Gravedigger's Cottage (3 page)

I would know that smell, wouldn’t I? I was doing this all the time, killing things. Unless it was them doing it to me, dying. All the same, in the end, they ended up there, under there, under us, with the earth upturned and the scent penetrating all the way into me and staying there.

Walter had stood by the grave now for as long as he was able to do any one thing. He had been okay through this, resisting his natural urge to upset me and to pretend he didn’t feel hurt. Without speaking, he went into the house.

He didn’t see me see him, but I saw him raise his eyes and tell her good-bye.

“What are you thinking, Sylvie?” Dad asked.

Two things. One, for starters, he didn’t ever call me Sylvie, like I said. He was trying to play. He was trying to help. I loved it when he tried.

The other thing was, he knew better than to ask that. We had been through this many times before, with him asking me what was I thinking.

I never answered that. Because I
said
what I was thinking when I wanted to talk about what I was thinking. I had no trouble saying, when I wanted to be saying, but when I didn’t want to be saying, you could tell, because I stood there,
not
saying. Because I think that’s important. I think your thoughts are more like a place, where you can stay, comfortably alone if need be.

But he asked, and I told him. I told him all that, or at least I used to tell him all that, all those first few thousand times he asked me what I was thinking, but now I had shortened the whole thing to a special one-word digest:
“Dad,”
which was pronounced with two distinct syllables,
“Da-ad,”
and he remembered right away and then we were okay again. Then, usually a little while later when I was quiet again, he would ask me again what I was thinking and I would patiently tell him again. And then he’d remember again. And then we were okay again.

“Well, you want to know what I’m thinking, then?” he said as he gently steered me away from our goodbye to Loose Lucy as darkness began to really finally close us in.

“Yah, Dad, I do.”

“I’m thinking I’m really looking forward to the new house, to a new start. I’m thinking we were here long enough. I’m thinking it’s time.”

He squeezed me extra hard, and as we approached the back door we saw the backlit figure of Walter standing in the doorway, arms folded, as if we had been out all night and kept him up worrying.

“Yah, Dad,” I said, leaning into him, “I’m thinking you’re right.”

This was the first I had heard of this thought. But it must have been true because I said it.

Same went for this one.

“And I’m thinking I don’t want any more pets, once we get to the new house. I’m thinking I couldn’t bear to bury anything else under us, at the new place.”

He let this go without remark. He gave my shoulder a silent squeeze. Much went without remark with Dad, but sometimes the silent squeeze wasn’t what I wanted. Sometimes it was, but I had a right to a choice, didn’t I?

“Doesn’t it hurt, Dad? Doesn’t it keep hurting, even when it’s past? And doesn’t it want to come out sometimes?”

He did it. He had the nerve to squeeze my shoulder again. When I kept staring up at him, heating up the side of his face with my glare, he was forced to consider again.

“It’ll be okay, sweetheart,” was what he decided, was what he always decided. “We won’t dwell on that now,” was what he said next, as he always liked to say next.

“Right.” I sighed as we stepped inside. As we did, Dad grabbed Walter in a one-arm bear hug, while still holding me with the other. When we were squished way up close together, I leaned over and kissed Walter on his big round forehead.

“Hey!” Walter shouted.

He didn’t really mind though. It beat what he was doing, in the house, alone with his red-rimmed eyes.

A
MONG THE MANY KINKS
of the Gravedigger’s Cottage was the doorbell, which made a clang sound as if someone were hitting one of the radiators with a great big hammer.

The first time I heard it, it threw me a little, but then it was nothing compared to what I found outside the door when I answered.

“Hi,” I said.

“I’ll be your boyfriend,” he said.

We had never met. We had lived in the house for about a week. It was August, school hadn’t started yet, Dad hadn’t gone back to work. We spent our time, the three of us, nicing up the house some, visiting the rocky, fairly private beach, and puttering about the general vicinity without really meeting people in any meaningful way. And then came Carmine.

“Um, you will not be my boyfriend, no.”

“Wow, you’re mean,” he said.

“I am not mean. Who
are
you?”

“I’m Carmine.”

“Hi, Carmine. Thanks but—”

I was forced to interrupt myself here because of what Carmine was doing while I talked. While I talked, he wrapped himself up in a hug as if he were worrying or cold, which in eighty-two-degree heat was unlikely.

“Why are you doing that?” I asked.

“What?” He kept doing it.

“Stop that,” I said, pointing at his huggy arms. There was a daffy excited smile that went along with the hug.

Walter heard and came to the door.

“Hey, Carmine,” Walter said.

Carmine stopped the hugging and turned sort of normal looking. “Hi, Walter.”

“How do you know him?” I asked Walter.

“Ah-o-o.”

Walter answered me the way he had answered almost every direct question since he’d turned ten, with a stretched-out single syllable sluurb that contained all the elements of the words
I don’t know
without actually articulating any of them.
Ah-o-o.
Sometimes he managed it without even opening his mouth, and it still sounded the same.

Fortunately or unfortunately, I spoke the language.

“How can you not know? How can you meet somebody, how can you know somebody, and not know how?”

Bet you could guess what his answer was.

“So who have we got here?” Dad said, completing the whole happy family in the doorway.

“I’m her boyfriend,” Carmine said. Then he hugged himself.

“You are
what?”
Dad said in such a different voice from the friendly greeting of a few seconds earlier, I had to turn and check that it was still him.

“He is
not,”
I said to Dad. “You are
not,”
I said to Carmine.

Walter was beginning to gather how upsetting I was finding this, and acted accordingly. “Don’t be mean, Sylvia,” he said. “Loosen up.”

“Yes,” Carmine said, “loosen up.”

“Do not loosen up,” Dad said.

“I used to have a friend who lived in this house,” Carmine said.

“Really?” I said. “Well, you don’t now.”

“Yes, he does—me,” said Walter.

“How did the two of you meet?” asked Dad.

“Ah-o-o,”
they both said; they both shrugged.

It went on this way for a while before Carmine was invited into the house. It was by no means a unanimous decision, with Walter wanting him in, me wanting him gone, and Dad ultimately I think just wanting him off our front step.

“Wow,” Carmine said as he stepped into the front hallway and past the fifteen-pane glass foyer door. “What a cool house.”

“I thought you had friends here before?” I said.

“Yah,” he said, looking around as if he were in a museum, “but they moved away a few years ago. And they never let me inside.”

I whipped around and laid a
see
stare on Walter.

Walter made his other universal response noise. “Huh?”

He was our first house tour. I was thinking about it even as we were doing it, traipsing like a tiny indoor parade through the odd-size doorways, into the odd-shaped rooms, how weird the idea was. Why should anybody else care what your house looks like? Why should anybody think that it was a good and pleasant and entertaining idea to be dragged around and shown somebody else’s bedroom and pantry and toilet? I had never conducted one of those tours before, had never been taken on one, and, frankly, never missed it.

Carmine couldn’t have agreed less.

“What an amazing door,” he said as we slipped from the foyer into the living room. It was a nice enough door—tall and rectangular; bare, scratchy, cocoa-colored wood that had once been painted lilac but was now stripped clean except for some artfully overlooked patches. Nice enough but amazing? You had to be pretty excitable.

And that was Carmine.

“Look at the bite marks!” he squealed. There was evidence all over the house that the previous occupants kept cats or badgers or macaques that were allowed total freedom. It was kind of cool in spots, kind of gross in others. Carmine took advantage of the situation to make a grab for my hand, to comfort one or the other of us. Bless him.

“Want to see a lot more bite marks?” I said.

The hand troubled me no more.

It was almost like we were seeing the house new again, as if
we
were the ones being shown around. Because this was different from when the real estate woman had shown the place to us. Even though it was only a very short time ago, it was very different.

Because it was ours now. It was, already, us.

And it was so very, very much a
cottage.
We were living in a cottage.

I had always connected the word
cottage
with a kind of sweetness, a quaint, temporary, novelty type of structure. I never thought of a cottage as being a place where people—human people, serious, full-size, nonfictional people—would ever live, full-time, all the time.

Neither did the previous owners, apparently.

There was a lot of homemade about the place. The doors to both my bedroom and Walter’s were a lot closer to picnic tabletops than real doors. They didn’t even have knobs but instead had those little kind of garden gate latches that you opened with a flick up of a finger. The natural wood floor of the living room was a darkish molasses color, except for four or five wide boards, positioned randomly here and there. These were a dramatically different blond wood, apparently used to replace old bad boards.

Except then when you went into Dad’s bedroom, across the hall, the floor all over was a brilliant blond wood—except for four or five randomly placed molasses boards, matching the living room floor.

“It’s like a puzzle,” Carmine said with delight.

Dad, I noticed, was looking at it all anew. And with something less than delight. His brow crunched down low over his eyes as he concentrated on what he was seeing, and he started acting like some kind of hired surveyor of his own place. He drew his famous little notebook out of his right hip pocket. And his trusty little pen from the left front.

Walter looked at me, and I at him. Dad was taking notes.

“Can I go to the bathroom?” Carmine asked, the excitement proving too much for his system.

“Sure,” Walter said, failing to read Dad’s face.

Dad’s face, if you cared to read it, clearly stated that it was time for Carmine to go home and use his own bathroom.

He is not impolite, my dad. Far from it. It was just that, even before now we had become aware of what was probably the house’s least charming eccentricity.

The toilet was not the most robust mechanism. You could all but hear it sigh with fatigue and depression when you flushed it.

Up till now it was an annoyance, but at least it hadn’t been a public nuisance. This was the world getting inside our soft underbelly, and Dad would have problems with that.

Now…

We mulled, almost huddled around the bathroom door, as we waited for Carmine to return to the tour. The bathroom was situated at the far tip of the L by the back door just off the kitchen. It was not an out-of-the-way place. It was not a through way. It was not a place we could cut the tour and leave somebody who—despite claiming to have friends who used to live here—did not know his way around.

So we waited. Nearby.

Dad made busy, turning on the loud kettle to make tea whether we wanted it or not. Walter went shopping in the fridge, staring, closing it, opening it, staring. I turned on the kitchen radio for the camouflage of music, but timed it just right for
Story Time,
which they might as well call nap time.

It was all a kind of hoax anyway. We were not trying not to listen. We were trying not to
seem
to be listening.

Meanwhile we were listening our heads off.

And rooting for the toilet.

Come on, toilet.

Walter slid up next to me, whispering. “What is he doing all this time?”

“I don’t know. He’s
your
little friend.”

“He’s
your
boyfriend.”

“I am going to kill the next person who—”

We were interrupted, fortunately, by the sounds of some telltale rustling in the bathroom. A shuffling of feet, a big slam of the seat…

Come on, toilet.

Dad, try though he might to be cool about it, was leaning his whole self in the direction of that bathroom door, like a silent movie guy leaning into the wind.

We were perhaps putting a lot of pressure on the poor toilet to uphold the family honor.

The toilet let us down.

Oh my. Oh, that wasn’t very good at all. The toilet…it wasn’t even all the toilet’s fault in all fairness. That little Carmine must have just waved at the handle, because the thing didn’t even manage its usual sad swish of a flush. It was like it had quit and died right there, with all its steam running out. If you could punch a toilet unexpectedly in the stomach, this is the sound it’d make.

You’d have to understand about Dad, and his privacy, and his ways with people and the world and all. He didn’t go out into the world more than he had to, and he didn’t let the world come inside much either. So something like this, like Carmine coming in and getting
toured,
well, that was big effort for Dad. And the thought that the whole process was kind of jammed up here, with Carmine and whatever suspended in the innermost, private-most part of Dad’s private world…that would be a lot for him.

Dad stood there, anxiously awaiting an outcome. In the bathroom, Carmine took forever, waiting for the tank to refill, then flushing again. You know the way TV kidnappers clamp a hand over the victim’s mouth to shut them up? Dad was doing that to himself. For as long as he could manage.