Grave

by Turner, Joan Frances

  “We’re there,” he said, a little thread of triumph snaking through his voice like someone had tried tricking him out of the knowledge. “Almost there.”

  “I think so,” Janey said. Just as mild and soft as if he hadn’t left her arm ringed with bruises. “I just wish I could remember what I was supposed to tell—”

  He yanked her forward. Another half-mile down, my feet hot and raw but if I complained it’d just set Billy off, there were the beginnings of another tiny abandoned town—not even a town, really, one of those little summertime beachfront hamlets that was a few houses thrown together, a couple of stores, police station with a group hazard-shelter underneath. People, though. As the trees opened up and gave way to grass and the road became pure white gravel, like back home, I saw the smallest little signs of life, like the faint wing-flutter of a bird that looked dead but was just stymied, half-paralyzed by the cold: bicycles propped neat and unrusted against a shed wall, the raked-up beginnings of vegetable gardens like Paradise City’s in what had been a front yard. A silhouette, just visible in a house window, watching us approach. In the center of what had once been that whole town was a huge oak tree, living-leaved and trunk so thick even Stephen’s long arms couldn’t have circled it, and nailed to the tree was a hand-painted wooden sign with tall, thin, sprawling black letters: COWLESTON HUMAN SETTLEMENT. ALL ARE WELCOME. GO TO THE GRAY HOUSE WITH THE RED MAILBOX OUTSIDE.

  Billy hunched forward, frowning his way through the sign, then snorted like that was just the funniest thing he’d seen in his life. “So cute,” he muttered. “That’s just so fuckin’ cute—okay, then!” His voice rose to a shout, there in the middle of what had never quite been a town square. “All are welcome? Here I am! You frails hear me? I’m here to get what’s mine!”

  A gray-shingled house with a cardinal-red mailbox on a pole wasn’t ten steps away, turn your head and there it was, but before we could go to it (was that where Death was waiting for me, was he luring in more humans in the guise of rest and welcome?), the door opened and a little group of people came swiftly through the yard, down to meet us. A skinny, sunken-eyed man with shaggy hair and beard, half gray and half redheaded just like Amy’s mother; behind him a short stubby little woman, Chinese, Korean, with a Purdue T-shirt straining across her chest and a huge cross slung around her neck. The others, a girl maybe sixteen holding a baby, an ancient dry stick of a man who could barely stand upright, they fell back. Billy smirked, letting go of Janey as he folded his arms.

  “Well, hello, folks,” the red-haired man said. “I guess you’ve read the sign.” His eyes flickered to the dark finger-shaped marks on Janey’s arm, then back. “This is Cowleston, idea of it at least, I’m Russell and—”

  “I don’t give a shit who you are,” Billy said, his harsh grating ex’s syllables a short sharp shock after Russell’s quiet solicitude. “I want something to eat, and then I want to know what you’ve done with my girl.”

  Russell, I’ll give him credit, he didn’t blink. If he were in charge here like it seemed, he’d probably already dealt with so many crazy people this was a drop in the Atlantic. “I don’t know who your girl is, mister,” he said, calm as anything. “But if you think she’s come here, maybe I can help you out—”

  “Does she want to see you?” the short woman asked. Fingering her cross, like that’d help her. Something in me liked how nervous she was. “Because you should know that humans are free agents here. We’re not sending her back to you, if she doesn’t want to go.”

  Billy just stared at her, and when his eyes, his mouth creased up smiling it was like his icy-lakeness broke out in soft, ominous cracks. “A human,” he said, “thinks she can keep Mags from me. A human.” He took a step forward. “A fucking hoocow bitch thinks that—”

  “You leave her alone,” the old man behind her shouted. Trembling, whether from fear or palsy or both I couldn’t tell. “We don’t want your kind here. Get out and leave us alone.”

  “Tina,” Russell said, without turning around, “take them back into the house.”

  “Is that where you’re hiding her?” Billy gave Russell a shove, just a tiny little tap on the shoulder, and that was enough to throw Russell off balance, make him stagger backwards. “Is that where you’ve got Mags? Because you’re giving her back now. You and whoever that was behind the wall, that high wall I can’t get over, this is where I’m supposed to be and you tell me what you know, tell me how to get her back before I—”

  “Get out!” shouted the girl with the baby, it didn’t cry but just stared at all of us with big wide fearful eyes, six months old at most and already it’d seen too much. “Leave us alone and get out!”

  More people emerged from the other houses, the yards: a burly man with dirt-caked jeans clutching a trowel, two women with what looked like chicken feathers stuck to their shoes, a much older woman smart enough to linger near her front door. The man took one look and jerked his head at the women to stay back and that made Billy actually throw his head skyward and laugh, a snarling spit-soaked ugly sound.

  “Go ahead,” he said, to nobody in particular, “try and bash my head in with a garden hoe. Go on! You can’t fucking do it. If you could, I’d be out of this shithole faster than—I want my girl back.” He grabbed Russell by the shoulders, dug and gripped and twisted and Russell’s knees buckled, his heels digging new divots in the dirt. Billy shook him, a dog shaking furious at a rabbit in his teeth. The short woman, Tina, tried to pull Russell from his grasp and Janey just stood there like always, wide-eyed, round-eyed with fear, dismayed fingers splayed over her mouth and I didn’t like this anymore, stop, stop—Billy let him go. Russell swayed in Tina’s arms like the palsied old man, gulped, straightened himself out inch by inch though I could tell it hurt like hell. The others just stood there, watching, just like we were. Because even a dozen armed humans against an ex was no fair fight, because there was nothing they could do.

  “This is a human settlement,” Russell said. “Just like the sign says.” Still calm, still quiet because he was stubborn as hell, that’s probably how he got here in the first place without dying. “There’s nobody here named Maggie or Margaret—we keep a roster, we take attendance at Sunday town meeting. I’m sorry for your loss.” There was an incipient tremor in his voice that diminished swiftly, swallowed down hard. “We’ve got nothing against your kind, but your kind disrupts things for us, so I’m afraid I have to ask you to leave. There’s a good bit of beach, just about a mile down the road—there’s a few like yourself out there and a lot of empty space if you want to be alone. Good woods for hunting. I’m sorry for your loss.”

  You sort of had to admire how he gave that speech, all steady and sensible like he wasn’t talking to something that could gut him with one fist, tear away his face with nothing but bare hands. Talking like he really had any hope of keeping us out.

  I didn’t like this. I didn’t like it and I couldn’t make it stop. Billy smiled, and nodded, and then punched Russell in the face so he went flying and kicked him into a curled-up ball, kicked him again, and some of the other humans were running to try and pull him off and Tina, in the Purdue T-shirt, she marched up and kicked Billy, hard, over and over.

  “Oh my God, don’t!” I shouted before I could stop myself, Billy would kill her and I didn’t want to see her die in front of me. Russell groaned out some warning from the ground but Tina just stood there, eyes blazing, until Billy stopped and looked up at her in amazement, at her fingers grabbing in vain at his arms.

  “The fuck,” he muttered.

  “You get out,” Tina said, and I could feel the heat coming off her, burning up with her own righteous wrath, fists forming at her sides. “You get out, go try and scare someone who actually gives a damn for your—”

  Maybe she thought Billy wouldn’t hit her, a woman. She bet wrong. She fell hard and rolled, like a toy tossed out of a crib, and the man with the trowel couldn’t get a grip on Billy’s arms and now that baby was screaming, it wasn’t a
ny fool, and the palsied old man and old woman on the porch, living ballast, were watching in helpless wide-eyed horror. Billy grabbed Tina’s head by a fistful of her black hair and spit in her face where she lay, a long vile stream; she screamed, and Billy laughed when he pulled his hand away and it was still holding the hair, smears of blood on the severed ends. Janey who’d just been standing there shaking like the old folks let out a cry and kicked Billy just like Tina had, tried giving him a good shove, and she couldn’t make him budge.

  “You don’t need to do this,” she pleaded, so soft and quiet and Daddy-may-I-please-have-this-toy like Don had taught her and I was afraid for her, afraid but frozen where I stood. “You don’t need to hurt anyone like this, when you’ll see her again so soon. I know it. It’s part of the weight pressing down on me, all that knowledge. I know it.” Janey laughed, blonde hair all unkempt in her eyes and suddenly I saw a different person there, someone she might’ve been before all this, ready to bust up with the absurdity of what she was saying even knowing it was all true. “It’s like he said, like Russell said, she’s not here, you have to go further down the road—”

  It was like I saw the blood before Billy’s fists even before they landed, the stream of it sharp against Janey’s skin as it ran from her nose, her mouth, and it was worse even than with Russell and she curled up and cried and I was screaming at him to stop, stop. Humans were running from out of nowhere now, from the houses, the gardens, the woods, a few dozen at the absolute most, they were dragging Russell and Tina away, they tried coming between Billy and Janey and got torn up in turn—I was on Billy’s back now, leapt up piggybacking, fingers gouging at his eyes, trying to get around his neck. I could kill him. I could kill him like Amy killed his precious Mags, like they all killed those Scissor Men in the woods, an ambulating thing dead rotten inside was no match for Homo novus, just let it happen, feel the strength I had to have somewhere inside flow all through me—

  My neck wrenched backward and I seemed to be sailing through the air, and when I opened my eyes I knew it wasn’t right away, that minutes or hours had passed even though I hadn’t felt it. My shoulders, my arms felt like something had wrenched them out of the sockets, popped them back in, yanked them back and forth over and over, and my whole face was tender, swollen, like a great stubbed toe. I couldn’t move. Turning my head to the side made waves of sickness surge through me and I saw Janey lying there next to me, limp and bloodstained like an old rag tossed in the trash. Pairs of feet all around us, threadbare sneakers and dusty cracked boots and two bare, waxen-pale sets of toes, fringe of dirt all around their edges like a piecrust, planted flat and wide apart inches from my head. I looked up. Billy, his face twisted up smirking and more tears rolling incongruous down his cheeks, blotted out the sun above me.

  “I’m done dragging you along, deadweight,” he said, almost as soft as Janey herself. “Rot here with the rest of your kind.” He glanced over where Janey lay, laughed. “Thing is, I think that little bitch was right. Think I know where to go now. And you, you don’t know it but you ain’t never leaving here.”

  The great barefooted cloud covering the sun lifted, floated back toward the road, and the light came flooding back in. It was too much for my eyes and I closed them again, and then couldn’t open them for a long time.

  ELEVEN

  LISA

  So, we got this far, all the way from Great River to the south, Gary to the north, Leyton to the west and Cowles here in the east—all of us, one route or another—and now we were falling apart fighting over a dog. Not even fighting, really—the lot of us weren’t even that much on speaking terms to scream at each other. I’d given up searching for Nick and managed to calm Naomi down and coax her back to the cabins for a nap. Jessie pulled me aside as soon as she saw me, told me what happened in the woods with Stephen; she had the same hard-eyed, hard-nosed look in the telling of it that I’d wanted to slap off her face dozens of times before, while we both were still living. I never did. She would’ve, without a second thought, if the situation were reversed.

  “Your kiddie can stay,” she told me. “You wouldn’t if she didn’t, anyhow. Amy can stay for a while longer, too, her and her mother. Stephen, he’s out. I want him gone by sunset tonight. And don’t bother running to Renee to be your angel of mercy—if it were up to her, she’d kick all of you, including the dog, out of here right now.”

  “Jessie—”

  “No.” She shook her head, over-emphatic like she was trying to shake water from her hair. “Enough fighting. I’ve had enough fighting for ten lifetimes. All of us have. I need some peace and quiet, and there won’t be any with that boy around. I know his type. I was his type.” She laughed without mirth, crossed her arms so her fingers dug gently into her own sleeves. “Russell will take him in. Russell’d take Hitler in, if he asked nice enough. He’s gone tonight.”

  She trudged off into the trees without a second glance. I heard the rise and fall of voices, her and Linc saying things it was probably good I couldn’t hear, and then Naomi slipped out of our cabin, pressed her small head against the side of my leg. She’d heard everything, of course, though she’d been meant to be napping. Six years old, seven, and she didn’t miss a trick, probably the only way she’d lived through that first winter.

  “I hate him,” she said. Her fingers crept to her mouth and her teeth tugged on a hangnail, biting down sharply.

  “He’s acting crazy now, all the time, and he hurt Nick. I’m glad he’s leaving.”

  People used to like to go on about how different the world would be if children were running it, how much better, but kids are merciless when you’ve fucked up and Naomi’s not got much reason, after having the likes of Billy as a stepfather, to forgive it. “Nick’s all right,” I said, and gently pulled her fingers away from her lips. “I don’t know what happened, but Stephen would never just—”

  “He did!” She stuck her hand back to her mouth, wrenching at the cuticles. “He did! He’s—he’s hoo chickencrap, that’s what!”

  She got that kind of talk from Billy, verbatim. Echo echo. It made me sad on her behalf. “Nick’s like me, I think—nothing much can hurt him. And don’t ever say ‘hoo,’ it’s a nasty word for human beings and that’s what you are. Or ‘crap.’ Do you want to walk around saying terrible things about yourself that aren’t even true?”

  Naomi hung her head, shook it. She had such thick hair, thick deep mahogany brown with glints of dark auburn in the right light; I liked looking at it, for its own sake, from gladness that chance had handed her at least one nice thing. “I was saying it about him,” she muttered, “not me.”

  “Stephen’s sorry for what he did.” That wasn’t a lie, I knew it wasn’t, though Amy wouldn’t hear it and Jessie wouldn’t have let her, either. When I prayed she and Amy would get along, when I was holding my breath hoping Jessie wouldn’t have one of her moments and kick us all out on sight, this wasn’t the kind of mutual accord I had in mind. “He got scared, Naomi, and fear makes you do some terrible things without thinking.” I brushed her bangs from her eyes, silky-thick hair so unlike my own drab scraggly flyaways. “You heard what Jessie said—he thought he saw something he didn’t. He thought Nick was attacking him. Like last night, when he thought Nick was going to hurt you. He’s sorry for it now, and we’re all scared, aren’t we, there’s some pretty scary things happening that—”

  “I’m not scared.” Naomi scowled at me, baring her teeth like she must’ve seen Mags do in fights. “I’m not scared at all. I’m just glad he’s leaving.”

  Bared teeth like a zombie itching for a fight, their version of a cat’s hissing and bristling fur, but her eyes were shadowed with adult fatigue and full of doubt. I’m not scared, right? Am I? Do I have to be? And me, I itched inside to tell her she was right, to make things right with a finger-snap and a triumphant smile—that was the better part of my love for her. I couldn’t give her birthday parties, I couldn’t give her Karen’s bedroom and toys and dolls, I couldn’t
give her anything, but that I should be able to give. But in this world, that was just like dreams of birthday cake. I couldn’t give her dreams, just a few years’ worth of hope. Please, God, if You really exist and I’m not just kidding myself, don’t let her figure that out until years away, until she’s already grown up and ready to leave.

  “Go take a nap,” I said. “For real, this time. And if I find you running around the woods playing when you’re supposed to be in there—”

  “I am sooooo dead,” she sing-songed, “so soooo dead I’ll be crying at my own funeral.” And hurried back inside.

  My lips twitched, wanting to laugh; already I’ve become predictable enough not to be intimidating. Would Karen have talked like that? Mouthed grownup words and looked up at me through the veil of them, scared, needing me to—the thought of all the things that could’ve happened to Karen, that first winter, made my skin hot and my stomach twist up with a sick scuttling panic. I marched away from the cabins, each step hard and arduous. Physical effort always made me feel better. Nothing from last winter ever happened to Karen. Karen was safe. I’d keep on keeping Naomi safe. I didn’t see Jessie again, as I descended the ridge; she was God knew where and I was glad about it. I didn’t want to talk to her.

  Stephen was huddled near the shoreline, right up near where the tides came in; he stared out at the choppy gray water with arms wrapped around his knees, chin angled down, the sort of quiet wretchedness that isn’t seeking sympathy or a chance to explain or anything else but a hole to crawl into, to be by itself with itself. He barely glanced at me when I sat down beside him.

  “Funny, isn’t it,” I said, as the water rushed in, slapped the sand like dozens of tiny, sharp little tapping fingertips, then swiftly and quietly retreated. “The lake looks so different, depending on where you’re standing. The water’s bluer over at Prairie Beach... it looks bluer, at least. And the tide doesn’t seem so strong.”