In Silent Graves

by Gary A Braunbeck

  The new doll was sitting on paper.

  A package.

  The package, to be exact, the same one Robert had nearly tripped over before coming inside.

  He moved the doll aside and read his name and address written in an almost-childlike scrawl on the brown wrapping paper. The return address was his own, as well.

  The buzz-whirrrrrrr of the mixer stopped for a moment while the three metal cookie trays were separated and the first bag of chocolate chips opened.

  Robert watched as his hand dug its fingers into the brown package paper.

  The buzz-whirrrrr of the mixer started again just as Robert’s fingers tore into the paper and ripped a clean, straight path down the center.

  He watched and listened, fascinated by the whole thing; image and soundtrack to some art-house foreign film: The Mixing Hand Rips. Wild Matryoshkas. The Seventh Chip. Pelle the Cookie. All starring Max von Sydow as Perpetual Happy Guy. Dubbed and letterboxed for the cinema purists.

  As he watched the movie play out before him—hand tearing, package coming apart, sounds of cookies being made—Robert began to feel shiny again—no less weighed down, but the pain was receding. Pill must be kicking in.

  He decided that the movie must be some kind of black comedy, because there was a certain absurdist humor to it. A Rube Goldberg short-subject. So he allowed himself to laugh once again. He thought it was a pity that von Sydow was always cast as the brooding, worried, depressed so-and-so. Hell, the guy did a Woody Allen movie, didn’t he, and when he’s finally cast in a comedy, what kind of part does he get? A depressed, suicidal artist. No wonder he turned around and did that Stephen King movie Needful Things; he probably needed something light.

  That struck Robert as funny, so he laughed again.

  The cookie soundtrack droned comfortably on as the package revealed its contents: Rockin’ ‘78: The Cedar Hill High School Yearbook.

  “Aw, isn’t that nice?” Robert said to no one in particular. “The year I graduated.” He looked at the three matryoshka dolls facing him. “See, Dad had finally gone into AA that year because he’d gotten laid off in February and we were all afraid that his drinking might get a lot worse, what with no job to waste his boozing time anymore...so we didn’t have a lot of what you’d call your ‘disposable income,’ right? I wanted to get a copy of the yearbook but we couldn’t afford it so I never did. And now...somebody sweet has gotten one for me.” He leaned forward and smiled at the dolls. “Want to take a look inside? Have a stroll down memory lane? Oh, let’s!” He flipped open the oversized hardcover to a page at random. “The drama club! The spring play that year was Spoon River Anthology—you know, two-and-a-half hours of dead people coming out of their graves long enough to read their own epitaphs. Big hit with the teens, major chuckle-fest. Oooh—says here that the musical that year was Finian’s Rainbow!” He leaned even closer toward the dolls and whispered, “So, how are things in Glockamora? And will you all return there some fine day?”

  (Take a breath and get a fuckin’ grip, pal!)

  “And here,” he said, ignoring the voice in his head, “is a photo of the sexiest little bunch of cheerleaders this side of a Playboy Pay-Per-View special, the Cedar Hill Wildcats Catettes. I always sort of liked their short skirts, gave you just enough of a glimpse of the Promised Land to make you watch only them in hopes of seeing more...but then I was seventeen and constantly horny and had never had sex with anyone who wasn’t my right hand, so I think I’m entitled to wax nostalgic about my long-lost teenaged raging hormones. But I see I’m embarrassing you ladies, so let’s move on—ah! The senior pictures! We didn’t have the money for me to get any taken, so I won’t be in here but that’s no great loss to Posterity—I had hair like the fifth Bee Gee. Let’s see—” He flipped randomly through the photos. “Here’s Vanessa Tartar—who, oddly enough, didn’t like seafood. I was the only person who thought that was funny. And John Wade, the living Howdy-Doody. Yeah, yeah, and here’s Rick Rush—great name, if I’d had a name like that I could’ve been a star. Rick played football. Bet’cha can’t guess what his specialty was? Hah! This is Kim Luther—I had sort of a crush on her but she never knew it, and Molly May, and—oh, we’re leaving someone out.” He reached out and turned the fourth matryoshka doll around, not surprised to find that some of its still-wet paint came off on his fingers. Wiping his fingers on his coat, he looked at the fourth doll at the same time he turned to the next page of senior photographs—

  —and found himself looking at the same face on both page and doll.

  Cathy Pope.

  It wasn’t by accident that he saw her face in the yearbook; there were only five photos on this page, all of them three times the size of the other senior pictures. Cathy was the only girl on the page, and whoever had done the layout had put her picture right in the center.

  The caption at the top of the page read: In Memoriam.

  Below Cathy’s photo was a quote, and a set of dates:

  “I don’t want to try to be like anyone else; I just want to be the best Cathy I can be!”

  1961-1978

  He looked from the photo to the likeness on the doll.

  They were an exact match. Her sparkling brown eyes; the long, thick, dark hair that tumbled about her shoulders like a velvet cradle; the little splotch of freckles on her nose that she’d said she hated but that Robert knew she hoped made her look cute. In both doll and photo, her seventeen-year-old bloom shone strong and radiant.

  Robert’s throat muscles were suddenly about two times too big for his neck. “Oh, Cathy....”

  They’d met in November of ‘77 at a recruitment session for the audio-visual club. Robert had been interested in doing something on-camera, while Cathy had wanted to get involved behind the scenes, maybe producing a talk show or something like that. He’d been drawn to her shy sweetness and the way she seemed to think everything he said was funny. It was the first time in his almost-eighteen years of inhabiting this planet that Robert had actually felt attractive. He remembered their first few dates, the way it had taken him a while to get used to her dry wit, how his whole body seemed to vibrate whenever she’d hold his hands. “I’m sorry my fingers are so bony,” she’d say, but he didn’t mind, not one little bit. She was the first girl he’d ever made out with, the first whose breast he’d ever touched, the first he’d ever cried in front of during a bad date shortly after his dad had gone into AA. She had listened to him as he talked about how bad he felt for his mom and how he worried about his little sister. He told her about how his spleen came to be ruptured, the weeks in the hospital, and how he had bad dreams that Dad might fall off the wagon and do something like that to Lynn.

  “What about you?” she’d asked, putting her smooth, warm hand on the back of his neck as they sat in the front seat of her father’s ‘75 Mustang. “Don’t you worry about what all that’s done to you?”

  “Not really,” he said. It was the truth. “I mean, I’ve been the only thing that stands between him and Mom and Lynn for so long that...I just don’t think about how it affects me. That doesn’t seem so important.”

  “Well it is to me, you goof! I don’t like to think of you being in pain.”

  He’d almost laughed at that but managed to swallow it back at the last minute. “‘In pain.’ You make it sound romantic.”

  “Nothing romantic about it. I don’t see anything romantic about having your youth ruined.”

  Always, she’d been that way, one of the most compassionate people he’d ever known. And she never seemed to get angry with people who let her down. Once, when a couple of her friends had canceled movie plans with her at the last minute (and he knew how she’d been looking forward to going out with her girlfriends), Robert asked her why she wasn’t mad.

  “What good would it do? Getting mad just saps all the energy you could use doing something positive. Sure, they stood me up, but now I’ve got a whole evening to do with whatever I want. I could read, listen to music, go window-shopping—”
>
  “—or you could hang up and come get me and we could spend the evening together.”

  “Took you long enough. See’ya in twenty minutes!”

  By January they were officially a Couple. In March, after a particularly long and steamy make-out session, they were sitting next to each other on the couch in her parents’ den (her parents had always been cool about not bothering them when they were alone at her house), still fully clothed but definitely seriously mussed. She was snuggled against him, her cheek against his chest while her hands drew small, indecipherable patterns on his shoulder. It was warm and close and intimate and he’d wanted for it to never end.

  “Listen to me,” she whispered, “because I’m only going to say this once—and you’d better not laugh if you know what’s good for you.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay. I’m crazy about you, Robert Londrigan. Since we’ve been going out I’ve never been happier or felt sexier or looked so forward to each morning because it means another day that I get to see you. Get that smug grin off your face.”

  “I’m not smug.”

  “You look like Bo-Bo the Dog-Faced Boy. Stop it.”

  “Let me think about something depressing.” A beat. “Sorry, can’t seem to find anything right at the moment.”

  “Shh.” Her finger against his lips. “Listen. Dad said you could drive his new car when we go to the prom.”

  “The Caddy?”

  “You’re not being quiet—do you want to hear this or not?”

  He mimed locking his mouth and tossing away the key.

  “I’ve already found my dress—and no, you can’t see it. I...I love you, and I think you love me, so I feel okay telling you this next part.” She sat back and faced him. “I’m a virgin, okay? It’s not that I haven’t had the chance to be with a guy...in that way, I’ve just never met one who I cared enough about to....” She sighed, looked down, shook her head, then stared directly into his eyes. “I love you, Robert, and here’s what I’d like to happen: after the prom and the parties, I’d like for us to drive out to Buckeye Lake to my parents’ summer cabin, and I’d like us to spend the night together in the same bed, and I’d like for us to make love like two people who love each other are supposed to, all right?”

  He touched her cheek. “I love you, too, Cathy.”

  “You’d better.”

  Then she gave him one of the ten greatest kisses in recorded history.

  Two months later, on the way back from visiting her grandmother in Columbus with her parents, a drunk in pickup truck crossed the center line on I-70 doing 88 miles per hour and hit them head-on. Everyone—except the drunk, who would later blow his brains out while out on bond—was killed instantly. From what Robert was able to find out from Cathy’s friends at school, there wasn’t enough left of her for an open-casket funeral.

  That was the first time Robert thought it amazing that the human heart made no sound when it broke. It had almost killed him, losing her.

  He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out the card Amy Wilder had given to Danny, then turned it over and once again read the words on the back.

  May 21, 1978. Not such a pretty picture.

  May 21, 1978. The day Cathy and her parents had been killed.

  No wonder he hadn’t wanted to remember why the date seemed familiar. It had taken the better part of three years for him to recover from her death—not that there weren’t other girls after her; he’d turned into a regular hound dog after graduation, and once he got to college people often joked that he was constitutionally required to bed down with a new woman every four days. He’d drunk a lot during those three years—too much, in fact. But it seemed the best way to distance himself from the ache Cathy’s death had left. Boozing and screwing, screwing and boozing, with a little school thrown in for good measure.

  Sometime in the middle of his sophomore year he woke up with a hangover in the bed of a woman at least fifteen years older and whose name he couldn’t remember and realized that he was going to wind up in a detox ward if he didn’t stop. It amazed him then—and still did—that he hadn’t caught anything worse than a mondo case of crabs from his reckless behavior. That morning, waking in the older woman’s bed and realizing he not only couldn’t remember her name but had no idea where they’d even met, he suddenly felt like a living literary cliché: a character cut from a first-draft Fitzgerald.

  Some might see a certain tragic romance in his actions those three years after Cathy’s death; Robert thought he was just being an asshole.

  He spent a very, very long time and much effort trying to expunge the memory of those times from his universe. It also meant expunging Cathy’s memory.

  He had been shockingly successful.

  Until this night, in the basement of the house he’d once shared with Denise, he had not thought of Cathy Pope, even briefly, in at least ten years.

  He didn’t feel shiny any more.

  Dear God, had he ever really taken time to know any woman? Even those with whom he was involved only for a little while? Would it have been that much trouble, was it too much to ask that he pay a little more attention, that he participate in a conversation without trying to find a way to make himself or his dreams its subject? Had he really destroyed that element of genuine character that erased ego and machismo from a man’s nature and allowed him to be vulnerable and wholly himself when he was with a woman who cared about him?

  What the hell had happened to the fine man that the awkward boy had once imagined himself becoming?

  “Where’d you go?” whispered Robert.

  I should have turned out to be a better person—a better man—than this.

  He had the memories of so many dismissed women to prove that.

  He threw the yearbook across the basement, smiling at the loud smack! it made when it slammed against the side of the water heater.

  Above, the mixer droned on, buzz-whirrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

  “Turn that damned thing off, will you?” he yelled.

  As if in response, the stereo started playing again—only this time they’d found the record album and were playing that much louder than the CD; the cracks, hisses, and pops in the twenty-odd-year-old vinyl were, in places, almost louder than the music itself.

  Oh, I guess progress will provide for its children

  Even though their eyes won’t see the sky

  I’ll remember sparrows, but by then they’ll never miss them

  It’s sad enough to make a grown man cry.

  “Oh, no,” whispered Robert, knowing what was about to happen.

  Like it had every time he’d tried to play it for the last five years or so, the record stuck at this point: “...cry”—snick!— “...cry”—snick!— “...cry”—snick!— “...cry”—snick!

  He stumbled up the stairs and into the kitchen. He could smell the first batch of cookies baking in the oven. Someone had torn up a couple of cardboard boxes and duct-taped them over the broken window in the back door. The kitchen and house were getting warm again. The mixer had been placed on its stand and the next bowl of batter, placed firmly on the rotating plastic disc that was part of the mixing unit, spun ‘round and ‘round as the metal beaters churned.

  Once more, something inside Robert’s mind sputtered, just a little.

  So he laughed, just a little.

  He headed toward the front door, unlocked and opened it, then turned to the house and called out to whom- or whatever was there to hear, “I’m going out for some cigarettes, honey. Be right back.”

  Upstairs, the toilet flushed and a child giggled.

  Robert staggered out the door, closing it behind him but forgetting to lock it.

  A minute after he rounded the corner of his street, the deadbolt on the front door locked into place.

  Chapter 7

  He walked around for maybe forty minutes before the cold and snow started getting to him, then he ducked into a bus-stop kiosk and sat on the cold metal bench. At least he was out of the
snow and wind.

  He felt the firmness of the cell phone in his pocket and knew that all he had to do was call Lynn and Danny and ask them to come get him.

  And what would you tell them? That you decided to surrender the house to a bunch of ghosts that use the toilet and have a thing for Nitzinger songs and chocolate-chip cookies?

  He fumbled a cigarette into his mouth and smoked it in about two minutes.

  He was just lighting a second smoke when the last bus of the night pulled in. He didn’t look at any of the disembarking passengers—like him, they were too tired and too cold for social graces. It wasn’t until he looked up to wave the driver on—Just sitting here, not waiting for you—that he caught sight of the lone passenger sitting near the back of the bus.

  Brown eyes sparkling, dark hair still a velvet cradle, and her seventeen-year-old bloom as strong and radiant as ever, Cathy Pope blew him a kiss, smiled, then waved as the bus pulled away.

  PART THREE

  Remain in Light

  The individual has a host of shadows,

  all of which resemble him and for the moment

  have an equal claim to authenticity.

  —Kierkegaard, Repetition

  So I’ll drive out to some big, flat ranch,

  strip down to the pink to let my skin breathe,

  and I’ll dance for lightning, I’ll dance for rain,

  I shall dance for pleasure, I shall dance for pain,

  I’ll scream out at the emptiness until my lungs bleed

  and try for the volume that will make the fossils stir

  deep in the desiccated earth and rise to the surface,

  hard skeletal denizens of a long-dried ocean swimming

  through layers of rock, wreaking a tectonic tsunami

  that will shock the city from its flatland coma.

  —Lucy A. Snyder, “Permian Basin Blues”

  The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.

  —Anaïs Nin