Grave (8 page)

“If you keep talking like that,” Lisa said, and for once the nail-pounding harshness of her words was a relief, “or thinking like it, I’m going straight to your mother and—”

“For God’s sake,” Amy said, almost wearily scornful, “I’m not going to kill myself. I swear. On your stupid rosary beads, I swear it.” Her hands reached back, tugging at handfuls of ponytail until a slipping elastic inched back in place. “After everything that’s happened, it’d be pretty stupid to do that—there’s no point. Besides, I don’t want to be—have
you
ever wanted to die?”

I waited.

“Many times,” Lisa said. “Even if you don’t count right after Karen died—a lot of times.”

“So before the plague, too?”

“Before the plague, too.” Her laugh was a convulsive bark that made my whole skin prickle. “Especially before the plague.”

A bird called from up overhead, the trees just behind me: something whose crooning chirp started out low and rose high and then swiftly muted itself again. I didn’t know what it was. Then I heard the croaky braying of a crow, a few yards away. The first bird’s voice spiraled higher and higher once more but then, before that second low note, it abruptly stopped singing. No crow sounds, either. Just silence.

“I don’t want to die,” Amy was saying, calm and unhurried like she was working it all out for herself, out loud, for the first time. “I never wanted to die, I mean, I wasn’t afraid of dying, exactly, but I never—when I look at other people and how they live, how they’re alive, it’s like they’re doing it in a totally different way and I’m just standing there, watching them, imitating.” Her arms stretched over her head, each hand grasping the opposing elbow. “And it’s got nothing to do with the plague, or everyone dying, or what Natalie did—or even what I did. That’s the thing. Like, ever since I was born, I’ve been... traveling. Somewhere else.”

The sadness unspooling between them both was like a thread, a spun ribbon, knotting them together in a great capacious net while the rest of us swam free outside. Except I knew the feel of that net too, the texture of that rough rope cutting into my hands; I’d almost swear I’d known it in the ghost times, the most-forgotten times, before the laboratory became my whole life. But what could I have ever said to her, my own daughter, if she’d confided all this in me? No words in any language are as cloying, self-serving, as selfishly solicitous as
I know just what you mean
.

Lisa shifted where she sat, tugging on another strand of hair. It was a miracle she hadn’t pulled herself bald. “Look, Amy, everything that’s happened since—”

“It’s got nothing to do with that.” She didn’t sound angry, or frustrated that Lisa didn’t
know just what she meant
; in fact, there was almost a buoyancy to her words now, the ballast of confession tossed overboard. “It’s from a long time before—you can’t tell my mom. Okay? She’d just start in again about how it’s all her fault and if she’d just stayed—well, it was okay before, you know, I mean years ago, because it really was only her and me and we almost never talked to anyone else. I didn’t even really know enough other people to feel different. I didn’t have any friends. I didn’t know how you talk to people, how to get friends. Then I learned how to pretend at it, use their language, but—”

“Lots of people have trouble making friends,” Lisa said. “It doesn’t make them freaks.”

Silence again, like Amy was thinking that one over. Or just being polite. “But it does make them friendless,” she said. “Okay, see, I can see how all of you look at Nick, I’m not blind, but I spent all that time running away from him and now it’s like he’s the only real friend I ever—”

I’d taken a step closer, then closer again to hear them better and I startled some large possum-like thing that went scuttling off in a crackling volley of dry twigs. And there I was, nothing between them and me but a half-dead lilac bush. They both turned swiftly and Amy’s face shut up fast and tight with suspicion, like in the old days whenever Mike’s sister tried kissing her hello; it shoved me farther away than the strongest set of hands. Lisa looked from Amy to me, then back again, waiting virtuously for her cue.

“I got worried about you,” I said, my voice hardening as I turned to Lisa. “When Naomi came back all by herself.”

Lisa gave me this tight little nod, her eyes searing me with a clean defiant heat of
don’t even ask
, and suddenly all I could think about was what Naomi said, about how Lisa’d had to shit. Had she dug a hole and buried it, like you were supposed to do camping, or was it lying somewhere away from here for the flies to find, or had this whole privileged conversation happened right in the same spot, Lisa’s shit sitting right at their feet? I couldn’t smell anything, but then Lisa’s shit didn’t stink anyway, now did it. My skin prickled harder and my heart was beating in a bad way, sharp and drum-tight, and as Amy got to her feet, I pivoted and turned away—

A possum. The thing that gave me away was a possum, I’d guessed right. Now it lay curled up not five feet away from me, dead. Playing possum. It had to be from how I’d startled it. But I’d seen so many dead things back at the lab and I just knew, I knew looking at it; it’d died quietly right beside me, and I hadn’t sensed a thing. It lay cradled in the mud and leaves and a damp gray netting of dead branches—so many, like someone had been gathering tinder and then dropped armfuls without ever building the fire. Something touched my arm as I stared at it and I jumped, then saw Amy standing beside me, her apprehension turning to fear.

“Mom,” she said, “look.” She pointed back into the trees, the path we’d all followed. Lisa was coming up too, gazing where Amy’s arm led. “Before, when we came down here, it was...”

Green. It had been all sorts of colors not half an hour before, green with spring and brown with mud and purple-pink-white with blossoms, with only a few dead branches here and there—and now the soil was covered in them. The whole ground was a nest of gray twigs, dropping steadily from overhead, and the new, soft spring leaves had turned colorless and withered. The forsythia bush just ahead of us, that yellow everyone calls “butter” even though it’s so much thicker and brighter a color, all its flowers were decayed and dropped to the ground.

The bird I’d heard singing, something brown-speckled but yellow as the petals had been—I knew it was the same one, I just
knew
—lay there in the twigs not just dead but swollen with decay, industrious carpets of tiny dark insects already working at feathers and flesh. Close by lay the crow, its wizened feet pointed suddenly and forever at the sky. All where we’d walked were huge, new bald patches of gray, brown, black; it was all falling to pieces like that poor little bird, like a great ripe fruit spotted with a sudden, deep rot.

Lisa just stared, at the bushes, the birds, and then wild-eyed and already breathless she was running through the trees, back to the clearing. Amy and I stood gripping each other’s hands, too scared to move, too scared to speak aloud. We held our breaths, held them like it might trick whatever was out there into leaving us be, and then I heard Lisa’s voice, a rising-falling chorus of feverish relief, and the higher-pitched sound of a protesting child.

Amy shuddered. I squeezed her hands harder and there was Lisa, still half-running as she headed toward us, Naomi in her arms and Nick trotting close at her feet.

“I don’t need to be carried!” Naomi kept saying, trying and failing to squirm out of Lisa’s iron plague-dog grasp. “I’m not a baby, I don’t need to—Lisa, look, the birds.” Her head twisted around and she stared, stricken. “Poor little birds.”

Her face convulsed as she tried not to cry; then she snuffled and mopped her eyes and turned back to Lisa with an air of reproof. “We need our bags,” she said. “You left them.”

“I’ll go get them,” Lisa said, her grinding voice coming from somewhere far away; she didn’t move, didn’t set Naomi down. Her arms were trembling. Nick kept making a circuit around the clearing, sniffing not just at the birds but at the dead bushes and branches, at the poor possum. Dogs loved dead things and loved rolling in them and I was bracing myself for that, but all he did was sniff and pace, round and around, over and over. Amy watched him in silence, and we all watched her, and finally she stepped back and out of my grasp.

“Here, boy,” she said, a quaver in her voice. “Come on.”

Nick abandoned his rootings-around and trotted obediently toward her without a moment’s hesitation. They both headed back toward the long grass where she and Lisa had sat, and we all followed her, as if surely she knew the path like we didn’t, as if she’d been leading the way all along. The sun had finally come out in earnest, weak and clouded over but still steady against our backs. Amy headed slowly around the uneven perimeter of the woods, the thick tangle of former backyards still alive and green and flowering with weeds. Still untouched. She came to an abrupt stop and we all looked warily around us, waiting for the man, with his long black coat and pale cropped hair. Waiting for him to appear before us, his face that none of us had ever quite seen lit up with triumph:
How’d you like all that back there, huh? How’d you like that? What makes you think I won’t do it to you?

But he wasn’t there, not anymore, at least not where we could see him. Only Stephen, still walking up and down alone in the long grass not fifteen yards away, hands thrust deep into his pockets and dark head bent under the weight of his own thoughts. Amy turned to me and I could feel her pent-up urgency to speak, to speak now and say something I needed to hear, something even Lisa and that boy had never...

Quick as I observed it, the moment passed, and she turned away.

“Stephen?” she called, startlingly loud in the too quiet, rotten woods. “You ready? We’re gonna head out.”

FOUR

NATALIE

“Y
ou gotta come see this,” he kept saying. Over and over.

You gotta, you gotta—I didn’t have to do anything. This is my house now, it’s always been
my
house, I’m in charge here and if I want to walk up and down the hallway the whole day, then I will. If I want to not talk to anyone, then I won’t. Amy and all my other real family hate me, my Friendly Man just shows up to be horrible and say things that don’t make any sense. I might as well just walk up and down. The man, his dirty blond hair clipped short, his voice almost southern-sounding like you hear sometimes even this far north, I knew he’d worked here for years but I couldn’t remember his name. Like it mattered. He grabbed at my arm and I yanked it away, almost hissing.

“Leave me alone,” I said. “Just leave me alone.”

“Kid—”

“Don’t
call
me
kid
.” Hissing for real, from behind my teeth, trying to make my face a slitty little Halloween mask like an actual cat. If I’d had fur to make stand on end, make me look and feel like a big deal you didn’t mess with, my man would’ve treated me better. “Don’t you ever call me that, I—”

“
Miss Beach
.” He looked past patience and I didn’t care. His skin, the patina of worked-in grime all over his clothes... he looked as close and musty as the hallway smelled and his big thick-necked body seemed somehow to blend into the floor and walls, dissolve into it, one great aura of unclean. “Ms. Beach, whatever the hell you want, I must
humbly request
you come with me and see what’s going on outside. I don’t know if I’m seeing things, or—”

“So ask one of the others.” I shook his hand free and rubbed a finger against the wall, the protective glass covering a huge photograph of the lab staff circa... 1925, the writing said, even though their clothes looked awfully modern for that. Long rows of men in suits where only the collars looked really old-fashioned, one or two women in straight up-and-down dresses and short fussy hair. “I know they’re still wandering around here even though I told everyone to leave, I’d be paying your salary but nobody listens. Go ask them.”

His thick curve of a mouth, pink lips rubbery and flabby all at once, he twisted it up like I’d just shoved something sour into his cheek. “I can’t,” he said, and something flitted fish-like across his face and swam away again, that look when you can’t decide whether to run from something or hit it in the face. “I can’t. You’ll see why. For fuck’s sake, you wanna be in charge here so bad, this is something you gotta see.”

The layers of dust over the photograph glass left all the faces in shadow, dust so thick you couldn’t even make a proper clean line with your fingertip. If Amy thinks she’s too good for a little dirt she can just shut the hell up and grab a mop. I don’t have time for that, I’ve got serious work.

I don’t have time for this either. “So what is it, anyway?”