Moonlight & Vines (17 page)

I feel so calm. It seems as though I should be either freaking out completely or delirious with wonder and awe, but there's only the calm. I sit there for a long time, running my finger across the bump of my new birthmark, then finally I button up my blouse. I fill the grave—this goes a lot quicker than digging it did—and cover up the raw dirt with pine needles. I wrap the shovel in my blanket and walk back to where I parked my car on Battersfield Road.

Traci has to know the whole story, of course, so I tell her everything. I don't know how much she believes, but crazy as it all sounds, she believes that I believe, and that's enough for her. I'm afraid of getting involved
with her at first—afraid that I'm turning to her on the rebound from what I never quite had with Nina but certainly felt for her. But it doesn't work that way. Or if I am rebounding, it's in the right direction.

I remember Nina telling me that I'd be changed if I—I guess absorbed the sword is the best way to put it—but that she didn't know how. I do now. It's not a big thing. My world hasn't changed—though I guess my view of it has to some degree. What's happened is that I'm more decisive. I've taken control of my life. I'm not drifting anymore—either in my personal life or on the job. I don't go for the safe, soft stories anymore. One person can't do a whole lot about all the injustice in the world, but I'm making damn sure that people hear about it. That we all do what we can about it. I'm not looking for a Pulitzer; I just want to make sure that I leave things a little better behind me when I go.

Six months or so after Traci and I start living together, she turns to me one night and asks me why it didn't disappoint me that Nina never came back to me after I did what she asked.

“It's because I remember what she told me in that dream I had the night Martin died,” I explain. “You know, when I dreamed the sword was lying on the bed beside me and talking to me? I didn't remember when I woke, but it came back to me a few days after I got back from the pine grove.”

Traci gives me a poke with her finger. “So aren't you going to tell me?” she says when I've fallen silent.

I smile. “She said that if she was freed, she might not be able to come back. That really being human, instead of passing for one, might mean that she'd be starting her life all over again as an infant and she wouldn't remember what had gone before.”

Now it's Traci's turn to fall silent. “Is that why you want us to have a kid?” she asks finally.

With modern medicine, anything's possible, right? Or at least something as basic as artificial insemination.

“I like to think she's waiting for us to get it together,” I say.

“So you're planning on a girl.”

“Feels right to me.”

Traci reaches over and tracks the contour of my sword birthmark with a finger. “Think she'll have one of these?”

“Does it matter?” I ask.

“Doesn't matter at all,” Traci says. She rolls over to embrace me. “And I guess it means we don't have to worry about what to name her either.”

I snuggle in close. I love finally knowing who I am; loving and being loved for who I am. I just hope that wherever and whenever Nina is reborn, she'll be as lucky as I feel I am.

Lillie's in the graveyard again, looking for ghosts. She just can't stay away.

“I'm paying my respects,” she says, but it doesn't make sense.

These days All Souls Cemetery's about as forgotten as the people buried in it. The land belongs to some big company now and they're just waiting for the paperwork to go through at city hall. One day soon they'll be moving what's left of the bodies, tearing down all those old-fashioned mausoleums and crypts and putting up something shiny and new. Who's going to miss it? Nobody goes there now except for the dealers with their little packets of oblivion and junkies looking for a fix.

The only people who care about the place are from the Crowsea Heritage Society. And Lillie. Everybody else just wants to see it go. Everybody else likes the idea of making a place gone wild safe again, never mind they don't put it quite that way. But that's what they're thinking. You can see it in the back of their eyes when they talk about it.

See, there's something that scares most people about the night, something that rises out of old memories, out of the genetic soup we all carry around inside us. Monsters in closets when we were kids and further back still, a long way, all the way back to the things waiting out there where the fire's light can't reach. It's not something anybody talks about, but I know that's what they see in All Souls because I can see it, too.

It's got nothing to do with the drug deals going down. People know a piece of the night is biding in there, thinking about them, and they can't
wait to see it go. Even the dealers. You see them hanging around by the gates, money moves from one hand to the other, packets of folded paper follow suit, everything smooth, moves like magic—they're fearless, these guys. But they don't go any further in than they have to. Nobody does except for Lillie.

“There's been nobody buried there in fifty years,” I tell her, but that just gets her back up. “All the more reason to give those old souls some respect,” she says.

But that's not it. I know she's looking for ghosts. Thing is, I don't know why.

Alex's problem is he wants an answer for everything. All he ever does is go around asking questions. Never lets a thing lie. Always has to know what's going on and why. Can't understand that some things don't have reasons. Or that some people don't feel like explaining themselves. They just do what feels right. Get an idea in their head and follow it through and don't worry about what someone else is going to think or if anybody else understands.

In Alex's world there's only right and wrong, black and white. Me, I fall through the cracks of that world. In my head, it's all grey. In my head, it's all like walking in the twilight, a thousand shades of moonglow and dusky skies and shadow.

He thinks of me sitting here in the dark, all those old stone mausoleums standing around me, old and battered like the tenements leaning against each other on the streets where we grew up, and it spooks him. But All Souls comforts me, I don't know why. Half the trees inside are dead, the rest are dying. Most of the grass is yellow and brown and the only flowers in this place these days grow on weeds, except in one corner where a scraggly old rose bush keeps on trying, tough old bugger doesn't know enough to give up. The stone walls are crumbling down, the cast-iron gates haven't worked in years. There's a bunch of losers crowded around those gates, cutting deals, more nervous of what's here, inside, than of the man showing up and busting them. I come in over the wall and go deep, where the shadows hide me, and they never even know I'm here. Nobody does, except for Alex and he just doesn't understand.

I know what Alex sees when he looks at this place. I see it, too, at first,
each time I come. But after a while, when I'm over the wall and inside, walking the narrow lanes in between the stones and tombs, uneven cobbles underfoot, the shadows lying thick everywhere I look, it gets different. I go someplace else. I don't hear the dealers, I don't see the junkies. The cemetery's gone, the city's gone, and me, I'm gone, too.

The only thing still with me are the walls, but they're different in that other place. Not so worn down. The stones have been fit together without mortar, each one cunningly placed against the other and solid. Those walls go up ten feet and you'd have to ram them with a bulldozer before they'd come down.

Inside, it's a garden. Sort of. A wild place. A tangle of bushes and briars, trees I've got no name for and vines hanging everywhere. A riot of flowers haunts the ground cover, pale blossoms that catch the moonlight and hold it in their petals.

The moonlight. That moon is so big in this place it feels like it could swallow the world. When I stand there in the wild garden and look up at it, I feel small, like I'm no bigger than the space of time between one moment and the next, but not the same way I feel small anywhere else. Where I come from there are millions of people living everywhere and each one of them's got his or her own world. It's so easy to lose a part of yourself in those worlds, to just find yourself getting sucked away until there's next to nothing left of who you are. But I don't have to be careful about that here. There aren't any of those millions of people here and that moon, it doesn't swallow up who I am, its golden light fills me up, reveling in what it knows me to be. I'm small in its light, sure, but the kind of small that can hold everything there is to be held. The moon's just bigger, that's all. Not more important than me, just different.

Those junkies don't know what they're missing, never getting any further inside the gates than the first guy in a jean vest with the right price.

Trouble is, Lillie doesn't understand danger. She's never had to go through the hard times some of us did, never really seen what people can do to each other when they're feeling desperate or just plain mean. She grew up poor, like everybody else in our neighborhood, but her family loved her and she didn't get knocked around the way those of us who didn't have her kind of parents did. She was safe at home; out on
the streets, I always looked after her, made sure the hard cases left her alone.

I'm working as a bouncer at Chic Cheeks the night I hear she's been going to All Souls, so I head down there after my shift to check things out. It's a good thing I do. Some of the guys hanging around by the gates have gotten bored and happened to spot her, all alone in there and looking so pretty. Guess they decided they were going to have themselves a little fun. Bad move. But then they didn't expect me to come along.

I remember a teacher I had in junior high telling me one time how wood and stone make poor conductors. Well, they conduct pain pretty good, as those boys find out. I introduce one of them face-first to a tombstone and kind of make a mess of his nose, knock out a couple of teeth. His pals aren't chickenshit, I'll give them that much. I hear the
snickt
of their blades snapping open, so I drop the first guy. He makes some kind of gurgling noises when he hits the ground and rolls onto my boot. I push him away and then ignore him. He's too busy feeling his pain to cause me any immediate grief. I turn to his buddies, a little pissed off now, but we don't get into it.

“Oh Christ,” one of them says, recognizing me.

“We didn't mean nothing, Al,” the other one says.

They're putting their knives away, backing up.

“We knew she was one of your people, we never would've touched her. I swear it, man.”

Guess I've got a bit of a rep. Nothing serious. I'm not some big shot. What it's got to do with is my old man.

Crazy Eddie is what they used to call him on the streets. Started running numbers for the bosses back when he was a kid, then moved into collections, which is where he got his name. You don't want to think it of your own flesh and blood, but the old man was a psycho. He'd do any crazed thing came to mind if you couldn't pay up. You're in for a few yards, you better cough it up, don't matter what you've got to do to get the money, because he'd as soon as cut your throat as collect the bread.

After a while the bosses started using him for hits, the kind where they're making a statement. Messy, crazy hits. He did that for years until he got into a situation he couldn't cut his way out of. Cops took him away in a bunch of little bags.

Man, I'll never forget that day. I was doing a short stretch in the county when I found out and I near laughed myself sick. I'd hated that
old bastard for the way he'd treated ma, for what he did to my sister Juney. He used to kick the shit out of me on a regular basis, but I could deal with that. It was the things he did to them . . . . I knew one day I'd take him down, didn't matter he was my old man. I just hadn't got around to it yet. Hadn't figured out a way to let the bosses know it was personal, not some kind of criticism of their business.

Anyway, I'm not mean like the old man was, I'll tell you that straight-off, but I purely don't take crap from anybody. I don't have to get into it too much anymore. People take a look at me now and think, blood is blood. They see my old man's crazy eyes when they look in mine, and they find some other place to be than where I'm standing.

So I make the point with these boys that they don't want to mess with Lillie, and all it takes is a tap against a tombstone for them to get the message. I let them get their pal and take off, then I go to see what Lillie's doing.

It's the strangest thing. She's just standing there by one of those old stone mausoleums, swaying back and forth, looking off into the space between a couple of those stone crypts. I scratch my head, and take a closer look myself. She's mesmerized by something, but damned if I know what. I can hear her humming to herself, still doing that swaying thing, mostly with her upper body, back and forth, smiling that pretty smile of hers, short black hair standing up at attention the way it always does. I'm forever trying to talk her into growing it long, but she laughs at me whenever I do.

I guess I watch her for about an hour that night. I remember thinking she'd been sampling some of the dealers' wares until she suddenly snaps out of it. I fade back into the shadows at that point. Don't want her to think I've been spying on her. I'm just looking out for her, but she doesn't see it that way. She gets seriously pissed at me and I hate having Lillie mad at me.

She walks right by me, still humming to herself. I can see she's not stoned, just Lillie-strange. I watch her climb up some vines where one of the walls is broken and low, and then she's gone. I go out the front way, just to remind the boys what's what, and catch up with Lillie a few blocks away, casual-like. Don't ask her where she's been. Just say how-do, make sure she's okay without letting on I'm worried, and head back to my own place.