Tripping Back Blue

by Kara Storti

  “Souls are everywhere,” she says softly.

  “Like your husband?” I ask. She doesn’t respond right away. Maybe it is too blunt of a question.

  But she looks pleased to answer it. “Oh yes, he’s here right now, enjoying the conversation, like me. I talk to myself sometimes—Stacey must think I’m off my rocker—but it’s really him I’m talking to. No shame in that, no shame, I say. Things change, we adapt. That’s all we can do.”

  “What was your husband like?” I ask. She seems surprised. And pleased. People must have stopped asking her that a long time ago.

  “He was my person,” she says, looking down at her gold wedding band. “The one, no doubt about that. Strong and silent type. Loyal and caring. It’s as if he was tagged with my name as soon as he set foot on earth. We met when I worked at a hospital in Worcester. He was the head administrator; I was a lowly nurse. My nurse’s uniform must have been flattering back then, all that attention he showered on me was rather embarrassing. At first.” She winks at me; I smile. This is kind of like shooting the shit with Nurse Caven, but better. Conversation is nice, and maybe I’ll be getting something out of it.

  We have a good view of the whole front end of the cemetery and the road that runs next to it. There are no cars in sight—there usually aren’t so early on a Saturday morning. This puts me at ease. This is my venture and my venture alone.

  She’s not paying attention to any of her surroundings, just me and the sound of her own voice. “Our good times were miraculous. We had a spell of rough times too—like all marriages do. He lost his job after I had quit mine to raise our daughter. Those years were trying. Jobs were scarce and money was tight and there were times when all we ate were bananas, eggs, and rice.”

  “Why don’t you want to bank off your product?” I ask, finally taking the opportunity to bring the conversation back around to why we’re here, or at least why I’m here. “I mean, you don’t seem to be hurting now, but you could make a killing.”

  “I told you, I want it out of my life. My son-in-law moving here with my granddaughter . . . this is a new beginning, and I want it to be pure. That’s all I want to say about that for now,” she says curtly.

  “Okay,” I say, raising my hands. “Didn’t mean to hit a nerve.”

  “You’re not hitting a nerve, honey, you’re just getting at the truth, and sometimes it’s too much to handle, especially on a sunny day like this.”

  I bow my head in agreement, fingering the pages of the travel-size bird book in my hoodie pocket. The smoothness of it soothes me to no end. It’s a form of protection, it’s thick enough to be bulletproof, it’s a good-luck charm because of the heron on its cover. Herons are good omens when you see them. Why? They are self-reliant and are hyperaware of the world around them. People who see herons in their dreams are good at dealing with others and make good leaders. I’ve never dreamed of one. I should.

  -----

  “Come with me,” Orah says, standing and walking up the path into the older part of the cemetery that disappears in the woods. I’m following along, as the path gets steeper and steeper and then slopes down sharply again, a few gravestones scattered here and there, some still upright, while others are laid out on the ground, broken, chipped, even tagged, oh the blasphemy.

  I’ve never been this deep into the cemetery before because the bird watching isn’t as good among the heavy cover of branches and leaves. Orah knows exactly where to step, what turns to take, even though there is no clear path. The forest thickens, it’s getting all Sleepy Hollow in here as we make our way down a somewhat treacherous incline, infested by tree roots and slate.

  At the bottom of the incline, Orah disappears behind a large patch of tall grass. I follow. When I reach her through the thicket, I look up to see a ledge about twenty feet high. I didn’t even know the drop-off existed. I see her take a key from her back pocket and use it to open a metal door in the middle of a stone wall that I wouldn’t have noticed just passing through. It looks like the wall was shoved into the earth of the ledge.

  “What is this?” I ask, as she pushes the door open. Dust puffs up around her ankles. She tucks the key back into her pocket.

  “The crypt of my ancestors,” she says. “They built it and died and got buried here. Come in. I’m assuming they built it into the ledge so it would be as inconspicuous as possible.” She gestures me inside; I pause at the entrance.

  I try to catch a glimpse beyond her, but it’s too dark to see anything. I can’t imagine how it must look in there, how it must smell. “Uh-uh. I’m not going in.”

  “Suit yourself. You might want to see what’s in here, however.” She smirks; she’s so damn tickled by my hesitation.

  I groan and press on behind her. Damp, cool, suffocating. I have no idea what I’m getting myself into, but I’d be stupid not to see this through. The deep dark bandages itself around us, mummifying me. I’ve been to some rough locales throughout my years of drug dealing, but I’ve never heard of anyone hiding their drugs inside a tomb. Though I’m sort of impressed, I’ll admit there is a small part of me that is nervous, maybe a little scared. Why is it here, among the dead? Is this yet another sign?

  Suddenly, there’s light. Praise be. Orah has pulled out a battery-powered lamp from behind God knows what. There are two stone coffins, or more accurately there are two sarcophagi, one on either side of us, but they’re not sealed off. The lids are gone, and the bodies are exposed, so exposed, bones at all different kinds of angles, they aren’t bodies, they’re just a bunch of sticks rigged together. Good God. I’m surprised it doesn’t stink of death and decay. It doesn’t smell like anything but dirt.

  “Phineas, are you okay?” Orah asks.

  “Yeah, yeah. I’m fine,” I say, bending over, clasping my hands around my knees, trying to catch my breath. The ringing in my ears is a siren’s wail. It’s okay, I’m a weakling, but Orah can see me this way, I guess I don’t mind. Because it’s not just the bodies that are bringing me to my knees, man, it’s the flowers.

  Flowers.

  Everywhere.

  Their point of origin is the skeletons. They’re bursting directly from the bones like souls finally released, and these souls are stunning, like roses, but with more petals, bigger heads, shinier, silkier, heavier. And their blue color—what is there to say? In the barely-lit dark they seem to glow from within and change shades: there’s an almost blackish purple, oh wait, a blueberry blue, nope, it’s got to be dark denim, on second thought it’s lapis lazuli. Each variation of blue is a different word of a different language reciting a sonnet, singing a lyric, exclaiming a truth. True blue, citizens of D-Town! The flowers rise up from the dead and climb up the dirt walls of the crypt and hang from the ceiling, their vines snaking across surfaces, their leaves heart-shaped with long, curly tendrils. They make their way down the other side of the wall and onto the ground where their heavy-petaled heads gaze upwards.

  “What is this?” I say, touching a petal. It immediately disintegrates upon contact. I try to pick up the pieces, but there is nothing to pick up.

  Orah raises her eyebrows. “This is indigo.”

  Chapter Twenty-six

  In the dank atmosphere of the crypt, Orah tells me about the flower that has no name, even after years of research in trying to identify it. She urges me to never tell a soul—not Stacey, not her father, not Faith—about this place, to never utter a word, because it is the only location on earth where indigo—in all its delicate glory—is protected from the outside elements.

  “How the heck are these flowers growing without sunlight?” I ask.

  “It’s part of the magic. They’re fueled by the dead.” The idea of this gives me the creeps, but at the same time it’s a damn good representation of the circle of life. We die; we are born again.

  “So you just came across it here and decided to snort it up your nose? That makes no sense.”

  “It wasn’t like that at all,” she says. There’s a small bench up agains
t the wall where she sits. She pats the empty space next to her. Why not take a load off? If she’s not weirded out by this place, I’m not going to let it get to me either.

  She continues after I sit. “When my daughter died—Stacey’s mother—I was in a terrible state of mind. I thought God had already taken too much away from me when he took my husband at such a young age. But then he went and took my daughter too.” Her sadness is palpable. It seems like the flowers are shimmering different versions of blue in response to her emotions. If Faith were here, she’d compare their petals to mood rings.

  “Stacey told me she died of a virus.” I sense that she might want to tell me more about this.

  “You know how we realized something was really wrong?” she asks.

  I shake my head, and I’m more than curious to know. It hits me—the yearning to learn about Stacey and what has shaped her into the person she is today.

  “It started out with the flu. But then Page’s fingernails began to turn a shade of blue and so did her toenails. We thought that they were bruises until the whites of her eyes turned a pale blue. The doctors couldn’t figure it out. They ran test after test and couldn’t figure it out. Everyone was baffled. No one knew what to do.”

  “Talk about inconclusive,” I say, looking at my own chewed-to-the-quick fingernails.

  “The closer she got to death, the darker blue the whites of her eyes became, to the point where you could barely see where the blue disease ended and the black pupil began. It scared Stacey. Billy tried to be brave, but all he wanted was his daddy.”

  “Poor kids,” I say, but the comment falls flat. What do I know about kids? About families in general? About what it’s like to want to be with your daddy?

  “The more I thought of it, the more I wondered if it was something in our genetic makeup. I’d heard over and over again from my mother about the Klaski blood being ‘contaminated.’ There was a story about an infection on a farm of my great-grandparents in the Adirondacks. Who knows, maybe something was contracted from the animals.” Her voice sounds tired, and she falls silent.

  But I want to know everything now that she’d started. “So you think that the virus was passed down—like through DNA or something?”

  “It’s one possibility.” She straightens up, summoning up the strength to continue. I know this is a hard story to tell. But I know she wants to tell it. Maybe she needs to.

  “I was there holding Page’s hand the day that she died. The hospital room was dark; it was past two in the morning. She opened her eyes, squeezed my hand, and said, Everyone is right about seeing things before you die. My memories are flashing before me. All my best ones.”

  I know I’ve just heard the story of her daughter’s death, and there’s part of me that feels sad for Orah and for Stacey, but I can’t help but get a little revved up by how the story connects with indigo. Indigo makes you see your favorite memories, like what Page was seeing. Page, who was turning blue, the color of indigo, and dying. So did that mean that when you take a hit of indigo, you have to die a little to see the memories?

  Orah breaks my train of thought. “After Page died, I couldn’t visit her grave. I just couldn’t. No mother should have to experience her child dying before her. She was only twenty-seven when she passed . . .”

  “Life isn’t for the faint of heart,” I say. I immediately feel stupid for trotting out this cliché. Luckily Orah doesn’t seem to notice.

  She sighs, and her expression is one of tired melancholy. “Finally, I found the courage and went to her grave. It’s next to where my husband’s is and where mine will be. I was there by myself. I had to be alone, this first time, with my grief.”

  She pauses. I know there’s more and, I admit, I’m eager for it, even though I know I’m being kind of morbid. “I showed up at the cemetery, around this time, early morning. What I saw was a shock. It literally brought me to my knees.”

  “The flowers,” I say.

  “They were so blue in the sunlight. They didn’t look real—they looked like they were made of glass—almost transparent in the light. I started to cry just thinking I wanted to die and be put in the ground next to my daughter. But when my tears hit the petals, the blue turned different shades. I watched, almost enchanted, and for the first time since Page had died, I saw the beauty of life. The flowers were showing me life could change with a single tear. Hopelessness may surround you, but then you see a bird you like, things shift, and you start to feel different. Different in a way that you can look at what’s ahead of you in a new way. So when the flowers were changing, they were speaking to me, and telling me that it was going to be okay, if even just for a moment.”

  I am drinking in her words. She had wanted to die, and then the flowers gave her hope. Page had died, but something about her death, maybe her DNA, and the blue disease mixed with the earth, gave birth to a new form of life. Death to life. To hope. To rebirth.

  “I reached out and touched the flowers,” Orah continued, “and they disintegrated. Their residue dusted her grave, made it blue-toned. I said good-bye to my daughter again that day and kissed the top of her grave. The stone was sweet-tasting. I licked my lips, which were even sweeter. The taste seemed like a gift. A gift from Page. The flowers had grown from her bones, and were so strong their roots sprouted through the cracks in the coffin, and pushed through the ground. How do I know this? I’ve seen the way the flowers behave in this crypt and how fast they grow. Nature is powerful. It will always fight to make itself known. These flowers were an extension of her. Why wouldn’t I want her to be part of me forever? I grabbed one in my palm and ate the petals even as they turned to powder.”

  “And you had a flashback when you ate the flower? A memory?”

  “Oh yes, a very lovely, heavenly one at that.” I don’t ask her what her memory was. I could tell it was private, and I didn’t want to know. Some things aren’t meant to be shared.

  “It was such an intense experience it became addicting. I went back and back until all the flowers were gone, and they didn’t grow back. That’s when I started to do some research.”

  Now her tone has changed. She’s leaving behind the personal memories and is moving to a new part of the story, the part that she knows is going to be about me and what I’m looking for. I know she knows this, because she looks at me out of the corner of her eye, clearly amused by how captivated I am. Well listen here, Mother Goose, Faith and I were never read bedtime stories as kids, so there’s a lot of catching up to do.

  “I spent the next year trying to track down gravesites of my relatives.”

  I’m sure she pauses here for effect. She’s playing with me now. What an old lady. I imagine Stacey being like her in fifty or sixty years.

  “What did you find?” I ask, because I know she’s going to make me beg for it.

  “There’s an old Klaski graveyard at an abandoned farm. Those gravestones are the oldest I’ve ever seen in our family, dating back to my great-great-grandparents.”

  “Were the flowers there?”

  “Not many. I think indigo needs to be protected and can only survive outside for so long. There were a few plants, but the petals were not that deep blue, and the experience they gave was barely anything. But I’m convinced that’s where the flower began because that’s supposedly where the virus started, at least according to what my grandmother told me long ago.”

  “Anywhere else?” I prompt. I’m beginning to hope that the indigo is growing all over the area.

  “Don’t get ahead of yourself. This is the only indigo place you’ll ever need. Believe it or not, this crypt was the hardest to find. No one knows it’s back here, it’s so old.”

  “And there’s so much of it.” I look around again. It’s hard to believe anything could live in this gloom, but the flowers are everywhere.

  “No snow, no wind, no drought. Just dark and dank, like a grave. This is the only place I visit, and I’ve been coming here for years. The flowers just keep blooming.”

>   Forgive me for salivating at this fact. Endless supply. An endless opportunity for cash. I could finance Faith’s education, no doubt, on this. I could finance her freaking life. And the idea of indigo potential on the farm where it all began? I bet those old bones would grow an indigo even more divine.

  “You know what I learned throughout this whole experience, Phineas?”

  I set the fantasy of my future life aside. “Do tell.”

  “We are not put on this earth to be happy all the time. I don’t think trying to be happy is the secret to life.”

  It certainly isn’t what my life is, that’s for sure. “Then what is? Be sad and suffer?”

  “No, no. It’s not about trying to be anything. Happiness is not something that can be attained and once attained, that’s it. It’s an ongoing project.”

  She’s losing me now. We’re into Buddha Zen land, not where I want to be. I try to bring her back. “Okay, but what does it have to do with this?” I gesture around us to the flowers that seem to have gotten bigger, bursting with more life the longer we’re in here.

  “You have to find the bright spots. The little moments. Hold onto them for however long they last, and when they’re gone, pay tribute by remembering. The memories can restore us, history can teach us, and the fact that happiness isn’t all the time makes us appreciate it more. Life is hard. Tragedy befalls us every day. But there’s always going to be a bright spot, no matter how big or how small. We will always have something to look forward to, and we will always have bright spots to remember.”

  Thoughts of the deals I’ll make, the money I’ll make, disappear. I am only listening to her voice, her advice, and what seems like a truth I haven’t digested before. This woman, she should speak to the masses. I’m sad I never had a grandmother like this. I could have used a dose of this philosophy way back when.

  “I’m going to be ruminating the crap out of this, Orah. For a long while.”

  “I hope it will help you.” I hope so too.