Gravedigger's Cottage (6 page)

“Don’t call me that,” I snapped, even though it was rude and unfair, and I knew it was unwise to yell at crazy people.

He sighed and snorted. “I have to say, you seem a little bit crazy to me.”

Well. There was criticism to pay attention to.

“And another thing. If anybody lies, it’s you. Remember that thing you said to me, about when I wind up as old as you?” He was building up a head of steam. “Won’t happen. Did the math.” Sounded very much like checkmate.

“Sorry, Carmine,” was all I could think of to say.

“And don’t call me that,” he said.

Fine, I suppose I deserved that.

“What’ll I call you then?”

“Barry.”

“Right. Okay, Barry.”

“I just remembered who gave me your number.”

“Who?”

“Walter.”

“Grrr. Whatever. What did you call me for?”

“I called to invite you to a party.”

“Sorry, I can’t go.”

“I haven’t even told you when it is yet.”

“When?”

“Tonight.”

“Can’t.”

“Why?”

“Busy.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Don’t you?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Why not? Why couldn’t I be busy?”

“Because. You don’t have any friends. You don’t do anything, any of you. The three of you just stay holed up in The Diggers all the time. If you did anything, we’d know about it.”

A wave of chilly goose bumps rolled over me, like a million cold tiny spiders running up the front of me, over me, and down the back.

“You little freak. What do you mean by that? And who are
we
?”

“Jeez,” he said, and he sounded far away, apparently holding the phone at a distance. He was being dramatic—I wasn’t that bad. “You know, Sylvia, you really are going to make me start thinking you’re kind of crazy.”

“I’m not crazy,” I said crazily, because he was making me crazy,
“you’re
crazy.”

“I just meant,” he said in that extracalm voice that nobody ever uses when they are really calm but everybody uses when they want to make you go berserk, “that people around the village, because you are new and because the place is so small, people tend to know what everyone’s up to, that’s all. Sheesh.”

“Yah, well I live in this little village, and I don’t know what anybody is up to.”

“That’s why you need to come to the party. So you can start finding out. It’s a community, you know? You’ll be a part of it.”

Should that have sounded good? I didn’t know. I suppose to a lot of people, especially people who had just picked up and moved to a whole new place, that would have sounded very good. Warm, even, comforting.

But I was guessing. It was pure guesswork, what other people might have thought, because all I could feel was what I could feel, and I felt shaken. Community. Community? Did I want that? Was that what we were here for? Small-town life? People looking out for each other? People looking
at
each other?

“Walter!” I called.

He came bounding up the stairs, and when he reached the cozy little landing between our bedrooms, I handed him the phone. “You lied about giving him the phone number.”

“Um, possibly, yes.”

“Why did you give him our phone number?”

“He traded me a bag of Reese’s Pieces.”

I shoved the phone into his hands before shutting myself off in my room.

Party.
Ah, no, I don’t think so.

“Of course we’re going to the party,” Walter said as he tramped behind me through the dunes. Dad, back at The Diggers, had sent us out on a mission to collect authentic decorative sea stuff for his new vision of the home. Probably instead of actually fixing and upgrading and rehabbing stuff he was going to spread around seashells and driftwood all over the place. Which was a finer idea altogether, in my opinion, and much more in line with Dad’s notion of home-improvement work.

“Of course we are not,” I said. I stopped and bent to pick up a pinkish something out of the sand. The body of a crab that had been eaten by a seagull sometime before I was born. I dropped it and moved on.

“You have to start listening, Sylvia. You never listen, you know that? You never listen, and you never think about other sides except yours.”

“Because the other sides are wrong. And…what was the other thing?”

“You never listen.”

“Yes, I do.”

“No, you don’t. You decide and you command and you insist, but you don’t listen. Dad says you’re not my sister, you’re my
in
sister.”

I got indignant. Then irritated. Then a little proud.

“I don’t think he’d say that.”

“Not when you could hear him. He’s afraid of you like everybody else is.”

Nobody is afraid of me—that is just ridiculous. He was really making me boil by saying so. Well, maybe not boil, but pretty warm. That is, smile. I took a quick dogleg down out of the dunes to make a run for the water, completely sure he would stay right at my heels.

“Hey,” he shouted, right at my heels.

But the surf, as we got nearer, was working to smother all lesser sounds.

The first two waves, when we got as close as we dared, down over the gritty dry sand to the gritty packed wet stuff,
pounded
down when they broke like a team,
bam-bam.
It was that serious, emphatic type of surf day where the waves come in madly and then stop short. Followed immediately by the suck back to almost pure silence while the sea and we catch our breath for the next.

It was in these silent breaks Walter tried to fit his case.

“No joking, Sylvia, I think we should go to the party.”

“Okay,” I said, “why?” See, I could be reasonable and listen.

He started to speak, and the waves came, like my bodyguards.

Bam-swoosh-bam.

He tried again.

“It’s a thing they do here, every summer, before school starts. Bonfire night. All the kids go. Nobody misses it. It’s a tradition.”

Now the waves came in, switching sides, to give Walter’s words the impact. But not enough.

“That doesn’t mean we have to go,” I said coolly, picking up a piece of half-decent driftwood that was shaped almost like Nova Scotia. I knew my dad would love that.

“Yes, it does,” Walter said, a bold statement made so boldly it didn’t matter that a whopper wave tried to stifle it. “Listen,” he said, speeding up to seize the space of wave silence as well as my own. “I don’t want to be a freak, okay? If everybody goes to this thing and we are invited to this thing and we have a chance to get to know people and things…” He was shouting now, defying the waves, defying them impressively, I had to admit. “What’s the harm? If we don’t go, that’s a bad start. We can be a lot of things, but
geek
sticks, you know,
weanie
sticks,
creep
sticks…I don’t want to be any of those. We already have a hole to dig out of anyway, with the Gravedigger’s Cottage situation making us look like hermit ghouls, so I don’t think we should make it any harder for ourselves.”

He was overstating things, as he does. We were fine. There was nothing wrong with the way we did things, and if Walter was suddenly seeing things in a different light—a
dim,
unenlightening light—then that was his problem. It was important that I not encourage him, especially on such a silly issue.

I walked on, and picked up the most wonderful dead starfish that had washed up on the sand. It was a beauty, stiff but still orangish, and as big as my hand. Immediately, I brought it right up to my face and breathed it deep.

I don’t know if it is a guilty pleasure or not, but I do know it is a pleasure. I have always held a deep, passionate affection for the smell of old starfish, even rotting starfish. I do not know what it is about them, but they have always called to me, like a siren song—or a siren scent, I suppose—from the sea. And as I stood there with the starfish, smelling it, feeling the oddly rough clingy pebbly texture of its back and its uncountable sucky finger things, I closed my eyes and smelled the smell, felt the beginning mist coming down from the sky and the rising spray coming up from the surf, washing lightly over my face. A seagull flew close by and let out a little scream, and I could not imagine much of a better moment all over. I could not.

I opened my eyes again, and cast my gaze well on down the beach. It was an amazing beach, known locally as the Beach at the End of the World because you couldn’t actually see the finish of it in either direction due to the curving-away rocky edges of the land, the frequency and intensity of the mists, and, well, the huge endlessness of it. We heard all this from the real estate agent when she was busy not telling us about weeping walls and Gravediggers. Couldn’t blame her, I suppose.

I looked, I smelled, I felt it on my face, in my mouth and eyes. You could pretty well deal with anything else if you had all this. And it sure would help things if we could bring as much of this perfect outdoors as possible into our indoors.

My dad was going to love my starfish. He had a net, like a small fisherman’s net, that he was keeping in the garage, and he liked to attach some of these sea-based things to it, like a sort of organic tapestry he was creating. I knew my starfish was going to wind up entwined there, and I hoped it would all wind up on some wall in the house, any wall in the house.

“Hey,” Walter said in my ear.

I had my eyes closed again. I kept them that way. “Hey what?”

“Hey, it’s starting to rain.”

“That’s not rain, it’s mist.”

“Still. Don’t you think we should get going?”

I gave him a blind shrug. I liked the feels, the smells, the sounds of right here right now. Where does it say a person has to go in out of the rain? What is so wrong with rain?

“You should do what I’m doing, Walter. Then you’d enjoy it more.”

He didn’t say anything for a bit. Then he did.

“Are we all right, Sylvia?” he asked, altogether too seriously.

I opened my eyes. And there was his face.

It made me very sad, the way I was seeing it now. His round, round face with the round, round eyes, always seeming somehow to become even more perfectly circular when he got at all forlorn. The moisture in the air taking his longish caramel-colored hair and smoothing it down to frame all around that face. His heart-shaped little mouth, pursing and poking out just before he spoke.

“Don’t you want to have friends, Sylvia?” he asked.

What kind of a question was that? Of course I wanted friends. I was very friendly. I loved having friends, and friends loved having me back. At the old place, at the old school, there was an actual waiting list to become my friend, because I just couldn’t deal with the volume all at once.

I just didn’t always feel exactly up to it. The effort of it. That was all. That would pass. Probably, sometime. Being friends and having friends would not always be so hard as it seemed now. Probably.

“You’re my friend,” I said.

He pinched and squinched his face all up, like he was exasperated with me. He could be a real little old man sometimes.

“Yes,” he said, “I am.”

“Good. Then that’s settled. Let’s go home and I’ll make you and Dad and me hot chocolate.”

He started walking ahead of me. He picked up a decent-sized piece of blue sea glass. He showed it to me. It wasn’t completely worn the way the best sea glass should be—the edges were still kind of shiny and dangerous—but it was a beautiful cobalt blue and close enough for what you can find of sea glass anymore since people got all good and conservationist and insufficiently conscious of sea glass.

“I’m going to the bonfire,” he said to me firmly, and turned to walk on.

Must have been the new house, the new situation, making Walter McLuckie bolder and more adventurous than ever before. Maybe living in the Gravedigger’s Cottage was making him feel like he had some kind of new powers.

Because this was a tall statement. For one thing, this bonfire—well after dark, without any adults present—was not even possibly the kind of thing Dad would say okay to. And that would mean doing it on the sly.

Walter McLuckie was never a sly guy.

And it would also mean doing it without me, because I wasn’t doing it.

“Well, I’m not,” I said.

“Fine,” he said.

Not fine. Not fine at all.

T
ANK WAS THE
I-dare-you-to-kill-this
indestructible pet gift I got from Dad.

It was a dare that should never have been made.

He was a sturdy tortoise, no doubt about that. He was stepped on a good many times, old Tank was, but he’d just suck himself up and wait for the danger to pass, then be on his way again. He ate greens—dark lettuce, spinach, broccoli, asparagus, snow peas, green beans. If they were a little bit wilted, he was okay with that. He had a particular fondness for green peppers which, if I chopped them up really small for him, he would eat with the gusto of a starved dog.

He ran for green peppers. He would smell them from his little nap area, which was a long pine box that once had a bottle of wine in it, and he would just bolt like a thoroughbred toward his bowl.

I may be exaggerating. I may, in the glow of hindsight, in the afterglow of Tank’s afterlife, be making his achievements more notable than they actually may have been.

But he was great. He didn’t gallop, maybe, but he really did charge after his green peppers. He was like a perfect child. Ate exactly the best things without a peep. Couldn’t even make a peep if he wanted to, although he wasn’t silent. I used to take him up and put him on me while I slumped extra far back on the couch in front of the TV. He would climb up my sweater, working so hard, his determined pointed beak pushing on up the mountain of me, then through the tangle of my hair, then around my neck as he searched for a better place to be. Then I would scoop him up, hold him to my ear, and listen to him.

The tiniest little breaths.
Huh-huh-huh,
he would go, right in my ear. Only audible if I had his head basically placed right inside my ear.
Huh-huh-huh,
Tank huffed. I never failed to giggle. I wanted to squeeze him so much, but we never could quite work that out, the proper squeeze.