Grave

by Turner, Joan Frances

  “I can’t,” she whispered to me, quietly, a broken sound. “I’m sorry. I just can’t. I want off this merry-go-round, I can’t stand it, I—”

  “You ‘ain’t gotta,’” I said. “It’s all right. It’s going to be all right.”

  She couldn’t do it, and I understood why. I always had. Finally, I thought, I almost started to understand myself. This had been coming, slowly, gaining on me moment by moment, my entire life. One way or another. And I knew, I was sure, what were to be my last words.

  “Don’t say anything,” Lisa insisted, louder, defiant. She knew what was happening, she knew and I wouldn’t let her stop it. “Nobody say another damned word, don’t, please—”

  Death was losing his physical form, turning taller, lighter, darker, as he prepared to consume this whole earth, the skies, the stars, his own self. Everything that was and would be. This was the end. This was our final chance.

  “I’ll take it all from you,” I said. “I’ll take your place, I’ll be what you are now.”

  My mother made a sound, a wordless animal sound like a mother might make when she loses her child. But she didn’t try to stop me. I wouldn’t be stopped. “You can die. You can sleep. You can sleep forever. I’ll take it all from you, everything that is, everything that—”

  “Amy!” Lisa cried, frozen where she stood, a paralysis of panic. “Amy! Stop!”

  “Eternity!” I shouted. “Eternity! I choose eternity!”

  All that was left of his skies, his stars, his kingdom was his face, swollen to Earth-size and then Jupiter and then something for which Jupiter was only one of hundreds of fleck-tiny, barren moons. He was the earth and the heavens and the day and the dark, one eye a blinding beam of perpetual sun, endless light, and the other a chasm, a miles-long well choked at the very bottom with drowned bodies. An endless night. His smile was the earth opening up to swallow us all, a smile splitting his immense face open ear to ear, like a cut throat. Everything was overpowering light, everything overwhelming darkness.

  He stretched out a hand to me, a huge enveloping hand. I was right, I was sure, I’d never take back what I’d given him but we would all cease to exist anyway, that was just how it was, at long last it was all over—

  Blue.

  The blueness all around was soothing and cool, a clean, medicinal stream bathing a wound. But it was nothing but the blue of an ordinary sky, an ordinary sky on an ordinary day in late spring heading into early summer. The sand, ordinary sand the color of an unfrosted cake just out of the oven, sank and settled beneath my body and sloped gently downward, from a ridge punctuated with tall grasses and stubby scrub trees to a long stretch of choppy gray water. Out there on the horizon, plainly visible on a sunny clear day like this was, was the smoke-colored outline from the lake’s other shoreline, the standing remains of what had been the skyline of Chicago. There was a faint echo inside my skull, a memory of a profound and fatal vertigo long since subsided. I lay there on my side and slowly, carefully, raised myself on an elbow, as if from sleep, like the sand were the tangled sheets of the bed I’d left behind, back home, a lifetime ago—

  “Amy!” voices called out. “Are you there? Amy!”

  I didn’t feel any different, not really, other than that tiny, insistent echo that wouldn’t leave my head. Was I supposed to feel different? Had it all really happened?

  Something cold and wet gently prodded my arm and that made tears stream down my cheeks, tears I quickly mopped away: good boy, good Nick. I knew he’d never really left me, ever. I threw my arms around his neck and he wagged his tail, licked my face like he might’ve done back in his first flesh-and-blood life. I rose to my feet and called out, even though I could see them plain from where I was, I called out as if I’d gotten lost in a thick expanse of woods.

  “Here!” I shouted as they came running, stumbling. “Over here!”

  And then I was running too, stumbling toward them: Jessie, Linc, Renee, Stephen, my mother, Lisa, Naomi, unable to believe we were really here, all of us on Cowles Beach—no. Not Cowles. Up there on the ridge was the familiar outline of the erstwhile lab, our old ancestral home. Empty, forever. They all ran to me and I ran to them but then just inches away from me they all stopped short, not knowing what they were looking at, not sure who or what I was anymore. My voice, though, it had still been mine. My hands raised up to my eyes—they looked like they always had. Had what I thought happened, really happened? Were we dreaming, were we dying, were we even here—

  And then I heard it.

  The music in my head was strange and lonely and wild and like nothing I’d ever heard before but it was everything I’d ever wanted out of music in my whole life, everything I’d ever dreamed of sounding like when I had my band, my imaginary band that was going to play amazing frightening things no pop-addled kid could understand and tour Europe and go everywhere, everywhere making hostages of the world with our rhythm. It was the saddest and most beautiful thing I’d ever heard, it was just a few ragged, uneven, tentative notes flying through my mind but it was perfect, perfect madness, perfect melancholy, perfect beauty—

  Calliope music, like something at an old-time carnival. The ghost of a carnival. Wild and mad and perfect.

  I stood there listening and when I turned to Stephen, when I saw the look on his face, I knew that he heard it too, that that raggedy free-floating waltz was filling up every hollow space he’d ever possessed, we’d ever possessed. He heard it. He took my hand, not knowing yet what it meant, just knowing that whatever it meant there was no stopping our ears to it, no turning back. My mother slipped her arm around me, looking scared, exhausted, but the music despite its sadness and her fatigue made her smile.

  “Do you hear it?” she murmured. “Do you?”

  What a question. What a question to ask when I could see us all hearing it, the sound pulsing between us and among us like electricity singing flesh—flowing from me, to her, to Stephen, to Linc and Renee standing there with wonder on their faces and hope in their eyes. To Jessie. Who heard it in her own mind, heard it in disbelief, and then when she realized she hadn’t imagined it and it wasn’t going away, she started to cry, silent tears of relief coursing down her cheeks as she grabbed Linc and Renee, as she kissed them, as they smiled and each put up a hand to wipe her face dry.

  “It’s over,” Jessie whispered, and the happiness in her face gave me such a sudden overwhelming sense of sorrow that for a moment, it was hard to breathe. But only for a moment. “Finally. It’s all over.”

  Was it over? Was I, now, what I thought I had become?

  “Do you hear it?” My mother touched her ear, carefully, like she were afraid to shatter an eardrum, and then she turned to Lisa standing there with Naomi close in her arms. “Where does it come from? Can you hear it?”

  She smiled again, smiled so wide and happy I grinned back and couldn’t stop myself from hugging her. “Do you hear it, Lisa? Do you hear the music?”

  Lisa gazed at all of us, each to each, and I saw the beginning of a terrible suspicion dawning on her face.

  “I can hear you,” she said. So calm, so quiet. “But I can’t hear any music.”

  Naomi glanced up at her, confused. Scared. “I can’t, either.”

  The music spiraled upward and outward and everywhere around us, anarchic and beautiful, warming our skin and easing into our bones like the soft steady overhead sun. Jessie kept on quietly crying, Renee and Linc drying her eyes for her in silence. Stephen and my mother held tightly to me and I held back; I stretched an arm out to Lisa but she stood where she was, not wanting to believe it. Not wanting to believe that through no fault of hers, no fault of Naomi’s, there was a new and unassailable wall that divided us, the hearing and the deaf.

  THIRTY-ONE

  LISA

  Were we dead? Was this just another illusion, like the parkland and the woods?

  There was sky and sun overhead, and sand underfoot; the lab building sat empty and quiet up at the summit of the dunes. Pr
airie Beach, again, as it had been ever since the plague roared through it and past it and burned itself out. Jessie, Amy, everyone was back, everyone—

  I could feel the grit of sand in my sneakers, that little ache between my shoulder blades I sometimes got when I was tired, the flyaway twitchiness of hair strands brushing my face. Maybe this was heaven but I still felt like I needed a bath. I felt funny, too, in another way: like there’d been something small but weighty and oppressive lodged inside me, a stone, a growth, a cherry pit stuck in the back of my throat, and without my noticing it had quietly dissolved and vanished. Naomi was crouching on the sand, her hands clamped over her ears and eyes squeezed shut bracing herself for another terrible surprise. I gently touched her hair and she jumped, her eyes flying open, and then reached down, pressing a hand to the sand. She looked up at me, not rising from her knees.

  “Are we dead?” she asked. Very softly, as if she were afraid one errant word might shatter the sky. “Is this heaven for real?”

  The grit of the sand, the dry twitch of my hair was what decided me. “I don’t think so,” I said. “I think—I think we’re back. I think this is the world.”

  The world. The living world, where my feet itched and my neck ached and where ever since the illness, since my transformation into what Amy called an ex, every word I spoke was a sharp hissing jackhammer thing, every consonant cut slices from the air; sometimes, as I talked, I actually felt my tongue snapping painfully as a rubber band against my tense-jawed mouth. That was still there. That hadn’t gone away. If this really had been heaven, I’d have sounded like a human being again. I’d have been one, instead of... whatever I now was. Whatever Mags and Billy had been.

  But I was alive. We were alive, all of us here and shouting for each other and running at double speed to find each other again, and the world was back! The whole world was actually alive! Wasn’t that something? Wasn’t that something absolutely wonderful? How had it ever happened, how had it—

  And then I was remembering how it happened, remembering it like the way some dreams only return in their own good time after sleep retreats. I knew what had happened, what Amy had said, but I also knew, I was certain, that it couldn’t have been real. It couldn’t have. It was a dream, as much a delusion as that parkland, those woods—

  “Do you hear it, Lisa?” Amy asked me. “Do you hear the music?”

  No. I didn’t. Not like them. I heard their voices, and the calls of the gulls, and the soft rolling rush of the waves, but I heard no music at all.

  Jessie pushed Linc’s hand away, wiped her eyes, and that’s when I realized she had been crying. Jessie was crying, and there was music playing that I couldn’t hear, and something was wrong, someone needed to tell me what was wrong. It couldn’t have been what I thought had happened, back in the world of the dead, nothing to do with what Amy had said. It couldn’t have.

  “I think...” Jessie glanced at Amy, her breath audible like she’d been running a race. “I think this means he said yes.” She glanced at Amy, panting now, her voice faltering. “I think, I think this means—that Death brought us back—from oblivion—that he’s passing existence on to—I feel funny, Lisa. I feel—”

  Amy threw her arms out to Jessie, as if she were about to faint, but instead Jessie sat down hard in the sand, relief and pain cutting creases in her face. As I ran over to her, Renee and Linc sank to the sand in turn, drained and played out, all their unnaturally youthful faces so suddenly sick and old. No. They were just exhausted. We were all exhausted. Everything would be all right now, everything. What I thought this might mean, it wasn’t true.

  Amy was looking at me as if she could hear my thoughts, as if my thoughts scared her because she didn’t know how to tell me I was wrong. Nick, her dog, sat calmly beside her as she stood there, watching Jessie fall to the sand, and there was something different about her too. There was something in her eyes that hadn’t been there before, at once distant and removed but yet as close-feeling as skin on skin. So intimate, even without touching, that it was like she could see right through me and into me and—no. Something was wrong. I needed someone to tell me what was wrong. I left Jessie’s side to go to Amy, and she took my hands in hers. She turned her head toward the ridge, gazing at what had been the lab.

  “It’s true,” she said. Quietly. Gently. The same meditative way Florian had talked. “It really happened.”

  Lucy, standing there beside her, turned pale and nodded and then, I didn’t want to, I refused to, but I understood. Death, and life, and all of existence, had taken hold of her, poured into her small skinny human body as if she were now a bottle that could somehow contain oceans, her flesh and blood only a shell surrounding—no. No. I shook my head and looked to Lucy and when I saw she understood as well, when I saw even in Naomi’s eyes a kind of childish understanding and awe, I wrenched my hands away like they’d been burned.

  “No,” I said aloud. “No.”

  “It happened,” Amy said. She was already beyond me. Standing there, not two feet away, she was already beyond us all. “Death, and life, and all of it, passed from the person who used to carry it—he got tired, he couldn’t stand the burden anymore, and now it’s passed to me. I took it.” For a moment she looked on the verge of laughing, as if she couldn’t truly believe it herself, but it had changed her already. Already, she was something not like us. “And it’s inside me now. I can feel it, I swear it really is like being a glass or a pitcher or something filling up, I can feel all of it pouring inside—”

  “No!”

  “I chose it,” she said. So calm, so sure, so beyond us all. “Maybe someday I’ll give it up, just like he did, I won’t be able to stand it anymore—but I chose it.” She glanced again toward the lab. “I never even thought about it before, you know, but this means I’ll be everywhere—I’ll see the whole world, I’ll be the whole world. Remember, Mom, how much I always wanted to just get out of here and travel?” She wrapped a tendril of hair, bright strawberry-auburn hair, around her fingers and laughed. A happy laugh. “There’ll be almost nowhere I can’t go—”

  “No.”

  “That’s what I always wanted when I was—what I always wanted before. I won’t know everything, though, he said so. He said he wasn’t all-knowing, not ever. Or all-seeing. So there’ll always be something to learn, something I haven’t seen. Things to surprise me. I hope some of the surprises are good.”

  She reached out a hand for me, let it fall again unsure what to do. “So don’t be sad for me. Please? I’m not going to die. At least, not for a long time.”

  But Jessie was. I knew it. I could see it. I had Amy on one side of me and Jessie on the other and devil and deep blue sea had me so confused I didn’t know what to do, who to—

  “You can’t go,” I said. Flat, final, childish, and which of them I meant it for, both, neither, everything, I didn’t know. “You can’t. You can’t go.”

  “She has to,” Jessie said. Quiet, calm, just like Amy. “And we have to.”

  “I can’t—”

  “I’ll be all right,” Amy said. “And so will they.”

  She ran over to them suddenly, to where Linc and Renee and my sister sat exhausted and draining on the sands, and threw her arms around Jessie, who suffered the embrace for just a few seconds and then briskly pushed her away. At least that much hadn’t changed, even now that she really was finally—she pushed Amy away but her eyes were solemn, almost sorrowful, someone saying goodbye to a friend. Amy reached down and embraced Linc for a moment, then Renee, and then she turned to me looking just for an instant as scared, as lost, as when I’d first rescued her from that poor feral dog.

  “Were those my first?” she asked. Her voice shaking. “I didn’t mean to. I didn’t try to. Were they the first living things that I...”

  Her words trailed off. No. I couldn’t lose my sister again, not again, and Amy, it’s like I told her, I have three daughters and I can’t lose the second just like I did the first—my heart cracked a
nd split open and released a geyser of tears, Naomi grabbing me and hugging me as I sank in shame to the sand. Was she next? Would I lose her next? Jessie slid over to me, half-crawling, and for just a precious few seconds, her head was in my lap.

  “It’s what I want,” she whispered. “It’s what I want and I’m not afraid. This has been like torture. Everything since I came back alive, it all—Joe was right, in the end, I didn’t want to believe him when he first said it, but he was right. This has to end. All along, I was supposed to be dead. Now I can get off the merry-go-round. Now I can stop being so dizzy from all the spinning—life and death and—and I can rest. Okay?” Her head jerked up and she was pleading, pleading with me who she couldn’t help but leave behind, to be all right. “Please?”

  “Lisa,” Naomi whispered. “Don’t cry.”

  “I don’t want you to go!” I was the child now, surrounded by maddeningly sure and decided adults, and I was horribly ashamed of myself and I couldn’t help it. I looked over at Linc and Renee as if they could somehow stop this, knowing they couldn’t, and for one mercifully brief second I hated them for it. “I don’t want any of you to go!”

  “We’ll be all right,” Linc said. Gentle but unyielding, as he took Jessie back from me. Holding my sister, his wife, in his arms. “Don’t forget, we’ve seen it all before.”

  The tears wouldn’t stop. “Amy.” I was back on my feet now, desperate, as if I could bargain with this, as if exactly that perpetual human failing hadn’t nearly destroyed everything and everyone. “I can’t let you. I can’t let you go again, I can’t let you be all alone—”