Grave

by Turner, Joan Frances

  “Amy,” Jessie said to the nice girl, quietly. She was staring at the others, who were wandering farther away. “Your mom.”

  Amy didn’t turn to look. She just shook her head. “It’s too late for her,” she said. “I could see it back in the movie theater, or... whatever that was. It was already too late then. She didn’t know me.” Her eyes were leaking again. “She didn’t know me.”

  “Then pull yourself together,” Jessie said. “If it already was too late, then that’s that and it’s done. We can’t lie around crying now.”

  Her eyes, though, weren’t nearly as hard and sharp as her voice.

  Amy didn’t answer. She squatted down, running a palm almost tenderly over the empty spot at our feet, and then stood up again with a handful of that oddly crumbled-up ground. She put some of it in her pocket, letting the rest drift back through her fingers and fall.

  “It doesn’t hurt, anyway,” she said. “At least, it didn’t look like Stephen was in pain, or Florian—for God’s sake, why isn’t it happening to us, you and me? Why aren’t we forgetting everything, like the others...”

  She trailed off all of a sudden and her eyes widened, full of a newfound apprehension I couldn’t understand, and she slipped her hand back into her pocket. The same one where she’d put that bit of pale earth.

  “Jessie,” she said. In a low, urgent voice. Then she pulled from that pocket a slim, flat, hard thing, a dull greenish color with striations of brown. A stone.

  Jessie let me go, and reached into her own pocket, and pulled out another stone, a different color. A color whose name wouldn’t come to me. She and Amy stared at each other, like something had just happened they couldn’t believe for even a minute, and then they were laughing, hard and helplessly, like they might never stop.

  “I took it from Florian,” Amy managed, when she got her breath back. “He left it on the ground, back in the woods at your beach, and I took it. I just wanted it. I didn’t steal it, or at least I didn’t mean to, he never—”

  “I should have known,” Jessie said, eyes still shining from all that laughing, like she hadn’t heard a word from Amy’s mouth. She was pacing back and forth, agitated, delighted discovery and fearful confusion lighting up and darkening her expression all at once. “I bet that’s why we can still remember Florian too, and all the ones who don’t exist anymore—I should’ve known. I’m a fucking fool, of all people in the whole goddamned world I should’ve—did your mother ever pick up any of the lake stones? Or Lisa? Lisa, these things. Do you have any of them?” She was shouting again, so slowly and loudly that I grimaced, her hand with the stone in it shoved in my face. “Do you? Just nod or shake your head!”

  I didn’t understand what she was asking me, so I didn’t do anything. She made an impatient sound and grabbed my hand, prying it open; she stuck the stone on my palm and curled my fingers back around it, around that hard thing that had pressure and yet at the same time, no weight. It dropped straight through the flesh and bones of my closed-up hand, and onto the ground at my feet.

  Jessie’s face, her eyes, clouded over. Then she picked up the stone and turned back to Amy.

  “That answers that question,” she said, much more softly. “They’re keeping us together, somehow. And I should’ve known it. After everything that happened during the plague, I should’ve known.”

  She put the stone back in her... clothes. The place in clothes where you keep things. All at once the word wouldn’t come to me. “That’s what he meant,” she said. “When he called us all thieves. It has to be.”

  Amy frowned.

  “It has to be,” Jessie kept saying, walking around so fast now that the ground was spitting excited little puffs of itself all around her feet. She ignored me now, avoided looking at me, like just the sight of me somehow hurt. “Remember what I said, about the stones helping us when we got sick? Me and Linc and Renee, and Lisa too? We were supposed to die, but because we had these, we didn’t. We lived. You and Stephen, your mother, you were supposed to be dead, but you lived. You came back. That lunatic kid you told me about from the lab, she fucked with all this stuff and—”

  “But we didn’t mean to come back!” Amy was clutching her own stone two-handed, like she was scared it would grow legs and leap away. “Me and my mom and Stephen—and Natalie too, when they were still experimenting on her—none of us did it on purpose.”

  “And I didn’t know what the hell I was doing either, with the stones. It was all just an accident. And I only ever knew the lab was trying to get rid of us, of undeads—I had no clue they were gunning for life everlasting.” Jessie stomped her feet and laughed. “Doesn’t matter, obviously. We all fucked up, so we all need punishing.”

  She grabbed a stick, a lumpy uneven thing, from where it lay and trailed it over the ground. It crumbled and fell apart right there in her hand, and as she dropped the stick again, its soft little fragments disintegrated completely, not leaving even a trace of dust. Or that other stuff, the kind of dust that happened when something burned in a fire. It had a name. Fire and things burning, did that feel hot, or cold? I couldn’t remember.

  The two girls, Jessie and the other one whose name had escaped me again, had stopped marching around and stood staring at each other. Maybe they’d forgotten what came next, like me. The quiet was heavy, thick, like air before... that thing that sometimes happened, with flashing light and water pouring from overhead.

  “But we didn’t mean it,” the red-haired girl kept saying. “We weren’t trying to steal anything. Natalie even invited us to join her, in more experiments, and we said—”

  “I bet you didn’t mean to kill someone,” the other girl spat. “Did you? But that doesn’t matter, either. Too late. You did it. And believe me, if I’d known what I was doing myself, if I’d known what it was like being...” Her voice faltered. “If I’d understood what it would be like, walking around in a human body again, barely feeling anything like I did before, not hearing anything at all like—I’d never have done it.” She tilted her head back, shouting at nothing. “Did you hear me? I’d never have done it, I promise! I didn’t wanna cause trouble! I’d have just let us all die!” Silence. “That crazy old fucker Billy was right, I admit it! We should’ve all just been good little boys and girls, and laid down and died!”

  Her words echoed around us. Nobody answered.

  The shouting girl shook her head. “See?” she said. “It doesn’t matter, and it never will. Regret never matters for shit.”

  Beyond us, I saw the light-haired one wandering around and around in ever-widening circles, drifting slowly out of our sight. The dark-haired one now lay motionless in the sand, beside the little girl. The third one was missing. One. Two. Three. What comes after that?

  “Stephen,” the bright-haired girl said. “Before he... Stephen said Death told him that he was once alive too. Death was, I mean. Alive. And he, Death, said he couldn’t escape all this either. You remember? We all heard that. So is Death just, I mean is he—”

  “Dying?” the other girl said. “You mean, is even Death just another undead, a cranky old dusty crumbling into ash?” She was starting to laugh again. “And so he decided fuck it, all living things ever did was bitch and complain about him anyway, so if he’s gotta go, he’s gonna take us all with him? Yeah, that sounds like him, all right.” She dug a heel into the ground, turning slowly on her foot. “I guess maybe that means this was all gonna happen anyway, sooner or later? Maybe. And even with all that power, all that everything, he just can’t help it. He can’t stick around forever either, he just let us think he could. Kind of humiliating when you think about it, huh?”

  I couldn’t stand anymore. I fell down, and landed on my side. On the thing that lay below. Looking into the thing that lay above. The voices were still talking, but it was harder to hear them.

  “Then why not just end things fast?” the first one asked. “Why bother with all of this? Why make us watch?”

  “Because it’s like I said,” a
nswered the other. “All of this is just like him. Because Death’s a sadistic son of a bitch.”

  The sounds drifted over me where I lay. They made no sense. But inside, in the last part of me still left, I knew it didn’t matter. Because nothing, not since the second I was born, had ever really made any sense. It never did, not for anyone, ever. We just liked to pretend that it did.

  “She’s going,” someone said. “So are the others.”

  “Hey, Lisa,” someone else said. A soft voice. Sad. “You annoyed the shit out of me, but you were a good sister. Most of the time. So thanks.”

  “I don’t want this,” said the first voice. It was stretched and thin, like it wanted to tear in two and let a scream come out. “I don’t—”

  “Well, we’re both still here,” said the second. “At least, we are now. Nothing to do but keep going.”

  Nothing to do but keep going. Those words, those sounds, made no sense. And yet they did, somehow, inside, in the last disappearing part of me I still had left.

  Another sound rose up, a great loud buzz. It swelled up and grew bigger and louder, pushing its way into what was still left of me, and broke me all apart.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  AMY

  “Keep going?” I asked. I was laughing and I couldn’t seem to stop, because now my mother and Lisa and Stephen were gone for good, and only the lake stones were letting me remember they’d ever been, and the only other option was to scream. “Keep going? Aren’t you the one who just said you might as well have just laid down and—”

  “Too damned late for that, isn’t it?” Jessie shook the sand from her shoes. “It’s always too late, no matter what—I told you, regret means shit. This is all we’ve got left, and he hasn’t done us in yet, so I want to find him before he does. I want to find him. We need to have... words.” Her voice rose up into the sky, the bright blue beautiful unreal sky that wasn’t anything but another mockery, shrill and raucous as a gull. “We’ve got words!”

  Renee was gone too, and Linc, and poor Naomi who withered away and vanished all alone. And Nick, who I’d so blindly thought would be here, he was my guide and my friend and just the thought of his reproachful eyes and quietly thumping tail made me want to start crying again, I wanted Stephen and Nick and Lisa and my mother—words. They were every bit as shit as regret, and Jessie knew it. And they were all we had left, them and a false sky and sea and sand into which we too would surely soon disappear. And our feet, to let us walk in endless circles seeking the biggest of big nothings until we fell apart, fell down, disappeared.

  As we all went through the false movie screen, the floor beneath our feet had softened and shifted and before we had time to lose our balance, it became sand. The fragrant cool air became heavier and thicker, full of the constant possibility of rain, but instead of blankness and blindness there was sunlight, everywhere, and blueness overhead diminishing to grays and violets at the edge of the horizon. Far off at the bottom of the dune where we now stood was a great expanse of choppy dark blue water and out on the horizon itself, its perfectly straight ruler-line separating dark blue from light, the faint shadowy outline of something that looked like what had once been Chicago. The way it always looked from across Lake Michigan and the Illinois state line, like a far-off, overbuilt island smoldering with smoke.

  All false. All delusion, just like that movie theater spinning random reels of a few final, happy memories before we all waved bye-bye. Like everyone but Jessie and me had begun to do, bare seconds after our feet found the sands, eaten up and blown away. Like the terrible shoreline from where we’d all started. I loved this place, this place I had so suddenly and desperately wanted to save, but that was just more mockery too, more delusion. More sadism, a little taste of everything I’d missed. What I loved, all of it, was already lost.

  I’d never meant to steal anything. I’d never meant to reject Death’s gift: my own inevitable death, the ticket to this place that, before the lab’s meddling, before the strange interceding mercy of these lake stones, I could never have refunded. That little seed of himself that he offered to, pressed on, everything that lived. Without ever intending it, I’d thrown that in his face. Which was the greater unknowing crime—the theft of life, or the ingratitude for life beyond? Both of them, now, lost.

  There was deceptive calm and quiet here and cool spring breezes, but mostly there was light, deep strong light ubiquitous as the air. Everything was so fresh, so clean, and beside me I saw Jessie craning her neck to take in the china-blue sky, pulling in long, savoring breaths. She pivoted on one foot, a single slow revolution, and shook her head.

  “Always seems to come back to this,” she said quietly. “This beach. Real or imaginary. Every single time.”

  “He’s making fun of us,” I said. Was he? Or was this some little hint, a single dropped stone on the pathway to find him, and we’d just lost our sense of direction? The last good place. The last place that was anything. If Death himself were... dying, somehow, was where we stood now his own final rallying surge of vitality, his last gasp?

  “Any time you think you know where to go next,” I told Jessie, “just yell. Any idea.”

  No answer. She took in another long, audible breath, savoring the clean sweetness of the air.

  “I never thought I’d actually be happy to breathe,” she said softly.

  So matter-of-fact. So pacific. I remembered how people with the plague, sometimes, could become so angelically peaceful right before the end, the fight drained from them altogether. It was creeping over me now too, that same sudden yielding lassitude, the same yearning to give in and give up. She’d said we had to keep going, it was all we had left to do, but weren’t we just kidding ourselves? Wasn’t all that was really left to us just standing still, standing right there? Saying another goodbye? It was so beautiful, like Lake Michigan but also like all the memories I had from when I was little, that time we went to Cape Cod; if I went down to the shoreline, I was sure I’d find that same salty rubbery seaweed floating in the water. I was scared to go down there and I didn’t know why.

  Because maybe he, it, was waiting out there, on the horizon, just like before when he came to greet us and love us and swallow us whole. Because maybe all this wasn’t just mockery after all, not just a random bit of fruit casually tossed just out of Tantalus’s reach. Maybe he was lulling us, distracting us, with sunshine and sweet memories and our own long goodbyes, so he could slip away somewhere like an animal and quietly, finally cease.

  We had to get out of here, before I decided to forget why we ever came.

  “We have to go.” I tugged on Jessie’s sleeve, insistent like a child. My younger self, at Cape Cod. Can we go to that Clams-’N’-Cones on the highway, for fried clams? Can I have soft-serve? “Over that next ridge, or... somewhere. Now. We have to keep moving. We have to. You said so. You said it yourself.”

  Jessie said nothing.

  “We can’t just stay here,” I said. “Waiting. It’s selfish. Horribly selfish. We have to try. That’s all that’s left to do. You said so.”

  Jessie folded her arms across her chest, gazing out at the water. Staring as if she awaited something, someone, to rise up and flood us with his own all-consuming light. Just like me. Just like before. I didn’t like her and I didn’t understand her and I knew she felt all that doubly for me, and I couldn’t, I wouldn’t, go on without her: I’d been alone before, all alone, after Ms. Acosta and before poor lost Nick, and I couldn’t do it again. I wouldn’t. I held my breath, standing there in the clean sweet illusion of air.

  Then she shook her head hard, like wrenching herself from a daydream, and as if I’d been the sorry lingerer, she jerked her head impatiently toward the sands.

  “Up that way, I guess,” she said, already starting to walk. “Over the next ridge. Better than just standing around here doing nothing.”

  Her eyes flickered back toward the water, the tiny shadowy outline on the horizon of a phantom city always out of reach. Her steps f
altered, hesitated.

  “I guess it is, anyway,” she said.

  Then she turned her back on the water and we headed up the ridge. A seagull flew overhead calling and crying out and even though I heard its long cloud-trail of a caw, felt its shadow fall on me and then swiftly depart, I never saw an actual bird at all.

  TWENTY-SIX

  NATALIE

  “My life was saved,” she said, “so that I could stop you.”

  Grandma. You could be so stupid sometimes, about the most obvious things, when you were actually so smart. But I’d heard scientists were like that, sometimes, and artists too. They didn’t live in the same reality as everyone else. But that hardly meant reality didn’t exist.

  “I’m not stopping for anything,” I said, “and if anything did stop me, it won’t be you.” I hugged Sukie my doll where she sat safe in my jacket, warm and lumpy inside where I’d stuffed her gut full of all the extra lake stones she could carry. “Just because you failed, that’s no reason I should give up—”

  “One had to be careful at the lab, working with young children.” Grandma shook her head of ruined, broken-off hair, hunched forward like an ape as she talked. “When they were the participants, in the experiments, it was so easy for them to get attached to you, start thinking they cared for you, and you for them—a terrible mistake.” She smiled again, like she thought I just couldn’t get enough of seeing her missing teeth. “That could be fatal. To do what we had to do, every day, you had to cultivate and nurture a certain sense of ruthlessness.”