Grave

by Turner, Joan Frances

  “I’m not a Christian,” I said. I just knew she’d be trying that next. “So forget it.”

  “My church’s founder, a hundred and... forty-seven years ago? Forty-eight?” Off to the races. Billy should’ve hit her harder when he had the chance. “Now that’s just sad, I was on the board’s sesquicentennial committee at one point and now I don’t even remember—Mother Anne Brown, our first prophet, she said, that verse wasn’t just poetics, that stones have life inside them, they pulse, they sing—”

  “Like bones,” Janey said.

  We all looked at her, surprised, because she actually sounded like she was right here and not somewhere planets removed. “A skeleton’s a symbol of death,” she said. “Bones look like white stones, or dead branches, like they prop you up inside and that’s all. But they have marrow inside them, blood vessels. While we’re alive, they’re living too.” She stuck out her forearm, examined the bumps and divots of elbow, wristbones, knuckles. “Like a piece of those rocks, inside us. Or like the rocks are living tissue too. We just haven’t gotten to their marrow.”

  Was she trying to tell us something? Trying to say she’d always known more than she ever let on? I stared at her hard, trying the silent intimidation that sometimes worked with her back in Paradise, I couldn’t say right out what I was thinking because there were too many humans here to hear it, but those others buoyed her up and circled her protectively without realizing they did it, their presence guarded her and gave her ammunition against me. Like Stephen, Lucy, Lisa kept me away from Amy, if it’d been just the two of us it would’ve been so different. Tina was smiling and smiling at Janey like she’d just found some extra Jesus behind the pickles in the pantry.

  “You’ve read her work!” Tina said. “Meditations Upon the Illusion We Call Death. You never said.”

  Janey shook her head. “But I haven’t. Don always said—”

  “The stones sing,” Tina kept on, oblivious, excited, “when they start to show their life, when they grow hot as human skin and tremble in a person’s hand. When you can start feeling the presence of that marrow.” Two little spots of color showed on her cheeks, beneath the long streaking bruise Billy had left behind. “But the true song is only sung when they split open, when they spill their marrow onto the—”

  “Ow! Dammit!”

  It was like the stones in my palm had been listening to Tina, like everything everywhere was in on its own joke and ignoring me—they’d grown hot as my blood while Tina jabbered and babbled, and then hotter, until I was holding live coals and my fingers flew open of their own accord, the stones clattering to the ground beneath all our feet. Stephen reached down and snatched one up before I could stop him, dropped it again swearing, and I dove into the dirt—neck hurt, back hurt, even my bones felt spongy and horrible—and snatched them both back up before I could think about it, before I could hesitate because my nerves remembered pain. I wasn’t afraid of pain, not after all the times they’d given it to me. My fingers, my whole hand curled up tense and tight with the effort of not dropping them again, sweat broke out on my forehead and just as I couldn’t stand it anymore, as I was shaking and feeling like I’d be sick or scream, both the lake stones split open there in my palm.

  The stone pieces were cool again, as though great gusts of steam building up inside them had been released, and something sticky and sugary was oozing from them, a warm little stream of ink or tar. The color turned to molasses as it hit the air, blackstrap, then sorghum, and then it dried up and went grainy within seconds so I was holding a handful of brown sugar, gritty yet soft. Brown sugar, or sand. It almost seemed to hum to itself, the stuff in my hand, and the skin it touched was soothed, cooled, quietly humming too.

  The singing sand streamed from between my fingers, like it were water flowing through the cracks, and scattered on the ground. The hollow stone shells were all I had left.

  The old woman, the one I wouldn’t look in the eye because I was sure she was just here to spy for the neighbors, maybe check on the old man who might be her husband if she could spare five seconds, she put a hand to her mouth and made a sound full of dismay, but not surprise. Maybe she was in Tina’s crazy cult too. Stephen and Russell, they just looked confused, but Tina’s eyes were hard and suspicious in a way I’d never seen before, that made me want to laugh. Didn’t take much for you to drop the mask, did it, Sister Superior? I know your kind. Everybody knows your kind.

  “Is this a joke?” she demanded.

  Janey and the old woman kept staring, staring at me, until I could’ve slapped them both, and Russell reached over and patted Tina’s shoulder with a calm I could tell he didn’t feel. “Let it go, Tina,” he said. “This isn’t the worst stunt by far anyone who’s come here ever pulled—”

  “I don’t think this is funny.” Tina had recovered herself, a little, she’d jammed that mask of willful good cheer firmly back in place, but the flush-spots were back on her cheeks and her mouth kept giving her away, twisting and curling into angrier shapes. “I don’t expect you to share my beliefs, we’ve never proselytized—Russell’s an atheist, you can ask him—but a little simple respect isn’t too much to—”

  “Is it a trick?” Stephen had left his perch and was squatting in the dirt, fascinated, a chicken trying to scratch up some elusive, marvelous species of grub. His fingers sifted through the earth, prospecting, but he couldn’t retrieve any of the stony singing sand. He looked up at Tina, frowning, like she’d been holding out on us all. “So if you’re me and you never believed any of that, and just saw it happen anyway, what does it mean?”

  “It’s not a trick.” The old woman was on her feet, painfully, struggling upright with the help of a splintering porch pillar and waving off Russell as he jumped up to help. “It’s not a trick, or a joke. Is it, Natalie?”

  I hadn’t told her my name. Someone else, Russell, he must’ve, but I somehow felt like he hadn’t and nobody had and the old woman’s voice was such a ruined thing, rasping and ill, like it was a delicate rare metal and just to be vicious someone had pounded it thin, twisted it into an ugly shape, left it out in the heat and rain to corrode. And it was familiar. Familiar like the parody, the shell of something that had worked itself into every corner of my childhood and—was this a joke? I glared at her, her ruined face, her sad thin sunken curve of a mouth.

  “Like you would know,” I said. A stranger. That’s all she was. I was seeing things, like Tina and her pathetic angel-wing stardust fantasy she called religion. “Like any human being anywhere, knows anything—”

  “No,” said another voice. A woman’s. One single, fragile word, a china egg cracked along its side. “You don’t.”

  She hadn’t been there in front of us, she hadn’t been anywhere at all, but then she was: swaying barefoot back and forth in the dirt, a thin dark-haired woman in a torn yellow nightgown stained with long streaks of dirt and blood. The blood, the dirt were caked on her pipe-cleaner legs, her mouth was drawn up in a too-sweet, too-friendly television smile, her eyes were so big and dark and deep that they were like pits, twin wells in the ground, oozing the sad amiability of madness. Except behind all that, behind the bright-eyed crazy that had eaten up whoever this woman was when she was alive, you could see the glint and gleam of something else. Someone else, living inside her, using her hurt little legs to walk around on like he could use the body of anything dead. It smiled at me. He smiled at me. He’d come.

  Tina, beside me, drew in her breath. Stephen made a wordless sound that told me all along he hadn’t believed it, hadn’t really believed Amy at all when she told him what she’d seen and how she’d got to the lab, and now here it was in front of him and Mr. Cool almost moaning in fear and I should’ve laughed in his face, I wanted to, but I couldn’t laugh. I couldn’t move. This was the moment, and I couldn’t move. She, he, in that filthy yellow nightgown, stood there looking at the ground beneath its feet, the little bits of rock I still clutched in my hand.

  “That won’t help you,” he
said. “Nothing will.”

  It, he, glanced toward the sky. There was a long drawn-out sound, like Stephen’s throat magnified, like something huge and heavy being slowly pulled apart, and then the sun vanished and the sky went out.

  SIXTEEN

  AMY

  The waves go in. The waves go out. Not like ocean waves, great crashing cresting things I saw for myself when I was little, but quiet-strong currents that slip in more softly, rush instead of crash, and pull you under before you even realize they’ve got you. Their strength all contained in a sort of internal weight, no big white-capped heights, holding itself close like the fingers of a grim, bruised fist. The fingers straighten out, and the water streams over the sand. They draw back toward the palm, the water heads out.

  This had all been happening since before any of us were born. And still was, now that we were all almost gone. The lake didn’t need us, the seagulls, the trees, I felt like that should be all the real hint anyone needed. We weren’t the center of anything, except in our own heads. Except the problem was that inside our own heads was where everyone was trapped. Including me.

  After Stephen left, Florian—the remnants of Florian—just curled up quietly on his log, withering in slow degrees where he sat. Jessie cradled him in her arms with a ferocious expression, like she could somehow shield him from whatever was pulling him to pieces; Linc and Renee paced around them both, a team of doctors confronted with some bewildering new disease. Naomi cried and cried at the sight of her angel falling apart and Lisa finally had to pick her up, carry her bodily back to the cabins, Naomi screaming and donkey-kicking in the first genuine tantrum I’d ever seen her throw.

  I was so glad my mother raised me agnostic. And that I didn’t have any kids, or foster kids, of my own. It wouldn’t work out anyway, if I did. I wasn’t any good with people, including the ones I loved.

  As I watched the water, I reached into my jacket pocket and took out a lake stone, the greenish-brown one Florian had relinquished back in the woods. Back when he’d still had hands. I’d picked it up, from where it lay on the ground at his feet, and he didn’t protest, nobody tried to stop me: I couldn’t explain why, but I wanted it, wanted it badly, more than any of the other stones scattered around and embedded in the sands even though many of them were bigger, smoother, prettier. It felt weird in my grasp, almost hot and twitchy as I passed it from palm to palm, and finally I put it away again. It seemed to press itself into my side, a whole pincushion of heated needles poking and prodding, but I didn’t want to throw it away.

  People have drowned here, from the undertow, storms. Folks heard “lake” and thought of a placid smear of blue crayon in a drawing. They had no idea.

  I missed Stephen. But what good did that do either of us?

  Nick who’d reattached himself to my side after Stephen left pressed his muzzle against my leg, stared lamplike at the water. After Stephen left, and after Florian started fading away, drawing away from the old ghostly man as if he really were diseased, contagious... was he? He said right out, Florian did, that Nick wasn’t supposed to be here in the flesh any more than he was—was Nick going to come apart next? Fade back into oblivion, into the here-now-gone-again specter he’d been when I first knew him? I reached out in fright and hugged Nick to my chest, feeling good hard solid muscle and cold wet nose and warm thick shaggy fur. All four paws, all accounted for. And forget Florian, forget everything he said, it was Nick I really trusted to tell me the truth, but he still hadn’t explained what was happening, the dead things, the blind spots, he still hadn’t shown me—

  Sometimes, and I wouldn’t have told anyone this if they tortured me, I felt like Nick always knew what I was thinking, like he was thinking over my exact same thoughts at the very same time and mulling them and then I could almost hear him inside my head going But I can’t. Not yet. I didn’t actually hear anything but myself, it’s just, I felt like I should be hearing him. Not like we could speak to each other—whatever his thoughts were, they seemed just as wordless and nebulous as any ordinary dog’s—but we still reflected and mirrored each other so perfectly that I knew what those wordless nebulous floating things translated to.

  I knew what he was thinking, really thinking, because it was always what I was thinking. Nick hadn’t shown me what was really happening because, just like Florian, he couldn’t. He didn’t know. I knew that before he “told” me, but his telling me was my telling myself.

  Or maybe I was just crazy. How would I know how any animal thinks, anyway? Presumption. Didn’t even know my own mind.

  Soft sounds behind me, the faint swoosh noises of sand displaced by human feet, then firmer louder sounds as the sand became more solid near the shoreline and I knew without looking that it wasn’t Lisa, she couldn’t ever manage to be this quiet when she was nervous. My mother sat down beside me, on the opposite side from Nick, and stared out with me at the choppy gray-tinged waters.

  “How is Naomi?” I asked.

  “Better.” My mother reached over and worked her fingertips against Nick’s forehead, a little massage. He suffered it in silence. “Part of it’s that she’s flat worn out. We all are. Lisa finally got her to take a nap.”

  Right after Naomi got done crying over that Florian, she started crying all over again because Nick still wouldn’t be her best friend. Couldn’t he humor her a little bit, at least? Dogs were supposed to love little kids. “I’m glad you didn’t raise me to believe in all that stuff,” I told my mother. “That church of hers. Or in any of Lisa’s.”

  My mother made a little noise that wasn’t quite a laugh. “No comment,” she said.

  None of that growing up, but now I saw things that weren’t real, weren’t solid, then suddenly became real, everywhere I went. Like Nick. And now, things that seemed solid but melted into air, into nothing, everywhere I went. Like the man in black. Like the man he used to answer to, that we all answer to in the end. The boss of us. Just like that Jessie does, apparently, except right now she’s trying to pretend we’re not even here.

  “Do you remember when I was little,” I said, “five or six, and you had that conference or whatever it was and we flew to Massachusetts? And saw the ocean at Cape Cod?”

  My mother smiled. “You were seven. You kept asking, but what if the plane crashes? It was my first time on an airplane, too, but I could hardly look scared about it, not in front of you—”

  “And when I ate the seaweed?”

  She laughed. “The look on your face, I wish I’d had a camera. But when I tried some myself, I almost saw the point—it was foul, but something about the texture, it was this thick rubbery bright green stuff, it never quite broke down under your teeth so there was something satisfying about chewing it. Like how a rawhide bone must feel, right, Nick?” Nick who’d never chewed a bone in his life—this life, anyway—looked politely up at her. “Remember that little restaurant you liked, the clam shack?”

  Plump little fried clams, still with their bellies attached like they didn’t make them out here, and thin crumbly onion rings, thick airy vanilla soft-serve. I remembered. That was my favorite thing about the trip, but that’s how you think when you’re seven. That and the ocean.

  “I wish we’d stayed out there,” I said.

  “There wasn’t any way to do that.”

  “I know.”

  Because the lab kept drawing her back. Because the lab was her true birthplace, whatever her birth certificate—wherever that was—said otherwise. Her true home, Natalie’s, Stephen’s. And now mine.

  My mother reached out to the thick wet streak of shore-sand just past us, smooth and even as a tile, and pressed her fingers to its surface. Dug in. “In a couple of days,” she said, “when everyone’s calmed down, I’ll go talk to Stephen. See what we all want to—”

  “I don’t think we have a couple of days,” I said. “Not if Jessie’s friend is right.”

  My mother didn’t answer. A seagull strutted, contemptuous, inches from her digging fingers, daring her
to send him fluttering back over the waters.

  “And I think Stephen is right,” she said at last. A muscle at the side of her jaw drew tense. “Whatever’s happening to the world—if it’s really true—we can’t just sit here waiting around for our own doomsday like a lot of—”

  “And what the hell kind of magic trick are we supposed to pull to make it stop?”

  My mother’s profile, as she sat there resolutely not looking at me, was sharp and obstinate and why was there so much gray in her hair? In the two years she’d been away, it was like she’d aged twenty. “Because we’re in it already, Mom, and you know it. We’re in over our heads. And that Natalie’s in over her head too, I can feel it, and now, whatever we do, the whole world is about to... I don’t know what, something that might kill us, might kill lots of things, but—”

  “We don’t know that. We don’t know there’s nothing we can do.”

  “And if there is something, how the hell are we supposed to figure it out?” I wanted to grab her, shake the truth into her, it was staring her in the face and sitting cold-nosed and quiet by her side. “I’m not kidding, how exactly would we do that? And why would it be us who did? Something’s happening that’s way beyond us stopping it, it’s happening and I don’t think Natalie knows what it is either, just like the lab didn’t know why everyone starting getting sick back last—” I shook my head, on the verge of saying something truly reckless, and then I said it anyway. “And seriously, why do you care anyway? You and Stephen? The whole world ending is just what you should want, right, since you’re so sick of living? Like I guess it’s just an accident, that when you left me you didn’t kill yourself after all?”

  My throat was tight and hot, saying it out loud. The thing I really feared. My mother turned her head toward me, her eyes still young like they were supposed to be but when my mother had been young like me, that’s when she’d been saddest of all.

  “Don’t hold against me,” she said without anger, “what I did when I was sick in the head. I realize that’s asking a lot, maybe, but it’s not fair.”