort of relief when he stayed at my side.

“Do
you
know this place?” I asked him.

“We do,” Jessie said softly. She, and Linc, and Renee, stared fixedly at the black-haired woman without waving back. “We did. Before she took it away from all of us.”

The black-haired woman rose from her bench and came toward us, smiling.

TWENTY-NINE

JESSIE

W
ell, heigh-ho, Teresa, long time no see and fuck you forever! And there was Teresa’s gazebo, the simulacrum of it, her own ash maybe still swirling around its rafters like an angry cluster of bees. It was the first thing you saw in Great River Park once you passed the red brick visitors’ center, the parking lot, the water mill that had still been operational until we undead took over the place. Home, a year ago, a thousand years ago. Ours. Except not.

Why the hell did he, it, have to decide to show up as Teresa? I wanted to see Sam again, Sam who’d killed himself and then found himself right back on earth undead. Or Sam’s poor Ben, who hated hoos with such poison I was Our Lady of All Flesh in comparison. Or Mags, poor Mags, or Annie, our peacemaker, who we’d had to kill for her own sake when she lost her eyes. Anyone else. Anyone at all.

The part of Death that was Teresa—the part I’d once thought no more than an outward disguise, a shell, but really and truly was her—stopped before me, the innumerable grave-robbed rings I now thought of as Renee’s clinking and clicking on her emaciated fingers. She shoved her wind-chime hands into her pockets.

“Didn’t you ever once curse this undead life?” she asked me. Still smiling.

Joe’s words, the last time we ever saw each other. Poor Joe, who I used to love like the crazy kid I was back then, even after he turned his back on me and all of us, even after he gave up. Linc stared past Teresa, fixing his eyes on the gazebo’s peeling white wood, and I saw a muscle tense and tighten along his jaw, something in his eyes between weariness and longing. The others were huddled behind Renee, holding their collective breath, waiting on some sort of signal I wasn’t going to deliver. Amy came running up, then her steps faltered and she stopped.

“So we did it,” she said to Teresa, but soft and tentative like she were in someone else’s church or temple, afraid of offending. “We found you.”

“Why you?” I demanded. “Why couldn’t you have come as someone else? Anyone else?”

Death, Teresa, the part of Death that was Teresa, just shrugged. “Aren’t you glad it wasn’t that worthless brother of yours, yet again? Maybe I have less say than you think, over what part of me shows up, and when, and how.” She cocked her head to the side, like she always had alive whenever she thought she’d just said something flat-out clever, and grinned. “Anyway, this part of me was a loudmouthed braggart, wasn’t she, when she was living? Wasn’t that part of why you hated her so much? So it makes sense for her to show up in me now, when I went and shot off my big mouth and gave myself away—”

“Then we were right,” Amy said, and then louder when nobody answered: “We were right. Weren’t we?”

Teresa reached out, as if nobody had spoken, and clapped me on the shoulder. Behind me I heard Lisa draw a sharp breath.