Shallow Graves

by Kali Wallace

It was the same night as the party.

  Somebody had played a prank on me. A joke.

  My family didn’t know anything was wrong. In the morning I would call my friends and they would laugh themselves sick. I would laugh too. My father would frown. Meadow would roll her eyes. Sunny would ask me if it was scary being buried, even as a joke. Mom would help me plot my revenge.

  I should go downstairs and shower and get to bed. Tomorrow I would laugh and everything would be fine.

  For a few minutes, I tried to believe.

  Then I saw the note on the counter. It was addressed to Greta, one of my mother’s postdocs. Mom’s handwriting on a plain white sheet. Greta kept an eye on our house when we went out of town. Brought in the mail, watered the plants. I picked up the note, read it twice, set it down.

  On the calendar on the refrigerator, there was a red line drawn through a week at the beginning of June. In big looping letters, Sunny had written, “To the lake!” My mother’s aunt gave us a new calendar every year. It had been African mammals before; now it was tropical birds.

  They had gone to the lake cottage without me.

  My hands began shaking and I couldn’t control my breath. There was a police detective’s business card clipped to a magnet next to the calendar. We weren’t the kind of family that ever needed to call the police. Our house had never been broken into, our cars never vandalized, our safety never threatened. The card was half-hidden behind a coupon for an oil change, like it had been there so long they had stopped looking at it every day.

  I checked the bedrooms to be sure. The house was empty. I went into the study and turned on my mother’s computer.

  Mom had dozens of articles bookmarked, from the Evanston RoundTable, the Review, even the Tribune. They all told the same story. Seventeen-year-old Breezy Lin of Evanston had gone to a party with friends, but she never made it home. Police had found my phone and keys at Nate Havers’s house. They had talked to my parents, Melanie, Maria, Tatiana, and all the people I knew at school, my friends at the skate park on Lake Shore Drive, teachers and guidance counselors, everyone. There had been community meetings, bake sales, organized searches. Nate’s parents had given a statement: they had no idea there would be underage drinking at their son’s party, they were helping in any way they could, etc., etc.

  I had been missing for a year.

  I kept reading. The articles helpfully informed me I was a good kid with good grades and no history of trouble, but I was also friends with a group of teenagers who had a tendency to get a little wild. My friends must have loved that. Pride more than indignation, that’s how they would react, as long as nobody’s college chances suffered. They would have relished telling the cops and counselors all about my mostly imaginary reputation.

  The police never admitted to having any leads. The most recent article was from several months ago. Either the news had stopped caring or Mom had stopped collecting.

  I went into Mom’s personal email—she never changed her password—and found the emails she exchanged with her sister Colleen. Mom explained they were leaving town for the week because Meadow had been having trouble in school and Sunny was depressed and they all needed to get away. Every day was difficult. Breezy was supposed to be graduating, getting ready for college, growing up. Mom didn’t know how to have hope anymore.

  She wrote that she still froze every time the phone rang. She didn’t know what my father was thinking. Aunt Colleen told her that she couldn’t give up, that her daughters needed her now.

  Breezy needs me, Mom had written. She needs us.

  I could hear her voice as I read, resigned, torn with exhaustion. One of the news articles in the RoundTable reported that Dr. Erin Donahue had cried openly at a meeting as she stood before the community and pleaded for information about her daughter’s whereabouts. My mother never cried. Not in private, not in public. Not even when her own mother had died at the end of a long, slow sickness. Mom got angry instead of sad. Her voice rose, her skin turned pink, her hands shook, and after the storm passed she would laugh and say, “Well, I’m Irish. I’m allowed to have a temper.” She didn’t cry.

  I read the words, but they slipped over the surface of my mind, painless and slick. I felt sorry for her, this mother, this weeping, unfamiliar woman who was mourning a lost daughter who might have been anyone, a whole person made of more than blood and dirt and ice.

  I left the computer on and went through the house again. In my parent’s room I found a prescription for sleeping pills on my father’s side of the bed and a book about grief on my mother’s. Across the hall in Sunny’s room, her soccer uniform was thrown over her chair, freshly washed but not folded; I was relieved to see she was still playing. Meadow’s room had changed the most. She had replaced her black bedspread and black curtains with pale blues and greens, her pictures of blood-red roses and tormented angels with simple line drawings of faraway monuments: the Coliseum, the Great Wall, the Sphinx.

  I went down to my own room last. I imagined myself opening the door and finding myself lying there in bed, a sleepy confused version of me who would blink at the light, shove her messy hair out of her face and ask, “Who are you?”

  My schoolbooks were arranged in a neat stack on my desk, my laptop closed and unplugged beside them. The cops would have taken it, looked through my photos and emails, laughed about the tameness of the porn, saying, wow, that girl was either confused or greedy, but she could have gone for something a little more hard-core and made our jobs more interesting.

  There was a faint depression in the comforter where somebody had sat at the edge of the bed.

  I sat in that same spot and pressed my hands together between my knees. It was Mom who came down to my room, probably, but maybe Dad too. Never together. Mom would come late at night, or early in the morning before anybody was awake, open the door quietly, shut it behind her. Meadow and Sunny would know she did it, but they would never say anything.

  Sitting there on my bed, I thought: I can lie.

  “I can’t remember,” I could say. “I don’t remember anything after the party. I don’t know what happened.” I could lie to the police, to the doctors, to my parents. I could lie to my sisters. “I don’t remember leaving the party. I just woke up and came home. I didn’t even know how much time had passed.”

  And they would nod. Their expressions would be sympathetic and relieved. They would take me to the hospital. A nurse would examine me. She would ask delicate questions and she wouldn’t believe my answers.

  The police would want to know about the dead man by my grave.

  “I don’t know him,” I would say. “I’ve never seen him before. I don’t know anything about him. I didn’t kill him.”

  They would ask if I knew he was a murderer. I would lie, lie, lie.

  I inhaled and exhaled. Closed my mouth and stopped breathing. I waited for the burn in my lungs, the pressure in my chest building into pain, but it never came. What came instead was the memory of blood on my hands, whimpering winter wind, a family dinner ended by bullets and knives.

  I jumped up from my bed and stumbled into the bathroom. I retched until my throat was raw and my gut ached. I felt hollow, my insides scraped out. I rose to rinse my mouth, and that’s when I saw the bruises around my neck.

  Handprints, a butterfly matched set, livid and purple. I fit my own hands to the marks and tried to remember what it had felt like, being strangled.

  I didn’t leave that night. I stayed in the silent, empty house for five days.

  During the day I hid in my room behind the closed door. When Greta came over, I listened to the floorboards creaking, water running, doors opening and closing. At night I went out again. I left my own skateboard leaning against the wall in the entryway and stole another from an open garage several streets away. I spent the nights skating around, past familiar houses and streets, unnoticed. I didn’t speak to anybody. I avoided all contact, all conversation. Some people made me nervous in a way I couldn’t define, but I scu
rried away from them like a cockroach hiding when the kitchen light comes on. I didn’t think to examine the sensation at first.

  The first time I truly paid attention to somebody who felt different was at a stoplight in Morton Grove. It was late at night. I stopped to wait for the light to change. Green to yellow to red, and the white walk sign appeared. A single stopped car. The driver’s face was a pale smudge through the glass. But his shadow—

  His shadow was breathtaking.

  I first felt it from the sidewalk, but it was only a tickle, a spider-creep brush on the back of my neck. Ten feet away and it unfurled like a black sail, a balloon of gauzy silk. I wobbled on my skateboard, put one foot down to catch myself, and stopped in front of the car. The headlights drowned me from the waist down. Through the windshield the driver’s face was unremarkable. Round and soft, a middle-aged man carrying his years in his jowls, balding, ordinary.

  I knew him. I didn’t know his name, but I knew him. I had never met him before, but I knew him. Our lives had never intersected before that moment, but I knew without a doubt one true thing about him: he was a killer.

  He tapped the horn. The light was green and he was shaking his head at me, inching the car forward. Startled, I ran back to the sidewalk. The man drove away, and with him went his shadow.

  I stood on that corner for a long time as the lights cycled through their rhythm of stops and starts. Being so close to that man, meeting his eyes through the windshield, seeing the bland impatience there, it left me with a jittery feeling, a nauseous clamor of nerves I didn’t understand.

  It wasn’t until I was back in my basement with the blinds closed did I remember where I had felt it before: the man at my grave. The one I had killed with a touch, before I even knew what I was doing. He had felt like that, in those first panicked moments after I woke up.

  I began looking for killers.

  Short of walking down the street and hoping a murderer was waiting in line at Starbucks, I wasn’t entirely sure how to go about finding them, not until I remembered Joya Allen.

  Joya Allen had been a casual friend of mine in middle school, but for high school she went to Saint A’s and I didn’t see her much anymore. During our junior year of high school she killed her stepfather in a car accident. She hadn’t been reckless or drunk; she’d lost control of her mother’s BMW on the icy street and hit the man in their own driveway. The impact slammed him against the front of the house and broke his spine. It was officially an accident, but there were rumors. Joya had never liked her stepfather very much. He was overbearing, intrusive. Handsey with her friends. They were only rumors.

  I didn’t know the limits of my newfound sense. I didn’t know if guilt mattered, if intent mattered, if accidental deaths were the same as cold-blooded murders. I didn’t know anything. I certainly didn’t know any convicted murderers. But I did know where Joya Allen lived.

  I went to her house one night and lurked like a stalker in the hedge separating her yard from her neighbor’s. I didn’t know which bedroom was hers, but it didn’t matter. That close to the house, close enough I could have tossed a handful of pebbles up to the second story windows, I felt a dark mist of guilt flowing outward, as encompassing as fog from the lake, spreading from a single point in an upstairs bedroom.

  My fingers itched. I clenched my hands into fists at my sides.

  I pictured myself walking over to the door and finding a key under the mat.

  Waiting until I was sure everybody was asleep. Slipping inside.

  Creeping up the stairs, soft steps on soft carpet.

  Standing over Joya as she muttered in her sleep. She would be dreaming of the man she had killed. Remembering how she felt in the moment she made the decision to hit the gas, anger and hatred and disgust and fear. The thump of car striking flesh, a crunch, remembering, and reliving.

  I would place my hand on Joya’s warm forehead.

  I would feel for the shadow of her guilt, and I would pull.

  I wondered if it would be easier to kill the second time. The possibility made me nervous in a way I didn’t like. I didn’t want to hurt Joya.

  I left her house without looking back.

  But I paid more attention after that. There were more killers around than I expected, but I kept my distance, and kept my hands to myself. I always returned to my house before dawn. I drew the curtains and hid from the sun, a silent ghost in my own home.

  Silent, but not alone. The man I had killed was my constant companion. A real estate agent found his body a few days after I woke up. I read about it in the news, but those bloodless articles felt distant and impersonal compared to what I had taken from him. His memories, snapped into my mind at the moment of his death, had faded from immediacy, but I still had them. I will always have them. When I lay in the dark and could not quiet my mind, he and I crept together through a small house in the drifting snow, peered through the windows, and thrilled when the woman walked into view.

  I didn’t want to understand. I wanted him out of my head and his disgusting memories gone. When he intruded and I caught myself yearning, planning, wanting, I flung myself out of bed and ran into the bathroom. I searched through the drawers until I found a pair of scissors, a package of disposable razors, a metal nail file. I hoped the pain might drive him away, but the sight of my own blood rising from the cuts on my legs only made the memories stronger. Children slumped over their dinners. The husband, the interloper, dead on the floor. And her, clutching at the stab wounds in her chest, dying.

  After the blood stopped flowing and the cuts began to heal, I took my father’s sleeping pills from his bedroom and swallowed them all.

  It didn’t work. Number one on my list of failures.

  I went to the lake and tried to drown. I stole rat poison from a neighbor’s garage. Failure, failure. I made a list to keep track. I took a kitchen knife from the wooden block on the counter and filled the bathtub, climbed in and trembled, blade in hand, until the water was pink and cold and my skin was pruned. Failure.

  According to the calendar my family was due back from the cottage on Sunday.

  I cleaned the shower and the bathroom, wiped everything dry and put the towels in the washer. I erased all the evidence I had been there. I looked for cash in my room, in Meadow’s and Sunny’s, but decided not to take it. I took only a pen and the space camp notebook from my desk. I balled up the dirty clothes I had been wearing when I died and stuffed them into a plastic bag. I didn’t know what else to do with them.

  I left before dawn. I swung the plastic bag over my shoulder, dropped the stolen skateboard to the asphalt, and I left.

  TWENTY-NINE

  I WAS STILL on the lawn when Zeke came home. Watching the stars and tracking the satellites as they passed overhead, wondering which of them might be the ISS. Before, in my previous life, my normal life, I would have been imagining how I might describe that night later, in an interview, when somebody asked me, “When did you first know you wanted to go into space?” And I would say, “I always knew,” and I would talk about lying on the grass and watching the space station in orbit.

  The truck pulled into the driveway; the front door opened and shut. I felt the grasping shadows that whispered killer. A minute or two later I heard voices through the open bedroom window. Jake was angry about Zeke’s field trip to Wyoming, angry about Rain, angry about the visit to Ingrid’s, and probably angry about me too, but he didn’t really get around to that before a door slammed and the argument ended.

  The kitchen door squeaked open. “What are you doing out here?”

  Trying not to eavesdrop. “Looking at the stars,” I said.

  The southeastern sky was washed out by Denver’s yellow glow, and the dark shoulders of the mountains loomed in the west, but there were still more stars than I ever saw at home.

  I rolled my head to the side to look at Zeke. “Are you in trouble for helping us?”

  Zeke let the door swing shut behind him and sat on the edge of the concrete patio.
“Jake’s just being an asshole.”

  I thought maybe Jake had good reason to be upset, but I wasn’t about to complain about being rescued from that red room.

  “It’s okay for him to do any stupid thing, but if I—” Zeke stopped abruptly, kicked idly at the crisp grass. “What are you even doing out here? It’s the middle of the night.”

  “I don’t sleep.”

  “Why not?”

  “I mean, I can’t sleep. I haven’t slept since I woke up from being dead.”

  “Huh. Weird.”

  “That’s one word for it. Can I ask you something?”

  “I guess,” Zeke said warily.

  “Can you die?”

  “Uh, yeah. We die. Not as easily as humans.”

  “What does that mean? Extreme old age? Ghoul cancer?”

  “No,” he said. “Somebody pretty much always kills us.”

  The way he said it, so flat and accepting, it was worse than anger or fear would have been. Habit, Jake had said, when he compulsively checked through the front window.

  “Who?” I asked. “People like that guy in Wyoming?”

  “Yeah. Humans,” Zeke said, like it was obvious. Maybe it should have been.

  “Is that what happened to your parents?”

  A pause, then, “Yeah.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It was a few years ago.”

  I didn’t think a few years would make any difference when it came to losing your parents. “How old were you?”

  “Twelve. Jake was seventeen. Eighteen. It happened right after his birthday.”

  “My sister Sunny is twelve,” I said, mostly to myself. “Thirteen, now. I missed her birthday.”

  “Is she your only sister?” Zeke asked.

  “No. There are three of us. Meadow is in the middle. We—” The word caught in my throat. For a second it hurt to speak. “It’s just the two of them now.”

  A few years ago, when I started high school, Mom and Dad had called a family meeting. They had never done that before. My sisters and I joined them in the dining room. Mom and Dad assured us nothing bad had happened, but they wanted to talk to us about the plans they were making in case something ever did. Our mother’s older sister, Kathleen, had agreed to take us in. Meadow and I exchanged a skeptical glance across the table. Kathleen’s second husband hated kids in general and us in particular. But that was what the adults had decided. Aunt Colleen was a photographer and always traveling, and Dad hadn’t seen his family in China since he left for the United States at eighteen. Kathleen was the best option. Mom went over our college funds, their life insurance, their wills. Dad assured us they weren’t sick or taking up skydiving. They just wanted to be prepared. We listened, but the words washed over us without impact, because who ever believes their parents are going to die? Even Sunny laughed when Dad said we would have to fight among ourselves over who got his best bathrobe, the soft gray one we all coveted on cold winter mornings. Meadow added that we would also fight over who got Grandma’s china set because none of us wanted to be stuck with something so ugly. It was hideous, with big pink flowers and faded green leaves, smears of brown paint meant to be branches, and gold edging like fat worms. Mom shook her head and said she would ask the lawyer about arranging for the china to be mysteriously dropped off a moving truck during probate.