Burn Our Bodies Down

by Rory Power

  I crouch, tuck my hair behind my ears. Ignore the gummy stick of my own blood, and begin to dig.

  I hit skin first. A stomach, full of give and curdle. I recoil, feel a heave in my gut, vomit and acid and a sob building to a break, but I have to see this through. I have to. So I bend over her again, dirt up to my elbows, sweat on my forehead, and I brush the earth away from her face.

  From my face. From ours. Because of course we’re the same. Of course she’s me, just like I’m her.

  Her neck is bent, too far to be anything but broken, and her eyes are half-shut. Under her lids I can see the pool of black, of liquid rot, clumping in her eyelashes, one tear of it sticking to her cheek. Just like the other girl. Naked, too, like the girl in the morgue, only this time I can’t draw a sheet over her and leave her behind. I have to look. At her eyes, at her hands. At her mouth, loose, drooping down to one side of her face, a hole torn in the skin at the edge of her lips, gaping so I can see her teeth.

  Everything else has felt so close. Overlarge in my sight, so I can’t look away from it no matter how hard I try. This—I don’t know. I’m here but I’m not, and it’s not my hand reaching out, steady and still. Not my hand tapping lightly on the gleam of this girl’s teeth.

  Until it is. In a rush, dizzy and everywhere and all of my body prickling at once, like coming back from someplace numb. I can’t hide from this. Not even in myself.

  I cradle my hand to my chest and stare down at her. Like that moment on the highway, my first day here. Another girl, just like that. I had it making sense. That girl for Katherine, and me for Mom. So who is this?

  It comes back to me then. My first night here, kneeling on the window seat. Looking out over the corn and hearing a cry. Hearing it stop. It was her. It had to be her. This girl, with her neck snapped, with her skin still fresh and gleaming. New, from nowhere. Another.

  Dread like the slow build and whine of a siren. I have to move this girl, even though I’m terrified of what could be underneath her. How many girls have there been? How many of me has Gram killed?

  I crouch, empty stomach clenching as a wave of dizziness crashes over me. Get a grip on her wrists and tug, my legs barely staying underneath me. She’s so heavy. Dirt pouring across her face and into her mouth. I’m sorry, I want to say, but she deserves more than that.

  I get her just free of the grave, her torso sprawled on the grass, her legs still half-buried. And there. Underneath her. Another. My face. Gram’s, and Mom’s, and Katherine’s.

  This one’s dressed, wearing a T-shirt and shorts. Nothing like the stained party dress I’ve still got on, but I recognize them. The same sort of clothes in the dresser in my room. I bite my lip and reach around to tug the shirt collar to the side. There, right where it was on every other T-shirt in my dresser. My mother’s name.

  This girl was inside Fairhaven. Gram kept her. Dressed her and fed her and then she ended up here. Just like I did.

  I knew it. I knew it. But that doesn’t make it any easier to bear. Heat races over my skin and I could throw up but I feel more like crying. I push the tears back and dig until I see her more clearly.

  She’s younger, this girl. Like me when I was thirteen, fourteen. My freckles before they faded, my hair before the gray really grew in. But her eyes belong to the girl in the fire, to the girl buried above her. Black and dripping, her flesh bloated and splitting, her clothes ragged, half-gone. And worst of all, pieces of her palm, sliced up separate like kernels on a cob of corn. Some have come loose, scattered in the earth around her. Pink at the root, white and tough at the top, black spread like blood from the hole left behind.

  Like the harvest, the one Gram and I brought in. I try to breathe deeply, try to keep myself whole and here, but the trees are pressing in around me, the ground swaying under my feet. This is too much. I have carried so much and how am I supposed to understand this?

  Easier to keep going than to think about it. And I’m so tired, so so tired, but I bend down, and I take hold of her arms. My sweat drips onto her brow. I smooth it back, but my touch strips her skin from the bone, pulls it clean away from her forehead.

  I clutch my stomach, gather myself away from the grave and scream into the back of my hand. Every move I make, worse and worse. Every touch just hurting someone else. I should never have come here. I should never have climbed out of that grave.

  But I did.

  I lived, and they didn’t. I’m still here, and they aren’t, and whatever they are—sisters or something else—I have to bear witness. Have to see them, the way I wanted Tess to see me.

  I turn around, make myself look. This is what happened to you. It was real then, and it’s real now.

  I keep digging. Bodies and bodies, younger and younger, stacked so close and all of it wrong, the smell too clean, too chemical as they decompose. One girl with bruises around her neck, skin pulling away from her bones, draping like fabric. Another unmarked like she died in her sleep, maggots dotted like rings on her fingers. And the deeper I get into the ground the less of them is left. Flesh pebbling to nothing, the roots of the apricot trees winding through their ribs. Until I find the last set of bones. Too small to be anything but an infant.

  I sit back on my heels. My hands have finally started to shake. Gram put me here, where she put the rest of me. All those bodies, all of them living once, hidden in that house one after another. No wonder it was so easy for her to swing that shovel. She’s done this over and over. Kept these girls and killed them.

  Just the way she thought she killed me. And the girl in the corn, the girl whose body Eli carried that day, she was no different. Gram called the fire an accident, but I know what it was. A last resort. The only way for her to catch a girl who had started to run.

  I wrench myself away from the grave and stagger down the path, farther into the grove. Toward the burn, the blackened reach of what’s left of the trees. Tears hot in my eyes, but I don’t know what they’re for, because this isn’t actually happening. It can’t be.

  I stop short when I see it. A small, flat white stone alone in the grass. A marker for a grave, I think, suddenly certain. And I don’t need to dig it up to know who it must be.

  Katherine. The only one of them—us, a voice whispers to me, us us us—anyone wanted to remember.

  I kneel by her headstone and rest my palm against it, flinching for a moment as I remember the skin of the bodies behind me. Above us, the apricot trees reaching down. Some of them burned and some of them bearing fruit. I reach for the lowest of them, pluck the fruit from the branch.

  Gram, with a hundred of them in her freezer. Why?

  Carefully, I find the seam with my fingertips and pull the apricot apart. There, nestled in the center, in the gentle curve where the pit should be, is a perfect white tooth. Like the one I saw in the garbage at Fairhaven. There is no blood. No nothing. It never came from anywhere but here. Nielsen women, growing in everything.

  I go cold with it. Waver and slip, and my eyes are open but there’s nothing in front of me.

  That story in Mom’s Bible. About Gram giving birth in the apricot grove. And no father, not then and not ever, and not for me either. Did we all come from here? Is there another girl growing in the earth under my feet? I read Mom’s diary, the passage she left me, and I came from her, I thought I did, but maybe I’m like the girls I dug up.

  Or am I like Tess? Like Mom? Is my body waiting to bloom?

  Tess. I get up, brush the dirt from my dress and peer through the apricot trees, try to spot the Miller house. Gram found out Tess was pregnant, said it had to be stopped now that it was spreading.

  I nearly laugh. I’m just like her, aren’t I? As long as it’s only Nielsens, it’s fine. But as soon as it touches someone else, it’s gone too far.

  There is so much I still don’t understand. But before I get answers, I have to get Tess. The first name on Gram’s list of loose ends, and I know what that means now.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  The lights are on at
the Miller house. It’s closer than Fairhaven, but I can still only see the shape of it, the windows bright against the evening. I set off, at as close to a run as I can manage, bare feet aching against the earth.

  I shouldn’t have left her. I went to talk to Mom and she wasn’t even there, and I left Tess alone, alone with her parents and with Gram. But I won’t make that mistake again. I’ll get her and we’ll go to Connors. We’ll sit in that station until the sun comes up, talk to the people we should’ve talked to from the start, and then, I hope, get the hell out of here.

  I run up onto the porch and lean on the doorbell, knock and knock and call for Tess, for her parents. I don’t care if they’re in the middle of a fight. But the lights stay on, and the door stays shut, and I can’t see in through the tastefully frosted windows on either side of the entryway.

  Gram came from here. I watched her truck come up the road from this house, back at Fairhaven. If she’s been here already, with that list of loose ends in her head . . .

  I take a steadying breath and gingerly try the doorknob. It turns. The door eases open. It’s strange to not hear Mrs. Miller immediately welcoming me in, polite to the point of frantic. It’s strange to be here at all without Tess. Too quiet, too calm. Please, don’t let it have happened. Don’t let me be too late.

  “Hello?” I call. “Sorry for barging in. The door was open, so I . . .”

  Nobody scolds me. Nobody comes running. And it takes only a minute to see why. Because there’s blood on the white floor, and blood on the white walls, and blood on the white flowers in their white vase, where they sit on a little white end table.

  A numbness spreading from my chest, swallowing me whole.

  I see Mrs. Miller first. Laid out in the entrance to the kitchen, on her stomach. A shotgun blast through her nice dress, one heel stranded behind her, the other only halfway on her left foot. Her left hand is reaching out, her phone faceup on the floor.

  Gram. Coming back to Fairhaven, washing and washing her hands. The dark patterns on her dress. A shotgun in the back of her pickup. It was already done. I left the fundraiser and went after Mom, and Gram did this. I let it happen.

  “Tess?” I call. Please answer. Please.

  The quiet keeps on. Cottony, thick, and I have to push myself through it. Past Mrs. Miller, past the stare of her open eyes. Through the smaller family room and down the hallway, following the footprints along the hardwood floor. Gram’s footprints, in Mrs. Miller’s blood.

  I came this way that first day here, looking for Mr. Miller. It’s the same now, only it isn’t at all. Why would Gram do this? None of this had to happen. Not a single moment.

  I should never have come here. To Phalene, to Fairhaven. I should have turned around the second Tess saw me. Or stayed out in that fire and died there, next to my own body.

  The trail leads me past the bathroom, where a pile of white towels is crumpled in the sink, stained pink and red. Gram must’ve cleaned herself up some before coming back.

  Farther then, to Mr. Miller’s study, and I stop. Count the footprints as they lead inside and then back out. Something is in there.

  I think I know what.

  The door is ajar, showing me Mr. Miller’s desk and his computer, the screen dark. Slowly, slowly, I open it a little more. File cabinets against the back wall, a thick geometric rug covering the floor. My stomach turns over as I step in. This is worse. Worse than Mrs. Miller, worse than waking up in my own grave. Worse than all of it.

  “Tess?” I say. Keep my eyes fixed straight ahead. Don’t look to my left, where two slatted closet doors are thrown open. Don’t, don’t, don’t.

  Except I have to. I take a deep breath, and it writhes in my throat, like my insides are trying to force it back out. Tess saw you, I tell myself. She saw all of you. You owe it to her to see this.

  I turn. Catch a sob between my teeth, feel it split me in two. Mr. Miller is slumped on his knees, crammed in against the corner of his closet. The bullet’s torn through him so I can see chips of bone in the blood staining the floor. If I hadn’t seen what I’ve seen today, I’d lose the will to stay standing.

  It’s not just him, though. Peeking out from behind him, the hem of Tess’s seersucker dress. The pale stretch of her leg. He’s wrapped around her, and those are her arms around his neck, her hands loose and limp against his shirt.

  Dead. Both of them dead. One blast for two bodies.

  At least, I think, they were together, and that’s when I start to cry.

  Tess. Tess, who needed my help, who gave me hers so freely just because she could. It should be her standing here, her standing in the apricot grove saying goodbye before leaving me behind.

  How could Gram do this? How could she come here and turn this place to ruin? Lives, people, real things in a real world and Gram took them in her hands like they were game pieces on a board. Tossed them aside.

  “I’m sorry,” I tell them both. It’s not enough. It will never be enough. I can never give them the time they deserved.

  What I can do, what I have to do, is end this for them. For me, too. And I think of the lighter I found in my nightstand. Of every day in that Calhoun apartment, a candle held between me and Mom.

  Keep a fire burning. A fire is what saves you—that’s what she always said. She tried and tried to tell me.

  This time I’m finally listening.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Fairhaven is sleeping when I get there. The front porch is dark, the upstairs curtains all closed.

  I’m careful to stay quiet as I step up onto the porch and sneak through the open door, into the entryway. A radio somewhere upstairs, playing an old folk song. Like it’s just a quiet evening in the middle of nowhere.

  In the kitchen, the light is on. Gram must be in there, having her dinner. Is that what you do when you think your granddaughter and your neighbors are all dead?

  I keep on. Upstairs, to get the lighter. The photograph of Mom and Katherine is still in my pocket, and I rest my fingers against it as I climb. She’s here with me. They both are.

  In my room I pause for a moment. Look down at the Bible, the one I thought was Katherine’s. There is more of Mom in there. I’m sure of it. But it’s not something she chose to share with me. I leave it where it is, pull the nightstand away from the wall so I can open the drawer, and grab the lighter.

  Now what? Mom set the grove on fire, but she must have known it wasn’t over. Must have known someone else would have to take care of it, have to find the roots and rip them out.

  That’s my job now, and Gram’s how I do it. I’d be happy to never see her again, but she’s got the information I need. And what can she do to me now? Every shot she’s fired, every swing of the shovel, all when nobody was looking. Well. Look me in the eye, Gram, and see how far you get.

  I go downstairs. Not trying to be quiet anymore. Through the entryway. Into the kitchen doorway. A light is on over the stove, and a dish of casserole is warming in the oven. There’s a glass of half-drunk orange juice on the table. And a huddled figure. Gram.

  I knew she would be here. Still. I freeze.

  She straightens, a wash of yellow light sweeping over her face, and stares at me in the doorway. “Margot,” she says. Low and gravelly. “I didn’t think I’d see you again.”

  I could laugh. Instead I slowly lean against the doorframe, the smell of the casserole setting a growl in my stomach. “Life’s full of surprises, I guess.”

  For a moment we just look at each other—the only Nielsens to weather the storm. The only ones strong enough.

  “Your head,” she says suddenly, nodding to me. “Does it hurt?”

  “Of course it does,” I say. I’m too tired to do anything but stand here, fresh blood leaking into my hair. “You hit me with a shovel.”

  Gram snorts. “Not hard enough.”

  She meant to kill me. Like she killed the Millers. How can this be the woman who did that? Both of us still in our party dresses, both of us bloodstained. And here
she is. Drinking orange juice.

  She takes another breath, like she’s about to say something else, but then she just shrugs.

  “No, come on,” I say. “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I’m just surprised you came here,” she says. “If I were you, if I’d survived, I’d have started running.”

  I’ve had a lot of strange conversations, I think, but this is up there. “I had things to take care of.” I am tired of understanding only just enough to get by.

  I fish the picture Mom left for me out of my pocket and cross to the kitchen table. I unfold it there, between us. Katherine in her shorts and T-shirt, Mom in her dress with her face scratched out. Gram’s eyes go soft, and she traces the photo with a careful finger, lingering on Katherine.

  “Look how young,” she says, almost like I’m not here.

  “What happened to them?” I say. Enough of being careful. Enough of trying to get it just right. “What did you do?”

  Gram doesn’t take her eyes off the photograph. But she starts talking. “I inherited Fairhaven when I was twenty-one.”

  That’s hardly an answer. I force myself not to interrupt.

  “We were doing well then. All that land east of Phalene was planted. Those storefronts in town were all rented.” She sits back, pushes the photograph toward me, her eyes averted like she can’t bear to look at it anymore. “But I was young, and my parents were gone. I made some poor decisions, the way anyone in my place would.”

  Anyone. Somehow I don’t think anyone would end up where she’s brought us.

  “And?” I say, when she stays quiet for too long.

  A blink, and a shake of her head before she looks up at me. “And. I can’t remember exactly, so you’ll forgive me if I get my dates wrong. I think it would have been ’eighty-one.”

  “When what?”

  “It was a bad year for the harvest. The drought kept us from getting much, and what we did grow got hit with insects.” She scrubs her hands across her face, and I can see her shoulders trembling. “It’s been a long time since I picked through all this. I’m sorry.”