Can't Look Away

by Donna Cooner

  The oak trees are big and old, with many limbs already bare from the first cool weather of fall. Gray moss hangs from low-lying branches and blows softly in the wind. It’s quiet. There’s a small gate, and beyond are white headstones sticking out randomly from the cover of brown and yellow leaves on the ground.

  “Her grave is near the back. I’ll show you when you’re ready.”

  I let my breath out in a long sigh. “I’m ready,” I say, raising my chin.

  I slide out of the van and slam the door shut. We walk slowly toward the gate, the only sound the crunch of the leaves beneath our feet. On the far side of the perfectly maintained little clearing, the forest takes over again. The trunks of pine trees are tightly packed into a thick line against the back fence, every possible ground space between them filled with vines.

  “Do you want me to go with you?” Luis asks quietly, holding open the gate.

  “No.”

  “Walk straight through the middle. The newer graves are in the back. It’s right under that big oak back there.” He points, and I nod weakly. Ropes of vines drape from the treetops in junglelike profusion, but inside the tiny clearing, the trees are old and solitary, spaced out among the gravestones to provide shade. “I’ve got some arrangements to put out.”

  There are no other people here now, but the left behind have obviously been here. Their flowers and remembrances are scattered throughout. The only sign of life is a squirrel that makes a quick retreat with a pecan sticking out of one side of its mouth.

  I walk carefully back through the stones, trying not to step directly on a grave. The stones are old, some cracked and crumbling, with dates from the eighteen hundreds. One has a tiny lamb on it with a missing ear. Another has a dove etched into the granite with two miniature stones on either side. I should feel scared, but I only feel the profound quiet. I glance at the dates of the three headstones in front of me. All the same last name. A mother and her two children? What terrible thing happened to them in 1938? I can’t stop and wonder. There are newer markings now, less crumbled stone and more polished granite. All have stories. Lives lived and people left behind to grieve.

  Without warning, the question from Miranda’s game of hide-and-seek breathes through my mind. You’re not coming to find me, are you?

  But I am.

  I keep walking, heading directly toward the big tree Luis pointed out. The tombstones get even more modern, the dates more current. Some even have photographs etched into the stone. One is covered in pictures of cats and has the family name, Rattenborg, engraved on top. I glance at the date. She died last year.

  And then I’m there. The grass hasn’t grown over the dirt yet. The name on the stone is stark and cold — Miranda Jo Grey. And underneath, the date of her birth and her death, and the words Gone but not forgotten.

  “When the moon shines bright, your fears will be few …” I whisper softly, my finger tracing the outline of the words, “and only sweet dreams will come to you.”

  The guilt feels like a kick to my stomach. But, then, it’s always been there, waiting on the edges of my mind and haunting my dreams.

  If only I didn’t make you go to the mall. If only I wasn’t mean to you. If only I stopped you. If only I apologized. If only …

  I drop to my knees in front of the tombstone. The etched name is cold under my fingers. I trace it once, and then again. All I feel is stone. The wind blows gently at the moss. The silence is absolute. There is no response. No giggles. No chatter. No arguing. Nothing. How could there be nothing? How could she be nothing?

  I struggle to my feet, wiping the dirt off my hands. There’s a concrete bench and I sit down, pulling my jacket in a little tighter to my body even though it’s not cold. The brown barren patch of earth looks so lonely. I try to imagine it covered with an altar full of ofrendas and bright yellow flowers. It’s comforting somehow.

  “Are you okay?” Luis is standing in front of me.

  “I was just thinking.”

  “Well, now you don’t have to think. You can talk.”

  “Maybe it’d be easier if you were filming me,” I say casually, but I might actually mean it, and that makes me feel even worse.

  “Action,” he says with a small smile, then squats down in front of me and reaches for my hands. He holds them lightly in his and waits. I don’t pull my hands free. I don’t want to.

  “Luis?” I say, and he looks at me expectantly. “What do you think happens when you die?” Here in this place, I have to ask.

  “No one knows the answer to that for sure.” He holds my gaze solemnly. “But being around death all my life, I have some ideas on the subject.”

  “Like what?” I listen, fascinated.

  “What if it wasn’t a bad thing? Dying.”

  “But it is. A bad thing, I mean.”

  “It’s a bad thing for you. For everyone left behind. Because you miss them.”

  He looks at me for a reaction, but I am not sure what to say.

  “Think of it this way. Say someone was walking through this really big mud pile and there were, like, snakes everywhere and lots of dirty, slimy water and she felt sick and tired and was really, really struggling through that water and it was dark everywhere.”

  “So you’re saying the world is like that?”

  “Just stay with me for a minute. So you see her struggling to walk through all that mud and you know you could help. You could take her to a place where it would be warm and light and she’d feel great, but she’d have to leave the muddy, yucky place behind. Would you do it?”

  “Of course,” I say. “And maybe I could believe that for sick people who die or old people, but what about kids?”

  We both know who I am talking about.

  “It’s sort of the same kind of thing,” he says.

  “So everybody here on earth is just waiting to go to the big party in the sky?” I don’t mean to sound so sarcastic, but I’m not buying it. “My sister was a happy kid and she loved life. She wasn’t sitting around suffering, waiting for something better.”

  “All I’m saying is maybe we just don’t know any better than here.” Luis stares off into space in an unfocused way, and the look on his face is so still I am afraid to say a word.

  I try to digest this idea.

  “This better place — is it heaven?”

  “I’m not sure what to call it. I just think it exists.”

  “So you believe in God, too?” I ask.

  “Yeah. I do,” he said. “You?”

  “I don’t know anymore.”

  “That’s okay.” He looks like he means it. “But if some kind of afterlife exists, then dying wouldn’t be bad at all, right?”

  I still can’t agree with him, but I will think about what he said. The next question rattles around inside my head until I finally blurt it out. “Do you think sometimes people stay around … you know … afterward?”

  “I think there could be reasons sometimes for them to stay.” Luis looks at me, almost curiously. “It’s a very small space between the living and the dead. Why wouldn’t there be some overlap?”

  “Yeah. Maybe.” I look down at the ground, kicking at the leaves with the tip of my shoe, before I look back up to meet his eyes. “I just want proof.”

  “There’s a lot of stuff we believe without proof.” His dark eyes become thoughtful. “Think about the Internet. We all know it’s out there. We use it every day, but have you ever seen it?”

  “No,” I say slowly. “But even if you can’t see it, there is proof the Internet exists.”

  Like my vlog. All the people out there, listening to me. Responding to me.

  “I’ve seen lots of things I can’t explain,” Luis says quietly. “I don’t know if it’s proof or not. Doors opening when no one was there. Shadows. Voices.”

  “It doesn’t bother you? Scare you?” Thinking about ghosts makes me shiver.

  “It’s just part of my life, I guess.” Luis sits down beside me on the bench and slips an a
rm around my shoulders, pulling me into him. It throws me off balance, but only for a minute. I feel the warmth of his broad chest against my side and slowly melt down into him. It feels too good to pull away.

  “How do you know all this?” I ask.

  “I hear a lot of sermons from a lot of different ministers. All those funerals.”

  I think about that for a moment. It makes sense.

  “You are good at comforting people,” I say.

  We sit like that for a while, beside Miranda’s grave, not talking. The quiet surrounding us, the wind soft on our faces. I think about the cemetery in Luis’s grandmother’s town in Mexico, where the angelitos visit the living at midnight. This could be such a place.

  “Thanks for bringing me,” I say finally.

  “I didn’t have much of a choice. You’re pretty convincing when you set your mind to something.”

  I laugh. The squirrel scampers back out through the leaves, across the graves, digging around for another nut. A brown bushy piece of life among all the death. We watch it in silence.

  “It must have been tough coming here, but you did it. You’re stronger than you look.”

  But how I look is what I’m good at.

  I change the subject, uncomfortable with the compliment. “Have you ever spent the night out here before?” I ask, looking toward the thicket of woods surrounding us.

  He doesn’t ask why I want to know. He only nods. “The summer after my mom left, I was at this camp where they had this solo thing. They put you out in those woods.” He points toward the fence and the trees. “All you have is a tarp, some food, water, and a sleeping bag. You stay there for twelve hours by yourself.”

  “Why?” I ask, because it just sounds crazy.

  “It’s supposed to help you get in touch with your feelings and stuff like that.” He grins.

  “What’s out there?” I ask.

  “Tons of mosquitoes, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “Big cottonmouth snakes that curl up in the hollows of pine trees and open their mouths in wide screams when you walk past them.” He opens his mouth to demonstrate. “That’s in the daytime. When you can see them.”

  I cringe at the thought of what happens at night when you can’t.

  “And, of course, there are feral hogs. They run wild all over these woods and they are meeeean.” He draws the last word out into about five syllables for emphasis. “You do not want to run into one of those out there.”

  He’s right. I don’t.

  “After it gets dark, you can hear these big, clumsy armadillos crashing through the underbrush like huge half-blind tanks.”

  “I don’t think we have armadillos in Colorado.”

  “They look like tiny dinosaurs. They’re harmless, but they’re oblivious to everything.”

  “Good to know,” I say, but I’m thinking more about the snakes and wild hogs than the armadillos. Luis leans forward to put both palms down on his knees, his bicep stretching the arm of his white T-shirt. Not that I notice. “It sounds horrible.”

  He shrugs. “It wasn’t that bad. Even though I felt alone, I wasn’t really. The camp counselors were only a whistle blow away.”

  “So what was the point?”

  “I guess it’s about having time to think — without any distractions. Something about being truly alone, with all the sounds and darkness, helps you figure some things out.”

  “What if you realize you don’t like your own company? It might make for a really long night….” My voice trails off to a whisper.

  He tilts his head and looks over at me. “Why do you ask?”

  “I was just thinking about el Día de los Muertos and how people spend all night in the graveyard.”

  “In Mexico, there’d be plenty of people to keep you company. Out here, it’d just be you and the armadillos,” he says.

  And snakes.

  “But you survived,” I point out. “And all that time in the woods by yourself was a good thing?”

  He considers for a moment. “For me it was. There was something about just sitting outside in the dark all alone. Makes you face your demons, you know?”

  “I guess.” I know all about demons and the dark, but I’m not sure I want to face either one.

  “The secret to being a real star is commitment.” —Torrey Grey, Beautystarz15

  When I get home from the cemetery, I see my dad mowing the lawn. I wave on my way inside, grateful that I won’t have to answer questions about Luis or the funeral home van right now.

  I find my mom in her bedroom, sitting on the floor in front of her dresser. Photographs of a family that used to have four people are scattered around her outstretched legs. I sit down on the side of the bed.

  “Remember this one?” She holds up a photograph, her hand trembling. I know it well. It used to sit in a frame on top of our entertainment center in Colorado.

  “Yes,” I say. It was my thirteenth birthday and we hiked Torreys Peak, my namesake, for the first time as a family. It was a crisp fall day and the aspens were bright yellow against the blue Colorado sky. Miranda didn’t want to go all the way to the top, so we stopped halfway. I begged my dad to keep going with me, but he said we weren’t going to split up. He asked another hiker to snap a picture of us. In the photo, I’m scowling and looking away from the camera. My mom is smiling, brushing Miranda’s wild curls back from her face with one hand, and my dad has his arms around all of us in a big bear hug.

  “It was a good day,” Mom says, pressing the photo to her chest. Her breathing is so quiet. I’m afraid she is crying, but when I make myself look, she isn’t.

  She picks up another photo off the floor and holds it out toward me. It was our Christmas-card picture from last year. Miranda is in red and I’m in green — smiling brightly in front of a big fake photo-studio Christmas tree.

  One would never guess that my sister and I were always arguing, out of the frame. Meanwhile, everything else in my life at that moment was coming into perfect, sharp focus. My vlog was featured on TeenVogue.com and I was named one of the top ten teen beauty vloggers to watch. Page views and followers were skyrocketing. I shared my possessions and opinions freely with the world. I started spending more time watching YouTube than television. Every day I received messages from girls all over the world thanking me for being their inspiration. My extended social group copied my looks and retweeted my words. None of that is visible in this standard photo.

  “Remember how she used to lie under the Christmas tree and count the seconds between each blink of the lights?” my mom asks.

  I nod. At the time I thought it was incredibly annoying. Now I would give anything to see Miranda under the Christmas tree. Or anywhere else.

  Mom slowly opens her fingers and the picture falls back onto the scattered pile of frozen moments in time. I slide off the end of the bed and join her on the floor, reaching out for her empty hand. It feels cold and dry.

  “I think about her all the time. If I could just talk to her,” Mom says. Her voice sounds hoarse and sleepy. “But I can’t even talk about her.”

  It’s an astonishing echo of my words to Luis earlier. Evidently neither Mom nor I can share the pain out loud. But we are here. Surrounded by the images of our used-to-be life and bound together in the silent intensity of grief.

  “It just takes time.” I say what everyone says, but my throat hurts and I can hardly force the words out. The truth is I don’t know what it will take to put our world together again.

  “I don’t want to do it anymore,” Mom mumbles, almost to herself. Almost like she’s forgotten I’m here.

  I feel a sharp understanding of what she’s saying, but I won’t accept it. I can’t lose anyone else. “You don’t mean that,” I say.

  “I wanted to be really brave at this. I wanted to be noble and courageous and strong.” Tears well up in her eyes and slowly leak down her cheeks. “But I don’t feel brave or courageous or strong. I just feel broken.”

  �
��You can’t give up, Mom.” The tears are running down my cheeks, too. The pain so deep in my chest, I can’t breathe.

  I’m still here. I need you.

  “I’m not like you and your dad,” she replies. “You both always figure out what to do next.” She leans against me. “I don’t know what to do next.”

  She puts her head in my lap and I brush her hair back from her face. She looks so different now. Her features changed forever, collapsing into the terrible lines of unrecognizable pain, in the hospital corridor when she collapsed into my dad’s arms at the news Miranda would never wake up.

  I’m sorry, Mom. So sorry.

  “I don’t know what to do,” I murmur out loud, but I’m not sure she even hears me. Her eyes close and I look down at her still, sad face. Sometimes watching my mom with Miranda made me feel unimportant. Unnecessary. Unchosen. I was the changeling, with my dark hair and tall lanky body, who no one thought was related to the rest of the family. The dark, moody teenager. I just wanted to be left alone with all my Internet friends. “Can you just leave me alone, Miranda?” I always said. “Mom, tell Miranda to leave me alone.”

  I don’t want to be alone.

  “Please, Mom. I need you here,” I whisper.

  We stay like that for a long time without saying anything until she finally opens her eyes and looks up at me. It seems that, finally, she has heard me. She knows that I still need her. She still has another daughter.

  Somewhere in this searing, shared pain, I realize that my mom and I are more alike than I knew.

  “I love you, Torrey,” she mumbles tiredly.

  “I know, Mom.”

  Later in my room, I’m still thinking about my mom. My phone buzzes and I answer without even looking, instantly regretting it.

  “Hey,” Zoe says. “I’m surprised you picked up.”

  My heart stops. I don’t say anything.

  “Please don’t hang up.”

  “What do you want?” I manage to ask. It’s so strange to hear her familiar voice after all this time.

  “I’m so sorry, Torrey. It totally got out of hand. Please believe me. It was a stupid mistake.” The words pour out of her in a torrent.