Grave (45 page)

“Let’s go for a walk,” Teresa said. She tilted her chin up, calling to everyone. “You crazy kids too? Just a short little stroll, how about it?”

Shoulder to shoulder with Teresa I walked toward the gazebo, the others beside and behind me, easy familiarity guiding my steps, Linc’s, Renee’s. Our feet, they knew these hillocks and ridges and sloping crests of ground we’d walked hundreds, thousands of times, in our time of endless dying; we knew it like hands know a lover’s body in the dark. We followed the curve and bend of the river, crossed in a line over the old footbridge, took a gentle left to where open fields lay to one side, the beginnings of the woodlands the other. I surprised a deer here once, a stag so unexpected and big and beautiful I let it go, sated as I was on possum and raccoon, watched it bound back into the trees and toward the water knowing he and I couldn’t want for anything else. A thousand years ago, give or take a few centuries. Gone, and gone.

“Where are we going?” Amy’s mother asked aloud. “Are we still in...”

Her voice died away, and we kept on walking. Florian had had a tree deep in the woods where he’d hidden his lake stones, the last part of his unspoken past he couldn’t bring himself to give up, circling the trunk like a crude new-laid mosaic. Linc and I, though, we’d buried the remnants of his remains deeper in the woods, under an older, bigger tree that struck us more worthy of him than that sapling-stone. Whether or not Death had intended it, or anyone else liked it, that was where I was going, one last time.

I could remember Florian again. Did that mean he was back like the others were back, Linc, Renee, Nick, all of Amy’s people? And what did it mean, their return?

We passed the weather-stripped sign marking the Sulky Trail turnoff. That first deep bend in the river, with a tiny wooden observation deck hidden in a cluster of bushes. The old playground, farther in the woods near the river’s second footbridge, where Joe and I had met for the last time and—enough. I closed my eyes and walked with him, imagining him beside me, the both of us wandering just like the old days over the trail and out to the underpass and the far side where nobody would bother us. That little hillock here, at the start of the trail—watch those hoof-hollows, good for nothing but catching muddy rainwater—then that tiny clearing where the deer liked to feed, poor stupid deer never figuring out how easy they made it for us to snap their necks and pick them off, and then, and then—

I closed my eyes again. I imagined them all right beside me, all of us walking like the old days in a fractious, but easy group: Teresa striding ahead, in search of places none of us wanted to go; Ben and Sam joking about God knows what, Sam’s face seam-splitting in a rare outright grin; Billy strutting and waddling alongside, Mags never a moment out of his sight. Me and Joe in the center, letting everyone else do the talking. Renee, still shy, bringing up the rear, with Linc wandering aimless from person to person, never lingering long at anyone’s side. And last of all, Florian, our eldest, our heart, nothing ever the same after he died and left us. Our unspoken flesh and bone.

“Here,” Linc said, startling me from my thoughts. “Right here.”

A clearing, small but still more than big enough for the lot of us, bordered by clusters of beech, maples, ash. A big oak tree almost at its center, old and thick-trunked and with deep-fissured bark perfect to give undead, itchily infested flesh a good satisfying scratch. Florian’s tree, with his last few surviving bones and the soft crumbly top part of his skull buried in its roots at our feet. One last sight of it all. One last time.

Amy, the hoo-kiddy who couldn’t have had any idea what this place meant to me, she looked at the tree and looked at me and all of a sudden, she smiled. And I smiled back because there was such a strange lightness in that deafeningly silent air, a lightness and ease I saw on all our faces and that feeling had a name: relief. Whatever happened next, whatever became of existence and us, soon all of this would be over. We had found Death and emerged from oblivion and that had to mean, it
had
to, that at long last we were getting out. I wanted out. I was so tired of all of this. Living, dying, living-in-dying, I wanted off the merry-go-round. I’d had enough candy and rides. I wanted to go home to where it was dark and quiet and sleep and sleep forever. As much sleep as I should’ve had before I first woke up from the dirt, back when I was newly made and newly buried. Please, please, let me the hell out. I didn’t want anything, didn’t need anything but to be there in the stillness forever.

A gentle bony hand,
all
bones, rested on my shoulder and when I turned, Florian was there. He took me in his arms and when he let me go, as he embraced Linc and Renee, and Amy, and an eager Naomi, his expression was grave. Teresa just stood there, watching.

“I ain’t meant to be here,” he said. “You weren’t never meant to see me again, or talk to me again. You know that. It always meant that things wasn’t right.”

And that memories were all I was meant to have of him, or anyone else I’d lost. And that any talking we were meant to do would have been just another memory, an endlessly repeating retread of what we’d already said to, done with, thought of each other long before he’d gone. That was all you got. That was all they needed. It was all just the nature of the universe.

“I know,” I said.

“So, I gotta leave now.” His pale blue eyes blinked fast, hard. “I gotta leave now forever.”

I nodded. Florian looked almost sad, just on the far edge of sad, but stronger than that in his face was that same relief I was allowing myself to feel, allowing to leak prematurely into my bones. Because I wanted out that strongly, that badly. Naomi, still hovering around his heels, tugged urgently at his sleeve.

“Don’t go,” she pleaded. “Please?”

Gently, he detached her little hand, pushed her back to Lisa’s waiting arms. Urgency made his eyes heated and fierce but there was a quiet at the bottom of them, an underlying kindness that nothing could alter or diminish. Just as he’d been in life. My memory of him hadn’t failed me. It hadn’t lied.

“You ain’t
gotta
,” he said, to me, to Amy in turn. “Remember that. You ain’t gotta.” He put a hand on my arm. His fingers just barely curled around it, but his grip was iron-strong. “Both of you, either of you. All of you. Before you say yes, you gotta be sure.”

“Sure of what?” Lisa frowned, looking from him to us and back with unease curdling her words. “Sure of what?”

“It’s time,” Teresa said softly.

“It is,” Florian agreed. “Long past time.”

Then what had been him flew back inside me, inside all of us, and was gone from my sight forever.

THIRTY

AMY

Y
ears ago on my birthday my mother gave me a book, a secondhand Bulfinch’s Greek and Roman myths full of illustrations so beautiful, they made me wish I knew how to draw. As I stood there, face to face with Death once again, surrounded by the only people left to me in a place that was someone else’s longed-for home, the stories from that book kept coming to me stronger and stronger and I couldn’t get them out of my head. Iphigenia, sacrificed by her father Agamemnon to ensure safe passage for his ships battling the Trojans—I always rooted for the Trojans, Aeneas escaping the ruins with his aging father clinging to his back. There were some versions where Iphigenia offered herself willingly, a good Greek virgin obeying the behest of the gods, and of war. And ones where Artemis wrapped a cloud around the sacrificial altar, carried the real Iphigenia off in safety to some distant island while a double, a dummy, a ghost was “slain” in her place. The letter of the law obeyed, the spirit hardly mattered. Not all sacrifice was what it looked like—

Old stories in lost books, stories nobody would ever tell again because there was no one left to hear them. We had summoned Death back from oblivion barely knowing how we’d done it, but all I could think about was Iphigenia, movie theaters, the smell of fake butter and the sugary tastes-like-real-maple-syrup my mother and I had every Friday night, our weekly pancakes and bacon dinner. The dry shuddery feel of Mrs. Acosta’s flyaway gray hair and her nubbly cotton sweater pressing against my skin as she gave me a hug, the strawberry cake my mother bought from a tiny Polish bakery every birthday, the faintest scent-memory of motor oil on my father’s skin, the wild stomach-drop of my first time on a swing set, the big roller coaster at Prospect Fun Park (1,892 Days Without An Environmental Incident). The feel of my own hair against my hand, thick and a little coarse and begging to be washed. The steel wool of Nick’s fur. The waxen sweet of candy-corn pumpkins at Halloween. The lethal apple-cider smell of Dave’s diabetic dying breath. The unyielding discomfort of unbroken Doc Martens, the only gift my aunt ever gave me that I’d liked. The strange lit-up quiet after a heavy snowfall. The first lilacs of spring. Florian’s face, as he told us all goodbye.

Every memory, every gathered-up impression, every interior scrap and souvenir of what it had been to be alive, and all of it was killing me. It was killing me because as the memories of life rushed through me at quintuple speed, I also felt for the first time, swelling up so hard and fast in me that it shoved aside the air, all the death around me, all the death I’d caused: Ms. Acosta, Mags, Billy, Phoebe even though I hadn’t meant it, Stephen’s final trip to the lab and a slit throat. Probably Natalie, whom I’d deliberately turned my back on and forgotten. And so much more than that, so many more, all the death, the dying, the remnant-ghosts everywhere in the universe. And I felt all the life, too, all the life in everything and myself, swelling up full of air a buoyant balloon and there simply wasn’t one without the other, life and death were a single body and trying to conquer either one only maimed, disfigured, blinded, stifled the heartbeat of all the universe. Without one, there wasn’t the other.

Ever.

That was just how it was. That was how it always had to be.

“Precisely,” Death said to me, nodding with a satisfied, press-lipped smile. “Exactly.”

You gotta be sure.
Sure of what? What was I sure of? Not anything much, just a few things. A very few things. I loved my mother, and Lisa, and Stephen. I was a killer and I was sorry about it, but I couldn’t change it. I wasn’t human, not really, not any more than Jessie or her friends were. Maybe since before Natalie ever touched me, maybe ever since I was born. Maybe that meant something. Maybe it always did. I loved this world, this afterlife, the hidden viscera and lungs of the body that encompassed life, and death, and all. I loved it, and I had to save it from nothingness because I never wanted to leave it. But even now, that wasn’t up to me.

Was that surety? Was that certitude? It was all I had. It was all I would ever have to offer.

“Come over here, Amy,” Lisa said quietly. “Jessie. Come and stand with us.”

We ignored her, our only regard for Death. She, he, it looked different now: a white-haired, dark-skinned, arthritically pinched old man, wrapped in a dirty terrycloth robe exposing sharp shaggy shins and bare callused feet, his expression the baleful glare of someone long used to snapping his fingers and getting his own way. King Lear. I always liked Greek plays better than Shakespeare. Nick left Stephen’s side and padded up to me, the feel of his fur offering comfort, sustenance, in the face of whatever was about to happen.

“This is what you wanted, isn’t it?” the old man said to Jessie, his voice querulous and creaky and nobody’s we recognized. “To see the old stomping grounds, one last time? See your kindly blue-eyed Grandfather Maggot one last time? Well, here he was, and here you are. A little reward, for all that hard work trying to get to me. Enjoy it.”

Jessie reached up to the oak tree, pulling down a branch and contemplating its leaves like she’d never seen such strange, verdant, tissue-thin things before. Then she let the branch spring back.

“We know you now,” she said. She was calm, calm and so overwhelmingly tired. “You said it yourself, you tipped your hand. We know you.”

Death sat down right there on the ground, near a cluster of bushes covered in sprigs of tiny white flowers. The oak leaves were full summer-sized, but nearer the ground, the buttercups, the goldenrod, the violets bloomed in all their color, an endless spring. His heels stuck in the ground like twin trowels, bare brown toes pointing skyward.

“You were just like us, once,” I said. I wanted to sit down too, to savor the scents of the flowers and the dark soft earth, but part of me insisted on remaining standing even though there was no place to flee, nowhere to run. “You were alive, and human. Then you became something else. You became everything, living and dead.”

Behind me, Stephen made a startled sound. “That was really true?” he demanded. “I thought... maybe it was a riddle or something. A puzzle we had to solve. It couldn’t be that simple.”

Death grinned at us, a mouthful of yellowing half-broken teeth. His eyes flared up, very briefly, with the lively pleasure of a far younger thing.

“It’s just that simple,” he said. “I told you so! I gave myself away. I do that, sometimes. A lot of the time.” The smile faded, his face going calm and serene. “But of course, nothing’s ever really that simple. As you already know full well.”