The Edge of Over There

by Shawn Smucker

  His father came walking down the opposite aisle, and Leo flattened himself in the shadow along the grave, holding his breath. His father still carried Ruby like a baby in front of him, and he looked exhausted from lugging her so far. Her breathing was hoarse and labored, and one of her arms hung limp at her side like a pendulum in a clock that no longer works. The bag hung heavy from one of Amos’s hands.

  “Excuse me?” Amos said as he turned in between two of the crypts, and at first Leo thought his father was talking to him. He tensed up, preparing to run or to fight. He wondered how fast he could move while carrying his sister. But then his father kept talking, and he realized there was someone else.

  “Are you Marie?”

  “I am,” a woman replied, and in those two words her voice was magical, soft as silk. It moved like melted chocolate. There was something deep and ancient about it, like starlight falling through a forest of one-hundred-year-old trees. Leo could barely resist the overwhelming urge to get closer to her, to see her.

  “I need to leave,” Amos said, and Leo thought he could hear tears in his father’s voice. But there was also something mechanical there, and Leo realized his father must be repeating the lines the doctor had given him. “Can I use the key?”

  “I heard you were coming,” she said slowly. “That’s why I waited, but the night came first. I thought perhaps you had changed your mind.”

  “No, no,” he said, and his voice held a lining of fear, the thinnest thread. “I’m going. I’m ready to go.”

  Leo peeked around the corner of the crypt. His father’s back faced him. On the other side of his father was a tiny fire, almost comical in its smallness, yet producing a surprising amount of light.

  But Leo wasn’t looking for his father or even his sister anymore. He was trying to see where the beautiful voice came from. At first, he saw nothing but shadows, nothing but flickering light against the chalky white of surrounding graves that rose high into the night sky. Higher than he remembered. It was like he had shrunk down to the size of a mouse.

  Marie stepped forward, into the orange light from the fire.

  She was a large woman, made taller by a scarf wrapped around her head. It rose in an unruly white bunch and had red stripes running through it, some thick, some thin, like a cobweb that’s been brushed aside. Her ponderous but elegant body was draped in a patterned red robe, light and silky. It rustled in the breeze, or maybe it was the small fire that made it move? Beneath everything she wore black clothes that blended in with the shadows around her, so at times her body looked like nothing more than a red robe floating in the movement of the flames.

  But her face! Oh, her face! She was beautiful. Her skin was the color of caramel toffee. Small bits of jet-black hair snuck out from under her headscarf and curled in wiry wisps near her round, brown eyes. Her nose and mouth were soft and full.

  Marie sighed, and Leo felt the breathlessness that comes when a boy first recognizes beauty in a woman. He felt bashful and curious and couldn’t stop staring.

  “You cannot take the little one, and you cannot take the bag,” she said with regret in her voice. She talked to Amos the same way most adults talk to children who say they want to go to the moon. “It’s no place for a little one. Perhaps someday, but not yet.”

  Amos shook his head, slowly at first and then vigorously. “She’s very, very ill, and this is what I need to make her better. She won’t survive much longer. I have to take her. The doctor said . . .”

  Amos fumbled in his pocket as best he could while holding his daughter. He pulled out a thick mound of bills, holding them tight in his fist. A few of them drifted to the ground.

  “I brought double,” he said, his whining voice rising higher until he was nearly shouting in desperation. “I brought double! I can pay for both of us!”

  Marie stretched out her hand, but Leo couldn’t tell if she was reaching out to touch Ruby or to take the money or to reject both. Before she did anything, she pulled back.

  “Who told you to find me?”

  “It was the doctor. My friend.” Amos’s words came in a panicked rush, as if he was afraid to say too little, terrified to say too much. “Her name is . . .”

  Marie interrupted him suddenly, loudly. “Stop! Do not say that name here. She is a friend to no one, and if she is helping you, the only thing she is truly doing is helping herself. She helped me once, long ago. Helped.” Each time she said the word “helped,” it came out like a curse word.

  The two stood there, the tiny fire between them. Finally she said quietly, sighing, “I cannot allow you to take the little one. You can go if you’d like, but alone. I will take the child wherever you’d like me to take her. I will leave her wherever you ask me to leave her.”

  She stared at Amos, and in her eyes there was a strange sort of power. She looked at Ruby as if she already owned her, as if she was her child for the taking. But there was kindness there too, mixed in with it all, and Leo didn’t know what to think of this strange woman named Marie.

  “There’s no point in me going in there without her,” Amos said in a slow voice, emphasizing each word. “She’s dying. Her only hope is . . . Over There. I can’t leave her.”

  “Very well,” Marie said, stepping forward, lifting her robe, and stretching one of her bare feet above the fire as if to snuff it out.

  “Wait!” Amos shouted, and the whole earth stopped, or seemed to. “Wait. Weren’t you ever a mother? Didn’t you ever hold your own child?”

  Marie stared at him.

  “Didn’t you ever wait with them while they were sick? God forbid you ever had to watch them die!”

  Marie didn’t move.

  “I have nothing to wait for,” Amos said, and his voice was quieter now. “She will be gone soon. So really, you are only letting me go in because—look at her!—she will not be alive much longer.”

  Leo heard a car drive by on the street outside the tall wall. He could see a few dim stars in the night sky—most were drowned out by the city’s glow. Another car drove by, its headlights moving the shadows, forcing them to drift one way, then the other, like ocean waves. After the car moved into the distance, the shadows seemed more eager, stronger, and they reached for the flames.

  “Enough!” Marie shouted, and Amos jumped back a step. Leo felt his heart thud inside his chest. A desire to shout out, to reveal himself, nearly overcame him. She seemed to even have power over the shadows, and for a moment Leo thought that’s what she had shouted at.

  “You must listen very closely,” Marie said while throwing a few small sticks onto the dying fire. She spoke faster, the words blurring together like watercolors. Her accent became stronger, and her t’s sounded like a snare drum. “The Passageway has become . . . treacherous in recent years. Your doctor friend has been sending more and more people in through this gate. But you will find all you need for you and for your little one.”

  “Where are we going?” Amos asked with urgency. “Where are you taking us?”

  Marie sighed, started talking a few times, but each attempt trailed off. Leo could tell she was having trouble knowing where to begin.

  “I am not taking you anywhere,” she said. “I am simply unlocking the door and pointing you in the right direction, pointing you to the Edge.”

  She stopped and stared at Amos, her eyes challenging him to run away. When he did not, she poked the fire and sparks flew upward.

  She withdrew a large key and walked to the crypt Leo was hiding behind. The key was white as a bone, the size of her forearm. She held it by the head. The shoulders of the key were harsh squares. The shaft was long and straight, and there were teeth at the very end, five or six of them, like the skyline of a shadow city. Leo pulled back around the corner, out of sight, and listened. There was a deep scraping, like distant thunder crackling along the horizon, and where Leo leaned against the house-shaped tomb, it felt as though an earthquake shook it.

  There was a loud creaking, the sound of rock crashing onto roc
k, and Leo was certain that a neighboring crypt must have fallen over. Then he heard again—no, he felt—the grating sound of the key, deep and harsh, somewhere in the bowels of the earth, where earthquakes wait to shift and lava bides its time and history goes to live.

  “Be careful,” Marie said. “Take care of the child.”

  What had happened? Leo felt suddenly awake, as if a skin of numbness had fallen off of him. He took a deep breath, and it was like a first breath. He could smell the summer, the approaching rain, the city. Life swirled around him, even in Saint Louis Cemetery No. 1.

  Why had he waited there so long beside the crypt? Why hadn’t he raced in and grabbed his sister or told the woman she was right not to let his father take her in? Why hadn’t he fought for her?

  Why had he done nothing but stand by and watch?

  He glanced around the corner once more, and at that moment the fire went out in a rain of sparks like falling stars. Darkness roared in to fill up the space between the aboveground graves.

  No one was there.

  7

  LEO RAN A FEW ROWS in one direction, his feet slipping on the cement. He sprinted back again. He went out to the main walkway and looked one way, then the other. Marie was gone. There was no sign of her or Ruby or his father. No flowing red dress, no white headscarf, no father carrying a daughter with his arms weighed down by a heavy black bag holding a bowl, a plant. He felt lost, like someone overboard: the boat comes in and out of view as the waves rise and fall, but with each glimpse the craft is farther and farther away.

  Leo dashed back to the dark side of the crypt and looked for any signs of a door, any handles or knobs or latches. The smell of smoke drifted around him, and the embers were dying, dimming. He ran his hands up and down the rough white stone, and he felt it. At first it was only a crack, a gash in the rock the width of a pen, but as he explored it more he realized it had square edges. It was no natural crack. It was there for a reason.

  Leo plucked the lock-picking wires from his pocket, dropping them in his haste, and they made a clinking sound when they hit the concrete. He grabbed for them, chose the thickest one, and went to work. Even though it was dark he closed his eyes, focusing on the point of the pick, feeling what it felt. It scratched inside the hole, snagged on various surfaces, but there was nothing that would budge, nothing that even considered giving way. He pressed it along the inside.

  Snap. The pick broke.

  He chose another piece of wire from the ring. He tried to calm himself, tried to see with the lock pick the way he always did, but there was nothing.

  Snap. He broke another.

  Snap.

  Snap.

  Snap.

  He was down to his last hope. His last answer. He held it up and looked at it in the light—it was a hairpin bent into the shape of a lightning bolt. It made a dark scar against the sky, a rip in the fabric. He had found this particular piece of wire in a church parking lot where he searched for fool’s gold.

  For a moment, he thought about Ruby. For a moment, he wondered if perhaps he should let her go with his father. Maybe she would find healing there, wherever they were going. Maybe the doctor was right. Who was he to keep her from that?

  But none of it felt right. None of it. Not the sneaking or the stealing away or the secrecy. Certainly not the door in the side of a grave. No, his sister belonged here, with him.

  Leo put the small lock pick in, but he realized that the keyhole was far too deep for his short piece of wire. Still, he probed the sides of the hole again, scraping with the pick for any notches, any edges. In every lock he had ever picked there was space and emptiness, but there was also a crucial encounter, when he picked up on the location of the mechanism. After that always came the slightest pressure followed by a reluctant giving in, a release.

  Snap.

  His last pick had broken.

  He pounded his palms against the rock. He pushed. He shouted Ruby’s name. He fell to his knees, leaning his back against the stone.

  “Ruby!” he shouted one last time, putting his face in his hands and weeping. How could his father do this?

  Every good thing was gone. The shadows that lined Saint Louis Cemetery No. 1 gathered around him like pools of black water, bottomless, insatiable.

  Time did not exist there in those middle-of-the-night hours, and whether that was a product of Leo’s imagination or something Marie had left him with, no one will ever know. But if he’d worn a watch he might have seen the second hand stop for what would normally have been minutes, hours. Perhaps he even would have seen it tick backward, reaching to some ancient beginning. And he would have seen the minute hand dance forward, unfettered by any normal kind of passing. This is what grief will do, and loss. Time stumbles under the weight of deep sadness.

  Leo sat there, the stone hard against his backbone, until the eastern sky began to lighten. Eventually he stood, the numbness upon him again. He stared at the tomb he had slept against, the tomb with the square keyhole in it. He saw a small plaque.

  This Greek revival tomb is the reputed burial place of Marie Laveau.

  He stared at it for a long time.

  Marie.

  He turned and walked to the gate of Saint Louis Cemetery No. 1. It was still open, so he squeezed sideways through the gap. He didn’t care anymore if anyone saw him. He could see a man in a house across the street making coffee in his kitchen. Leo wondered what the man would think if he looked out and saw him. Would he think Leo was a boy, or a ghost?

  Leo walked back the way he had come, staring at the cracks in the sidewalks, noticing for the first time how their crooked winding was the same shape as the lock picks he had snapped. The dim stars faded and the streetlights blinked out and the morning had nearly arrived in full when he turned down the sidewalk to his father’s house. He walked up to the front door and walked inside. He did not lock the door behind him.

  Up three flights of stairs to the top floor of the house, to Ruby’s room. There, he fell asleep in her bed and dreamed of her. The two of them ran and ran, always through a never-ending city, always through alleys and side streets and the dark, dank basements of abandoned warehouses. But no matter where they went, there was always the sound of footsteps trailing behind or tapping lightly on the floor above them. When he and Ruby finally left their pursuers behind, they came out into the light, only to find Marie standing there, a stern look on her beautiful face.

  He woke to the sound of his mother coming into the house.

  “Amos!” she shouted in a hesitant voice, not wanting to come inside without an invitation, or at least an acknowledgment. The two of them had created very separate lives, and there was no longer that familiar freedom of simply walking into the other’s house without knocking first.

  “Amos!” she shouted again, and Leo did not have the heart to go to her, not yet. He could tell she was very worried. His father never left the house unlocked, and he never went anywhere early in the morning. He was a late-night kind of guy, one who rubbed his eyes and complained about the brightness of 9:00 a.m. while tightening the shades.

  “Leo!” his mother shouted, and this time her voice had an edge of panic. “Is anyone here?”

  He tried to shout back to her, but at his first attempt his voice came out in the sound of a sob.

  Ruby, he wondered, where have you gone?

  He took another breath, cleared his throat, and tried again. His throat ached from crying.

  “Mom!”

  He heard her footsteps dancing up the stairs. They were light, barely touching each step. She pushed open the door, and there was worry on her face. When she saw him, the worry fled, but only for a moment, because she saw the look on his face and the empty space in Ruby’s bed.

  “Ruby?” she asked. That was all, one word. Oh, the power of individual words, the power of individual names!

  Leo shook his head. “She’s gone,” he said, putting his face in his hands.

  Outside the window, he could hear the birds
singing.

  His mother sat down on the floor beside him. It was as if she had been expecting this all along, and now that it had happened, some kind of unnatural calm (or shock) had settled on her, stifling her. It seemed to take all of her effort simply to speak.

  “Gone?” she asked.

  “He took her,” Leo whispered.

  “Where?” she asked. “Leo, where did he take her?”

  Leo looked up in his mother’s face. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know.”

  “What do you mean, you don’t know?”

  Leo shrugged, an almost indifferent motion, but a solitary tear made a shiny path down his cheek.

  “I don’t know,” he said again. “He locked me in the closet. I got out. I tried to follow them.”

  All the weariness from the night before came over him and he closed his eyes. His mother was here now. She would take care of everything. She would know how to find Ruby. She would be able to bring her back. He opened his eyes and looked up at her. She seemed to be rising up out of deep water, coming back to life.

  “He didn’t take the car,” she said, her voice picking up speed. “Did he call a cab?”

  Leo shook his head and said the same three sentences again. “He locked me in the closet. I got out. I tried to follow them.”

  It was the only thing he would ever tell her about that evening. It was the only thing he would later tell the police when they questioned him. It was his attempt to block out everything else he had seen, everything else that he did not understand.

  Leo couldn’t bring himself to tell anyone anything more. Besides, what had he seen? Nothing, really. A strange woman hovering over a dying fire. His father holding his sister, their backs to him. Where they went from there, well, he hadn’t actually seen anything. He’d only heard the deep echo of a boulder crashing against another boulder, the primal turning of an ancient key. He’d seen nothing.

  He didn’t think his mother would believe him if he told her what he thought had happened, that his father had carried his sister through a doorway into a crypt opened by a beautiful black woman named Marie, probably the same Marie whose name was on that very grave. No one would believe him. He barely believed himself.