Shallow Graves

by Kali Wallace

  My scientific report on my own apparent mortality stops midsentence. I told myself as I was writing that I found my own affected detachment silly and mildly embarrassing, the same way it became embarrassing to play make-believe with friends long after you knew it wasn’t real but long before you were ready to admit it wasn’t fun anymore.

  I keep my notes in an ordinary seventy-page wide-ruled spiral notebook. On the cover is the NASA seal and a picture of the space shuttle Discovery. I’ve had it since the summer after sixth grade, when I wrote an essay about what space exploration means for the future of humanity and won a trip to a two-week space camp in Houston. They gave us the notebooks on the first day, but I never used mine except to write my name inside the front cover: BREEZY LIN, ASTRONAUT, in outrageously bold block letters. I didn’t want to ruin the rest of the clean empty pages with my looping childish handwriting. They gave us NASA pens too, which didn’t even last the full two weeks, and pins and stickers and patches to iron onto our backpacks.

  When I got home from space camp I put the notebook in my desk and forgot about it. After I woke up in my backyard grave and went home, it was still there, sitting at the bottom of the drawer beneath a pile of birthday cards and postcards, notes Melanie and I had traded during ninth grade geometry, bad poetry and embarrassing lovesick letters sent to me by a persistent crush. The notebook and a pen were the only things I took from my room when I left. Nobody would miss it.

  On the first page there are a couple of blank lines below the paragraph, then:

  I’ve been missing for one year. I woke up buried in somebody’s backyard.

  I don’t remember dying.

  I don’t remember.

  NINE

  THE LIST IS on the next page.

  1. Sleeping pills

  An entire bottle, choked down in several handfuls. In retrospect, it was a pretty stupid thing to try. If you can’t sleep when you’re dead, you definitely can’t sleep deeply enough to never wake up.

  That’s also how I discovered that all of the things I had learned in anatomy class about the digestive tract being controlled by the autonomic nervous system didn’t apply to me anymore. I can make myself breathe, can make my heart beat, but I haven’t quite figured out how to make myself digest what I swallow. It sloshes around in my stomach until I make myself throw it up. My gag reflex works just fine.

  2. Drowning

  Lake Michigan is right there. I entertained brief and undignified thoughts about a future as a deep-sea treasure hunter while I was beneath the surface, but otherwise suffered no ill effects.

  3. Rat poison

  Our neighbor Mrs. Feely left her garage open one night. Same result as the sleeping pills, only with more self-induced vomiting.

  4. Gunshot

  Heart, not head. The biggest risk was the number of houses I sneaked into before I found a loaded weapon in somebody’s bedside drawer. I was trying to be undiscriminating in my search, but it turned out the middle-aged white guy with the pickup truck and the racist antigovernment bumper stickers did not responsibly lock his weapons in a safe. I was so shocked.

  5. Electrocution

  It only occurred to me afterward that if I hadn’t picked the right spot, completely by chance, I would have given some train operator or security guard a heart attack. I ruled out public locations after that.

  6. Hanging

  Boring. Also: hard to get down once I was dangling there.

  7. Stabbing

  Bathtub, kitchen knife. I knew by then nothing was going to work.

  I couldn’t die. No matter what I did, the wounds healed. They hurt, every single one, pain like I had never felt before. They bled, they burned, they left scars. But they healed. The list was pointless, but it was all I had. I didn’t have any answers. I didn’t even have the right questions. All I had was data, and all the data told me was that sometime between the moment I had died and the moment I woke up, I had become something unnatural, something not alive but not dead either, and I wasn’t going to figure it out sticking knives in my stomach and watching my blood trickle down the drain.

  TEN

  THE OLD WOMAN’S name was Helen and she insisted I let her buy me another cup of coffee. I smiled shyly and sat with my backpack in my lap, my skateboard leaning against the side of the plastic booth. I told them the story about the irresponsible roommate and the change of plans. I only needed a place to get cleaned up, I said, and a ride to the nearest Greyhound station.

  They made the appropriate noises of sympathy and agreed that while they didn’t know anybody who attended that church—they were Methodists, you see, and went to First Methodist on Grove Drive when they went to church at all—Pastor Willow at the Church of the Prairie sure seemed like the right person to ask for help.

  “We’ll get you set right up, Katie,” said Helen. “Don’t you worry.”

  Katie was the name of Melanie’s older cousin, the one who had run off years ago to be a jazz musician in New Orleans and stayed after Hurricane Katrina to rebuild houses for charity groups. The real Katie was tall with dyed red hair and had a voice like an alcoholic gospel singer.

  “I don’t want to be any trouble,” I said. That was the only protest I offered. I had willingly gotten into the car with a murderer the day before, just to see what would happen. I wasn’t worried about accepting help from strangers.

  Helen patted my hand and volunteered to make the call when I admitted I didn’t have a phone. Her skin was liver spotted but her touch was warm, and I let myself be reassured. For two weeks I had been on my own with my secrets. It was a relief to have somebody else take over, if only for a little while.

  Even if she was a killer.

  Helen couldn’t hurt me. Her frail old shadows barely felt like guilt at all.

  Her car was a boatlike brown Buick that coughed and trembled. We drove north out of town, away from the highway, until there was nothing but muddy fields striped with young crops as far as I could see. Helen never pushed the car above forty-five. We made awkward small talk during the long, slow drive. She was happy enough to chatter about her children and grandchildren who were coming to visit in a few weeks, even though they always complained there was nothing to do in Nebraska in the summer. Riding bikes and climbing trees in the sunshine and fresh air wasn’t good enough for kids anymore, not like it had been when she was young.

  She didn’t mention a husband. I wondered if he was who she had killed.

  The better part of an hour passed before Helen slowed the car and said, “Here we are.”

  The sign beside the road announced the Church of the Prairie in bold white letters, and below that: “Jesus is help in times of hardship. Sun Service AM,” but there was no time specified. There was a cross atop the sign, the name and number of a Bible verse painted on the wooden frame.

  Helen put on her blinker and turned off the road, over a culvert running with rainwater, and into a gravel parking lot. The church was a boxy wooden building, topped with an old-fashioned spire, white paint peeling and faded. Beside the church the heads of white crosses and gray headstones peeked above the grass. An old man stood at the edge of the cemetery, shoulders hunched in a blue jacket, head bowed beneath a brown fisherman’s hat.

  Next to the cemetery was a small playground wrapped in a chain-link fence. The structures were metal, rusted, paint falling away in patches, and the swing set was crooked, as though half its double A-frame was sitting on quicksand. Two kids kicked on the swings in the rain. A woman in a red raincoat watched them from beneath a black umbrella. She turned as we passed, but she didn’t wave. Her face was shadowed by the hood of her jacket.

  At the end of the muddy driveway was the farmhouse and barn, both surrounded by a quivering cluster of cottonwood trees. The house was desperately yellow, weathered, as badly in need of fresh paint as the church. The windows on its upper stories looked toward the road like twin rows of eyes. Small purple flowers poked out of the wood-chip mulch in front of the porch.

&nbs
p; “Oh,” I said. I swallowed and rubbed my palms over my knees. “It looks nice.”

  It was anything but nice. It was bleak and cold and unwelcoming. It was the ugliest shade of yellow I had ever seen.

  There was nothing nearby. No other houses, no farm buildings. I couldn’t even remember when Helen and I had last passed another car on the road. My heart was thudding and I felt a nervous twist in my gut. I wanted to tell Helen to turn the car around and take me away.

  She parked in front of the house, but she didn’t turn off the engine. “This is the place. They’re expecting you.”

  I hesitated before putting my hand on the door handle. “It’s kind of in the middle of nowhere, isn’t it?”

  “Right in the heart of God’s country.” Helen’s smile was brief and watery. “Go on. No need to be shy.”

  I forced myself to return to smile and thanked her for the ride. I ducked into the rain and jogged to the front porch of the house.

  As I climbed the porch steps, the door opened.

  “There you are!”

  The girl in the doorway wore a long flower-print dress with an old-fashioned lace collar, and her red hair was split into twin braids over her shoulders. She could have been cosplaying Little House on the Prairie, but I had a feeling this wasn’t dress-up. She was in her twenties, fresh faced and pretty in a forgettable way, except for her astonishing green eyes. The color was so startling I wondered if it might be contacts.

  “Hi,” I said. Behind me Helen was already leaving. I fought the urge to run after her.

  “You must be Katie,” the girl said. She waved at Helen, received a brief horn tap in response. “Pastor Willow said you were on your way. Lunch is just about ready.”

  Then she smiled, and I nearly missed the last step.

  I recognized her. I had seen that smile before.

  My mind flicked through school and camp and summer, but nothing fit. I knew I had seen her before, that smile and that pretty red hair, the freckles across her nose and those green eyes, but I couldn’t remember when or where.

  “Yeah, I’m Katie,” I said. For the first time since I had left Evanston, I felt guilty about lying to a stranger.

  “I’m Violet,” she said. She stepped aside to let me in. “I hope you like potato and cheese soup. I know it’s more of a winter food, but it’s so gloomy today I thought it was right. Come on in.”

  The front hall of the house was just as virulently yellow as the outside. The walls were papered with an alarmingly cheerful sunflower pattern, and an array of photographs in white frames marched in neat lines down the hallway and up the stairs. There were dozens of photos, more than I could count.

  “Those are all the people Mr. Willow has helped,” Violet said. “We keep the pictures around to remind ourselves how important our work is.”

  “Wow. There are a lot of them,” I said.

  Some of the photographs were old, with faded colors and fashions right out of the seventies or eighties, but most were more recent. They were all posed portraits of men and women looking toward the camera, but rarely directly at it, distracted, their minds elsewhere in spite of the photographer’s best efforts. Some were smiling vacantly; most weren’t.

  “Mr. Willow has been helping people for a long time,” Violet said. “That’s him and his father.”

  She pointed to a photograph of a broad, unsmiling bear of man in a winter coat, standing beside a much skinnier teenage boy in corduroy and a patterned button-down, with a tragic bowl haircut and a vague frown.

  “His father founded our congregation,” she explained. “It’s a very sad story, but Mr. Willow always says that adversity is an opportunity for us to learn our true strength.”

  The men in the photo weren’t touching. They didn’t look much like father and son. In the corner somebody had written the date: 1973.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  Violet’s smile softened. She wasn’t a killer. She had no shadows clinging to her. Her smile was so light, her expression so kind, I wondered if they would even dare. “It’s better that he tells you. Do you want to get cleaned up before lunch?”

  “I guess I should. Do I really look that bad?”

  “You can do laundry too,” she said with a laugh. “I have some clean clothes you can borrow. I’m glad you’re here. It’s been so quiet this week. Usually there are a lot more of us. Oh, here’s Esme. Say hi, Esme.”

  In the front room there was a woman sitting in a wheelchair with a blanket folded over her knees. Her face was slack and she was thin in a wasted, unhealthy way, and she had a faint scar stretching from the corner of her eye down to her chin. Her shoulders hunched under a threadbare bathrobe and her hands were clenched on the arms of the chair. There was a towel tucked into the collar of her shirt; somebody had covered her up to help her eat but had forgotten to take it away when they were done.

  The woman turned her head when Violet said her name. She stared at me, her wide brown eyes unblinking, until I looked away.

  “She’s a little shy,” Violet said, and she smiled again, that same friendly smile, and I remembered where I had seen her before.

  Not in person. We had never met.

  But I had seen her face and her smile, and I had heard her voice.

  That’s what I remembered most clearly: the sound of her voice when she screamed.

  ELEVEN

  EVERY YEAR SINCE first grade, Diane Fordham invited a group of us over for her birthday party at the end of the summer, and every year I went to her big white house with a gift in hand. The inside of the house was just as white as the outside: white sofas, white carpet, white walls, white artwork in white frames. The only thing in the living room that wasn’t white was the cross on the wall, about six inches long, plain polished wood hanging above the white fireplace.

  I hated walking through that living room to the stairs. I worried I would leave tracks on the carpet and Diane’s mother and father—a tall stern couple who worked for an investment firm—would look down their thin noses and scold me for bringing dirt into their home. It felt like a test, crossing that white living room, and I never exhaled until I reached the stairs and the relative safety of Diane’s second floor family room. All through the night we would make excursions to the kitchen for snacks and soda, to the front door when we ordered pizza, but we were always quick, always careful, and every single time Diane said, “Don’t spill anything.” Every time. She had been hearing it her entire life; she blurted it out without thinking.

  It was fun when we were little, that yearly sleepover with so little supervision, but Diane and I grew apart as we grew older, and her birthday party became a tiresome obligation. The rest of us changed, started caring more about sports and boys and music and college and the future, but Diane was still Diane, with her bedroom of girly ruffles and lace in that albino mausoleum of a house.

  The August before our sophomore year of high school, the invitation came like it always had: a pink card in a square pink envelope, my name and address written in Diane’s curling cursive. My mother had left it on my bed with a copy of Scientific American and another letter in a regular white envelope. I recognized the handwriting on that one too. I set it aside without opening it. I already had a collection of Ricky Benning’s awkward notes and terrible poetry in my desk drawer. Melanie thought it was hilarious, and at first I had agreed, secretly pleased to be the object of somebody’s attention, even a loser like Ricky Benning, but now it was only embarrassing.

  I opened Diane’s invitation and called Melanie.

  “I can’t believe she invited you,” Melanie said, laughing. “I thought for sure you’d be off the list this year. You have a reputation now.”

  I was lying on my bed in my basement bedroom. The day was hot and sticky, but the basement was always cool, even through the long summer afternoons. The glow-in-the-dark sticker stars on my ceiling were faint yellow smudges against the off-white paint. Melanie’s words stung, but I wasn’t about to let her know. I remember
ed my aunt Colleen giving me a warning a few years before, as we were fixing Thanksgiving dinner. Colleen had said, “You have to be careful, Breezy. I know it doesn’t seem like a big deal now, but nobody ever cares about having a reputation until they’ve got a bad one.”

  Melanie loved that I had a bad reputation now, but she hated it too. She hated that there were things I had done before her, without her help, without her input. Her jealousy was petty, needlelike, deployed at unpredictable moments. I didn’t have any defenses against it. Not against Melanie. Not against my best friend. All I had was the naive hope that after three months of summer nobody would care any more about the rumors that had raced around before the end of the school year. Mostly true, but not completely: I did have sex with Michael Chaffert, my first time and he knew it, but I didn’t know he had a girlfriend at the time, and I definitely didn’t beg him to introduce me to all his friends for a whole summer of repeat performances. I don’t think anybody even believed that last part; everybody knew Michael couldn’t tell the truth about girls or sex if his life depended on it. But what they believed and what they laughed about were two different things.

  After a few weeks I had realized that denying Michael’s version of events wasn’t making any difference, so I chose another tactic. I told anybody who mentioned it that fucking Michael had been the dullest three minutes of my life and I couldn’t even be sure it had happened at all, that’s how little I felt, emphasis on the little. Maybe it wasn’t in line with Aunt Colleen’s well-meaning advice, but I had decided, as soon as ninth grade ended, that it was better to be scornful than shamed.

  It didn’t matter anyway, not after Cherie Kostova turned up drunk on the first day of school and wrecked her car on the third, and not after a junior named Samantha French announced that he was now Samuel French and the teachers and counselors scrambled to put together sensitivity groups and stumbled over pronouns, not after Lindy Oliver went off her meds and threw a chair across the room during Mr. Park’s class discussion about Ethan Frome. There was always somebody doing something more shocking, more outrageous, more interesting. I was completely irrelevant by the time our sophomore year began.