Six Feet Over It (8 page)

A folded newspaper article dated two weeks prior fluttered to my lap.
Tree Kills Girl Scout.

Emily is dead.

Below the headline her smiling school photograph, newspaper grainy black-and-white, unruly curls held back with a clip.

A pine tree, twenty-one inches in diameter and long dead due to drought, fell on the child as she changed into pajamas in her sleeping bag, crushing her.

Awakened by the tree’s fall, the remaining campers climbed from their bags and scattered. Camp counselors conducted a head count, noticed the corner of a bright orange sleeping bag beneath the fallen trunk, pulled the child from the immense weight and performed CPR.

Too late.

She was already dead.

The scream of the chain saw, the rush of air through pine needles, the deafening thud of tree against soil.

In the truck I could not breathe. Gramma and Kai, hefting a gallon of low-fat and a big bag of kibble, climbed up into the cab.

“What’s wrong with you?” Gramma asked.

Grandpa looked up from his Fingerhut catalog. “What?”

Gramma sighed. “Not
you,
dummy. Get a move on; don’t let this milk spoil.”

The road was curvy. I was sicker by the second. Kai whispered, “You okay?” and when I nodded she let me lay my head on her shoulder for maybe a minute. I was just about to cry when she moved her head to my shoulder, murmured she had a headache, dissolved. I wiped her tears with a tissue from Gramma’s bra, folded the yellow envelope, stuffed it and the article into my pocket. At the house I tucked Kai in bed, got her two aspirin and a cool, damp washcloth, and locked myself in the bathroom to cry. It didn’t happen. Too late. Now I was just nauseous.

I won’t survive without you.
Hadn’t Emily said those words to me, begged me not to go?

Every day, all day, cowering terrified beneath falling trees.

I harangued an annoyed and baffled Gramma, “Is this twenty-one inches? How big is this one? If this fell on you, would it kill you? Is this twenty-one inches?” She gave me her sewing tape measure and I found a trunk that fit. Surprisingly small.

I hid in the pantry with the phone, dialed Emily’s home number repeatedly, all hours of the day and night. It rang and rang until a recorded voice claimed disconnection, so I sent a letter, a thick envelope stuffed with ten pages covered front and back in my wobbly grief-penmanship asking her mom to call Gramma and Grandpa’s number. Wrote again and again how much I missed her. Missed Emily.

The letter came back in a larger envelope, along with all my letters to Emily.
No Forwarding Address.

Nothing in the newspaper story beyond the details of her death and the cold final statement:
No services will be held.

I phone-grilled Wade and Meredith, who expressed a modicum of sympathy but claimed ignorance on all counts; they’d read it in the paper, had recognized her photo from the one time they’d met her, and had thought I’d be interested but couldn’t remember what her mom even looked like, let alone if they’d seen her lately or received any phone calls asking for me. (“Who is this we’re talking about? Someone from school?”) My head throbbed with silent tantrums:
Don’t you people leave the house? Don’t you understand other people besides you exist in the world?
Wade was nice enough to walk to their cottage for me and knock on the door but reported it empty, once more listed on the rental market. I begged them to let me come home, but they phone-preached from the pulpit of bootstrap practicality to “Get back in the saddle and just be glad it wasn’t you.”

“Nothing you can do about it now,” Meredith said. “You’re on vacation! Get some fresh air, wade in the creek, enjoy yourself!”

Her delusions about what this “vacation” involved were practically adorable.

“Leigh,” Wade said, stern, when Meredith passed the phone to him, “do
not
bother your sister with this.” His voice was tight; my stomach swam. “Just let her be. Keep her out of it. People die every day. You’ll be okay. That girl was just a friend from school. You take care of your
sister.
Got it?”

I got it. Neither of them ever mentioned Emily’s name again.

I dialed the dentist office where her mom worked. “Honey, I’m sorry,” the nice receptionist said. “She never came back in, left her last check, we’ve got no idea where to find her.”

Calls to the
Mendocino Beacon
staff reporter, the Girl Scout site council, and the school district office all ended the same way.
We know nothing. We’re sorry. No idea.

Gone.

The afternoons in the forest crawled dully into one another, trees crashing to the ground all around us as I stood dutifully beside Kai but not paying attention, sickening images of Emily crushed beneath the trees crowding my thoughts with each earsplitting thud until Gramma’s shrill hectoring broke through—“Leigh! You could have
killed
her!”

Gramma was on the ground trying to lift Kai, plucking leaves and pine needles from the stubbly fuzz on her head.

I snapped out of my trance, helped pull Kai to her feet.

“Sorry,” I said. “What’s happening?”

“Oh, nothing much,” Gramma huffed, feeling Kai all over for broken bones. “Just great big heavy braches are falling on your sister, knocking her over, while you stand there daydreaming. Pay attention! She could have died right in front of your face, my God!”

“Gramma,”
Kai said, head in her hands, “it wasn’t
that
big, it’s not Leigh’s fault, and no one is dying.”

But it was my fault. All of it. I leave Emily for Kai, and Emily dies. I mourn Emily, and Kai is nearly killed.

Wade was right. Keep Kai out of it, keep it to myself, take care of her, or look what happens.

“Show’s over!” Gramma hollered, pulling the covers off me every morning at dawn to chastise my apparent aversion to physical labor and regale me with cluelessly ironic stories of how as a child in the Ozarks, she and her brothers had helped bury their uncle Mike in practically frozen soil and then slaughtered nine hogs for winter meat all in a single afternoon. If it was attention I was after, she suggested, I’d get a lot more by stacking some wood than I would lounging around moping in bed till the embarrassing hour of six a.m.

“What do you think happens when you die?” I asked her, pulling the sheet back up under my chin.

She frowned at me and unwound the sponge rollers from her hair.

“Well,” she said, “depends. If you’ve accepted Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior, you’ll go to Heaven and live forever beside Him in His glory and be with your family and never feel pain ever again.”

Emily alive in Heaven maybe? My heart eased up.

“But now, if you do
not
accept Jesus as your savior in this life, well then …”

“What?”

“Sure as sin you’ll burn forever in the black pits of Hell, tortured and alone. Forever.
Forever.
So if I was you, I’d get your parents on board and hightail yourselves to church once in a while. Now get out of that bed and come eat some of this bacon. Can’t feed it all to Rene; he’ll be sick on the rug again.”

That she and Grandpa never attended church themselves was a weird non-issue.

Saturdays I did not go to town with them. I sat and did nothing, mindlessly picked up Reader’s Digest Condensed Books from the dusty stacks lined beneath the living room picture window, reading them all one after another.
Wuthering Heights. The Three Faces of Eve. East of Eden. Rebecca
’s nameless narrator trapped behind the gates of the Manderley estate. I was nameless, too. My eyes bleary, head pounding, I read and read, dissected the narratives for clues, for secret meanings, for fortune-cookie platitudes to save me from the cement in my chest, the freezing cold, panicked, disbelieving ache for my best, my only friend, and for escape from the depressing Pixley house, silent but for the ticking of the giant grandfather clock near the front door, forever counting the seconds, chiming the hours and quarter hours and half hours. This “vacation” was never going to end.

Until it did. On the last day of June, another envelope from Meredith, white this time and no note, just two one-way bus tickets not home to Mendocino, but to Hangtown, a destination we stupidly thought was some park-and-ride situation that Wade would drive the rest of the way home from. We pulled away from Gramma and Grandpa waving on the Pixley sidewalk and I closed my eyes, leaned against Kai’s shoulder, and she let me for a while until she got a headache and moved to lay her head in my lap. I stroked the soft wisps of hair just beginning to cover her head and told her again and again, over her muffled sobs, that it was just the altitude making it hurt, that once we got home to sea level everything would be okay. It would be okay. It would.

And maybe it would have.

Shag Haircut is practically keening.

The wind chimes swing and I understand it is night, I am freezing cold and numb and Emily is dead. I chose Kai, left Emily alone, and now here she is. Now she really is dead. She is dead and buried in a hole here where I live; she is
here
and I am here, on her grave, in this random town two hundred miles from the ocean, from Mendocino, alone in the dark but for the still sobbing Shag Haircut.
How is this happening?
Many more minutes pass, each one colder and darker, too dark now to see her stone, to read it, but still I stare; she is calling my name, she is calling me—

“Leigh?”

My heart, my heart stops, oh God, she’s calling me from her grave, her cold
grave
—

“Leigh.”

Emily.

A narrow flashlight beam slices through the black. A hand reaches for my frozen own.

“Leigh.”

I let the hand pull me forward; light spills a pool on her headstone—

“Leigh. What are you doing?”

Dario moves the light from Emily’s name on the stone up into my unblinking eyes, does not let go of my hand—

“Do you want to go home?”

I think I may be sick.

“Leigh.”

Shag’s crying is more insistent.

“Okay, hold on, just—wait. Wait here for me.”

His voice is low; he comforts Shag and the sister. He takes them away to the office, and I stay stupidly paralyzed and alone with Emily, on her
grave,
oh God.

Headlights sweep the graves and Shag is past the Manderleys, leaving at last.

Dario is beside me. He lugs me and the flashlight up over the rolling hills of graves. What is he doing out in the dark? His hands are warm in the cold; he stays with me even on the headstone path to our door.

Just be glad it wasn’t you.

Wade’s ignorance, his and Meredith’s denial of Emily’s existence, rattles in my head; I pull my hand from Dario’s to walk instead toward the Christmas lights.

I hear him hang the flashlight in the shed. He pulls the silver trailer door open and maybe my vacant, ashen face makes him step wordlessly aside so I can zombie in to stand and say nothing for a long while.

I sit. At his tiny kitchen table. Freezing. Still I do not talk, and neither, blessedly, does Dario. What he does do is crank up a space heater (thanks, Wade) all the way to ten and start pulling things from kitchen cabinets. He heats a saucepan, and a while later puts a steaming cup,
I heart California,
in front of me. My frozen throat is killing me. I take a sip, push the cup away. He moves it back.

“Just drink it.”

“Tastes weird.”

“No, it doesn’t.
Champurrado.
It’s just chocolate.” He steps back to the counter, keeps his distance, moves dishes around. I breathe steam rising from the cup, lay my head on my arms, wonder vaguely if I will ever be anything but tired. If I will ever remember how to sleep.

Sleep, rest of nature, O sleep, most gentle of the divinities, peace of the soul …
Oh my God, shut up, Ovid, shut up, shut up—

Too cold, too stupefied to remember to hate him, I am grateful for Dario’s silence, and so I try another sip. This is
not
chocolate. Or at the very least is not the Ovaltine Meredith makes. I wrap my freezing hands around the hot cup and watch him rinse off a chopping board, wash a glass blender, wrap a disk of black chocolate in waxy paper and return it to the cupboard. He folds over the top of an open bag of cornmeal and screws the lid onto what may be a jar of anise seed, which I suspect only because for years I have watched Gramma dump tons of it into the Thanksgiving stuffing. He is fastidiously tidy. I breathe in more steam and sip once more. Molasses. Anise. But still, somewhere in there—chocolate. A longer swallow, and another.

I watch Dario, wait for him to launch into a big patronizing lecture about what the hell was I doing, poor Shag Haircut, and by the by, what is my problem, why do I avoid him, am I mad at him or what? But nothing. He says nothing. The scene is so melodramatic and embarrassing I can hardly believe it, but I am still too cold and numb to knock it off. He wipes the counter with a green sponge, tips the steaming saucepan into another cup for himself,
NPR Pledge Drive Volunteer,
sits opposite me at the little table and drinks. I drink. The space heater clicks off, then three minutes later it comes back on.