Shallow Graves (15 page)

“I remember going to a party,” I said. “I am a dead teenage cliché. I remember the stupid music and the beer and my best friend. . . .” I touched my cheek as though I could still feel the warm sting of Melanie's hand. “She slapped me. That's almost the last thing I remember. That doesn't seem fair, does it? My last memory of my entire life is my best friend since kindergarten slapping me.”

“Did you have a fight?” Jake asked.

“No.” I took a breath. There was an uncomfortable knot in my stomach. “I kissed her. I, uh. It seemed like a good idea at the time. She didn't think so.”

I wasn't sure what kind of reaction I was expecting, but Jake didn't look alarmed or disgusted. He was smiling. It was a sad smile. “I got a black eye and a bloody nose when I tried that.”

“Yeah? What happened?”

He shrugged. “Nothing. He apologized and went to get some ice. We told our parents I fell out of a tree.”

“Did he ever forgive you?”

“I don't know. What does your family think happened to you?”

I accepted the change of topic. “I'm missing. They had fliers and volunteers and a neighborhood search and everything. Yard signs. You've never seen anybody do yard signs like the concerned citizens of Evanston do yard signs. I would probably be on a milk carton if they still did that. Do they still do that?” I gestured at the laptop; the screen had gone dark. “There's a web page. My friends made it. It was the one year anniversary a few weeks ago. They posted all these
things about . . . nothing important. Stupid stuff.”

I had read through the entire page, every post and comment, all the way back to when it first started. There was a picture at the top of the page: me and Melanie together at a diner we used to visit on Friday afternoons. I remembered that day; Maria had taken the picture. She had been sitting across the table from us, complaining about how soggy her fries were and trying to get the waiter's attention. Melanie had whispered to me that Maria didn't care about her fries, she just wanted to flirt with the waiter, and I had sat up on my knees to look over the side of the booth to get a look at him. He wasn't anything special, a thin-faced college boy wearing the stupid restaurant uniform and a fake smile, everything about his demeanor saying that he knew the high school kids making a mess in his section would skimp on the tips. He barely even glanced at Maria when she finally got him to come over. She huffed and rolled her eyes, then immediately switched her attention to taking pictures of everybody around her. She told me and Melanie to smile, and Melanie had hooked her arm around my neck and we both put on big, stupid grins for the camera. It wasn't Maria's waiter who brought her fresh fries to our table but somebody we knew from school. He appeared beside our table and said, “Hi, Breezy,” not even glancing at Maria when he set the basket of fries in front of her. I said, “Hi, Ricky,” polite reflex, and he had hovered awkwardly until Melanie cracked up with her familiar, snorting laugh and said, “We don't need anything else, not unless you want to recite some poetry for us.” He flushed red and slunk away.

If I thought about it, closed my eyes, and remembered, I could
still feel the heat of Melanie's arm around my neck, across the back of my shoulders, and count the seconds she let it linger.

The online comments in the beginning had all been suggestions, speculation, worries. Predictions that other girls would go missing soon. Thoughts about how to organize. There had been search parties. They put up posters. They spread rumors. The cops brought out the canine units. The dogs never had a chance. I wasn't decaying, so there was no corpse smell for them to follow. But I wasn't myself anymore either. I was
too degraded.

All that effort, all that searching, and nobody once looked in the backyard of that foreclosed house just a few blocks from my home. I was only buried beneath eighteen inches of soil. A whole year, and nobody had noticed. People must have come through that house, potential buyers standing at the glass door, looking across the cracked cement porch and brown grass, talking about how much space there was for entertaining, for kids to play, it just needed a little bit of work, a little bit of landscaping. They must have looked right over me, right over the disturbed ground where somebody had dug a grave, but not a very deep one.

The more recent comments on the page had been memories, pictures, insults, rumors. Ran away with an older boyfriend, maybe she promised to love him long time, get it, it's just a joke, don't be so easily offended. Not saying she was a slut but, come on, you know how she was. She should have been more careful. Shouldn't have been drinking and wearing those clothes. Like anybody was surprised. Didn't her parents feel stupid for not knowing what she was like?

Reading through those comments felt like invading the edges of somebody else's life, another version of me who had done things I never had, suffered the hatred of people I had never even met, an imaginary girl overshadowing the real one.

“I don't think they're looking for me anymore,” I said.

“Why didn't you go home?” Jake asked.

“I did,” I said. “Right after I woke up. Nobody was home. So I left. What was I supposed to tell them anyway?”

He didn't try to answer. He only said, “I'm sorry.”

I looked away, and Jake stood and walked out of the room. A minute later he came back with a folded-up blanket and a pillow. He set them on one end of the sofa, then stepped over to the front window and looked through the curtains again.

“Why do you keep doing that?” I said.

“Habit. I've got work in the morning, so I'm going to—”

There was a quiet scratching behind the basement door.

“I have a confession to make,” I said. “Zeke told me not to go down into the basement.”

“But you did anyway?” Jake walked over to the door, pounded on it a few times. The scratching stopped, and the stairs creaked. “So you met Steve?”

“It has a name?” I said, incredulous. “Its name is
Steve
? What is it?”

“I don't know if it really has a name,” Jake said. “It's a brownie. They don't talk. But Zeke felt sorry for it because our landlady just kept calling it ‘that horrible thing,' so he gave it a name.”

“Your landlady knows about it? Is it like a pet?”

“It's not a wild animal. It came with the house,” Jake explained. “We don't know for sure, but we think our landlady's mother brought it with her when she moved here. After she died, it refused to leave. But it didn't want anybody else moving in either. It doesn't like humans.”

“What did it do?”

“Scared them away,” Jake said. “Little things, mostly, but after it pushed one man down the stairs, word got around.”

“He was badly hurt?”

“He broke his neck. He died.” Jake looked at me, waiting for my reaction.

The big-eyed creature might have been alarming to look at, but it was hard to imagine it trying to kill people between its bedtime stories. It was so little and quiet and scared.

“It didn't try to hurt me,” I said. “It didn't do anything.”

“You're not human.”

“Yes, I—” I stopped.

I wanted to argue with him, but I couldn't. The protest was dust on my tongue.

Jake pretended not to notice. “So now our landlady doesn't rent to humans anymore. It'll leave you alone as long as you don't go downstairs.”

“I won't. For real this time.” But it wasn't the thing in the basement that interested me. It was the fact that a human might know enough about monsters to rent only to people the homicidal house elf in the basement wouldn't hurt. I had so many questions. “Is that the kind of thing a landlord can put on craigslist? Is it in the lease?
Is your landlady human?”

“She is, yeah,” Jake said. “There are some humans who know just enough about us to know they don't want to know more. Look, I have to work in the morning, so I'm going to sleep.”

I didn't want him to go; I wanted him to stay up and answer all my questions about monster-human relations in property management. But he did look pretty tired, so I only said, “Good night. Thanks for letting me stay here.”

Jake disappeared into the bedroom and closed the door.

I didn't feel right using his computer and poking around his house while he was in the other room, so I went out into the backyard. I kicked off my shoes and stepped onto the lawn. The grass was scratchy and dry. I lay down, hooked my hands behind my head, looked at the sky.

Every time I thought I was getting a grasp on the rules of this new world I had awoken into, they shifted again. Violet and Mr. Willow insisted there was an obvious boundary between the worlds, a line with good humans on one side and evil creatures on the other. But even if I didn't trust Rain's motives or Ingrid's explanations, they certainly didn't rank above Willow and Brian Kerr on the potential evil scale. And assuming they weren't secretly planning to make a meal of me in the middle of the night, Zeke and Jake had been nothing but kind. I didn't know who to believe. They all wanted me to be afraid of something—monsters, humans, magic—but all I wanted was for things to start making sense again.

Maybe there was something wrong with the fear center of my brain. Maybe it had been damaged when I died. Maybe a worm got
in there during all that time I was in the ground and chewed up one important knot of neurons, the knot responsible for warning the rest of me not to get into cars with murderers or accept help from psychotic cult preachers or go home with monsters who eat human corpses.

In quiet moments, when I held my breath and listened, I imagined I could hear the worms still digging around, breaking connections any normal person's brain should be able to make.

I had never known this world existed. I hadn't asked for any part of it. I didn't want it.

But you can't go back to not knowing something once you've been thrown into the middle of it.

The air was cool, crisp, and the night was peaceful. I watched the stars, and I thought about monsters and magic and murderers, and it wasn't like sleeping, but it was as close as I could get.

BEFORE I DISCOVERED
what I had become, before I learned how much time had passed while I floated in the stars, before I made a list of all the ways I had tried and failed to kill myself, before I had a body count and an endless supply of murderers' memories chasing around my head, I woke up in an unmarked grave, and I killed a man.

And I went home.

Barefoot and chilly on the empty streets, spitting mud from my mouth and scrubbing dirt from my eyes, I went home.

There's a story about Yuri Gagarin, the first human to travel into space, and what he said when he came back to Earth. April 12,
1961. The Vostok 1 capsule and its pilot were only gone for 108 minutes, but those 108 minutes took them into space for one complete orbit, the farthest from Earth anybody had ever ventured.

When Gagarin landed, so the story goes, a farmer and her daughter saw him parachute to the ground in his orange flight suit and his helmet, and the woman asked him, “Have you come from outer space?”

He wasn't wearing a space suit, although that would make the story better. The Soviets didn't put their cosmonauts into space suits until after 1971, when Soyuz 11 suffered catastrophic decompression before reentry and its three crewmen became the first and only humans in history—so far—to die in true space rather than on the launch pad or in the upper atmosphere.

But before that, a man fell from the sky, and when the farmer asked if he came from outer space, he replied, “As a matter of fact, I have!” He told her he must find a telephone to call Moscow and let them know he was home. That's how the story goes. It's a foolish story, a silly story, but it's the kind of story we want to believe of humankind's first space explorer, that young man with the big bright smile who might have been the boy next door if only he hadn't been the one to leave the earth instead.

I was thinking about Yuri Gagarin as I walked home and blood flowed through my brain again.

“Hi, Mom and Dad. Sorry I'm late. Have I been gone long?” That's what I would say. I had no idea how long I had been lying in that grave. It felt like eternity. It felt like no time at all.

They would ask me where I had been. They would say, “We
thought you were dead.”

And I would reply, “As a matter of fact, I have been!”

Dogs snarled as I passed and threw themselves hysterically against their fences. Dead birds littered the ground in small sad lumps. Twice I caught myself wiping invisible blood from my fingers and cringing at piercing screams I couldn't hear.

I was confused and disoriented, but the neighborhood was familiar. I wasn't very far from home. Close enough that if I had asked to borrow the car, Dad would have told me to walk instead.

Our house looked much the same, but there was a flower bed in the yard that hadn't been there before, and one of the sick old trees was gone. Dad had been talking about having somebody chop it down forever, but I never thought he would do it. There was a hole where the stump would have been.

There were no lights on. I had lost my keys and my phone. I crossed the lawn, avoiding the scattered dead birds, and punched in the code to let myself in through the garage. Mom's car was there, but Dad's was gone.

This is what I told myself when I went inside:

It was the same night as the party.

Somebody had played a prank on me. A joke.

My family didn't know anything was wrong. In the morning I would call my friends and they would laugh themselves sick. I would laugh too. My father would frown. Meadow would roll her eyes. Sunny would ask me if it was scary being buried, even as a joke. Mom would help me plot my revenge.

I should go downstairs and shower and get to bed. Tomorrow I
would laugh and everything would be fine.

For a few minutes, I tried to believe.

Then I saw the note on the counter. It was addressed to Greta, one of my mother's postdocs. Mom's handwriting on a plain white sheet. Greta kept an eye on our house when we went out of town. Brought in the mail, watered the plants. I picked up the note, read it twice, set it down.

On the calendar on the refrigerator, there was a red line drawn through a week at the beginning of June. In big looping letters, Sunny had written, “To the lake!” My mother's aunt gave us a new calendar every year. It had been African mammals before; now it was tropical birds.

They had gone to the lake cottage without me.

My hands began shaking and I couldn't control my breath. There was a police detective's business card clipped to a magnet next to the calendar. We weren't the kind of family that ever needed to call the police. Our house had never been broken into, our cars never vandalized, our safety never threatened. The card was half-hidden behind a coupon for an oil change, like it had been there so long they had stopped looking at it every day.

I checked the bedrooms to be sure. The house was empty. I went into the study and turned on my mother's computer.

Mom had dozens of articles bookmarked, from the
Evanston RoundTable
, the
Review
, even the
Tribune
. They all told the same story. Seventeen-year-old Breezy Lin of Evanston had gone to a party with friends, but she never made it home. Police had found my phone and keys at Nate Havers's house. They had talked to
my parents, Melanie, Maria, Tatiana, and all the people I knew at school, my friends at the skate park on Lake Shore Drive, teachers and guidance counselors, everyone. There had been community meetings, bake sales, organized searches. Nate's parents had given a statement: they had no idea there would be underage drinking at their son's party, they were helping in any way they could, etc., etc.

I had been missing for a year.

I kept reading. The articles helpfully informed me I was a good kid with good grades and no history of trouble, but I was also friends with a group of teenagers who had a tendency to get a little wild. My friends must have loved that. Pride more than indignation, that's how they would react, as long as nobody's college chances suffered. They would have relished telling the cops and counselors all about my mostly imaginary reputation.

The police never admitted to having any leads. The most recent article was from several months ago. Either the news had stopped caring or Mom had stopped collecting.

I went into Mom's personal email—she never changed her password—and found the emails she exchanged with her sister Colleen. Mom explained they were leaving town for the week because Meadow had been having trouble in school and Sunny was depressed and they all needed to get away. Every day was difficult. Breezy was supposed to be graduating, getting ready for college, growing up. Mom didn't know how to have hope anymore.

She wrote that she still froze every time the phone rang. She didn't know what my father was thinking. Aunt Colleen told her that she couldn't give up, that her daughters needed her now.

Breezy needs me, Mom had written. She needs us.

I could hear her voice as I read, resigned, torn with exhaustion. One of the news articles in the
RoundTable
reported that Dr. Erin Donahue had cried openly at a meeting as she stood before the community and pleaded for information about her daughter's whereabouts. My mother never cried. Not in private, not in public. Not even when her own mother had died at the end of a long, slow sickness. Mom got angry instead of sad. Her voice rose, her skin turned pink, her hands shook, and after the storm passed she would laugh and say, “Well, I'm Irish. I'm allowed to have a temper.” She didn't cry.

I read the words, but they slipped over the surface of my mind, painless and slick. I felt sorry for her, this mother, this weeping, unfamiliar woman who was mourning a lost daughter who might have been anyone, a whole person made of more than blood and dirt and ice.

I left the computer on and went through the house again. In my parent's room I found a prescription for sleeping pills on my father's side of the bed and a book about grief on my mother's. Across the hall in Sunny's room, her soccer uniform was thrown over her chair, freshly washed but not folded; I was relieved to see she was still playing. Meadow's room had changed the most. She had replaced her black bedspread and black curtains with pale blues and greens, her pictures of blood-red roses and tormented angels with simple line drawings of faraway monuments: the Coliseum, the Great Wall, the Sphinx.

I went down to my own room last. I imagined myself opening
the door and finding myself lying there in bed, a sleepy confused version of me who would blink at the light, shove her messy hair out of her face and ask, “Who are you?”

My schoolbooks were arranged in a neat stack on my desk, my laptop closed and unplugged beside them. The cops would have taken it, looked through my photos and emails, laughed about the tameness of the porn, saying, wow, that girl was either confused or greedy, but she could have gone for something a little more hard-core and made our jobs more interesting.

There was a faint depression in the comforter where somebody had sat at the edge of the bed.

I sat in that same spot and pressed my hands together between my knees. It was Mom who came down to my room, probably, but maybe Dad too. Never together. Mom would come late at night, or early in the morning before anybody was awake, open the door quietly, shut it behind her. Meadow and Sunny would know she did it, but they would never say anything.

Sitting there on my bed, I thought: I can lie.

“I can't remember,” I could say. “I don't remember anything after the party. I don't know what happened.” I could lie to the police, to the doctors, to my parents. I could lie to my sisters. “I don't remember leaving the party. I just woke up and came home. I didn't even know how much time had passed.”

And they would nod. Their expressions would be sympathetic and relieved. They would take me to the hospital. A nurse would examine me. She would ask delicate questions and she wouldn't believe my answers.

The police would want to know about the dead man by my grave.

“I don't know him,” I would say. “I've never seen him before. I don't know anything about him. I didn't kill him.”

They would ask if I knew he was a murderer. I would lie, lie, lie.

I inhaled and exhaled. Closed my mouth and stopped breathing. I waited for the burn in my lungs, the pressure in my chest building into pain, but it never came. What came instead was the memory of blood on my hands, whimpering winter wind, a family dinner ended by bullets and knives.

I jumped up from my bed and stumbled into the bathroom. I retched until my throat was raw and my gut ached. I felt hollow, my insides scraped out. I rose to rinse my mouth, and that's when I saw the bruises around my neck.

Handprints, a butterfly matched set, livid and purple. I fit my own hands to the marks and tried to remember what it had felt like, being strangled.

I didn't leave that night. I stayed in the silent, empty house for five days.

During the day I hid in my room behind the closed door. When Greta came over, I listened to the floorboards creaking, water running, doors opening and closing. At night I went out again. I left my own skateboard leaning against the wall in the entryway and stole another from an open garage several streets away. I spent the nights skating around, past familiar houses and streets, unnoticed. I didn't speak to anybody. I avoided all contact, all conversation. Some people made me nervous in a way I couldn't define, but I scurried away
from them like a cockroach hiding when the kitchen light comes on. I didn't think to examine the sensation at first.

The first time I truly paid attention to somebody who felt different was at a stoplight in Morton Grove. It was late at night. I stopped to wait for the light to change. Green to yellow to red, and the white walk sign appeared. A single stopped car. The driver's face was a pale smudge through the glass. But his shadow—

His shadow was breathtaking.

I first felt it from the sidewalk, but it was only a tickle, a spider-creep brush on the back of my neck. Ten feet away and it unfurled like a black sail, a balloon of gauzy silk. I wobbled on my skateboard, put one foot down to catch myself, and stopped in front of the car. The headlights drowned me from the waist down. Through the windshield the driver's face was unremarkable. Round and soft, a middle-aged man carrying his years in his jowls, balding, ordinary.

I knew him. I didn't know his name, but I knew him. I had never met him before, but I knew him. Our lives had never intersected before that moment, but I knew without a doubt one true thing about him: he was a killer.

He tapped the horn. The light was green and he was shaking his head at me, inching the car forward. Startled, I ran back to the sidewalk. The man drove away, and with him went his shadow.

I stood on that corner for a long time as the lights cycled through their rhythm of stops and starts. Being so close to that man, meeting his eyes through the windshield, seeing the bland impatience there, it left me with a jittery feeling, a nauseous clamor
of nerves I didn't understand.

It wasn't until I was back in my basement with the blinds closed did I remember where I had felt it before: the man at my grave. The one I had killed with a touch, before I even knew what I was doing. He had felt like that, in those first panicked moments after I woke up.

I began looking for killers.

Short of walking down the street and hoping a murderer was waiting in line at Starbucks, I wasn't entirely sure how to go about finding them, not until I remembered Joya Allen.

Joya Allen had been a casual friend of mine in middle school, but for high school she went to Saint A's and I didn't see her much anymore. During our junior year of high school she killed her stepfather in a car accident. She hadn't been reckless or drunk; she'd lost control of her mother's BMW on the icy street and hit the man in their own driveway. The impact slammed him against the front of the house and broke his spine. It was officially an accident, but there were rumors. Joya had never liked her stepfather very much. He was overbearing, intrusive. Handsey with her friends. They were only rumors.