Grave

by Turner, Joan Frances

  I gazed into the semblance of Ms. Acosta’s gray eyes, their washed-out watercolor. “I didn’t mean to take anything from you,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  She pressed her cheek to the baby’s skull. “You and your friend,” she said, “know what that all counts for.”

  Nothing. Less than nothing. It was still the truth and I was still glad to have said it.

  “It can’t have always been you,” I said. “Can it? I mean, whoever you were, once, back when you were just an ordinary human being—you can’t have been the only one in all of history who ever... contained all this.”

  She smiled. “Incubated this contagion.”

  Jessie, unable to contain herself, crept closer.

  I stroked the baby’s hair, sparse and soft. Its flesh was as real as mine. Its bones as solid as mine. I got it wrong, I thought, believing Death’s appearing before me as Ms. Acosta, as myself, as anyone else was some mere disguise: Death was everyone else, was all of us together, and we burst out of it, him, in ways and at times, perhaps, even he scarcely could control. Brimming over with everything, with the sum of all existence. What would that feel like? If I was right, if Jessie was right, if this angry god that contained all and everything was also and at the very same time encased in flesh just as real, bones just as solid, breath just as vital as ours...

  “What happened?” I asked as Jessie came up beside me. “Were you forced? Tricked? Did youÖ inherit having to do it, or something?” My face flushed, my own thickheaded toddler questions embarrassed me, but we’d found Death and we’d found so much more and I couldn’t stop now, I couldn’t stop even knowing the next stop would surely be nowhere and nothing. “Or is it just like you were saying before, about everything being eternally random?”

  No answer.

  “So are we both crazy?” Jessie demanded. “Or is it true? Is any of it true?”

  The words burst from her, she couldn’t contain them, but she sounded a way I’d never heard her before: humble, that was what she seemed. Awed. Almost timid. As perhaps she’d been the very first time she met Death, saw what we had been calling his true face—not understanding, any more than I had, that all of it was his true face. All sides of him were just as real. All was all.

  “Is it true?” Jessie repeated. “Is she right?”

  Ms. Acosta’s smile deepened. It was far too broad, far too wide, for any mere human face to contain, but in that unnatural mouth and those washed-out, colorless eyes there was no anger, no wrathful rapacity, only a sort of weird delight. She ran a finger over the baby’s tiny ear, its full round cheek, as it ignored us all and slept the deep, profound sleep of oblivion.

  “I can’t help it,” she said. “I mean, it’s absurd of me, I know that, but I like a good laugh as much as anyone. Even if it’s on myself. So I always get such a kick out of accidentally tipping my hand.”

  A small dark shape was running over the sands, running like he’d never be out of breath and like the sharp hurting stones were just more padding for his paws. A speck, near the shoreline. Over the ridge. Up the duneface toward the grasses and trees and us. A sound came out of my throat like joy and I went running to meet him midway, and as Nick jumped at my legs and I wrapped my arms around his good solid weight, the beach itself dissolved, vanished as suddenly as had my ghosts; vanished with the calling gulls, the sunlight, as we emerged into a somewhere that was all dark, milky-thick fog. Then sunlit, and green.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  STEPHEN

  “Amy?”

  I could hear. I couldn’t see, but I could hear a woman’s voice, a woman I knew, rising in disbelief. Sobbing laughter. “Amy? Jessie! How did you—Stephen? Oh, Christ!”

  A weight, something both soft and sharp, flung itself on me and I shouted, then was shocked to realize that meant I had a voice. Then shocked all over again that I had arms to held onto the weight, fingers to clutch it, a memory to know once again who it was. Lisa. That was who spoke.

  Lisa. Amy. Jessie. I’d forgotten them all, I’d forgotten everything, I’d felt my own body falling into nothingness but somehow, now, I existed again. This wasn’t like what had happened all those years at the lab, being shoved headfirst into death over and over again and then frogmarched back into some parody of life—I was reborn, in earnest. I was nothing become something. I was life and death surging together in a single exuberant high tide, the waters bottled up and contained and crashing inside my own flesh. My pulse thudded so hard and fast and out of control that I should’ve been scared, I should’ve felt like I was dying, but wasn’t it all the same, in the end? Wasn’t it? Dead or living, I existed. I was. I was here.

  I started to laugh, and it was with joy. I was blind, I was seized up with a heart attack, I had no idea where I was or who was with me but dammit, I was here!

  Then my heart slowed down, and joy gave way to simple relief, and by slow degrees my vision came back. Lisa was still holding onto me, grinning and with eyes so shiny I knew she felt just what I’d been feeling, that the waters were crashing inside her too. Inside all of us. Renee was laughing and crying and kissing Lucy, Naomi, any and all of us in reach. Linc grabbed hold of Jessie and held on tight, his arms trembling and eyes wide as a cat’s who’d pounced on a rabbit, then just as quickly, he released her. Nick trotted in a circle around us, sniffing, taking his canine notes on what had become of us. I grabbed Amy and didn’t let go.

  “I remember forgetting everything,” I said, and laughed with the last remnants of my weird reborn bliss. And disbelief. “And then, I... something happened, and I was gone. And then I was back.”

  “We—” Amy trembled from head to foot. I tried to steady her, even though I still didn’t know what had happened or what would happen now. “Jessie and me. We didn’t fade away when you did, before. Those lake stones, they—we saw—”

  She could barely speak. Jessie, buffeted like an old newspaper in a windstorm from Lisa to Linc to Renee and back again, couldn’t either. Had they found Death, faced him down somehow like Jessie had been crazy to do? Was all this, right here, some sort of unexpected reprieve? It couldn’t be, I knew it couldn’t. Nothing was ever that easy.

  “Where are we?” I asked. “Are we still... dead? Do you know this place?”

  It was some sort of park, it looked like, not a tiny contained city park but somewhere big and wild and overgrown: a nature preserve, with picnic tables. Except the tables were nestled in grass so tall and thick, the blades were like long, thin, decaying teeth eagerly chewing and swallowing them up. A handkerchief-sized parking lot, its asphalt cracked and spitting up weeds, lay behind us; up head, beyond the picnic tables, was a riverbank almost hidden by clusters of trees in full summer leaf, a crumbling wooden watermill, a white-painted hexagonal gazebo on the summit of a small, gently sloping hill. The front of the gazebo was open, two or three nearly rotted-out steps leading inside; an angled plank bench lined the other five sides. Someone was sitting inside it, watching us, a skinny little woman I was certain I didn’t remember from this or any lifetime. She had black hair even wilder and more snarled than Linc’s, sallow skin, and, I saw when she raised a hand in mock greeting, fingers covered nearly to the knuckle in jangling gold and silver rings. Just like the ones Renee had on her own hands.

  Nick walked up closer to me, wagging his tail; I petted him, a silent apology, and felt a heavy, quiet sort of relief when he stayed at my side.

  “Do you know this place?” I asked him.

  “We do,” Jessie said softly. She, and Linc, and Renee, stared fixedly at the black-haired woman without waving back. “We did. Before she took it away from all of us.”

  The black-haired woman rose from her bench and came toward us, smiling.

  TWENTY-NINE

  JESSIE

  Well, heigh-ho, Teresa, long time no see and fuck you forever! And there was Teresa’s gazebo, the simulacrum of it, her own ash maybe still swirling around its rafters like an angry cluster of bees. It was the first thing you saw in Great Ri
ver Park once you passed the red brick visitors’ center, the parking lot, the water mill that had still been operational until we undead took over the place. Home, a year ago, a thousand years ago. Ours. Except not.

  Why the hell did he, it, have to decide to show up as Teresa? I wanted to see Sam again, Sam who’d killed himself and then found himself right back on earth undead. Or Sam’s poor Ben, who hated hoos with such poison I was Our Lady of All Flesh in comparison. Or Mags, poor Mags, or Annie, our peacemaker, who we’d had to kill for her own sake when she lost her eyes. Anyone else. Anyone at all.

  The part of Death that was Teresa—the part I’d once thought no more than an outward disguise, a shell, but really and truly was her—stopped before me, the innumerable grave-robbed rings I now thought of as Renee’s clinking and clicking on her emaciated fingers. She shoved her wind-chime hands into her pockets.

  “Didn’t you ever once curse this undead life?” she asked me. Still smiling.

  Joe’s words, the last time we ever saw each other. Poor Joe, who I used to love like the crazy kid I was back then, even after he turned his back on me and all of us, even after he gave up. Linc stared past Teresa, fixing his eyes on the gazebo’s peeling white wood, and I saw a muscle tense and tighten along his jaw, something in his eyes between weariness and longing. The others were huddled behind Renee, holding their collective breath, waiting on some sort of signal I wasn’t going to deliver. Amy came running up, then her steps faltered and she stopped.

  “So we did it,” she said to Teresa, but soft and tentative like she were in someone else’s church or temple, afraid of offending. “We found you.”

  “Why you?” I demanded. “Why couldn’t you have come as someone else? Anyone else?”

  Death, Teresa, the part of Death that was Teresa, just shrugged. “Aren’t you glad it wasn’t that worthless brother of yours, yet again? Maybe I have less say than you think, over what part of me shows up, and when, and how.” She cocked her head to the side, like she always had alive whenever she thought she’d just said something flat-out clever, and grinned. “Anyway, this part of me was a loudmouthed braggart, wasn’t she, when she was living? Wasn’t that part of why you hated her so much? So it makes sense for her to show up in me now, when I went and shot off my big mouth and gave myself away—”

  “Then we were right,” Amy said, and then louder when nobody answered: “We were right. Weren’t we?”

  Teresa reached out, as if nobody had spoken, and clapped me on the shoulder. Behind me I heard Lisa draw a sharp breath.

  “Let’s go for a walk,” Teresa said. She tilted her chin up, calling to everyone. “You crazy kids too? Just a short little stroll, how about it?”

  Shoulder to shoulder with Teresa I walked toward the gazebo, the others beside and behind me, easy familiarity guiding my steps, Linc’s, Renee’s. Our feet, they knew these hillocks and ridges and sloping crests of ground we’d walked hundreds, thousands of times, in our time of endless dying; we knew it like hands know a lover’s body in the dark. We followed the curve and bend of the river, crossed in a line over the old footbridge, took a gentle left to where open fields lay to one side, the beginnings of the woodlands the other. I surprised a deer here once, a stag so unexpected and big and beautiful I let it go, sated as I was on possum and raccoon, watched it bound back into the trees and toward the water knowing he and I couldn’t want for anything else. A thousand years ago, give or take a few centuries. Gone, and gone.

  “Where are we going?” Amy’s mother asked aloud. “Are we still in...”

  Her voice died away, and we kept on walking. Florian had had a tree deep in the woods where he’d hidden his lake stones, the last part of his unspoken past he couldn’t bring himself to give up, circling the trunk like a crude new-laid mosaic. Linc and I, though, we’d buried the remnants of his remains deeper in the woods, under an older, bigger tree that struck us more worthy of him than that sapling-stone. Whether or not Death had intended it, or anyone else liked it, that was where I was going, one last time.

  I could remember Florian again. Did that mean he was back like the others were back, Linc, Renee, Nick, all of Amy’s people? And what did it mean, their return?

  We passed the weather-stripped sign marking the Sulky Trail turnoff. That first deep bend in the river, with a tiny wooden observation deck hidden in a cluster of bushes. The old playground, farther in the woods near the river’s second footbridge, where Joe and I had met for the last time and—enough. I closed my eyes and walked with him, imagining him beside me, the both of us wandering just like the old days over the trail and out to the underpass and the far side where nobody would bother us. That little hillock here, at the start of the trail—watch those hoof-hollows, good for nothing but catching muddy rainwater—then that tiny clearing where the deer liked to feed, poor stupid deer never figuring out how easy they made it for us to snap their necks and pick them off, and then, and then—

  I closed my eyes again. I imagined them all right beside me, all of us walking like the old days in a fractious, but easy group: Teresa striding ahead, in search of places none of us wanted to go; Ben and Sam joking about God knows what, Sam’s face seam-splitting in a rare outright grin; Billy strutting and waddling alongside, Mags never a moment out of his sight. Me and Joe in the center, letting everyone else do the talking. Renee, still shy, bringing up the rear, with Linc wandering aimless from person to person, never lingering long at anyone’s side. And last of all, Florian, our eldest, our heart, nothing ever the same after he died and left us. Our unspoken flesh and bone.

  “Here,” Linc said, startling me from my thoughts. “Right here.”

  A clearing, small but still more than big enough for the lot of us, bordered by clusters of beech, maples, ash. A big oak tree almost at its center, old and thick-trunked and with deep-fissured bark perfect to give undead, itchily infested flesh a good satisfying scratch. Florian’s tree, with his last few surviving bones and the soft crumbly top part of his skull buried in its roots at our feet. One last sight of it all. One last time.

  Amy, the hoo-kiddy who couldn’t have had any idea what this place meant to me, she looked at the tree and looked at me and all of a sudden, she smiled. And I smiled back because there was such a strange lightness in that deafeningly silent air, a lightness and ease I saw on all our faces and that feeling had a name: relief. Whatever happened next, whatever became of existence and us, soon all of this would be over. We had found Death and emerged from oblivion and that had to mean, it had to, that at long last we were getting out. I wanted out. I was so tired of all of this. Living, dying, living-in-dying, I wanted off the merry-go-round. I’d had enough candy and rides. I wanted to go home to where it was dark and quiet and sleep and sleep forever. As much sleep as I should’ve had before I first woke up from the dirt, back when I was newly made and newly buried. Please, please, let me the hell out. I didn’t want anything, didn’t need anything but to be there in the stillness forever.

  A gentle bony hand, all bones, rested on my shoulder and when I turned, Florian was there. He took me in his arms and when he let me go, as he embraced Linc and Renee, and Amy, and an eager Naomi, his expression was grave. Teresa just stood there, watching.

  “I ain’t meant to be here,” he said. “You weren’t never meant to see me again, or talk to me again. You know that. It always meant that things wasn’t right.”

  And that memories were all I was meant to have of him, or anyone else I’d lost. And that any talking we were meant to do would have been just another memory, an endlessly repeating retread of what we’d already said to, done with, thought of each other long before he’d gone. That was all you got. That was all they needed. It was all just the nature of the universe.

  “I know,” I said.

  “So, I gotta leave now.” His pale blue eyes blinked fast, hard. “I gotta leave now forever.”

  I nodded. Florian looked almost sad, just on the far edge of sad, but stronger than that in his face was that same r
elief I was allowing myself to feel, allowing to leak prematurely into my bones. Because I wanted out that strongly, that badly. Naomi, still hovering around his heels, tugged urgently at his sleeve.

  “Don’t go,” she pleaded. “Please?”

  Gently, he detached her little hand, pushed her back to Lisa’s waiting arms. Urgency made his eyes heated and fierce but there was a quiet at the bottom of them, an underlying kindness that nothing could alter or diminish. Just as he’d been in life. My memory of him hadn’t failed me. It hadn’t lied.

  “You ain’t gotta,” he said, to me, to Amy in turn. “Remember that. You ain’t gotta.” He put a hand on my arm. His fingers just barely curled around it, but his grip was iron-strong. “Both of you, either of you. All of you. Before you say yes, you gotta be sure.”

  “Sure of what?” Lisa frowned, looking from him to us and back with unease curdling her words. “Sure of what?”

  “It’s time,” Teresa said softly.

  “It is,” Florian agreed. “Long past time.”

  Then what had been him flew back inside me, inside all of us, and was gone from my sight forever.

  THIRTY

  AMY

  Years ago on my birthday my mother gave me a book, a secondhand Bulfinch’s Greek and Roman myths full of illustrations so beautiful, they made me wish I knew how to draw. As I stood there, face to face with Death once again, surrounded by the only people left to me in a place that was someone else’s longed-for home, the stories from that book kept coming to me stronger and stronger and I couldn’t get them out of my head. Iphigenia, sacrificed by her father Agamemnon to ensure safe passage for his ships battling the Trojans—I always rooted for the Trojans, Aeneas escaping the ruins with his aging father clinging to his back. There were some versions where Iphigenia offered herself willingly, a good Greek virgin obeying the behest of the gods, and of war. And ones where Artemis wrapped a cloud around the sacrificial altar, carried the real Iphigenia off in safety to some distant island while a double, a dummy, a ghost was “slain” in her place. The letter of the law obeyed, the spirit hardly mattered. Not all sacrifice was what it looked like—