by Amber Kizer
Riverside Cemetery was one of the oldest, largest burial grounds east of the Mississippi. It never occurred to me to look for information, or more Fenestras, among the stones, monuments, and mausoleums until Rumi brought me here to visit his mother’s grave last February.
Aside from the ones Rumi pointed out, we’d found seven more, plus three that were so old the marble had washed into bumps and grooves, making it impossible to read. The names and dates were similar in script; all had one of two epitaphs we were working to decipher.
The trees made the cemetery feel like a horticulture park, with winding bike paths large enough for cars, rather than a place where people decomposed. The best parts were the purple violets overtaking the grass, just below the surface of the mower blade. Tiny intricate buds opened into fairy slippers, so that between tendings, the earth appeared indigo from a distance, a carpet of plush purple. The air sugared with the fragrance of blooming lavender lilacs, blushed peonies, and blossomed tulip trees. So beautiful. Peaceful.
Tens and I lay on our stomachs on a beach towel in the grass among trees on a hill, quite a ways from the plots we’d purchased. We had a guitar case and backpacks near us to appear like teens ditching class to neck. Binoculars in hand, Tens took first shift watching all the traffic and people for anyone who looked untrustworthy.
A rusty pickup truck with door signs on it from the monument company pulled to a stop at the marked location for the grave markers. We watched four men pile out. Using ropes, pulleys, cables, and brute force, they moved the plain granite rectangles into place. From here I could see the names Roshana Ambrose and Meridian Laine Fulbright chiseled into the stones. Anything?
My attention was drawn to a wandering soul who’d spotted me. “I’ve got one coming toward me,” I said to Tens.
A little old lady wearing a pink chiffon gown glided over. Her feet, which were not quite touching the ground, were my only clue she was a spirit needing the window.
“I’ve got you covered,” Tens answered as I felt the wave and let my eyes drift shut.
My window appeared. “Thank you,” said the old lady as she quickly slipped across the threshold into a concert hall, where musicians played a big-band tune and the audience broke into wild applause as she walked onto the stage, growing straighter, taller, more solid as I watched.
Tens caressed my cheek. I smiled as I opened my eyes. Shepherding souls really does become easier with practice.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Did I pass out?” I remembered a time when the souls using me drained me so completely that I was forever sick. Now stronger, I was more able to do my job.
“No, I think you fell asleep. You snored.” He grinned and leaned into my kiss.
We didn’t get much sleep after Tony’s worry-filled venting last night. We’d spent hours trying to untangle Juliet’s mind-set and motivation. What are we missing?
I sighed, entwining my arms around his neck and weaving my fingers in his hair. He shifted closer, pressing his hips and thighs against me. He smelled of soap and pine forests and wet dog. I flashed to Custos and pictured her tongue in my mouth instead of Tens’s. Lordy! Not sexy!
I giggled, unable to hold back.
“What’s so funny?” Tens leaned back and gazed at me.
“I really didn’t get enough sleep last night. I’m feeling a little nutso today.”
“That has nothing to do with last night,” he teased, rolling away.
“Oh, really?”
“Yeah, you’re crazy about me. I addle the ladies.” He puffed up his chest.
“Oh, you do, do you? Picking up on Rumi-isms?” Laughing, I threw a handful of grass in his direction. Violets landed in his hair like a haphazard crown that made me giggle harder.
I wished for the millionth time that I could make time freeze and Tens and I could simply be together without interruption. Without the world of death dictating we steal moments to cobble a life together. I didn’t know how Auntie managed the window all those years and carried on with her life in this world without skipping a beat. I’d barely passed the point of blacking out for chunks of time. I had to figure out how she could walk around, nurse the ill, take care of her family, and let souls through at the same time.
As Rumi said, being a Fenestra was like walking, chewing gum, patting my head, and rubbing my tummy all at the same time. Only energetically. That was the best way to describe it.
I glanced at the plots. “So, they delivered the stones we ordered.”
“Yep.”
“Anything?” No signs saying, “Talk to us, we know what you want to hear”?
He shook his head. “And I didn’t see anyone watching or loitering. They did their job and moved on to another section of the cemetery.”
“So it’s not the stonemasons.” I wrote this in my notebook.
“Doesn’t appear to be.” Tens kept shifting.
“So we wait?” I asked. I hate waiting.
“Yep.”
I pulled out a few books from the backpack. “For you.” I handed Tens a copy of Roman and Greek Mythology for Dummies. “Homework.”
“What are you reading?” he asked.
“Women in Judeo-Christian Religions.”
“I think I’d prefer to take gym and shop classes,” he grouched.
I snorted. “Me too. Only I don’t think we’ll find our roots among jumping jacks or table saws.” I tried to shake off the drowsy, cloudy brain that came from reading stale stories about long-dead, ballsy women. As if the men who wrote the stories cut out all the interesting parts.
“Why’d we let Rumi pick the assignments?” Tens asked.
“Tony helped.”
He snorted as if that mattered. “Can we get cheater’s notes?”
“Yours is the abbreviated version already.”
Tens leaned back against a tree and I settled my head in his lap. From there we had a view of the entire forty-sixth section.
“You’ll tell me if you see anything?”
“Sure thing. Unless I’m too engrossed in the antics of Aphrodite to notice.”
I knew his eyes were teasing behind his sunglasses even if he worked really hard to keep a straight face.
“You do that.”
As the sun set, no one had come by the section except two joggers. We stretched and put our stuff away. The gates closed soon, and being locked inside wasn’t exactly my idea of a hot date. “We need to head back. See if Nelli’s heard anything more.”
As we walked down the hill, a small black sedan with tinted windows roared around the corner.
“Way too fast for the cemetery.” Tens ducked behind a tree, dragging me with him.
The driver threw it into park but didn’t cut the engine. The latest summertime club jam pumped from speakers too large for the vehicle. Auntie would say it’s loud enough to wake the dead.
Tens kept moving, skidding closer, behind a mausoleum the size of a storage shed. It is a storage shed—cheery thought.
We were close enough to see the driver of the sedan was not much older than us. He was built like an athlete, his jeans were faded and ripped, and his Bulldogs T-shirt memorialized the last basketball championship of a local university.
“Be careful,” I whispered urgently. We didn’t know if he was good or bad.
Tens dropped his backpack and slid down closer, around toward the back of the vehicle.
The driver dug into his pockets. It looked as though he hadn’t shaved in days; bluish shadow accented his jaw. Shaggy brown hair was stuffed under a green baseball cap worn backward. He took out his phone and snapped a couple of quick photos of the headstones before turning back toward the car.
Tens wouldn’t make it to the car in time.
I stood up from my hiding place. “Hello? Can you help me, please?” I waved and hurried down. “I’m so glad I spotted you. I was here for a school project and got lost.” I tried to pout prettily while continuing. “Now, I don’t know if I go that way for the main gate
or that way?” I tried batting my lashes and sounding helpless.
He hesitated at the driver’s side of the car, seemingly torn between getting out of there and answering me. “Uh, I don’t know. Just follow the white or gold lines on the road.”
“Which way are you going? Maybe I can get a ride back?” I loped down, trying to appear as carefree as a high school sophomore should.
“What school did you say you went to?” he asked.
“She didn’t,” Tens said from behind him.
The man jumped, yelling, “What the hell?”
“Why are you taking pictures of these graves?” Tens’s face was harsh with angles and reflective sunglasses.
“Uh … uh … m-man …,” he stuttered.
“What’s your name?” Tens sidled closer.
“Ah, shit.” The driver slammed into his car and locked the doors. He hit the accelerator and took off.
I started to call out the license plate number so I could remember it: “W-I-2—”
“Holy hell, that went well.” Tens went to collect our stuff with a frustrated stomp.
“He was nervous. Fidgety.”
“Yep. Good thing he was wearing a Butler University shirt.”
“Everyone’s got those.”
“Not ones that say they’re from the student welcome home at Hinkle Fieldhouse. Did you see his hat too?”
“Grass green, but he wore it backward.”
“Capital W, lowercase o, capital W under a tree.”
“WoW trees? Like a student ecology group?” Weird.
“I’ve never seen one like it. Have you?”
“No. You think it’s important?”
“I don’t know. We can ask Gus, see if he recognizes it. Otherwise, I’ll be looking college bound and hanging out on campus until I spot him.”
“You really think you can find him again?”
“Do you doubt my abilities?” he asked with a twist of his lips.
I held my hands up, smiling. “Nope. You sure found me right quick,” I teased.
“If only you’d flown, I would have been all over the airport to collect you!” With both backpacks slung over his shoulders, he hugged me to him. I’d been put on a bus across the country and arrived at the station with no one to meet me. Josiah, in the guise of a taxi service, made sure I got to Auntie’s. It wasn’t the finest hour for either Tens or me.
“That was the problem? Glad you tell me that now!” I laughed. “Where’s my notebook?” I patted my pants.
“Don’t know.”
I ran back up the hill to where we’d planted ourselves. Sure enough, it lay there in the grass. I’d taken to having a notebook in my pocket at all times. I wrote down Rumi’s astonishingly big words (or tried to). I wrote down ingredients and French cooking terms that Juliet seemed to cough out with each breath while she cooked. I wrote down bits and pieces of things I picked up when souls went through me. But mostly I wrote down questions. Lots and lots of questions.
I jotted down everything we could remember about the sedan, the driver, and the license plate number. Tens took the notebook from me and drew the artwork from the hat. A deeply hued almost black-green tree, like an oak, and a font that looked like scripted cursive. WoW. Huh.
“Why did we park so far away?” I asked.
“Need me to pick you up?”
“Nah.” Actually, I did, but if I said that, Tens would increase the cardio that he seemed to think was a necessity to my well-being. I hated every step of the miles he made me run with him. But I loved him, so I did it.
Near the Gothic Chapel, we walked past an area with a newly dug grave, the green canopy and chairs set up for the morning service. “Tens, soul,” I said, clueing him in that I was about to be pulled under to the window.
An African American man with a white beard and full three-piece suit seemed overjoyed to see us, waving and calling out greetings as he neared. I stopped walking so I wouldn’t run into any stones. I couldn’t help the smile on my lips as he brought me to his window.
This time the windowpanes were stained glass, filling this side with colorful lights and bright rays of joy. Without skipping a beat, the deceased danced over and into a full church sanctuary mid-service. A choir sang, the congregation clapped, and the preacher at the pulpit welcomed him home.
I was just about to turn back to my life when I saw Howie, his face still frozen in scar tissue, sitting in the back pew. He seemed a little older. His hair longer but still muddy, his clothes still dirty.
“Howie?” I leaned across the window, calling for him. Shocked, I felt my human legs give way. I hoped Tens was close enough to catch me.
“Hello?” His voice broke.
“It’s Meridian. What are you doing here?”
“I can’t go on. Not until. You said I was going home!” He turned toward me, falling over the back of a pew in his haste to get to me.
My heart broke. Why isn’t he better? Are his wounds the same as Roshana’s? The window faded before I could say anything else. I blinked my eyes open and saw Tens leaning over me, shading my face with his.
“Meridian?” Tens held bottled water to my lips.
“He’s still there.” Howie’s stuck at the window? How do we heal him?
“I know. We’re in the van. I carried you here. You were yelling for Howie.” Tens tried to reassure me.
After the tornado dispensed with Jasper’s truck, we’d bought a used van. It wasn’t exactly great on mileage but it allowed us all to mostly travel together.
I nodded.
“Let’s get you home.” Tens touched my cheek.
We need to talk to everyone.
We drove through the gates as the security guard moved behind us to close them.
I watched neighborhoods flow past us, banners of black-and-white checkerboard and bunting draped across mailboxes and hung from porches. The entire city turned black and white, white and black in May. Forget patriotism on the Fourth of July; this was Indy 500 month, where race cars and racing were the topics of united celebration. It wasn’t lost on me that our month was turning very black and white, too, only evil against good, Fenestra versus Nocti.
As I watched yet another street of decorated houses speed by along an old avenue of tree-lined turn-of-the-century mansions, I tried to assimilate all that I’d seen. Nothing else could possibly pack itself in. I jinxed myself.
The van slowed. “Tens? What are you doing?” I asked, sitting straighter.
“Didn’t you see her?”
“Who?”
“The hitchhiker.”
“Pretty?” I teased as he pulled to the shoulder. “Uh, no. We are not stopping.” I didn’t have to watch late-night cop shows to know picking up hitchhikers wasn’t a smart thing. That there were baddies after us only added to that. Capital letter N-O.
“Already stopped.” Tens shrugged.
“She could be Jack the Ripper’s cousin,” I debated.
“Merry.” He rolled his eyes. Clearly, I’d begun to wear off on him. “Her sign. Did you see her sign?”
I guessed, “Will work for food?”
“Close, but no.” He set the parking brake as cars continued whizzing past.
“What?” I asked as he snapped off the ignition.
As Tens opened the driver’s side, a huge truck rumbled by, almost taking the door off with a honk and an obscene gesture.
“ ‘Will Protect for Food,’ ” he yelled over the traffic sounds.
“Huh?” I scrambled to follow him.
The hitchhiker turned, grabbed a hobo bag, and headed toward us.
I turned my head and read the sign dangling from her hand. In thick black marker, she’d written WILL PROTECT FOR FOOD. Weird. Creepy.
“She’s one of us.” Tens shook his head at my expression.
“Yeah, right. She’s probably on drugs and creatively minded.”
His certainty didn’t extend to me.
Her hair was military short in the back and sides, but lay
ers of punked out curls on the top were scrunched into waves like white-water rapids. It was hair that either took hours to appear so messy or she didn’t bother to style it at all. Hard to tell.
A black leather jacket, three sizes too big and with rolled up sleeves, covered a layered skirt sewn of knockoff silk scarves. Fingerless black gloves with silver studs competed to reflect the sunlight with miles of chains draped around her neck and bracelets up her arms. Earrings of feathers and tinsel bracketed a face full of kohl and color.
I hung back, ready to flag down assistance, but Tens strode forward like they knew each other. As we faced off, she smiled at Tens, flicking her hair out of her eyes. “Took you long enough.”
“Hello?” I said, wondering at her attitude.
“Tens and Meridian, I presume?” she answered in a heavy accent I didn’t recognize.
Tens grinned big and goofy. I’m missing a joke.
“I’m Fara.” She handed Tens one of her bags.
“Is that supposed to mean something?” I asked, perplexed by her confidence and swagger.
“She’s Juliet’s Protector,” Tens said to me out of the corner of his mouth.
I turned to him. “How do you know?”
He shrugged. “I know it.”
“I had no idea getting from New York to you would take this long. She’s still alive, right? Made it okay without me?”
Barely. Thanks for caring.
“When did you arrive?” Tens took her other bag and started walking back toward the van. I trailed along like a third wheel.
“Supposed to be here before Nowruz.”
Now-what?
To me, she clarified like I was a simpleton. “The Persian New Year. Zoroaster’s birthday. Also Juliet’s day of blossoming. I should be here for that.”
Yeah, you should have been, but you weren’t. “So what happened?” I asked. Thinking of the sleepless nights I spent worrying. Trying to remember everything and anything I thought Juliet needed to know before the clock struck midnight and souls knew her window was fully open. Get her through or she would die. As in dead dead. I could have used backup beyond Tens and Auntie’s journal. Maybe that accounted for the bitch in my tone.
She ignored me. She didn’t need to speak a word to break the silence. The jingles and jangles, twangs and tings of all the metal announced her every step.