Grave

by Turner, Joan Frances

  “She won’t,” Lucy said. Scared, so scared-looking, and so firmly decided. “Because I’m going with her.”

  “And so am I,” said Stephen. “Just like we said we would, before—he can’t stop us, the other one. He can’t. We’re going.” His eyes blazed up fiercely for a moment, as if he actually longed for someone to just try and stop him, and then his face turned pensive. “I don’t think we were meant for regular living life anyway,” he said, “any more than dead people—we’ve died too, like they have. Over and over again, just like them, except in a different way. We’re used to going back and forth.”

  Lucy nodded. “Never felt like one of the living, not really,” she said. “Even before they—even before. Never.”

  Stephen reached over and kissed Amy on the temple. “So that’s how it is. We’re going too.”

  Nick, all this storm and fury surrounding him, he just sat there calm as anything with his rheumy eyes gazing around him and his tail resting still against the sand. There beside Amy, his mistress, his protegÈe, no doubt at all that he was going too. Everyone going, except Naomi. Everyone leaving.

  “You can’t do this,” I shouted. I knew how infantile I sounded, and I didn’t give a damn. “You can’t, this goddamned—suicide pact—you can’t—”

  I was sobbing again, too hard to talk, and Naomi was crying too and I couldn’t have that but I couldn’t stop, I just couldn’t. Lucy came up to me and before anyone could stop me, I shoved her away, putting every ounce of inhuman strength I had into the push, watching in a fury as she flew backward and landed square on her ass.

  “Are you happy?” I demanded, standing over here where she lay sprawled in the sand, spitting out the words almost in a scream. “Happy now? All that ‘get away from my daughter, don’t tell me how to talk to my daughter, how to protect her, how to’—her own mother, and you didn’t even try to stop her! You didn’t even try! Now it’s too late and you get to drag her along while you cut your own throat and you must be fucking thrilled to death!”

  Stephen and Amy leapt in front of Lucy like they were afraid I’d kick her, hit her, but all I could do was disgrace myself as I stood there and cried. Lucy waved them away, then slowly pulled herself back to her feet. She looked me without rancor, tears brimming in her eyes, but she blinked them back before they could roll down her cheeks.

  “I’m not happy,” she said. “And I’m not unhappy, either. I’ve just never been so scared in my life. But I’m not leaving Amy behind, not ever again. No matter how scared I am. No matter what.” She pushed the back of her hand over her eyes, rough and abrupt like she was squeegeeing a dirty window. “And like Stephen said, that’s just how it is.”

  Amy put her arms around her for a moment. Steadying her, like Naomi was still trying through her own sobs to steady me. I had to pull myself together, for shit’s sake, right now. I mopped my own face and squatted down, held Naomi close to me lest someone try to take her next, but the salt water wouldn’t quit leaking from me. How did I stop Amy, stop Jessie—I didn’t know what to do. There wasn’t anything I could do. There wasn’t anything they wanted me to do. Amy, so shy, so certain, ran a hand over my hair.

  “You’re not alone,” she said. So sweet, so sad, so merciless. “Naomi needs you. And you need her. And—and exes can die, look what I—look what happened to Mags.” She swallowed. “Your daughter Karen, you’ll have her again, and Jessie, andÖ and everyone. Not right away, but you will.”

  She was smiling again, happy for me. Genuinely happy, and already so far beyond her own fleeting personhood, as if it were just a memory from decades, centuries back. “You’ll grow old and die, a long time from now, and then you’ll have everyone you lost again.”

  “And if I don’t?” I demanded. “If what happened to Mags was just an accident, a freak accident, what then? What if I’m stuck like this... forever?”

  What if I had to watch Naomi grow old and die, watch everyone grow old and die, nothing but decades and centuries of long goodbyes just like this one and no Karen, no Amy, nobody else ever again? Amy shook her head, but whether that was certainty or mere reassurance I didn’t know. Maybe I didn’t want to know.

  “Nothing,” she said, “anywhere, stays what it is forever. That’s what the lab thought they could do, and they failed. They failed at it and failed and failed, until nobody was left to try.” She looked back over the ridge, as if she were waiting for someone to arrive. Someone who should have been here long since. “Even Death isn’t what he—and someday I won’t be this anymore, someone else will take my place, and then I’ll be there with you. We all will. Just like Florian lives inside us, and somewhere else too, in death. It’s a good place, death. The afterlife. You know that. We’ve seen it.”

  She hesitated, then gave me a tentative, one-armed hug. “It’s—it’s part of Death, and Death can travel back and forth from it like living things can’t, but even Death can’t say exactly what it is or where it comes from, if it really is underground or in the sky or just all in living people’s minds. But wherever it is, some good part of you goes there, and stays there, and feels itself there and everyone it knew and lost around it. And it’s a happy place. You have to believe me, Lisa. It truly is.”

  She had raised her voice because Jessie was listening to her, craning her neck there on the sand. Linc and Renee and everyone else were listening too, anxious, needing the truth from the source. Treating Amy like that truth, already, without any questions, this couldn’t be happening—I grabbed Amy, hugged her fiercely to me, and she hugged back and made a little shuddering sound against my shoulder, the cloth of my T-shirt there suddenly turning damp.

  “I’m scared,” she murmured into my ear. “But it’s okay. It really is. Please be okay. I need you to be okay.”

  I wasn’t okay, I wasn’t at all—but what choice did I have? What choice did anybody ever have? What choice was there, that night the police came to our house, Jim’s and mine, cherry lights revolving wild outside and voices saying There’s been an accident, a very bad mother father sister so sorry, so very sorry—

  I’d had another year with Jessie, another year I would never have had. Now she was ready to go. I had Amy, who I would never have met. And she was ready to go. They needed me to be okay, because I’d already been given so much more than I would’ve had and now, now it was time, now it was their time. I would never have had Naomi. And she wasn’t going anywhere. I would never have had any of this, if it weren’t for the whole world spinning so horribly out of balance. If it weren’t for Amy, Jessie, all of us in our own small ways, reaching out hands to yank it into orbit and grab it all back.

  But what you’ve had, once you’ve had it, however you got it, it was so damned hard to just quietly give it up—

  “Look,” Lucy said, pointing.

  We all looked, up at the crest of the ridge. Wandering out of the trees near the aquatorium we saw the nebulous, unmistakable outline of a deer, nibbling idly on the long uncut swathes of grasses now lining the white gravel road cutting across the ridge. And a few yards away, walking toward us, the outline of a man whose face never stayed the same, but we still always knew.

  As if he’d been waiting to see him all this time, as if the sight of him were the key to his own release, Linc made a gasping, choking sound, rocking back and forth where he sat as if he were in pain. Then he toppled very quietly to his side and his breaths became easier, longer, drawn out, but there were fewer of them than there should have been, and dead spaces between them. I could almost feel it inside myself: his heart running down, his lungs giving out, his accidentally stolen life draining from his body. He lay there on the sand with his eyes closed and then without our seeing it happen, Renee was lying next to him, sunk against his shoulder, with Jessie’s cheek rested in his curved palm. They were ashen, shadows guttering blue beneath their eyes and their eyes closed against the punishing weight of the sunlight. We ran to them, we all ran to them but they weren’t dead yet, not yet; they were fading away, i
nstead of burning up. We would all be allowed to say goodbye.

  The man came closer, and closer.

  THIRTY-TWO

  AMY

  All it took was one word. Eternity.

  I could feel it inside me, rising up full and fast, the nourishing sustaining thing rushing into all the hollow spaces like water released from a jar. Like a libation, a slaking libation poured lovingly on dry untended grave-ground. A feeling of life. I had been alive for seventeen years without ever feeling alive and only now, now that I would never again be living as I’d known it before, did I feel anything but stone dead inside.

  I wished I’d had the words for it all, before. Maybe it wouldn’t have made the life come to me any faster, but it might have let me hold out without the mistakes I’d made, the horrible mistakes, knowing that one way or another it’d happen. Where there’s life, there’s hope. Maybe that’s what people really meant, when they’d say that.

  What was I now? Was I really... everything, even that which only seemed wholly separate from myself? It would kill someone, wouldn’t it, to even imagine they could somehow embody all that, take it all in? And yet it was true.

  It was true. Lisa, Stephen, Linc, my mother, Jessie, all them were still themselves and yet, now, they were all also me. And Amy too, the girl who had been Amy, now she was just one of a thousand million facets of this thing called myself. Multitudes upon multitudes, living, dead, undead, dead living. My libations.

  “Please don’t die.” Naomi’s voice, pleading. “Lisa, even if it is God’s will, I don’t want them to die—”

  “I know. But they’ve been very sick, honey. They’ve been in pain. It’s all right. We have to let them go.”

  Lisa’s voice was like a knife between my ribs: her resignation, exhaustion, fathomless sorrow and grief that I’d thought I’d helped assuage for just a little while but now without meaning to I’d brought it rushing back to her, full force. If it weren’t for Naomi she’d have begged me to kill her, I knew it, she’d have pleaded with me to raise my hand up just like he once had and strike her down, let her die. Just like I’d raised my hand up while I was still alive, still human, to strike others down. Thank God for Naomi.

  Had I raised my hand up already, just now, without knowing it? Knowing what it meant, what it felt like to do that in life, would I ever have to courage deliberately to do it now?

  I pulled away from them all, from Jessie where she lay cradled in Lisa’s arms, from poor Naomi who’d already in six years seen too much for a lifetime. From Stephen and my mother, even though when they said so easily, so unhesitatingly of course we’re going with you, of course you’ll never be so alone again my heart grew light and buoyant, despite the dying all around me. I wept for Jessie, for all of them, knowing that it was time for them to go and even if I could stop them, I wouldn’t.

  I walked away to give them space and room and nobody tried to stop me. Nick, my Old Nick I thought I’d lost forever, he padded alongside me just like he had since the true beginnings of my life, a far different and better moment than my mere birth. The sound of the calliope was still wheeling mad and drunken through my mind, every separate sad gorgeous note making my head reel and ring with the sound of a thousand, a million secret harmonies, but it wasn’t dizzying or crazymaking, it was just beautiful. It was a drunken crazy steadiness. It was what had always been meant to be there, in the hollow places, all along.

  “Beautiful,” he mused. “There’s a word for it.”

  He’d come down the ridge, not disappearing and reappearing as he always did but simply walking, trudging toward us, like any ordinary man. He stood there before me, his feet in their mud-caked work boots wide apart in the sand; he had my father’s face, this time, not the man who fathered me as my mother’s price for escaping the lab but the man who called himself my dad, loved me, died when I was only five and barely knew how to imagine where he’d gone. No matter that we’d never been the same flesh and blood—I looked into his face and still swore I saw the same straight, matter-of-fact slope to both our noses, the same shape of jaw and chin, the same little quirk at the right corner of our mouths, a constant permanent uptick like a smile always waiting to happen, and I was satisfied.

  “Is it the wrong word for it?” I asked.

  “Not at all,” he said. “Not at all. It’s just that it usually takes one so much longer to learn to appreciate it.”

  The quirk of the lip became an actual smile, one I remembered well and not just from photographs. Hello, Daddy. I was glad he’d come back again, if only the form of him, that the rotten flesh and tarry blackened blood of him that my mother set ablaze was nothing but the shell, the discarded candy wrapper. He—it—could be anyone, of course, but he gave me my father to talk to. To show me what would happen next. Strange sort of employee’s signing bonus, maybe, but I’d take it. Nick nuzzled around the legs of his jeans, wagging his tail, and he reached down and patted him with rough, easy affection.

  “Why me?” I asked. Never mind that I wanted it, that I chose it without hesitation. I still wanted to know. “Why me? And why you—I mean, the person you can’t remember but who you once were? Why us?”

  He shrugged. “Why anyone? You were there. I was here. You were willing. Just like I must have been, back in the day. Your friend Jessie, she’ll tell you—we’ve talked before, long before you and I met—I don’t punish, at least not on the individual level. This is no punishment. I—which, of course, is to say you—don’t judge. I don’t condemn. I merely take what I need. From each according to their ability, et cetera, did you get that far in school?”

  “They didn’t like to teach that stuff in school,” I said.

  “I’m not surprised. Mind if I smoke?”

  He pulled a lighter and crushed cigarette box from his back pocket without waiting for an answer, lit up, inhaled more deeply than any human could have managed. My dad never smoked, but then he’d never appeared out of nowhere at the averted end of the world either. As he exhaled, the smoke spun like frayed grayish-white thread from his mouth, his nostrils, the pores of his face and hands and every fold and crevice of his clothes. From his eyes, like tears gone to ice and then to fog and mist.

  “I, which is to say you,” I repeated. “So we’re... one and the same now? You and I?”

  The question seemed to surprise him. “Of course. Just as we’re one and the same with everyone else standing here, everything surrounding us, the whole of all and eternity—and I thought you understood all this already. They really don’t teach you kids much, do they?” He inhaled again, deeply, luxuriously. “We’re sharing that burden, the two of us, for the time being. I mean, you don’t make a transition like that overnight. But once you’ve learned everything you need to know, really learned it, I can give up my share. I’ll be gone. Dead. Just like your friend Florian: I’ll be part of you, but all and eternity will no longer be part of me. And the whole of the burden will be yours.”

  He exhaled again, spun the lit cigarette between his fingertips, gave me a sidelong glance. “I wonder how long you’ll last, when you have to do all the heavy lifting? A few decades, a few centuries—”

  “Time’s nothing,” I said. Easy, dismissive. And I meant it. “Time is nothing. I’m already forgetting what it means.”

  Was that a bad thing? Should I have been scared about it? What would it really mean, anyway, if eternity and ten seconds were to become interchangeable for me? Maybe I’d never leave this new life, this new afterlife. Maybe I’d never have to, never get old and tired like he had. Like whoever came before him must have. But what difference did it make, really? All in due time. An eternity away.

  “They can come with me, can’t they?” I asked. I’d just assumed they could, but suddenly I was afraid. “Stephen, my mother—”

  He shrugged. “Why not? As you folks like to say, it’s their funeral.” Exhale. In through the mouth, out through the nose, pores, eyelids, scalp. “Better you have some company anyway. I mean, we already know you
don’t do so well, left all to your own devices.”

  “No man is an island.”

  “No man is an island. They’re already something other to you, aren’t they? Human beings, I mean? Something else. So soon. It almost surprises me.”

  “They always were,” I said, and there was a quiet relief in speaking the words out loud. Like the first time I’d ever said them to Stephen, the first he ever said them back to someone else. The first night we were together. “I never felt like one of them. Not superior, I mean—just the opposite. I was always falling short. I was never really good enough, to make it as human.” Or fake it. Even that. “Maybe this is still falling short. But it’s what I’m ready for. I’m already too changed to feel like one of them, if I ever were at all—”

  “Doesn’t mean you won’t live to regret it.” He folded his arms, gazing down at me with a bemused, almost grandfatherly merriment. Still, even now, enjoying a good quiet laugh at my expense. “Live and live and live to regret it. Of course, too late now.”

  Maybe I would. Maybe sooner than I imagined. But so what? I didn’t have to do this. You ain’t gotta. But I wanted to. Just as, too long ago to fathom, he too might have wanted to. Maybe the real crime never was that we stole from Death—willingly or not—but that Death kept stealing and stealing our willingness, our eye-open consent, from us. Maybe if just one of us said yes, just the one, everyone else could rest better with not being able to tell Death no.

  “Did I... kill them?” I asked, inclining my head toward Jessie, the others. “I didn’t—were they, you know, my first?”

  Smoke kept streaming from his eyes, his skin, the cloth of his shirt. “Define ‘I.’” he said, smiling.

  But then he seemed to take pity on me. “One last benevolent gesture, courtesy of yours truly. It’s what they wanted, isn’t it? Weren’t they just saying so? You can’t rend your garments about it now.”