There’s a small cot in the room adjoining the kitchen, sheeted discretely with plastic, where they would have left the body while they spoke; while seldom used, the cot is there for just such occasions. They would’ve discussed terms—or, rather, her mother and Aunt Jenny would have told the man Avery’s terms, while Avery herself appeared aloof or sympathetic or absented herself from the conversation entirely, as best suited the situation. There would have been a decision—and if the man agreed?
Then, and only then, would she have dug the grave.
But when Aunt Jenny invited the man inside, he’d taken a step and then just . . . stopped. He’d gone statue-still—staring, Avery thought, at her. Then he’d carefully lowered his bloody burden to the welcome mat and drawn the knit mask over his face.
That’s when the gun had come out. That’s when the shouting had begun.
It should have gone differently—but it didn’t and here they were.
Avery had been tired when that knock came, struggling through the last few math problems Aunt Jenny had assigned, and watching the much-erased pencil lines blur as her aching eyes struggled to focus. Now she feels very awake, and very, very alive.
Outside, the night is cool and dark, no streetlights for kilometres, and the stars’ brilliance doing little to illuminate the poorly mown yard. The only light comes from the porch, the old bulb haloed in spider’s webs and dusty moths’ wings.
Avery takes a step, another. She could scream, she knows. She could scream and cry for help, and no one would hear her. The closest neighbours are more than a half-hour walk through the woods, and it’s farther still to the nearest town. The house is isolated—intentionally so—and this is the first moment that Avery regrets it.
“Here,” the man says when she’s taken a few strides into the darkness. “This is far enough.”
Here is not nearly far enough. So close to the house Avery can still see the bonfire lights of her family in the basement, five lives burning strong and bright and so close it seems she could touch them without reaching. But she can’t tell him that.
“I can’t have a grave in the middle of the yard,” she says instead, trying to keep her voice steady and mostly succeeding. She’s not wrong.
“Not my problem.” He places the blanket-wrapped body on the grass so very gently.
He accompanies her as she fetches a shovel from the shed at the corner of the cleared section of the property, watching to make sure she doesn’t make a break for the trees. He’s bigger than her, taller, and smells of sweat and blood; yet it’s only from so close that Avery realizes that he’s not quite as large as she first thought. His bulk comes more from layered clothing a few sizes too big than it does from muscle.
He’s bigger, stronger, faster than her—but even so, she thinks about escape. No one needs to be hurt. The night is dark, but within the forested part of their land it’s darker still, the canopy of leaves so thick that not even starlight can fall within. Avery knows this land and has walked its pathways at all hours since she was ten years old. She knows how to run here, how to move swiftly and quietly, how to use the bush to hide.
But then there’s her family.
But then there’s the gun.
So she goes into the shed and chooses a well-worn shovel, then walks back to the body to start digging.
The ground is rocky and dry. Benign neglect is not the only reason for the condition of their yard.
Avery’s first strike of the shovel pulls up a heap of grass and soil no bigger than her palm; the second attempt is much the same. The third she hits a buried stone, the shovel’s blade making a ting! as it rebounds.
The man is, of course, watching her. “No games,” he says. “Just dig.”
“No games,” she agrees, tossing aside a shovelful of stones.
Five minutes pass, ten, and the man starts pacing and still Avery digs. Her hole is shallow, a mere scratching in the dirt. She widens that hole, removing the layer of grass and topsoil bit by bit until a long rectangle emerges.
“You have to dig deeper,” the man snaps. “It’s a grave, not a fucking flower bed.”
“Yes,” she says, only that, and continues widening the hole.
It was, it seems, not the response he expects. From the corner of her eye, she sees his hand holding the gun twitch as if trying to rise on its own; his mouth works as if her answer must be chewed to be understood. His anger is almost a physical thing, filling the darkness between them, and Avery all but holds her breath as she tosses aside another shovelful of stony earth, and another.
At last he makes a sound of dismissal and turns away.
There’s a rhythm to digging and Avery tries to lose herself in it, in the lift of the shovel, the bunch and stretch of the muscles in her shoulders and arms, the bend of her knees. She’s dug graves before—here, on this land. Some were in use for only a span of hours, but some few remain, close, toward the treeline; though unmarked, she knows every one.
This is not the first grave she’s dug, only the first she’s dug without the steadying presence of her mom or Aunt Jenny. The first she’s dug with a man standing over her with a gun, watching her every move as if he’s waiting for her to fail.
After an hour of digging, Avery pauses to lean on the shovel.
“What are you doing?” he asks. “You can’t stop.”
“I need a break.” She tries to catch her breath, runs her forearm across her sweaty forehead. Her hand, when she lifts it, shakes from exertion.
“You can’t.” The command his voice once had is gone; his words, though insistent, instill little fear. He suddenly seems less threatening and more petulant, insistent but out of his depth.
“I am. It takes hours to dig a grave. Hours, and I’m tired. I don’t know what you expected.”
He expected to be gone already, she knows that. He expected her to dig faster, like a machine, not a stressed seventeen-year-old girl who hadn’t slept the night before and is up now long past her desired bedtime.
Avery looks toward the treeline, but even so she sees him reach for the gun tucked into the waistband of his pants. Sees him hesitate.
The heat of the moment has gone; whatever fear and anger fueled him when he came to the door has dissipated into the cool night air. It’s just the two of them now, the body still and unmoving on the grass, the growing grave like a shadow between them.
A few minutes pass in stiff, uncomfortable silence. Avery catches her breath. Not moving, she’s quickly becoming cold, the breeze making her shiver as her sweat cools. Even so, she’s in no rush to start digging again.
Instead she looks to the house, shifting her focus to see the burning lights of her family in the basement. They’re not still anymore, not sitting where they once were; they’re up and moving. One of them has found a way past the duct tape, freed all the others. That, more than resting, lets her take a deeper breath.
They’re okay, she thinks. And she knows that, in the end, she can handle herself.
She glances again to the man in the mask—or, as she’s come to realize, the boy. She’d first thought he was in his twenties, at least; but now, listening to his voice in the darkness, she realizes he can’t be much older than her, if at all. While her first impressions of him were muddled, she thinks now, this can’t have been planned, not any of it. He’s making this up as he goes along. He feels as scared as she does, and maybe as lost.
And Avery, digging—here, in this rocky earth, where she has dug eight times before—feels more like herself with every moment.
She could have killed him already. She knows it, true and solid as any of the rocks she pulls from the cold soil. Or, at least, she could have hurt him enough to stop him when he came into her house and threatened her family. Incapacitated him. Left him weak and writhing on the floor, for a moment—or, perhaps, forever.
Paralyzed. Blinded. Struggling to breathe without aid, his spasming, fluttering heart fighting to remember how to beat.
No, there was a reason Aunt Jenny had turned to Avery with panic in her eyes when that gun came out; a reason her mom whispered, “Calm, just stay calm, it’ll be okay,” over and over again. In the end, it wasn’t the man—the boy—with the gun that they’d feared most, but Avery losing control.
There are rules to what she can do, rules and ritual, and if they are self-imposed they are no less necessary. There must be a need, there must be a grave, and there must, in the end, be permission. No accidental deaths, no murders. Not ever again.
“You can take the mask off, you know,” Avery says then. “I’ve already seen your face.”
It’s true, even if she remembers only impressions—pale skin, dark hair, darker eyes. Yet it’s the wrong thing to say. She sees fear and panic grow in him, and the anger he uses to cover both.
“Look,” she says hurriedly. “I’m not going to call the cops, okay? That’s not what this is about.”
“Yeah?” Hard, accusing. “Why’s that?”
“I’m the one with a grave in my yard. How you think I’m going to explain that?”
“But there’ll be no one in it when you’re done.”
Avery huffs out a breath. “My mom has already been arrested and charged for fraud because of what I can do,” she says. “Years ago.” She’d only been a child, and none of them, not least of all Avery herself, had realized the full extent of her abilities. She’d been called the girl with divine healing powers, at least in a few online features and new age magazines.
The first big accident—when they’d ended up with a little girl who was no longer dead and no longer had cancer but had two very dead parents—had brought the eyes of the law upon them. Avery had been protected, given into her aunt’s care, while her mother had taken the fall. Fraud. Reckless endangerment. Manslaughter. Murder. The list had been long; the charges the prosecutor had been able to make stick, less so.
But prison time had been no less than she’d deserved, her mother had since said more times than Avery could count. She should have kept her child’s gift a secret, should have sheltered and protected her, and let that be that.
They’d been in hiding ever since—both from the law and from those who would come to her for healing, to bring back those they’d lost. Yet the desperate still make their way to her. On underground forums, rumours of her existence and whereabouts remain: the girl so powerful she can cure even death.
“I don’t need the attention, okay? There are questions I don’t want to have to answer.”
At last he says, “Fair enough.” Even so, it’s a long moment before he draws off the knit mask.
His skin is pale but flushed; cool as the wind feels, it’s far too warm to be wearing a winter hat. His hair is a sweaty tangle that falls long over his ears and forehead, the uneven ends speaking more of the time since his last haircut than any attempt at style. The bravado is entirely gone now from his posture and expression. Dark eyes look at her, strangely hesitant. Questioning.
“Hey,” she says softly. She holds out one dirty hand. “I’m Avery.”
He clears his throat, hesitates, then quickly takes her hand—and just as quickly drops it. His palms are clammy. “Jesse.”
“Nice to meet you, Jesse.”
Then Avery takes the shovel and begins to dig once more.
Perhaps an hour passes before Jesse speaks again.
In that time, the grave has grown deeper; Avery stands now in a long, rectangular hole deeper than her knees, and when she digs her shovel strikes thick, hard clay that’s even worse than the stones. There were farmers in this area once, but not many and never terribly prosperous. She’s never had trouble understanding why.
Jesse’s voice comes out of the darkness.
“Are they the same, the people you bring back? After they rise?”
She pauses, grateful for the reprieve. Her shoulders burn, and her mouth is dry, and she almost feels tired enough to curl up in the cool, dark grave to rest.
Avery thinks about that very first time, when she’d fallen on the playground in grade school and cracked her head on the way down, that blaze of white and pain and then reaching—
She isn’t the same; she’ll never be the same. It isn’t what he means, but still she says, “Of course not.” Feeling that ache again as if it were new, physical pain vanishing and sick guilt taking its place. Remembering her friend who hadn’t slipped, hadn’t fallen, but was suddenly down on the ground unmoving. She takes a breath and pushes the memory away.
Yet the answer is honest, no matter that the sharpest memories don’t have anything to do with the people who’ve come to her for help, or the state of the living when they leave.
She looks up at him. He sits on the ground, the pile of dirt to his one side, the body on the other. His legs are crossed, and the gun and the mask have been tossed aside. Even so, he will not meet her gaze.
“They’re not zombies, if that’s what you’re asking. Not damaged. They’re still themselves, but . . .” Avery lets out a heavy breath. “Raising them, healing them, it doesn’t change what happened. Doesn’t change that they died.”
Jesse stares at the bloody blanket and the concealed figure beneath, his expression blank.
“Will he remember what happened?”
He. Not his mother then, not a girlfriend. Boyfriend, perhaps? A brother, a friend?
“If he was conscious for his death, then yes, he’ll remember.”
Now Jesse looks at her, his dark gaze intense. “But he might not know that he . . . that he died, right? He might think that we just helped him, patched him up . . .”
Avery shakes her head. “He won’t be injured anymore, Jesse. Not at all. He’s going to wake up here, in my back yard, covered in blood and earth without so much as a scratch on him.” He would be weak and headachy, confused and disoriented—but very, very alive.
The blood, the dirty clothes—those, too, could have been different. Upstairs they keep a supply of clean clothing; and usually they bathed the bodies before . . .
But here they are. She sets the thoughts aside.
“Oh,” Jesse says. “I just . . . I wish he didn’t have to know.”
“Who is he?” Avery asks softly. “May I see his face?”
Jesse nods, and at that gesture Avery sets the shovel aside. She makes her way to the body, then kneels, looking down at the blanket. Jesse doesn’t move. Slowly, she draws the blanket back.
The body is easily as large as she is, yet the face is of someone far younger. A boy, no more than twelve or thirteen, no matter his stature. His skin is darker than Jesse’s—olive, or perhaps light brown—yet the similarities between them are easy to see. The dark hair, the sharp line of the nose, the softened curve of the lips.
“My brother, Nathan.”
There’s blood smeared across the boy’s—Nathan’s—cheek, and blood on his mouth, but no wounds that she can see. No head trauma, no obvious bruising. Carefully, she draws the blanket farther back.
At first, it’s hard to see the hole in the fabric of his sweatshirt; there is only blood, black in the dim light, sodden, shining. Despite the time since his death and the swaddling of the blanket, he’s drenched in it. Carefully, Avery probes for the wound. There it is: a small hole, no larger than a fingertip, low along his right ribs.
Bullet hole, she thinks. A collapsed lung, for sure—and who knows what other damage the bullet did, rattling around inside him? Enough to bring death, swift and sure.
She nods and pulls the blanket back over the boy’s face.
“He shouldn’t be dead,” Jesse says.
Maybe she should say what her mom might have said: that no one should die young, that death wasn’t fair, that
everyone should have a life full of opportunities for happiness and growth and change. Something, Avery thinks sourly, best stitched on a pillow.
She knows death the way few others can. She has seen the dead and the dying, the critically injured and the desperately ill. She has died herself once, and dragged herself back to life; she has caused death. Over and over, she has caused death, at first accidentally and then with permission, and it never, ever gets easier.
“He should,” she says in bland counter. “He was shot. He bled out. That’s how it works.” Carefully she stands and rolls her shoulders, wishing the movement did anything to ease the pain. She looks back to Jesse. “My helping him, raising him, it doesn’t change what happened, you know. It doesn’t make him any less dead now.”
There is silence—angry, uncomfortable silence, broken only by the sound of her climbing back into the grave, of the shovel striking dirt. She shouldn’t push; she knows it, and yet . . .
And yet.
“I know,” Jesse says. There is so much anger in the words, so much hatred, and every bit of it is turned inward.
Her voice is softer when she asks, “How did he die?”
The pause is longer this time; Avery can feel him assessing her, gauging her intent or her trustworthiness, she knows not which. At last he looks away, runs a hand through his hair.
“It was an accident. He was . . . he was shot.” As if that hadn’t been obvious.
Another shovel of clay and stone. Another. Then she asks, “Will you tell me what happened?”
The silence stretches, weighted, heavy. A minute passes, then a second and a third—long enough that she thinks he won’t answer.
And then, suddenly, he does.
Nathan, Jesse tells her, is his half-brother, and the boy that he’d raised nearly on his own while their mother was still alive. Yet, on her death a few years before, Jesse had been sent to juvenile hall while Nathan had gone into foster care.
Seasons Between Us Page 24
