Silent as the Grave

by Zoe Aarsen

  Hours later, when we arrived back at the Emorys’ house, my mom was waiting for me in her idling car. The sun was setting, and the warmth of the spring day had subsided to a wintry chill once again. Not wanting to say good-bye to Trey—but hoping it would only be a few weeks before we’d see each other again—I reminded him, “Just come down to Florida as quickly as you can. Get an apartment or something. You don’t have to wait until July anymore.”

  “Oh, I’m coming to Florida,” Trey teased me. “Nothing’s ever going to keep me away from you again.” Not caring if my mom was watching, he kissed me. He kissed me like it was the end of the world, and he’d been saving up love for me his whole life for this moment. When we finally parted, he said softly, “It may take a few weeks to sort everything out up here, though. Wait for me.”

  “I will,” I promised.

  10 YEARS LATER

  Every once in a while, I’d read a story in the newspaper about a family that lost a child in an accident, or of someone suffering unbearable grief after losing a spouse, and I’d take the time to find their e-mail address. I’d introduce myself and offer my services, and usually a few days would pass before I’d receive a reply. Everyone to whom I reached out accepted my offer in the end, even though sometimes a year would pass before they’d reply. Henry didn’t think it was the healthiest of hobbies, but he’d still often accompany me when I’d drive out to meet them, and I’d pass along messages from the recently departed. Usually, the spirits of the deceased would just want me to convey the abundant love they hadn’t had the chance to express before their death. One woman’s recently deceased husband provided her with information about a secret bank account he’d opened in Switzerland that she could access. In another instance, the spirit of a woman’s dead son told me where he’d hidden her Mother’s Day gift in the garage, and she was beside herself with emotion when she found it exactly where I’d assured her she would.

  I never charged money for my services as a medium. In working with a psychic I’d met through Kirsten to try to reestablish a method of directly communicating with Jennie, I got better at understanding when spirits were trying to communicate with me. I experienced an indescribable sense of joy through bringing closure to people who were grieving. Often, I wished that I could bring the same kind of closure to my mom, but I kept my services a secret from both of my parents.

  My hobby was something I didn’t discuss with friends, but both Violet and Cheryl were aware of it. Cheryl had surprised everyone in Willow by joining the police force after high school, and she called upon me from time to time for help in solving cases involving missing kids across Shawano County. Although in high school I’d always figured that Cheryl would end up studying some advanced science at an Ivy League school, she was a great cop. Cheryl had a persistent compulsion to make everything in the world right.

  Violet and I became very close friends in college. She and I had both been accepted at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and although her mother really wanted her to go to Stanford, she chose to stay close to home. Not surprisingly, she and Pete had broken up during senior year, and she’d spiraled into partying in college, probably as a way of coping with the horrors to which she’d been subjected in high school. It wasn’t uncommon for her to knock on the door of the apartment I shared with Henry at odd hours of the night or early morning, drunk and emotional, and crash out on our couch. Gone was the prim and smug Violet who’d arrived at Willow our junior year of high school with her cashmere sweaters and rosy cheeks. That girl had been replaced—at least temporarily—by a young woman with an appetite for every destructive habit life had to offer.

  As much as I suspected it secretly upset Henry that Violet was around so often, especially since he could never forgive her for what she’d done to Olivia, he understood that she and I shared a bond that no one else understood. I was the only person who fully comprehended what she’d had to do to keep her mother safe, and she was the only person who fully appreciated the lengths to which I’d gone to relieve her from the burden of delivering a soul every month. Violet grieved the loss of Trey much more severely than I ever would have expected she would, and keeping her—as Trey’s half sister—in my life was the only real connection to him I had. Sometimes she’d mutter something sarcastically under her breath, and she’d remind me so strongly of him that I’d break into tears.

  Violet had been the one to call and tell me about Trey’s death the day after I’d returned to Tampa. Michael Simmons had left a considerable portion of his estate to Trey, with no strings attached. Of course, Trey wasn’t the one who told me this. Violet was. Mr. Simmons’s team of attorneys had briefed Mrs. Simmons about Trey’s paternity in advance of the reading, and Violet informed me that although her mother was aware by then that Trey was her late husband’s biological son, she’d had no idea about the threats that her late husband and his attorneys had made to Trey’s mom.

  Violet had also told me shortly after Trey’s death—without a hint of regret—that she’d destroyed every bit of evidence she found on her dad’s laptop and in his home office about his request to his legal team to put pressure on Trey while at Northern to donate a kidney to Violet. Her father was already dead because of his selfishness and carelessness, Violet had reasoned. There was no need for her mother to also know that Michael Simmons had been a ruthless bully, willing to resort to murder under the right circumstances. The generous amount of money that he had designated for Trey made it clear that Michael Simmons had never had any real ill will toward his son; his motivation had always been to keep his paternity a secret from his wife. He must have decided when drafting his will that once he was dead, the secret wouldn’t matter anymore.

  The amount of money Trey had inherited would have been presented to him in enormous lump sums upon his eighteenth, twenty-fifth, and thirty-fifth birthdays. He would have received a generous living allowance, renewed via direct deposit on a monthly basis. And any educational expenses that he submitted to the law firm for approval would have been covered by the trust, so he could have gone on to earn as many degrees as he wanted, paid for by Michael Simmons. However, Trey hadn’t stuck around to hear the details. He had politely thanked Lawrence Strohmann of Ekdahl, West & Strohmann for his time, and had walked out of the reading of the will before even reviewing the documentation that he was supposed to have signed to legally acknowledge that he was the recipient of the trust.

  He didn’t want the money, didn’t want anything to do with the Simmons family name.

  But Trey hadn’t turned eighteen yet the day the will had been read. His mother and Walter Emory were still his legal guardians.

  So he may not have even known that his mother remained behind in the law offices that day, and that she signed those documents on his behalf.

  And as Violet told me all of this tearfully over the phone the day she called to tell me that he’d died—she said that he’d never even made it back home after learning of his inheritance. Within ten minutes of his mother signing the paperwork to accept the terms of the will, Trey had collapsed outside on the sidewalk. His autopsy had confirmed that he’d been suffering from internal bleeding for over a week, presumably since he’d been attacked at Northern.

  Just as excruciating as it was for me to lose him, my heart ached with the knowledge that he must have been in unbearable physical pain the entire time he was in Willow with me the last week of his life. Instead of throwing in the towel on helping me break the curse to seek medical attention for himself, he’d followed my orders. Stayed hidden at Glenn’s house. Accompanied me to Violet’s. Participated in saving Mischa.

  In the days following my hospitalization, I’d been deeply touched that Henry had taken a bullet for me. He hadn’t even hesitated; he’d just leapt in front of me. But Trey had knowingly sacrificed his life for mine too. He’d known that if we didn’t break the curse in time, I would have died before the new moon. If he’d gone to see a doctor, that stand-off with Mischa and Mr. Simmons could have had muc
h more tragic results. One thing I was sure of was that if Trey hadn’t been there that day, if he hadn’t pulled the pins out of my voodoo doll at the right moment and trailed me and Mr. Simmons up to the roof, I would have died. And the curse would have remained in play, quite possibly following Mischa into adulthood.

  Of course, what I didn’t realize for many weeks after Trey’s death was that we all should have seen it coming. When I’d predicted Violet’s death, it was far off in the future, after she’d lived a long and healthy life. That should have made it clear to us that she wasn’t going to die of complications from Alport syndrome, whether Trey gave her a kidney or not. Kirsten had warned us all about the rule of three, and while we were destroying the rosebush that his mother had planted, Trey had told me about his mother’s parents dying in a car crash. Their obituary was easy enough to find in the Willow Gazzette. They’d been hit head-on by a driver who fell asleep and crossed over into their lane, and they had both died instantly.

  They’d died in November of the year Trey was born, less than a month after Mary Jane had cast her spell to do harm unto Michael and Vanessa Simmons. Their deaths counted as two out of three terrible things happening to punish Mary Jane for her selfish spell-casting. I didn’t have to reconnect with Trey’s mother to ask if that was the reason why she’d left the house abandoned soon after. A little Google research revealed that her sister had gone to college in Ohio and had never returned to Willow, probably because Mary Jane had urged her to stay as far away as possible.

  She knew.

  She’d known all along that there was still a third terrible thing hanging in the ether for her, but her desire to provide Trey with the life that she believed he deserved outweighed her fear. And ultimately, he paid the price for her hope that he’d one day be welcomed into the Simmons family. As soon as he officially was, the rule of three claimed him.

  On some level, I’d known too. Maybe I’d just been in denial because I wanted so desperately for it to not happen the way I dreaded it would. But in hindsight, I realized the chanting that I’d heard the day we dug up the rosebush and burned its roots had not been tree, tree, tree.

  It had been three, three, three. Jennie had been warning me as best she could, and I’d refused to believe that I might ever lose Trey.

  Many weeks after I’d returned to school in Tampa, when I was still dazing off in classes and wandering the hallways bleary-eyed with grief, Ernesto approached me after calculus and handed me a small envelope with my first name written on it in looping, curly cursive. It was dime-store stationery with little red cardinals on it, and I knew immediately that it was a note from his grandmother.

  “My mom and I were cleaning out my grandmother’s room and found this,” he said.

  I’d been formally fired from my job at Oscawana Pavilion for taking time off so close to the Easter weekend, and then not returning when I’d promised I would. The last few times I’d called Mrs. Robinson’s room, Ernesto’s mom had answered the phone and hadn’t let me speak with her. I had feared that she’d been on her way to the next world. But having my suspicion confirmed by Ernesto felt like a punch in the gut.

  “Thank you,” I said. I wasn’t aware how close I was to tears until I heard my voice crack.

  Ernesto nodded. “She liked you a lot. She said you two had important business.”

  “We did.”

  I waited until I was on the bus home to open the letter.

  Dear McK,

  Your sister’s still in that dark place, but now she’s not alone. She’s working hard to keep whatever’s there with her from escaping. You’ll hear from her again.

  Let your bright light shine for others.

  Your friend,

  Cherie

  Although I hadn’t been able to communicate with Jennie directly since the day at the Simmons house, she’d found other ways to reach me. Every month, a few days before the new moon, I’d come home to find something—a pencil, a tissue—levitating in my bedroom, and I would know what I’d have to do. Online, I’d find a recent obituary from someone nearby in Florida, and leave that web page open on my phone for Jennie to observe. Then I’d burn some sage in my bedroom, call Mischa, and tell us both the story of how I died by falling off the roof at Violet’s house in April.

  Wherever she was in the fabric of space and time, Jennie would offer up the soul of the person described in the obituary in a way that matched my story. Mischa and I would chant the chorus, since I always needed the energy of a second person to “play the game.” And then we’d be done until the next cycle of the moon.

  We hadn’t broken the curse the day that Mr. Simmons fell off the roof. But Jennie had successfully led the spirits to an area of the dark place where she’d been able to imprison them. I never dared to find out what would happen if I didn’t transfer a soul in time. This was simply a condition of my life, and I believed wholeheartedly that when I did die, the curse would die with me.

  It took me a while in college to figure out what I really wanted to do with my life, flipping between majors almost every semester. My father scolded me about wasting time and money, especially because I could have gone to school in Florida at the university where he taught for free, but I didn’t feel like I was wasting either. I’d been accepted to the University of Wisconsin with a generous scholarship after winning an essay contest on the topic of perseverance.

  I’d been inconsolable with grief over losing Trey throughout my senior year of high school. The only person with whom I communicated regularly was Henry after we resumed our morning FaceTime chats. He’d convinced me to come back to Wisconsin to be closer to him. When I did, it felt so normal and right to be back in Wisconsin and around him that I was in no hurry to graduate and move on with my life.

  Ultimately, I settled on veterinary studies because through my work with Brian, my psychic mentor, I realized that I had sympathetic communication abilities with animals in addition to dead people. I couldn’t very well tell my dad how gratifying it was for me to hear from someone’s sick pet what was wrong with them, or to provide dogs and cats with comfort on their way to the spirit world. Being ever mindful of Mrs. Robinson’s request that I be a bright light for those who needed my abilities, I considered it an obligation to help people whenever I could. Dad never came right out and said it, but I knew he considered my decision to go to veterinary school as a form of betrayal because he saw it as my following in Glenn’s footsteps—and in a way, it kind of was.

  Mom and Glenn relocated to a modern condominium in Ortonville that looked kind of like a gingerbread house. While I knew it was hard for my mom to close the chapter of her life that had unfolded on Martha Road, she knew there was no turning back after the second fire. She and Glenn never married, but they seemed very happy together whenever I visited. Glenn was delighted to help me with homework and even let me spend weekends when I drove up to Ortonville working as an aide to gain experience.

  Dad and Rhonda’s son, Stevie, named after Rhonda’s father, shared a birthday with Olivia, but after I’d survived the new moon on which I’d half expected to die, I made every effort to stop placing significance on days of the month. Because of our enormous age gap, I mostly got to know my half brother over video chat after I left Tampa for college. I often wondered what Dad and Rhonda had told him about me and Jennie, or if they’d mentioned Jennie at all, but I figured Jennie was keeping an eye on him no matter what.

  Henry and I remained in Madison after we’d both graduated. The bullet that Violet had shot at Henry had left fragments in his shoulder, effectively ending whatever might have become of his tennis career. On rainy days, he wound his left arm around in circles, bent at the elbow, as if he thought he could ease the stiffness in the shoulder joint if he could just reposition his arm the right way. I wasn’t a believer in silver linings, but his injury made him focus more intensely on his interest in political science. By the time we were newlyweds, he had earned his law degree and landed a job with a firm specializing in civil a
nd social justice. Henry, always the peacekeeper, had dedicated himself professionally to defending people who had been victims of crimes.

  Mischa and I kept in close contact after high school, although once she and Matt married and she had their daughter, Lindsay, our phone calls became less frequent. Eventually, Henry took over the role as the listener for Mischa in my monthly routine, since her parenting schedule was so erratic. Not long after she’d had Lindsay, she had confessed to me over coffee that ever since the evil spirits had kicked her soul out of her body and we’d transferred it back in, she’d never felt completely “back.” That strange feeling of disconnectedness had ended her gymnastics career, and she never had a chance to become Willow’s first Olympian. Amanda, her older sister, had miraculously regained the use of her arms through advanced stem cell treatments, and ended up winning a silver medal for rowing in the Paralympics three years after the tornado touched down in Willow.

  Mischa was fond of nagging me about when Henry and I would start a family. I didn’t dare tell her that we’d been working on that for a while, but for whatever reason, it just didn’t seem to be in the stars for us. Violet knew better than to nag. After she earned a master’s degree, she moved to Europe. Whenever she called to tell me that she’d broken up with yet another boyfriend and was afraid that she’d never meet anyone special and have a family of her own, I reminded her of what I’d predicted for her on the mountainside in Michigan: a long life, a healthy family.