Things Too Huge to Fix by Saying Sorry (27 page)

Mac stared in the direction I was pointing. “If all the tear gas was here in the middle where the marshals were,” he said, “she probably would have pulled to the curb and stayed as far to the side as she could without getting off the road and risking getting caught between buildings.”

He led the way to the curb at the edge of the Circle, and we turned around, taking in the view as she would have seen it.

“All of this was mostly grass then, right?” Mac asked.

“Yeah.” I inched forward, like I might be Grandma, head down, face covered to keep the drifting gas out of my eyes and nose.
Why didn't you just get back in your car and run away? Stubborn woman
.

Yep, Oops
, I imagined her answering.
Just like you, with no earthly business being out here when you're still half in trouble and supposed to be home
.

“In the videos, people were running around a lot,” Mac said. He started jogging back and forth and pretending to throw air-Molotov cocktails at the Lyceum. He looked seriously ridiculous, but I couldn't find it in me to laugh.

On Mac's second pass, he bumped into me. I stumbled to the right, dropped my notebook, and I almost stepped on metal bars set right into the ground. The steam tunnel grate.
It was about three feet across and four feet long, rusty but solid, and held down by a thick chain and padlock.

I stared at it for a few seconds, then sank down beside it on my knees. This was the right spot. The steam tunnel entrance my dad mentioned. It had to be.

Mac knelt beside me, put my notebook on the ground next to my leg, and then fiddled with the big chain. “That opening is pretty small. Not big enough for a person to fall through, really, is it?”

“A person could fit on purpose if they tried,” I said. “If it was unlocked and open and stuff. Mom was right. There's no way the marshals moved Meredith through these smaller steam tunnels to get him to classes, like some people think. It would have been too tight a fit.”

It was weird, how many times I'd been to Ole Miss, and the Circle, and even the Lyceum, and I'd never noticed this little grate, sitting over in the grass by itself, with its chain and lock. I didn't know it mattered.

I leaned forward and peered into the darkness beneath the bars. It seemed to go on forever, bottomless and black. If this were one of my fantasy books, it could be a portal to some other universe—but this was real life. Likely nothing was at the bottom besides concrete, dead leaves, and rank, stagnant water.

“There's a ladder,” Mac said, showing me the metal rungs at the side. “Makes it even more of a tight fit.”

“There's no way Grandma fell down this tunnel by
accident,” I said. “That's for sure. If she went to the bottom, it was on purpose, and probably on that ladder.”

My mind danced around the thought like the hundreds of fireflies beginning to play in the dusky air around us. Wink, wink, wink—I could sort of see the truth, but I didn't think I wanted to. Not really.

Mac settled on his knees beside me. “Could there be some other tunnel entrance?”

“This is the one closest to the Lyceum, like in the ghost story I read. People said they heard screaming coming from just out front. Dad and your aunt think it was this one too. Besides, the nearest other entrance is nowhere close to where they would have walked to get to Dr. Harper's office.”

“Maybe there were different entrances in 1962?” he suggested. “I know the websites say nothing was padlocked back then.”

“Mac, Grandma was a Black woman who walked into a race riot. Even though Avadelle was with her, that would have gone badly. In
Night on Fire
, some of the rioters saw them and caught them—that's probably true.”

“In the book, GG tells them off, and the two characters run away.”

“But not in real life,” I picked at the grate. It moved on its hinges, just a little. “In real life, Grandma ended up down at the bottom of this steam tunnel entrance, hurt. Maybe the rioters pushed her down there. Or she went down to keep them from hurting her worse.”

I suddenly was too aware of the tanned whiteness of Mac's skin, and my browner tone. Fifty years ago, one of us might have been arrested, just for talking to the other one.

Mac rattled the chain keeping the grate closed. “It's rusty,” he said. “I can pull it a little—here.” He stuffed his free hand in his pocket and pulled out a keychain with a little flashlight on the end. “Use this. It's bright enough.”

Grunting, he shifted the chain, and I was able to move the grate just enough to make space for my arm. I pushed the little flashlight through and switched it on, illuminating the ladder and the stone walls at the top. Dirt and mold clung to the rocks in places, but I was surprised how clean it seemed.

Bit by bit, I moved the light down the ladder, pressing my face into the flaking metal of the grate, peering through divides in the lattice. I tried to imagine my grandmother climbing down, down . . .

The beam played off a rusted, snapped metal rung.

“There's a broken step,” I said. “Maybe that's what made her fall.”

Mac grunted again, and I realized he was leaning all the way back, holding the chain so I could keep the grate shifted to the side. If he let go, the grate would probably smoosh my arm off. I flicked the beam down to the bottom of the entrance, and saw the yawning circle of the actual steam tunnel. Spiderwebs covered it, and leaves were all over the bottom, like I had thought there would be.

Did Grandma fall into leaves like that?

I turned the beam to the walls—and almost immediately, I saw it. Scrawled writing, only it was more like etching, rock on rock, words cut into the stone by some other bit of stone, just above the tunnel floor, as if somebody had done it from a prone position. My heart thundered as I read the words, and tears filled up my eyes almost immediately.

“Dani,” Mac said. “What is it? Do you see something?”

“Yeah.” My voice sounded choked. “There are words on the wall. ‘Ruth Beans was here.' ”

I pulled my arm out of the grate so Mac could let go of the chain, and I sat up and handed him his keys. Then I choked up even more.

Mac rubbed his hands like they might be cramping from holding the chain. “So, definitely the spot—but no lockbox?”

I didn't move.

Mac switched on his flashlight again, and leaned toward the grate to look for himself. He had his back to University Circle, so he couldn't see the cars moving, or the black mustang parked in the spot nearest to us, or Dr. Harper getting out of the passenger side, moving slowly around the car.

Mac also couldn't see my father, grim-faced and glaring, seeming to take up half the sky as he stalked toward us.

Excerpt from
Night on Fire
(1969), by Avadelle Richardson, page 471

My father always said snow falls in the South like an unwelcome guest, that it comes in those secret hours, when darkness begs for dawn. He told me a frozen Mississippi moon could turn cold enough to hide the devil's own heat.

“All that preaching on Satan your mama's church does,” my father warned, “you mark my words, CiCi. They'll call Old Scratch's name so many times he'll show up right here in town, cloven hooves and all.”

When Oxford nearly burned for the second time, I knew my father had been right. Even God wouldn't have been able to sort sinner from saint the night James Meredith came to Ole Miss.

F
ROM A NOTE, STUCK TO
my door:

Since I'm not getting through to you out loud, I thought I might try writing. Honey, why won't you let this go?

—Dad

I wrote one back:

I don't like making you angry, Dad. I don't like making Mom angry. I really, really hate disappointing you. I don't want to disappoint Grandma, either. I know you and Mom and most people think she's already gone, and maybe she is, but I don't believe that, way down in my heart. I think some piece of her's still with us, for as long as she breathes. Grandma asked me to do something for her. It's probably the last thing she'll ever get to ask me to do, so how can I just let that go?

—Dani

When Dr. Harper drove you home with your father night before last, he told you he couldn't in good conscience help you anymore, since we didn't approve. Indri's mother is planning on keeping her home from camp now. Mac got in trouble last night with campus security and his folks for searching tulip beds with his dad's metal detector. The Richardsons came by to ask us if we could get you to stop whatever you're doing, because Avadelle's having chest pains. Is this what you want? To hurt people?

—Mom

I don't want to hurt anybody, not ever. I don't understand how looking into something that happened so long ago can be such a huge problem. And Mac? A metal detector? Wow. That's seriously awesome. Did he find anything?

—Dani

Mac didn't find anything with that stupid machine, unless you want to count sprinkler lines, pipes, and
a gardening trowel somebody left buried on the south end. Do you like that boy, Dani? Is it time for us to have . . . the talk? About boys and girls?

—Dad

Nobody does that anymore, Dad. The Internet and books take care of it as soon as most of us are able to read. And I like Mac as a friend. I don't know if I like him for more. Do I have to know right now?

—Dani

You absolutely do not have to know until you're ready. I'll take care of this with your father.

—Mom

I'm reading this too, you know, Cella.

—Dad

I took down all the notes and threw them away so my parents would stop using them to try to “communicate better.”
I sat in Grandma's room, beside her bed, watching her sleep and trying to write about whether I liked Mac or not, or come up with ideas about where to look next for the lockbox without getting grounded longer, getting arrested by campus security, getting my friends in trouble, or giving the Wicked Witch of Oxford a heart attack.

“This is complicated,” I told Grandma as I tore out yet another page of false starts and pitched it in the trash near her bed. “I don't have a single clue where you put that lockbox.
I gave it to history. I let the ghosts keep it for you
. Okay. What does that even mean?”

And should I even keep trying to figure it out?

I wasn't allowed at camp, per Mom. I wasn't allowed out of the house, per Dad. I had no phone, no computer time, nothing but my books and a notebook, and hanging around with Dad and Grandma. Dad talked plenty enough, about squash and lettuce and aphids and soil mixtures. Grandma hadn't said a word in days.

After a while, I gave up and walked over to her open window and looked outside. Dad was in his garden like always, picking produce and digging in the dirt. He didn't look up, even when I willed him to. He just gardened on, oblivious to all my staring and wishing.

I wasn't sure what I wanted. Maybe for him to glance up and grin and wave, like I was still his baby girl. He hadn't called me that since he picked me up on campus. Just
Dani
, and a few times,
honey.
Mom was still mostly using all of
my names, every time she said anything to me out loud.

“Grandma,” I said, “are you sure we're all gonna be okay? Lately, I've really started doubting it.”

When I turned toward her, her eyes were closed, but I thought she might have been smiling. I went back to her bed and gave her a kiss. Her skin felt warm against my lips, and for a while, I kept my head on her pillow, breathing in the scent of baby oil and freshly washed cotton. When I sat back, I realized Mom had taped two pictures over Grandma's bed. A couple of weeks back, in Creative Arts Camp, we studied flowers around campus, and tried to draw them. Indri's Dutch crocus looked like something off the cover of
National Geographic
. It fluttered on the wall in the slight, hot breeze. Next to her masterpiece, my version of the flower looked like a blue and purple deformed ghoul-goblet.

Grandma didn't seem to mind. To her, everything I created turned to solid gold.

I put my face back on the pillow, pressing my cheek into her hair, and I cried. More than anything, I wanted her to wake up and just be okay. I wanted everything to calm down and get easy again. Why did nothing feel easy? Would life ever be easy again?

There, with my eyes closed tight, my thoughts kept going back to one word.
Ghostology
. The study of ghost lore.
I let the ghosts keep it for you
. That's what Grandma told me about the lockbox. And when she took it away from Dr. Harper, she headed to the Lyceum. Except for the steam tunnel scream
story, which was probably about Grandma the night of the Meredith riot when she got hurt, the Lyceum's ghostology was mostly about the Civil War, about people seeing the spirits of Confederate soldiers who passed away there after the Battle of Shiloh. My mind flashed on the creepy window at Ventress Hall, and the bizarre stained glass eyes of dead soldiers in gray uniforms. I shivered. The whole Civil War thing on campus, all the statues, and that stained glass, and the turret where soldiers and students scribbled on the walls, and—

And then my eyes popped open. I lifted my head. My hand dropped to my jeans pocket, where I traced the familiar outline of the key.

Of course.

How could I—wow. All that digging. The metal detector. All the searching. Every bit of that had been completely stupid.

Ruth Beans was here
.

“I gave it to history,” I said out loud, feeling lightheaded. “I let the ghosts keep it for you. I think I got it. I think I understand.”