“Prison?” she asks. “For what?”
“Something stupid. Tried to steal a car right out of a neighbour’s driveway, thinking I could sell it at the scrapyard. Didn’t even know how to drive.”
Avery nods as if she understands, or has any idea how much cash you can get for a scrap car.
Jesse shrugs. “They wouldn’t have let me be Nathan’s guardian anyway. Too young. But maybe we could have been fostered together, you know?”
Instead, it was more than a year before he found where Nathan had gone, and longer until he could see his brother. Even then, Nathan’s foster parents—a decent couple clearly interested in adopting the boy—showed little enthusiasm for Jesse in the boy’s life. A bad influence they said, and the last thing Nathan needed when he was just starting to settle down. Even so, Jesse persisted, talking to his brother on social media, stopping by when he could, sending Nathan gifts when he had the cash.
All the while, Jesse made a plan for their combined futures.
“His foster parents did their best for him, y’know? But I’m blood. They couldn’t care for him the way I . . .”
At this Jesse goes silent, clearly struggling not to look at Nathan’s body. At last he clears his throat and continues.
Jesse was planning to move across the country, head to B.C., maybe get work in construction or at one of the resorts. The plan was that in a couple of years Nathan would follow—they’d share an apartment, Jesse could help Nathan go to university, maybe connect him with a job.
Except, it seemed, Nathan couldn’t wait a couple of years. The day Jesse set out, Nathan was there too, bag in hand, and nothing Jesse said could make boy turn around. So Jesse used half his money to buy another bus ticket, and when the cash ran out before the highways did, they started hitchhiking.
“Nathan’s big for his age,” Jesse explains. “I put a ball cap on him and told him to keep his head down. No one noticed.”
No one said anything was more like it, Avery thinks, but keeps the words to herself.
They’d gone some distance—and had a few free meals—when everything went wrong. A ride gone bad. A trucker got ideas, there was a scuffle, and then bang. Just like that.
But there’s something in his voice, something in the way he says it.
“Did you try to rob the driver?”
“No, why would you—”
“The gun. The knit mask. It’s September, Jesse, not February.”
He shrugs, then, awkwardly. “It’s not loaded,” he says. “I don’t even have bullets.”
But the driver, it seems, did. Jesse was the one with the weapon, the one demanding cash—but Nathan was big for his age, and he wore a mask too, and in the struggle he was the one hit. The one who fell to his knees at the side of the road, blood bubbling on his lips. The one who lay unmoving as the truck sped away.
“My fault,” Jesse whispers. “All of it.”
Avery isn’t interested in his guilt, not really. “And so you came to me.”
It’s a moment before he says, “I heard a story about you once, you know. The girl who could heal the dead. Eyes so pale they’re almost white and a scar across one cheek. Girl I knew in juvie—Sascha—said she’d died from cancer once, but that you brought her back. I didn’t believe it. Not until I saw you standing there, older, but looking just like she’d said.” He hesitates, then shrugs uncomfortably. “It’s not so hard to find your address online, if you know where to look. And Nathan . . . he died not so far from here.”
Avery closes her eyes. She remembers Sascha—remembers the healing that had sent her own mother to prison. But she doesn’t say anything, and this time Jesse doesn’t notice, too lost in his own thoughts.
“I’ve never told anyone that,” he says. “About stuff that happened when I was a kid. Didn’t think I could ever tell anyone what happened to Nathan.”
“It’s easier in the dark when no one can see your face. It’s like . . . no one’s judging you. You can say what you need to say.” At least, that’s the way it’s always felt to Avery.
“I guess so,” comes the reply. A moment, then quietly: “I’ve never been able to talk to anyone like this, though. Like, not at all.”
Or maybe, Avery thinks, it’s only that he never had anyone to listen.
But then, how long has it been since she’s had anyone to talk to?
“You’re a good storyteller,” she tells him without looking up. “It’s like you’re my own personal podcast. Any other stories to tell?”
But Jesse’s shaking his head, turning away.
“What about him?” Avery asks, not wanting the moment to end. Not wanting that silence to return. “Nathan. What was he like as a little boy?”
Jesse lets out a breath that tries and fails to become a laugh. “Oh, man. He’s always been the funniest kid. And smart, y’know? Super smart. Must’ve got it from his dad, whoever he was.” He looks up at the night sky, all that stretching black, and it’s like he wants to vanish into the darkness. His Adam’s apple bobs in his neck, and he brushes away a tear, and another.
She pretends she doesn’t see either, head down, digging. Another shovel of dirt onto the pile, and another.
Then Jesse’s voice comes again, lighter somehow, despite his swallowing back tears. “Okay, so this once when he was like four or five, right, Nathan came home from the playground . . .”
For a time Avery doesn’t think about the hole that she’s digging or why, doesn’t let herself remember that the little boy in the tales is lying dead only feet away, all his stories ended. She just listens.
“Okay, enough,” Jesse says some time later, when he’s found a pause in his stories. “Is what Sascha told me true, about your ability? With it being you who needs to dig?”
She shakes her head. “No, not really. It’s just—”
“Then it’s my turn.” He reaches for the shovel.
For a moment, Avery is caught speechless. If they’d done this the proper way, Aunt Jenny would have explained—
He would have known—
But they didn’t and he doesn’t, and even so, the offer is genuine. Jesse is, it seems, slowly realizing what he’s doing and what he’s done, and though he thinks he can’t let her family out of the basement he can at least do this.
And she is so very tired.
She nods once, quickly, then leans the shovel on the side of the grave. It is not so high that she needs a ladder to climb out, but it gives her a place to sit, legs dangling, and catch her breath.
In one easy motion, he’s risen and leapt down into the hole. It’s the thoughtless agility of a person to whom athleticism comes easy. He could have been a soccer player, she thinks, or a cross-country runner. Maybe he could have been a swimmer or taken up mountain biking in the back-country hills or—
Well. Perhaps in another life.
Even so, she’s suddenly aware of the closeness of him, the heat of him in the cold night, the easy way he lifts the shovel and begins to dig.
“Rocky,” he says at last, as if he has to say something. As if she had not told him this very thing and then dug a hole more than three feet down while he stood and watched, dirt and stones and pale clay piling up beside him.
She snorts. “I know.”
Perhaps it’s just the dim light, the way the porch light throws his face into shadow, but it looks like he flushes. Flushes and then, almost in spite of himself, laughs.
It’s not a sound she’s heard from him—not a sound she expected to hear, ever. It is, like his motion, easy, comfortable. She wishes—and it’s a foolish wish—that she could hear him laugh again.
She likes him. It’s stupid and she knows it, but in spite of everything he’s done, everything he’s said, she finds she likes the sound of his voice and the movement of his hands. Likes, maybe, the
person he could be.
She looks to her hand, dirt-blackened and callused; she looks to her feet, hanging into the grave, and then closes her eyes against a wave of sorrow and regret.
In another life, she tells herself, and wishes the words didn’t feel so hollow.
For a time, Jesse digs in silence. Avery watches as the last of the grave is dug, down and down until it’s done.
“That’s enough,” she tells him. She doesn’t know the depth, doesn’t need measurements; her heart and gut tell her they’re done.
Or maybe it’s only that she can’t have him tell her more stories, can’t keep fighting the stupid thought that they could have another night—not like this, but somewhere. Sitting on a porch, maybe, the night like a veil around them. Just talking.
She has her family, whom she loves more than anything; she has her little brothers and sister. It’s just that she can’t remember the last time she had a friend.
Jesse takes her offered hand as she helps him climb from the grave. He dusts his hands on his pants and looks around. Already, the night sky is lightening. On the far horizon, Avery can see a hint of blue.
Jesse looks at her, and for the first time the only thing between them is air.
“Is there anything . . .?” He fumbles for what to say. “I mean, before you can do your thing, is there anything else that I can—uh—”
“You could let my family out,” she says. Only that.
He doesn’t know what she’s known for hours: that her mom and Aunt Jenny got themselves free, that they locked and barred the doors, that they took the kids up to bed in the dark and silence, and watch now from the upstairs windows. That they could have come to her rescue, only she has waved them off once, twice, three times with a quick shake of her head that could be mistaken for brushing away sweat.
She’ll see this through, if that’s what Jesse wants.
He says, “You can let them out when you’re done.” The same words he said at the start of the night, mere hours and forever ago. Except this time, he sounds uncertain.
“Yes,” she agrees softly. “But so could you. No mask. No gun.”
You could apologize. The words hang unspoken between them. Unspoken—but heard.
She sees it in his face, that twist of guilt and regret, as he remembers what he’s done. He looks at the gun, long discarded on the ground, and then at the blanket-wrapped body. Something hardens in him then, like a mask coming down over his features.
“Let’s just get this over with.”
He doesn’t know how to be afraid, she realizes, or how to deal with his fear. Anger he knows. Anger is fuel, anger is productive—even if, truly, that anger has nowhere to go. Nothing to do but hurt.
She wants to tell him—again, this final time—that it doesn’t have to be this way. That he can make amends, and ease hurt with kindness, and if he cannot undo what he’s done, cannot unmake his choices, he can at least choose different things. Here, now. While he still can.
But there are words, it seems, that she too cannot say.
He goes to the body, kneels down. Nathan’s face is covered again, and Jesse does not draw that blanket back, only makes to lift this burden a final time.
“Here,” he says. “Help me lower him down.”
He’s come that far at least. Willing to ask for help; just comfortable enough to think that she might grant it. But she does not move, only comes to stand across the grave from him.
There are tears in her eyes. She didn’t expect that. How long has it been since she last cried? Years, she thinks. Years that feel like decades, even to someone as young as her.
Here, now, she feels her youth. Feels all her choices, made and unmade, and wishes she could be someone, anyone, but who she is. But what she is.
Wishes, truly, that this boy had come to her any way but this.
“Avery?” It is, she realizes, the first time he’s said her name. The first and, perhaps, the last. “A hand?”
She shakes her head.
“Jesse.” His name, so gently spoken. “Jesse, no.”
He’s annoyed at her refusal but brushes it away. “Fine, whatever, I can lift him myself.”
She raises a hand. He sees the motion and hesitates. Stops.
“Jesse,” Avery says again, and her heart is breaking. She takes a deep breath before she can continue. “Jesse,” and her voice is a whisper now, barely that. “The grave isn’t for him. It isn’t for Nathan.”
All the long night she’s wished for more light—for the moon to come out, for a brightening of stars. In this moment, she wishes she could see nothing. Then she wouldn’t have to watch as his confused expression changes. As understanding comes into his face, that rush of realization.
She expected anger. She expected hurt and denial. She has, over and over, seen all these and more.
Yet he says only, “Oh.” It’s a quiet sound, nearly a whimper. She watches as he goes to his knees as if he doesn’t quite have the strength to stand. As his arms fall, empty, to his sides.
He stares at the grave, that yawning black hole they dug together, side by side. His grave, waiting for him.
“I cannot make life,” she tells him softly. “I can only . . . relocate it.”
“A life for a life.”
“Yes.”
He looks to the house once, briefly; looks toward the five lives he knows are inside. But he does not ask that of her, does not even try. Only bows his head, his hair falling across his face like a dark curtain.
Silence between them, heavy, weighted. Silence as all-encompassing as the black.
She does not break it, only lowers herself to the ground and kneels as he is kneeling, the grave and his brother’s body between them. She wishes she could go to him, wrap her arms around his shoulders—
No, truly, she wishes they had time. That she could become someone whose hand he’d accept in comfort. That she could see him smile. That she could hear that laugh again.
Foolish hopes, all. She lets them go, one by one, and breathes until her eyes are dry.
At last he looks up. For a moment she wonders whether he’s going to try to leave. Some do. Even those who understand the necessary sacrifice ahead of time, sometimes at this moment they break. They change their minds. It’s no terrible thing, choosing to live; it’s not selfish to not give all of one’s self, all of one’s futures, for one who has already died, even if it might feel that way.
But perhaps she doesn’t truly know him, because when he looks at her face she sees only determination. Only thoughts of his brother.
“Okay,” Jesse says. “What do I have to do?”
Other deaths have been wrapped in ritual. Sometimes there’s a ceremony if that’s what the family wants. Sometimes there are words spoken, or prayers read. Once the sacrifice sang a song before she went into her grave, and her face had been glorious then, transcendent, as bright as her voice had been sweet.
Now there is only the two of them. Avery watches as Jesse climbs into the grave.
“Do you want a blanket?” she asks. Not the bloody blanket that wraps Nathan, but there are others, inside. She could get the blanket from the end of her bed, the blue one with the green stripes.
“Would it make any difference?”
“Only to you.” And, maybe, to her. More things she cannot say.
“Then leave it. It won’t matter for long, right?”
He crouches, sits, then slowly stretches himself out. The grave is long enough for him, but only just. His hair brushes against the top wall, the toes of his sneakers against the other. He lays his head back, then shifts to get more comfortable.
“Really is rocky,” he says then, and lets out a breath that is not quite a laugh.
Her lips turn up in a hint of a smile. “Told you.”
She comes to sit beside the grave, looking down at his face, his brother’s body on her other side. There should be something else she can say, if not words of comfort, then—something. But if there is, she does not know the words.
“Are you ready?” she asks. As if anyone could ever be ready.
He stares up at her from the dark and shadow, eyes wide.
“Will it hurt?” he whispers.
“No. I promise.”
“Okay.” His throat moves as he swallows. “Okay, whatever you’re going to do . . .”
She reaches toward him with one hand, toward his brother’s body with the other.
“Wait,” he says, voice cracking. She almost expects him to sit, to climb out, but he only takes a shuddering breath and says, “Tell him, tell Nathan . . . it’s not his fault. None of this is his fault, okay? And that I . . . that I’ll see him on the other side one day. A very, very long time from now. And that I want him to have a happy life, a good life. I want him to see the world and get married and get that dog he’s always wanted and, and . . .”
He’s weeping now; the tears drown out the words.
“I’ll tell him.”
A long moment, then: “Avery?”
She looks back down into that darkness, even though it’s hard. Even though she wishes it was already over, wishes she didn’t have to do this at all—that they could all three of them be here, her and Jesse and Nathan, and they could go inside and see her family, and see that her siblings were okay, and then Aunt Jenny would sit them down and they’d have pancakes for breakfast and—
“It’s not your fault either,” he says. “Look out for my little brother for me, okay?”
“Okay,” she agrees softly. “He can stay with us here for a while, you know. If he wants.” Another brother for her to love; it’s not the worst thing, no matter how she feels right now.
Jesse nods and closes his eyes.
“Thank you.”
Then because there is nothing else to say, she closes her eyes, too, and reaches.
Seasons Between Us Page 25
