On the Day I Died (2 page)

He knocked.

The porch light snapped on. The door swung open. Standing there was a woman as tired and sagging as her old house. “You’ve come to return her shoes, haven’t you?”

Mike stammered, “Y-yes, yes, how did you—”

“Someone always returns her shoes,” the woman interrupted. “Always on October twenty-sixth. Every year on this very date.”

“Mrs. Morrissey,” said Mike, “is Carol Anne still awake? Can I speak with her, please?”

The woman gave a hollow laugh. “Carol Anne is dead, been dead fifty-six years this very night. Drowned in a canoeing accident over on Hawthorn Lake, she did. My poor baby. Her body was in that freezing water for hours.”

“I … I don’t believe you. I just saw her. I just talked with her.”

“None of you ever believe me,” the woman said. “But it’s God’s own truth. I wish it wasn’t, but it is. She’s dead.”

Mike didn’t like looking at the woman’s white, sorrow-etched face. Her skin looked as if you could push a pencil through it and not draw any blood.

She went on. “Every year on the anniversary of her accident she walks County Line Road, searching, I suppose, for the help that never came. And every year she leaves her shoes. New shoes they were, bought the very morning of the accident. Oh, Carol Anne loved
those black-and-white saddle shoes. To this day, I don’t know why she wore them out canoeing.” The woman’s face seemed to collapse. “In truth, I don’t know why she even went canoeing that day. It was so cold.” She sniffled. “You know, I’ve been answering this door for decades now, reliving the horror of my baby girl’s death over and over again. I’m tired of it. I can’t take the grief anymore.” She moved to shut the door.

“Wait!” cried Mike. “What about her shoes?”

“You want to return them to her, you’ll have to take them over to the cemetery. She’s buried in a special plot reserved just for young folks. I thought she’d like that, resting with people her own age.”

Mrs. Morrissey pointed back the way he’d come. “You just take a right out at the gravel road, go about four miles, then take a left onto an overgrown path. The cemetery entrance is a few feet down. Look close, it’s hard to spot. Not many folks go out there these days.” With that, she shut the door. The porch light snapped off.

Mike made his way back to the car. His phone was ringing when he opened the door. He tossed it into the backseat. He needed to think.

He didn’t know what was going on. But it couldn’t be what Mrs. Morrissey claimed it was, could it? That was impossible—as impossible as an alien invasion or the existence of Bigfoot.

Yeah, if you say so, a voice whispered in his head.
But if you go home now, you’ll wonder about it for the rest of your life. You’ll always regret that you didn’t seek out the truth.

“Forget that,” Mike said aloud. Quickly, before he could change his mind, he hung a right and stepped on the accelerator.

He almost missed the dirt path. It was too narrow for the car to get down. He parked at the side of the road and, grabbing the saddle shoes, got out of the car.

From the backseat his phone went off again. Its ring sounded plaintive, beseeching.

He stopped. He should answer it. Already, he could hear his mother crying, “Oh my God, Mikey,” the relief thick in her voice. “Where have you been? Come home this instant.” And for the first time in his entire teenage life, he would do exactly what she said. He would turn the car around, forget about Carol Anne and her shoes and go home.

But the voice in his head whispered again, more loudly this time. It’ll only take ten minutes. What’s ten minutes? You’re already late. And then you’ll know for sure.

“Right,” said Mike. He started to pick his way down the path, the sound of the ringing phone fading behind him.

The path was little more than a suggestion. He fought his way through shrubs and buckthorn, the forest pressing in from both sides. At last, what nature had worked so hard to conceal came into view.

WHITE CEMETERY
. That was what the words on the metal archway read. A tall wrought-iron fence enclosed the graveyard, but the gates sagged open with age, and in places there were gaping holes where the rods had gone missing. Taking a steadying breath, Mike stepped through the gates onto consecrated ground.

The sky was bright with moonlight, although he couldn’t see the moon itself; the tall trees ringing the cemetery had blotted it out. A ground mist, like vaporous tendrils, seeped from the loamy, weed-thick earth. He noticed how the path—the same one he had followed through the woods—ran like a church aisle down the center of the graveyard, ending at an algae-covered lagoon. He noticed also that nothing stirred—not the rustle of bats’ wings, or the hoot of an owl, or the sigh of the rising wind. It had obviously been a long time since anyone had placed flowers or pulled weeds here.

Forgotten
.

The word popped into Mike’s head.

These graves—and the people in them—had been forgotten.

The headstones at the back of the cemetery near the lagoon looked especially old. They jutted from the earth like crooked teeth, some leaning sideways, others flat on their backs. The ones at the front were newer, and Mike bent, hands on knees, to take a closer look.

Lily
1982–1999

Cold droplets of mist slithered down his neck.

Seventeen, thought Mike, just a year older than me.

He felt a sudden urge to flee.

You’ve come this far, the voice in his head whispered. Don’t you want to know if she’s really here or not?

“I do,” said Mike aloud, but his voice shook. All his senses were on high alert.

Warily, he worked his way through the cemetery, row by row. Most of the headstones were simple marble or granite markers, chipped or cracked by time, some crusted with lichen. Others were shaped like hearts or crosses. A few more elaborate ones showed beatific angels soaring toward Heaven with children clutched to their chests. But all of them shared one thing: the person who occupied each grave was young, somewhere between the ages of thirteen and eighteen. Fear, cold and heavy, pressed down on Mike. Now he understood what Mrs. Morrissey had meant by “people her own age.”

This was a cemetery for teenagers!

He backed away, suddenly all too aware that he was alone in a graveyard in the middle of the night. His thoughts whirled, his imagination blooming. Visions of rotting corpses filled his mind. He could see their greedy fingers straining through the soil and mist, groping for one of his shoes.

In the shadowy darkness, he tripped over something, landing with a hollow thump beside a tall gravestone, roses and leaves carved deep into its granite face. Mike pushed himself to his knees and looked closer:

Carol Anne Morrissey
1941–1956

He uttered a low cry as the truth struck him. He had given a ride to a ghost. But it wasn’t this that sent him reeling over the edge toward terror. No, it was the realization of what he had tripped over.

Saddle shoes—fifty-five pairs of saddle shoes—lay scattered across the weed-choked mound of Carol Anne’s grave. One for every year she had been dead. Some had been exposed to the weather so long that they were nothing more than strips of shapeless leather. Others were newer, covered with just a thin blush of mildew. But the newest pair—
the brand-new pair
—was the one Mike still clutched in his trembling hand.

He screamed then, flinging the shoes and shattering the tomblike silence of the graveyard.

Shhh, you’ll wake the dead, the voice in his head whispered.

Too late.

The surrounding trees closed in, and the shadows deepened. The weeds tangled around his feet and ankles as if to hold him in place. Then a cloud swallowed the moon and he was enveloped in total darkness.

The wind rose suddenly, causing the tree branches to scratch and mutter.

“Listen to us. Hear us.”

Breathing rapidly, as if he’d just run a long race, Mike cried, “Is someone there?”

“Listen to us. Hear us.”

“Carol Anne?” he croaked. He looked around with wide, frightened eyes, his heart beating so hard he could feel it in his neck and wrists as well as his chest.

“Listen to us. Hear us.”

“Go away!” he tried to scream, but he could no longer speak. His heart was hammering at a terrified pace. Collapsing onto the mound of saddle shoes, he moaned. He could see them. They were all around him. Flickering shadows as insubstantial as drawings on air—a girl wearing a long, old-fashioned skirt, a boy with a camera looped around his neck. And others. A ring of wan shapes hovering on the fringes of the shifting shadows.

It’s a sign when the dead appear, the voice in his head whispered. A sign of your own death.

Mike moaned again.

“Me first.” A girl moved close, and as she did, the moon reappeared, as bright and white as a polished bone. In its light, Mike could see she had on a school uniform—a cotton blouse beneath a blue plaid jumper. Around her neck she wore a string of cheap plastic pearls. She reached for Mike, her death-pale fingers trembling and eager.

“No … please!” Crablike, he scrambled backward over the skittering saddle shoes till his back was pressed against Carol Anne’s gravestone.

The girl’s hand fell to her side. “Am I as scary as
that? I don’t mean to be. It’s just that I’ve been waiting such a long time, and … well …” Her words trailed away and she looked back at the others.

“Go ahead,” came a voice from the shadows.

“Tell him,” urged another.

The girl turned back to Mike, and she smiled uncertainly. “We want to tell you our stories,” she said. “Our
death
stories.”

“Death?” rasped Mike.

She nodded, her eyes filling with luminous moonlight. “And
this
one is mine.”

J
UST SO YOU GET the complete picture, I guess I should start by telling you about the Chicago neighborhood I lived in. Mine didn’t have a name like Hyde Park or Roseland or Austin, but it was still a tight-knit place—what my Nonna Rosa, who came over on the boat from Italy, called
comunità
. A community.

It was the kind of place where people made Chianti in their basements and grew Roma tomatoes in the tiny yards behind their two-flats.

The kind of place where my pop—like most of the other men on our block—worked the assembly line over at the Schwinn bicycle plant, while my ma and the other neighbor ladies stayed home to do the dusting and the laundry and the daily shopping. I can still see them, those housewives, dragging their two-wheeled shopping carts along Chicago Avenue. At DiAngelo’s Produce, they’d stop to squeeze the cantaloupes and complain about the
price of eggplant. Next door at Mr. Santorelli’s butcher shop they’d gossip and haggle over the chops, hollering stuff like “This time try giving me one that ain’t all fat!”

The kind of place where kids roller-skated, and played baseball, and stayed outside until the streetlights came on, the signal that it was time to go home.

And it was the kind of place where, if you earned a certain reputation, it stuck.

Take Mrs. Gioletti, for instance. She was seventy-eight and sun-dried as a raisin, but in my neighborhood she was still “a great beauty.”

Or Mr. Bianchi, who had been sober ten years but was still labeled “a stone-cold drunk.”

Or me.

In my neighborhood, I would forever be known as a liar.

But I didn’t tell lies. I swear.

I told stories.

They just came to me, stories about ships at sea, or long-ago murders, or how our next-door neighbor, Mr. Gamboni, was really a German spy. They weren’t big stories, or mean stories. They weren’t meant to hurt anyone. They were just stories with the teeniest, tiniest bits of truth buried in them. Fairy tales, really.

Like the time I turned in a report claiming that President Kennedy had come back from the dead to tell me who’d
really
shot him. You’ve got to admit it made a better story than sticking to the boring old facts, didn’t it?

Or the time I bragged to the kids in my social studies
class, “I got a record player for Christmas,” when everyone knew my pop couldn’t afford to put that much under the tree. “The Beatles sent it to me themselves,” I added. “There was the sweetest little note from Ringo!” It’s amazing how one detail can make a story so much better.