I thought he was joking until I realized there was no smile behind it. “No, no. I just dozed off.” I shook my head to clear it. “Here, have a seat. Let me get you something.”
I poured him a glass of chocolate milk. The whole time he watched me with the scrutiny of an anthropologist. Come on, remember me. You must remember me. Not a glimmer of recognition, but it had been a long and difficult day, and then there was the amnesia. With time his memory might return. Still, it stung to be so forgettable.
He dipped a finger into the milk, the earlier coffee scalding obviously still fresh in his mind, took a cautious sip, then gulped down the rest. “That’s good,” he said, a frothy brown mustache across his full upper lip.
I grinned like an idiot. “Well, if you didn’t like chocolate milk, I was going to have to ask you to leave.”
“So it was a test?” he asked seriously.
“No, that was a joke.” And a very feeble attempt at conversation. “So I’m guessing your sleep schedule must be pretty messed up after all those weeks in the dark.”
He nodded. “Day, night. It was all the same.”
I tried to imagine what that was like for him. Probably close to being buried alive and not so different from the stuff of my night terrors. “Can I get you anything else?”
“Yes. There is something.”
“Name it.”
“My father’s lockbox. It has important papers in it. I have to get it back.”
I’d been expecting something along the lines of a comb or a pair of socks. “Let’s worry about that later, okay? You’ve been through a lot. You’re going to need at least a few days to recover.” I held up the milk as if it were a remedy. “More?” Without waiting for an answer, I refilled his glass and tossed the empty carton, but I couldn’t stop thinking about my parents’ conversation. “Adam, are you sure you never left the property, maybe to visit relatives?”
“Yes, I’m sure.”
“It makes no sense,” I said, more to myself than to him.
“You don’t believe me? You should know I can’t lie.”
“Can’t? That seems like something a liar would say.”
“It does,” he admitted, “except in this case it happens to be true. Why the questions?”
“It’s something Rachel mentioned. Forget it.” Either he didn’t remember, or his parents lied to child services. Either way, he hadn’t died. Otherwise he wouldn’t be here, gulping down chocolate milk at our kitchen table.
Nana Jo shuffled into the kitchen to raid her box of nuts and chews. “Pay no attention to the old lady by the cupboard.”
“Nana, we all know about your secret stash of See’s Candies,” I said.
With a look of alarm she stuffed the white box under her arm and scurried from the room.
“So,” I continued, “what was that place where we found you?”
“Neil’s laboratory.”
“Yeah, but for what?”
Adam hesitated. “He conducted experiments with soils to grow . . . things.”
“Things? You mean plants and trees.” Well, that accounted for the garden tools in the shelling shed and the barrels of dirt below. And they did live in the middle of an orchard. “Did you help him with his experiments?”
“You could say that. And he was teaching me so I could do more.”
I detected some resentment in his voice. Maybe being chained to our fathers’ expectations was one more thing we had in common. “Is that why you speak Latin?”
“And Ancient Greek,” he added with pride.
“Okay. I hate to break it to you, but people don’t exactly go around conversing in Latin or Ancient Greek every day—unless, of course, you work at the Vatican.”
“Those languages have other uses . . . or did.” He wiped the chocolate milk from his upper lip with the back of his hand.
Those lips. His time locked in the shelter had not been kind to them. They were pale, cracked, and peeling, but they made me think back to the day of my accident and to what I’d always considered my first kiss.
Okay, so it was really mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. But it was sort of one of those whole Snow White scenarios, saved by the kiss of a true love. A ridiculous romantic notion, I knew, but I was young then and had bought into the whole fairy-tale version of how life was supposed to be. I could not have had it more wrong. The memory, though, as painful as it was, made me suspect that dead languages weren’t the only useful thing Neil had taught his son.
“Was your father also the one who taught you mouth-to-mouth resuscitation?” Oh, shut up shut up shut up, stupid girl!
Adam spluttered, the milk apparently having gone down the wrong way, then plunked the half-empty glass onto the kitchen counter, the ending punctuation to our conversation.
I rose from my stool. “I’m sorry. You must be exhausted.”
He cocked his head oddly and narrowed his eyes.
I swiped at my nose. “What? Do I have fudge on my face?”
“No. I want to see what sorry looks like.”
Okay . . . so that’s weird.
I switched off the range light, but we reached the doorway at the same time. I twisted sideways to let him pass. “Thank you,” he said, his cool breath more soothing than any freezer.
“For letting you through the door first?”
“For bringing me into your . . . home . . . and everything.”
“No problem.” But I was thinking it was a problem—a big problem, because I had the feeling that if we’d pulled anyone else from that hole, I’d have played it smart and called the police before hauling him here.
I heard the twang of sleeper-sofa springs. “Goodnight, Adam,” I whispered, not intending him to hear. Certainly not expecting a reply.
“Goodnight, Lily.”
RULE #7
GET OUT OF THE WAY WHEN PEOPLE ARE GRIEVING.
The sagging lead glass of the dormer window gave a warped view of the street below. The media minions were still there. Some of the faces had changed along with the vehicles, but the scene was much the same as it had been all week. Our home, our place of business, had become our prison.
At first Evan was more than eager to talk to them and did a great job of painting himself the hero. He even went so far as to suggest we try capitalizing on the situation until I reminded him how he felt when his face made front page of the local rag last year after a certain game-betting scandal.
Dad thought all the media hype would help business—Good Samaritan Funeral Home Rescues Homeless Fire Victim and all that—but the reality had become something entirely different. Sure, lots of people were cruising by, hoping to catch a glimpse or snap a photo of “the boy unearthed,” as one journalist coined Adam. But for the most part business had stayed away, or gone to EMS no doubt. Certainly none of us ever imagined the media’s interest in Adam would last this long, and with each day I expected Dad to announce it was time for Adam to move on. Just last night he reminded me “This is not a boardinghouse.”
Of course Evan was quick to make a joke out of it. “Sure it is. This is where you check in when you’ve checked out.”
I swear.
Drawing my bedroom curtains to the chaos below, I started downstairs but pulled up short at the first step. Adam was hunkered in the darkest corner of the family room, an atlas splayed across his lap. The constant scrutiny by police and the public had put a strain on all of us, but none more than him. He rarely spoke, clung to the dark recesses of the house, and ate alone if at all. My parents thought he should see a therapist to help him adjust to life on the outside before he left to live on his own. “He probably should see a therapist,” I told them. “But he also just needs to see what daily life is like in the real world.”
Until he came here, his entire universe was confined to a weedy patch of land where he knew every irrigation ditch, every low-hanging branch, every exposed root. Here, the hazards were all new, from the sleeper sofa that tried to swallow him whole on his second night to Specte
r, the suspicious, ghostlike cat with teeth and claws always at the ready. Never mind the swarms of strangers all clamoring for the lurid details of his captivity.
“Besides, who’s going to pay for a therapist?” I asked. “Us?”
That killed that discussion.
With my head poking between the banister rails, I tried to guess what might be going through Adam’s mind. His memory of us as kids had not returned, so we were starting over as strangers. Part of me, the more sensible part, thought that was as far as it should go. But sometimes loneliness won out.
Like four nights ago when a lightning strike took out a transformer. Maybe it was the intensity of the storm or maybe that was merely an excuse, but I’d crept downstairs with my sewing and an offer to share some candlelight. When Adam didn’t object, I took a seat in the wing chair opposite the sleeper sofa. Utility wires whipped and crackled beyond the nearby window. I wanted to say something, anything, to distract us from the approaching storm, but all my words were logjammed in my head.
Flash.
One one thousand. Two one thousand. Three one thousand . . .
Boom.
At this rate the house would soon be reduced to matchsticks. I snuck a nervous glance at Adam. Back during our days in the orchard, he always knew what to say to get my mind off my worries and troubles.
As if he had read my thoughts, he set aside his untouched dinner. “Want to talk?”
I nodded a little too desperately.
“Hmm. Well, did you know lightning produces heat three times hotter than the surface of the sun but has no temperature of its own?”
Not exactly comforting or what I had in mind, but it was a start. “Did you know,” I said in reply, “lightning kills more men than women?”
Flash.
One one thousand. Two one thousand . . .
BOOM.
The center of the storm was drawing closer, as was Adam, who had shifted to the edge of his seat. Our knees were now nearly touching.
“More men than women, you say. Fascinating—and a little threatening.”
I smiled and held up my hands in defense. “Just stating a fact.”
FLASH. The room lit up for a sliver of a second—
BOOM!
The loudest yet. I jumped, losing the thread from my needle—and my composure.
Adam leaned in. “And did you know the word for an irrational fear of thunder and lightning is ceraunophobia, from the Greek word cerauno?”
“Are you saying I’m irrational?” I pretended to be offended.
His held up his hands. “Just stating a fact.”
“Fine. Did you know lightning kills more than two thousand people a year?”
“You’re a bit obsessed with death, aren’t you?’
I laughed for the first time that evening. “Well, duh, my home is a mortuary.”
He turned serious. “At least you have a place to call home.”
“Adam, I’m sorry.
“It’s okay. Not your fault.”
True, I didn’t cause the fire, but I’d let him down in other ways.
Flash.
Our eyes found each other. Silently we counted off the seconds, and with each I wished this could be his home for a little longer. That sort of thinking frightened me more than the storm. Ten long seconds passed before the faint rumble of thunder found its way to our waiting ears. The storm was retreating. It was time for me to do the same. I gathered my needlework and bounded up the stairs. Adam was right. I was being irrational, but I had been struck before. Not by lightning, but by a desire just as likely to stop a heart. Never again.
After that stormy night I was more careful to keep my distance, but that didn’t mean I’d lost interest in learning everything I could about him. I wasn’t alone. Adam was all Nana and Mal talked about, and Rachel was determined to find something he would eat. The first items ruled out were SpaghettiOs and green beans. He’d eaten enough of those while holed up in the shelter to last a lifetime. Dad kept probing for more information, too. All he’d gathered so far was that Adam’s days were filled with studying, house chores, and futile efforts to revive the aging walnut grove. Even Evan, who was usually too wrapped up in his own affairs to pay much attention to anyone else’s, made it his personal mission to get Adam computer literate before the week was out. That was fine until Adam’s face appeared on a news feed and freaked him out. But we all agreed Adam was an enigma that had defied explanation—so far.
During his time here, I’d spied him picking up the most peculiar objects, things I usually took for granted—a TV remote, a stapler, a pair of forceps. He would turn them over and over in his hands, shake them, sniff them. I caught him binge-reading my father’s old college textbooks one day and flipping through Rachel’s stack of Family Circle and Good Housekeeping on another. You’d think he was cramming for a test on survival in the modern world. Maybe he was.
As I continued watching him from the safety of the stairs, Adam exchanged the atlas in his lap for one of Nana’s old gardening books and began reciting the plants’ scientific names aloud as if the very sound of them was a comfort. According to what little he’d told us, his father use to drill him daily not only in Ancient Greek and Latin but also in such subjects as antiquities, horticulture, and astronomy. And yet the boy could barely boil water. “Zantedeschia. Zantedeschia. Zantedeschia,” he practically sang, and I wondered what the word could mean.
I rested my head against the staircase spindle, mesmerized by his mindless chant, but my traitorous earring clinked against the rail. Adam’s head whipped up. Quickly I pretended to adjust the strap on my sandal, then darted past him toward the kitchen. Neither of us managed so much as a “good morning” to the other. Economy of words. In that we had always been alike.
As I passed the front window on my way to the kitchen, I noticed a stranger outside our house crouched over a rusted bike, his helmet and shades shielding his face from view. I watched as he fiddled with the chain. Pathetic. A five-year-old would have been done and gone by now. He didn’t appear to be a reporter—no voice recorder, phone, or camera that I could see—but he was definitely scouting the house. Chances were good that he was another one of Sturbridge’s stooges. We’d already caught one fronting as a meter reader when he was really scouting for code violations.
When the stranger caught me watching him, he mounted his bike and pedaled away.
I scraped together breakfast, then went out back to tell Dad about the suspicious bicyclist and help him load the hearse. He didn’t think much of it. I figured he was too tired to care. He and Tony had been up much of the night on a call. When you own a funeral home, you work all hours.
With Evan still out on his morning run, it was up to me to deliver one of our recent arrivals—or I should say departures—Mr. Pranav Singh, to the crematorium so my dad could get some shut-eye. Driving was definitely not my forte, but what it came down to was this: I was eighteen, Evan was college-bound in the fall, and now that I had formally begun my apprenticeship under Dad, he was counting on me to pick up the slack by helping with ship-out paperwork, graveside deliveries, and general errands. It was all part of his master plan for me to take over one day, and the only reason I’d agreed to it was that it legally allowed me to work directly with the dead. It had required dropping out of school, busting my butt to get my GED, and skipping out on my senior year. I was fine with that if it meant no longer having to endure the cruel pranks and taunts of fellow classmates. And it made my dad happy.
I snatched up the keys and braced myself to run the gauntlet of news vans.
“Why don’t you take Adam with you?” suggested Rachel. “It’ll do him good to get out of the house for a spell.”
“Sure,” I said feeling anything but. “Come on, Adam.” I climbed in behind the steering wheel of the hearse and unlocked the passenger side. Cautiously he slid in. He ran his hands across the glove compartment, accidentally elbowed the window button, and jumped, hitting his head on the roof as the glas
s slid down and then back up again.
“Automatic window,” I explained. He angled away from it nonetheless. “Ready?”
He blinked.
I instructed Adam to slouch down in his seat and then pulled around to the front of the house. A reporter rushed at us, cameraman at his heels. I sped up but hit the large pothole at the end of the drive and the hearse bucked. “Okay back there, Mr. Singh?” I called, driving off in a plume of exhaust. No complaints.
It was a short ride to Crenshaw & Madsen Crematorium—one more reason we needed to convince the owners to sell to us. Why wouldn’t they? They’d been a family business for nearly as many years as we had. We’d need a sizable loan to swing it, but pulling off the purchase would allow us to put profits into our pocket for a change, instead of into the middleman’s.
I kept to the side streets to avoid crossing the train tracks. No need for more unnecessary jostling. Still, every time we took a corner Adam gripped the armrests like he was trying to wring blood from them. Hey, it’s not like I was taking turns at warp speed. Far from it. In fact, Mallory and Evan were always teasing me about how I drive like an old granny. (I assume that by “granny” they didn’t mean Nana Jo, who had a bit of a lead foot.) It was all so easy for them. They weren’t the ones who’d dabbed face powder and mascara onto countless car crash victims. So yeah, maybe I was a tad overcautious. It wasn’t as if it did our patrons any good to be tossed around like a shoe in a dryer.
Neither of us said a word, and it was okay. Apparently, with the exception of violent thunderstorms, we were each content with the simple comfort of a ready listener if anyone bothered to say anything. Again, talk for either of us had always been more burden than necessity. What we needed was each other’s company.
Across from me, Adam had his nose pressed to the glass. Honestly this part of town was nothing much to look at—abandoned cars, boarded-up houses with dry weeds to the sills, sun-bleached FOR SALE signs. But to Adam it was the new frontier. He glanced over his shoulder. “What’s in the box?”
“You mean who. Say hello to Mr. Singh,” I said.
Mortal Remains Page 5
