by J. C. Geiger
“Like PTSD?”
“Restless legs syndrome.”
“Is that a twitchy spasm thing? Like Tourette’s?”
“No. It’s not like that.”
“You don’t swear uncontrollably?”
“I don’t.”
“I can’t believe that’s a syndrome. I’m going to look it up.” He thought she might pull out her phone and give him a break. But she just hit him with another question.
“Do you get nervous when you play music?”
“Not usually. I was a little nervous at my audition. The guys there—you could just feel how much they’d played.” Improvising for that panel had felt like improvising for Dakota: He could play his whole heart out, and it might not be enough.
“So you’re going to school for music then?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “I mean, I’m going to keep playing music, but I’m going to school for business.”
Her eyes shot open and Lance looked over his shoulder, because maybe someone behind him had just picked up a giant bloody hatchet. But there was no ax murder. That look was just for him, studying business.
“Business,” she said.
“What?”
“Why would you study business?”
Lance’s stomach prickled. But he knew the answer to this question. He had the script.
“There are a lot of places you can go with a business degree,” he said. “Most competitive employment sectors are looking for business graduates, so I want to give myself the academic freedom to find something I love.”
“Wow. You love music, right?”
“Yeah. But I need to make good money.”
“Why,” she asked. “For what?”
That solid stare. Was she serious?
“You need to know why I want to make good money?”
“Yeah. What do you want to do with all your good money?”
Lance had a specific vision of himself with money. Wearing expensive sunglasses, he walked out of an important meeting and into a parking lot. He opened the door to a new white convertible, threw himself into the front seat, and jammed a key in the ignition, music blaring as he peeled off to kick ass at his next important meeting. He’d never considered the purpose of these meetings. Only being rushed and valuable. He smiled, picturing it.
“So?” Dakota asked.
Lance shrugged and said: “I want to be able to do what I want.”
“What do you want?”
According to his five-second mental film clip, he wanted to be between meetings.
“I want to travel,” Lance said, remembering Seattle. “Play music.”
“So why not just travel and play music?”
“Oh, right.” Lance laughed. She wasn’t smiling. He frowned. “Because you can’t just do that. I need to make money first. I mean, do you know the average business graduate can make over sixty thousand dollars a year? That’s really good money. After a couple years, I’ll be able to do whatever I want.”
“Sure,” she said. “But by then you’ll want different things. Maybe you’ll want a nicer car. And a nicer house. You could be married with babies and knickknacks and window treatments.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“With window treatments?”
“With the whole thing.”
“Nothing. If that’s what you really want,” Dakota said.
“It’s not what I want right now.”
“Exactly! Right now, you really love something. That’s rare. You carry your horn around like a newborn baby. Right now you stop and smell flowers.”
His cheeks burned, full of blood.
“Cute,” she said.
“Great,” he said, touching his cheeks.
“That’s rare, Lance. That’s precious. I like Lance Right Now. I don’t know about Business Lance. We might not get along.”
“And obviously this is all about you,” he said.
“Well, sure.” Dakota smiled.
“Do you always start fights with strangers?”
“Only when I like them.”
“Did you pull boys’ hair in grade school?”
She stared back at him, considering this.
“No. I didn’t mess around with hair-pulling. I just knocked them over. Flat on their backs. Usually when they weren’t looking.” She laughed. “I can’t believe I’m telling you this.”
“It’s great,” he said. “I’m sure they loved it.”
“Maybe. I liked more boys back then. It’s harder now. There are fewer people I want to knock down.”
“Should I be careful?” Lance asked.
“No. You’re safe. You’re a high school student with a promising future in business.”
She was now taking a tone with him. And his own tone was creeping up the back of his throat like the first tickle of a cough. How did this girl spend her time, anyway? Did she still live with her parents? Hang out with the drunks from last night?
“I just believe long-term happiness is about delayed gratification,” Lance said. This was the voice he used when he raised his hand in class. The voice he would use in front of a gymnasium full of people when he gave his speech this Friday.
“Oh yay,” she said. “Let’s talk about delayed gratification.”
“Have you ever heard of the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment?”
“Nope.”
“It’s a really famous experiment,” he said. She did not react. “Here’s how it worked. They would take a five-year-old kid and put him in a room with a marshmallow. So here’s the marshmallow.”
Lance tossed a white sugar packet in the center of the table.
“The researcher gave the kid two choices. Either eat the marshmallow now or wait five minutes and get two marshmallows.”
Dakota grabbed the packet and tore it open. Dumped it in her coffee.
“Well,” Lance said. “Now you won’t get two.”
“I only wanted one.”
“Fine. But you know what they learned? The researchers followed these kids for twenty years, and they could trace all their successes back to the marshmallow decision. One marshmallow now or two marshmallows later? It tied into how much money they made, where they lived, and whether or not they’d been in prison. Kids who could wait for the second marshmallow made more money, lived in better neighborhoods, and were generally happier. Kids who ate the first marshmallow ended up getting arrested or dropping out of high school.”
“Sounds like the first marshmallow was laced with something.”
“No,” Lance said. “They just proved it. Success is about delayed gratification.”
Dakota was looking at him evenly. Chin out.
“So who won?” she asked.
“Won what?”
“The marshmallow contest.”
“I don’t think anyone won.”
“That’s what success is about, right? Winning.”
“Well. I guess whoever ended up with the most marshmallows.”
“Right,” Dakota said. “That makes sense. That’s very mathematical.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I just want to make sure I got this right. A five-year-old who wants to eat a marshmallow is eventually going to prison. The winner is the kid who would rather hoard his bullshit marshmallows in a lab with creepy grad students.”
“In all fairness, we can’t know they were creepy.”
“Yes, Lance. We can know that. And you know what I think? A five-year-old who won’t eat a marshmallow is a freak. And that’s who’s running our country right now. A gang of freakish children, all grown up, who never learned what the fuck a marshmallow was for. They just learned how to count them. Probably at business school.”
“Oh, good. Because I’m taking Statistics and the Marshmallow Economy next semester.”
“Good for you,” she said. “Start pricing window treatments.”
Dakota grabbed a second sugar packet. Tore it open.
“You said you only wanted one,” Lance
said.
She stared right back. Poured in the sugar.
Just then, Maude came by: “Any food?”
“No,” they both said.
Maude left and Lance tried to keep his leg still. He’d probably just lost his ride to Joe’s Place. People were eating all around them. Obnoxious sounds. Laughter and slurping and lip smacking. A woman at the next table, chomping ice cubes. Like chewing glass.
“You’re fighting your leg,” she said. “It wants to move.”
A bar of sunlight slanted across Dakota’s face, brightening her eyes. Fixed on him. Moss-colored in this light, with sunflower halos. No one ever looked at him this long. And this girl didn’t blink.
Dangerous.
“C’mon,” she said. “There’s somewhere we need to go.”
“Where?”
“Aux Sable Cemetery.”
Not helping.
Back in the Focus, Dakota was listening to folk rock with predictable harmonies, but at least the songs didn’t fade out. They ended on a specific note, the way songs should end. The band was singing about ghosts. Maybe she was playing this on purpose, to scare him.
The car tunneled through low-hanging trees, and the road turned from pavement to gravel to dirt. A green bird spun and plunged toward the windshield. Lance jerked back, and the bird slipped past them, spinning in the updraft of the car. Not a bird, a leaf. The trees all around them were distorted, like fun-house mirrors.
“Bigleaf maples,” Dakota said. “Aren’t they cool?”
“Whoa,” Lance said. That was it. “Those leaves are enormous.”
“Bigger than car tires,” Dakota said “You should see them in autumn. Golden kites, all over the road. It’s amazing.” Dakota drove too fast, but it felt good and a little out of control, like a raft spinning down the rapids.
Aux Sable was impressive. It took them five minutes to drive its fenced perimeter—a big graveyard for such a small town, like the whole population had died and been buried there a hundred times. They parked near the front gate.
The air here felt cooler than it had near Whiggley’s. Maple leaves rustled like the hiss of drum brushes, and the sky was putting on a good show. A silver crease tore through a mass of cotton-topped, lead-bellied clouds, spilling chutes of light. Golden puddles lay in the hills. They looked good enough to swim in.
Good job, Sky Team, his father would’ve said. Remember this, Lance. It’s the most important thing you’ll see all day.
But the sky was hard to remember, exactly as it was. Could you pin it down with notes? Capture it with a song?
Dakota was looking at him. She’d just said something.
“What?” he asked.
“I like how you look at things.”
Goosebumps sleeved his arms and he walked quickly, unsure of what to say. She stopped at the front gate.
“Remember your cemetery etiquette,” she said, pausing at the threshold. “Thank the dead for allowing you to visit. When you leave, remember to say: I truly appreciated our time together. I must ask that you please don’t follow me home. Then spin three times.”
He laughed. “And that works?”
“It has so far.”
Inside, the cemetery was incredible. A silent city of monuments and obelisks. One fifteen-foot marble statue of a woman spreading her arms. Two men riding tall black horses. A gravel path snaked up through the grass, taking them close to what resembled small stone homes in a medieval village. Glass doors and walls. Knobs and keyholes. Some had chairs inside. One had a stack of magazines and a coffeemaker.
“Lots of rich people buried here,” Dakota said. “Their relatives come to visit and just sit inside the mausoleums, like they’re getting used to the idea.”
“The idea of what?”
“Being dead.”
Dakota had done a headstone rubbing project, and knew things about the cemetery. Names and dates. Information you have to research and remember: family histories, the reason some markers faced the sun and others faced the shade. As they walked farther, she grew quiet. She was ahead of him, and he remembered something his father said:
If it’s five miles into the woods, it’s five miles out.
Every step, taking him further from Bend. Complicating Lance + Miriam with two new variables: time and footsteps. How long had they been walking. Ten minutes? Twenty? They should probably turn around.
“Dakota,” he said. “Dakota.” But he had that breathless feeling, when the words wouldn’t come, and Dakota was too far ahead, already climbing the cemetery’s tallest hill.
When Lance reached the top, he paused to catch his breath. Dakota stood waiting for him. The breeze was cool, and all four sides of the surrounding iron fence were visible from where they stood. Carved into the distance, a straight line of stone and steel. Railroad tracks.
“Can’t escape the train,” she said.
“Enjoy the trainsong,” he said. “Thanks for that little tip.”
“Ha!” Dakota said, punching his arm.
“I almost died. It literally knocked me out of my bed.”
“Happens,” Dakota said. “My dreams have all made room for the whistle. I have a banshee dream, a giant teakettle dream. There are more.”
“Does it come every night?”
“Two twenty-six a.m.,” she said. “You could set your watch by it.”
“Don’t people complain?”
“People complained when they tried to stop it.”
“What!”
“Oh yeah,” she said. “Five years ago, a neighborhood association tried to get a noise ban and people came crawling out of the freaking woodwork. I mean, a hundred people. The Float turned into the King County Fair. Grandmas and grandpas and broke-down lumberjacks all trucked in from the woods to save their precious train whistle. Folks got straight-up weepy, Lance. I do not lie.”
“Why?”
“They grew up with that whistle. It was in all their best memories and two a.m. teakettle dreams. It’s like a part of them.”
“That is the single dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,” Lance said.
“Kind of makes me love people,” Dakota said. “Kind of makes me hate them.”
She was looking off to the right, toward the cemetery’s bad neighborhood. The grass was bunched and twisted. Stubby headstones poked up from the ground like molars. In the center of a loose ring of stones stood a giant willow tree. Spaghetti branches dangled to the ground.
“Outlying graves. Most old cemeteries have them, for the dead who don’t belong,” Dakota said. “Atheists. Suicides. Murderers.”
“I should probably go back,” Lance said.
She smiled. “Are you scared, Lance? You’re totally scared.”
“I’m not.”
“Then come on. That’s Unger’s Willow. It’s a rite of passage. It’s why I brought you.”
They kept walking and the ground sloped down toward the willow. Tablets and wedge stones turned blank, their letters wiped clean. Bindweed caught the tips of his shoes, making him stumble. They were near the willow when the sound came, a piercing squee, squee, squee.
Lance froze. Craned his neck slowly. To his right, a small clawed thing on a headstone. On its hind legs, chest puffing.
“What the hell is that?” he whispered.
“A chickaree,” she said.
“Are they native to Washington?”
“A squirrel, dude. It’s a squirrel.” The rodent dropped on all fours and looked more like a squirrel. It scampered down the backside of the headstone, then followed them all the way to the edge of the willow’s green curtains, chittering and scampering, claws clicking over headstones. Dakota pressed her right hand through the willow’s limp branches. Her fingers disappeared inside.
“It’s haunted in there,” she said.
“Dakota.”
“It is,” she said. “Our best ghost story is in here. Come on.”
She parted the branches. Vanished.
Greenery tickled the back of his
neck as he followed her inside. The whisper of small, rattling leaves. The space beneath the willow was cool and dim, an emerald dome supported by its beam of a trunk. The bark, malformed. Like someone had turned the wood to taffy and twisted hard to the left.
“The guy who built the railroad died here,” she said. Dakota’s eyes stole snatches of color from wherever she was looking. In the filtered half-light, they looked green and unnatural. “Here we remember Lawrence Unger.”
The air was too still. No breeze. Only the squirrel, still scampering overhead. Rustling branches in sudden, uneven bursts.
“Is that true?” Lance asked.
“Yes. Lawrence Unger was rich and lived alone in the East Hills. Had some guy bring him groceries every morning. The guy showed up one day and Lawrence wasn’t home. It took them a week to find his body.” She stepped forward, tapped her foot beside the trunk. “They found it here.”
Lance took a step back. “How did he die?”
“Hunting knife,” she said, dragging her fist across her neck. “Slit his own throat.”
“Oh god.” Lance touched his bare neck.
“He carved a note into this tree,” she said, fingers brushing over wounded bark. Dim slashes, still visible. “A question.”
“What did it say?” His voice barely came out.
“Can you see me now.”
“Can you see me now?” Lance said. “What’s that mean?”
“We can’t ask him.”
“What do you think it means?”
Her lips came together. She pressed her palm to the bark.
“I don’t think anyone knew Lawrence Unger,” she said. “He was like a ghost, all by himself in a big, lonely house.”
“And now he is a ghost,” Lance said. More rattle-scampering. He looked up, but couldn’t find the squirrel.
“Yeah,” she said. “It’s a problem, wanting to be seen. That’s got to be why ghosts haunt. You spend all day with living, breathing people, but no one notices you. Maybe if you’re a ghost you try to whisper first. Or sit on the edge of someone’s bed. But after a while, you’d have to scream. Throw things around. I think you’d be willing to scare the living shit out of someone just so they’d finally see you.”
The space beneath the willow constricted. It felt like they were standing in one of those small stone buildings. Stippled sunlight fell on Dakota’s cheeks.