Grave (48 page)

“No!”

“I chose it,” she said. So calm, so sure, so beyond us all. “Maybe someday I’ll give it up, just like he did, I won’t be able to stand it anymore—but I chose it.” She glanced again toward the lab. “I never even thought about it before, you know, but this means I’ll be everywhere—I’ll see the whole world, I’ll
be
the whole world. Remember, Mom, how much I always wanted to just get out of here and travel?” She wrapped a tendril of hair, bright strawberry-auburn hair, around her fingers and laughed. A happy laugh. “There’ll be almost nowhere I can’t go—”

“No.”

“That’s what I always wanted when I was—what I always wanted before. I won’t know everything, though, he said so. He said he wasn’t all-knowing, not ever. Or all-seeing. So there’ll always be something to learn, something I haven’t seen. Things to surprise me. I hope some of the surprises are good.”

She reached out a hand for me, let it fall again unsure what to do. “So don’t be sad for me. Please? I’m not going to die. At least, not for a long time.”

But Jessie was. I knew it. I could see it. I had Amy on one side of me and Jessie on the other and devil and deep blue sea had me so confused I didn’t know what to do, who to—

“You can’t go,” I said. Flat, final, childish, and which of them I meant it for, both, neither, everything, I didn’t know. “You can’t. You can’t go.”

“She has to,” Jessie said. Quiet, calm, just like Amy. “And we have to.”

“I can’t—”

“I’ll be all right,” Amy said. “And so will they.”

She ran over to them suddenly, to where Linc and Renee and my sister sat exhausted and draining on the sands, and threw her arms around Jessie, who suffered the embrace for just a few seconds and then briskly pushed her away. At least that much hadn’t changed, even now that she really was finally—she pushed Amy away but her eyes were solemn, almost sorrowful, someone saying goodbye to a friend. Amy reached down and embraced Linc for a moment, then Renee, and then she turned to me looking just for an instant as scared, as lost, as when I’d first rescued her from that poor feral dog.

“Were those my first?” she asked. Her voice shaking. “I didn’t mean to. I didn’t try to. Were they the first living things that I...”

Her words trailed off. No. I couldn’t lose my sister again, not again, and Amy, it’s like I told her, I have
three
daughters and I can’t lose the second just like I did the first—my heart cracked and split open and released a geyser of tears, Naomi grabbing me and hugging me as I sank in shame to the sand. Was she next? Would I lose her next? Jessie slid over to me, half-crawling, and for just a precious few seconds, her head was in my lap.

“It’s what I want,” she whispered. “It’s what I want and I’m not afraid. This has been like torture. Everything since I came back alive, it all—Joe was right, in the end, I didn’t want to believe him when he first said it, but he was right. This has to end. All along, I was supposed to be dead. Now I can get off the merry-go-round. Now I can stop being so dizzy from all the spinning—life and death and—and I can rest. Okay?” Her head jerked up and she was pleading, pleading with me who she couldn’t help but leave behind, to be all right. “Please?”

“Lisa,” Naomi whispered. “Don’t cry.”

“I don’t want you to go!” I was the child now, surrounded by maddeningly sure and decided adults, and I was horribly ashamed of myself and I couldn’t help it. I looked over at Linc and Renee as if they could somehow stop this, knowing they couldn’t, and for one mercifully brief second I hated them for it. “I don’t want any of you to go!”

“We’ll be all right,” Linc said. Gentle but unyielding, as he took Jessie back from me. Holding my sister, his wife, in his arms. “Don’t forget, we’ve seen it all before.”

The tears wouldn’t stop. “Amy.” I was back on my feet now, desperate, as if I could bargain with this, as if exactly that perpetual human failing hadn’t nearly destroyed everything and everyone. “I can’t let you. I can’t let you go again, I can’t let you be all alone—”

“She won’t,” Lucy said. Scared, so scared-looking, and so firmly decided. “Because I’m going with her.”

“And so am I,” said Stephen. “Just like we said we would, before—he can’t stop us, the other one. He can’t. We’re going.” His eyes blazed up fiercely for a moment, as if he actually longed for someone to just try and stop him, and then his face turned pensive. “I don’t think we were meant for regular living life anyway,” he said, “any more than dead people—we’ve died too, like they have. Over and over again, just like them, except in a different way. We’re used to going back and forth.”

Lucy nodded. “Never felt like one of the living, not really,” she said. “Even before they—even before. Never.”

Stephen reached over and kissed Amy on the temple. “So that’s how it is. We’re going too.”

Nick, all this storm and fury surrounding him, he just sat there calm as anything with his rheumy eyes gazing around him and his tail resting still against the sand. There beside Amy, his mistress, his protegÈe, no doubt at all that he was going too. Everyone going, except Naomi. Everyone leaving.

“You can’t do this,” I shouted. I knew how infantile I sounded, and I didn’t give a damn. “You can’t, this goddamned—suicide pact—you can’t—”

I was sobbing again, too hard to talk, and Naomi was crying too and I couldn’t have that but I couldn’t stop, I just couldn’t. Lucy came up to me and before anyone could stop me, I shoved her away, putting every ounce of inhuman strength I had into the push, watching in a fury as she flew backward and landed square on her ass.

“Are you happy?” I demanded, standing over here where she lay sprawled in the sand, spitting out the words almost in a scream. “Happy now? All that ‘get away from
my daughter
, don’t tell
me
how to talk to
my daughter
, how to protect her, how to’—her own mother, and you didn’t even try to stop her! You didn’t even try! Now it’s too late and you get to drag her along while you cut your own throat and you must be
fucking thrilled to death
!”

Stephen and Amy leapt in front of Lucy like they were afraid I’d kick her, hit her, but all I could do was disgrace myself as I stood there and cried. Lucy waved them away, then slowly pulled herself back to her feet. She looked me without rancor, tears brimming in her eyes, but she blinked them back before they could roll down her cheeks.

“I’m not happy,” she said. “And I’m not unhappy, either. I’ve just never been so scared in my life. But I’m not leaving Amy behind, not ever again. No matter how scared I am. No matter what.” She pushed the back of her hand over her eyes, rough and abrupt like she was squeegeeing a dirty window. “And like Stephen said, that’s just how it is.”

Amy put her arms around her for a moment. Steadying her, like Naomi was still trying through her own sobs to steady me. I had to pull myself together, for shit’s sake,
right now
. I mopped my own face and squatted down, held Naomi close to me lest someone try to take her next, but the salt water wouldn’t quit leaking from me. How did I stop Amy, stop Jessie—I didn’t know what to do. There wasn’t anything I could do. There wasn’t anything they
wanted
me to do. Amy, so shy, so certain, ran a hand over my hair.

“You’re not alone,” she said. So sweet, so sad, so merciless. “Naomi needs you. And you need her. And—and exes
can
die, look what I—look what happened to Mags.” She swallowed. “Your daughter Karen, you’ll have her again, and Jessie, andÖ and everyone. Not right away, but you will.”

She was smiling again, happy for me. Genuinely happy, and already so far beyond her own fleeting personhood, as if it were just a memory from decades, centuries back. “You’ll grow old and die, a long time from now, and then you’ll have everyone you lost again.”

“And if I don’t?” I demanded. “If what happened to Mags was just an accident, a freak accident, what then? What if I’m stuck like this... forever?”

What if I had to watch Naomi grow old and die, watch everyone grow old and die, nothing but decades and centuries of long goodbyes just like this one and no Karen, no Amy, nobody else ever again? Amy shook her head, but whether that was certainty or mere reassurance I didn’t know. Maybe I didn’t want to know.

“Nothing,” she said, “anywhere, stays what it is forever. That’s what the lab thought they could do, and they failed. They failed at it and failed and failed, until nobody was left to try.” She looked back over the ridge, as if she were waiting for someone to arrive. Someone who should have been here long since. “Even Death isn’t what he—and someday I won’t be this anymore, someone else will take my place, and then I’ll be there with you. We all will. Just like Florian lives inside us, and somewhere else too, in death. It’s a good place, death. The afterlife. You know that. We’ve seen it.”

She hesitated, then gave me a tentative, one-armed hug. “It’s—it’s part of Death, and Death can travel back and forth from it like living things can’t, but even Death can’t say exactly what it is or where it comes from, if it really is underground or in the sky or just all in living people’s minds. But wherever it is, some good part of you goes there, and stays there, and feels itself there and everyone it knew and lost around it. And it’s a happy place. You have to believe me, Lisa. It truly is.”

She had raised her voice because Jessie was listening to her, craning her neck there on the sand. Linc and Renee and everyone else were listening too, anxious, needing the truth from the source. Treating Amy like that truth, already, without any questions, this couldn’t be happening—I grabbed Amy, hugged her fiercely to me, and she hugged back and made a little shuddering sound against my shoulder, the cloth of my T-shirt there suddenly turning damp.

“I’m scared,” she murmured into my ear. “But it’s okay. It really is. Please be okay. I need you to be okay.”

I wasn’t okay, I wasn’t at all—but what choice did I have? What choice did anybody ever have? What choice was there, that night the police came to our house, Jim’s and mine, cherry lights revolving wild outside and voices saying
There’s been an accident, a very bad mother father sister so sorry, so very sorry—

I’d had another year with Jessie, another year I would never have had. Now she was ready to go. I had Amy, who I would never have met. And she was ready to go. They needed me to be okay, because I’d already been given so much more than I would’ve had and now, now it was time, now it was their time. I would never have had Naomi. And she wasn’t going anywhere. I would never have had any of this, if it weren’t for the whole world spinning so horribly out of balance. If it weren’t for Amy, Jessie, all of us in our own small ways, reaching out hands to yank it into orbit and grab it all back.

But what you’ve had, once you’ve had it, however you got it, it was so damned hard to just quietly give it up—

“Look,” Lucy said, pointing.

We all looked, up at the crest of the ridge. Wandering out of the trees near the aquatorium we saw the nebulous, unmistakable outline of a deer, nibbling idly on the long uncut swathes of grasses now lining the white gravel road cutting across the ridge. And a few yards away, walking toward us, the outline of a man whose face never stayed the same, but we still always knew.

As if he’d been waiting to see him all this time, as if the sight of him were the key to his own release, Linc made a gasping, choking sound, rocking back and forth where he sat as if he were in pain. Then he toppled very quietly to his side and his breaths became easier, longer, drawn out, but there were fewer of them than there should have been, and dead spaces between them. I could almost feel it inside myself: his heart running down, his lungs giving out, his accidentally stolen life draining from his body. He lay there on the sand with his eyes closed and then without our seeing it happen, Renee was lying next to him, sunk against his shoulder, with Jessie’s cheek rested in his curved palm. They were ashen, shadows guttering blue beneath their eyes and their eyes closed against the punishing weight of the sunlight. We ran to them, we all ran to them but they weren’t dead yet, not yet; they were fading away, instead of burning up. We would all be allowed to say goodbye.

The man came closer, and closer.

THIRTY-TWO

AMY

A
ll it took was one word.
Eternity.

I could feel it inside me, rising up full and fast, the nourishing sustaining thing rushing into all the hollow spaces like water released from a jar. Like a libation, a slaking libation poured lovingly on dry untended grave-ground. A feeling of life. I had been alive for seventeen years without ever feeling alive and only now, now that I would never again be living as I’d known it before, did I feel anything but stone dead inside.

I wished I’d had the words for it all, before. Maybe it wouldn’t have made the life come to me any faster, but it might have let me hold out without the mistakes I’d made, the horrible mistakes, knowing that one way or another it’d happen.
Where there’s life, there’s hope.
Maybe that’s what people really meant, when they’d say that.