Six Feet Over It (16 page)

In my Emily jeans, right back to avoiding Elanor, furious with myself because I knew this would happen. What is
wrong
with me? Be loyal to Emily, or leave her lonely and have a living friend. I can’t have both—these are truths
I
made evident and still I can’t abide?

I choose Emily.

Elanor’s parents invite Kai and me to join them at a rented cabin in Lake Tahoe for Fourth of July weekend. Luckily, we end up with back-to-back At Needs—cancer, heart attack—a legitimate work excuse to apologetically decline.

I lean in Kai’s bedroom door, hungrily watching her drop sunscreen and extra towels into her backpack.

“This is stupid. You’re not in charge of burying anybody. Why can’t you come?”

“I know,” I say. “I’m sorry.” Even Dario has given up trying to figure out what my deal is with Elanor: no more lectures or bait-and-switch Rivendell visits, only audibly heaved sighs every time I decline an invitation or run to hide in the house when the van shows up.

Still, he registers my loneliness. Even Meredith will be with friends for the holiday, drinking boxed white wine from plastic cups at the Mendocino Firecracker Day Parade before picnicking on the bluffs with the other artists, toasting not only our nation’s liberty but her own freedom from the oppressive Monarchy of Motherly Obligation.

At sunset on the Fourth, I lock the Manderleys behind the last patriotic mourners to find Dario and Wade have loaded the pickup truck with lawn chairs, a cooler of beer (root beer for me), and King Fong’s Chinese takeout. Even on Independence Day, there is no stopping Wade’s admiration of the Fong’s blatant use of MSG. A prominently displayed placard in the restaurant details the many beneficial uses and “inevitability of MSG in any decent Chinese food,” and this strikes a chord with Wade, who feels that avoiding every little thing the FDA says is bad for you when we’re all going to die eventually anyway is just “damned ridiculous.”

So we eat Dave Fong’s shrimp fried rice and have the best view of the fireworks in the entire county. Far from the crowds and rip-off ten-dollar fairground parking, we luxuriate at the top of Sunny Hill, blankets on our laps, oohing and aahing at the pistils and roundels in our own private box seats, colors and jewels exploding in the stars, dripping into the black and violet shadows of the pines and the mausoleum, the light reflecting in Dario’s unblinking eyes.

“I love it here,” he says.

“The graveyard?”

“America.”

“I bet they don’t put on a show this good for Cinco de Mayo,” Wade says, battling a slippery soy sauce packet.

“We have rockets. But that’s not our Independence Day.”

Wade looks up from his soy sauce problem. “Yes, it is!”

“No, May fifth is the Battle of Puebla. During your Civil War.”

“Against
who
?”

“The French. Independence Day is September sixteenth. We beat Spain.”

Wade shakes his head, tears the soy sauce open with his teeth, and douses a carton of white rice while Dario offers more interesting facts about life in Mexico. Like how where he is from, there is no such thing as a burrito.

“Bullshit,” Wade says, dipping a pot sticker in plum sauce with a plastic fork, never chopsticks.

I am fascinated. “So if I went to your house and said, ‘Hey, can I have a burrito?’ ”

“They would bring you a small donkey.”

“Bullshit!” Wade says again, tossing a beer to Dario, who for the millionth time reminds Wade he does not drink. Dario rolls his eyes at me on the sly.

I swoon.

I try hard not to let my thoughts drift glumly to how badly I am treating Elanor, or enviously to Kai swimming in the lake with Balin, their long-haired, bescarved parents on a blanket nearby being all nice and encouraging, offering bean sprout and almond butter sandwiches and vegan marshmallows to roast.

A breeze picks up, smearing the fireworks against their black canvas.

Dario takes his sweatshirt off, lays it across my shivering shoulders.

Later, in the veterans’ niche, he finds a bouquet of tiny American flags and I watch him take one to Emily. I imagine it looks nice there, unfurling over the dove.

A particularly sweltery late July afternoon and I trudge home from the DMV, where, despite my best efforts, I have aced my learner’s permit test. Wade is knee deep in a front yard casket liner digging up old geranium roots but offers me a muddy gloved high five.

“Fantastic!” he sings, tossing some roots out of the liner. “Now work on your sister for me and we’ll be all set.”

As if. She just laughs and laces her running shoes.

“Where’s Dario?”

“Post office. Back in a minute.”

Why do I bother asking anymore?

Wade stretches and leans on his shovel. “You want to start practicing this weekend?”

“Practicing what?”

He laughs. “Driving, dummy! We’ll go to the school, swing around the parking lot.”

I shrug. “Dario’ll do it.”

He hesitates for the smallest part of a moment—then goes right back to shoveling.

Yikes.

“I mean,” I say, “if you
wanted
—”

“No, I’ll sign the thingy, say it was me—licensed driver, yeah?” Another trifling law Dario seems willing to break.

“Thanks.”

“How many hours?”

“Um. Fifty?”

“Huh. Just make goddamn sure you do
not
go past the gates. At all. Ever.”

I resist saying
Yes, I know, I know,
and instead press the bruised issue of “What if we were out and we got pulled over, but I was driving? Would Dario still—”

“Just get your license and we won’t have to worry about it.” He busies himself with his bulbs, grousing into the soil about certain people needing to get a “passport, for God’s sake.”

“But with a passport, wouldn’t he—”

“Jesus H!” Wade screams, tossing the shovel and jumping out of the liner. “Argh!
Huge
snake!” I rush over to see. “What is it doing in my damned planter?” He runs off toward the shed to find a weapon to defend himself against the monster, which turns out to be a common garter snake, maybe ten inches long. I peer down into the liner to get a closer look.

“Get away from that thing!” he yelps. “It’ll bite your face off!”

I follow him to the shed; he rummages through a pile of burlap bags. “What would happen,” I say, “if he got a passport and then came back?”

He pulls rakes off the wall, weighing them in his hands.

“Have to get a green card, visa, all that,” Wade says. “They’d make him leave after a few months, or he’d need a sponsor or some damn thing. I told him I’d do it, but … I don’t know. He’s still here, so why get him up a tree about it?
This’ll
kill it!” He stands tall, wielding a rusty, scary-looking scythe, clearly in no mood to plumb the depths of illegal immigration.

“Seriously?”
I sigh. “Don’t be such a baby.”

I grab a burlap bag and jog up the driveway to the liner, Wade calling desperately after me to
Look out!
but obviously glad I have taken the reins. “Don’t touch it! It’s a dangerous serpent; it’s got
fangs
!” I wrap the bag around my hand, pluck the sun-lounging snake from the flowers, and toss it into the tall rough beside the house, where it lands with a gentle thud and skims silkily away, swimming the bright sea of summer grass all the way into the trees toward the veterans.

Wade throws his hands in the air, eyes wide. “Now it’s gonna come right back up here! Why the hell would you throw it behind the house? For crying out loud!”

I press the bag into his open hands and start back down to the office.

“Hey!” he calls. “Don’t forget to tell your mother!”

“Tell her what?”

“Your permit, that you got your permit! She’ll be thrilled!”

Where is Dario?

I keep walking, wanting more than anything to punch Benjamin Franklin in the face for ever insisting America needed a postal service.

“I’M GOING TO KILL US BOTH,”
I whisper, white-knuckled at the wheel.

The Sierrawood truck idles behind the shed; I struggle to shift into reverse. “It’s broken.” I force it.

Dario winces. “Clutch?”

“Yes,”
I say, casually pushing the clutch in with my terrified left foot. He pretends not to notice.

“Okay, try some gas.” The truck jerks backward, dies.
“Some.”
In fits and starts, I get down the drive, onto the gravel road, all the way to the office. “Good, good!” he murmurs happily. I get it turned around (“Nice eleven-point turn!”) and back up to the shed with much less terror.

“Shifting is scary.” I climb from the truck.

“Scary?”

“Won’t the engine fall out if I do it wrong? Fall apart?”

He stops walking. “Fall
apart
?”

Oh God. Gramma had no idea how a car works; of course she only said that to scare me into behaving.

“You’ve got to calm down,” he says. “It’s not that big a deal. You’ll be a wonderful driver.”

He squeezes my shoulders, hurries to the trailer to change into clean funeral clothes for a ten o’clock service. I start walking home slowly, and he calls, “Hey, wait—come get these boots for your dad.”

Wade has asked to borrow Dario’s fishing hip waders so he can search through the grass for more deadly snakes, a ridiculous venture the likely outcome of which I don’t even want to think about.

I run to the trailer, pull my hair up off my face in a ponytail, and hover in his doorway. He pulls a box of fishing stuff from under the bed and rummages for the boots. The trailer is, as always, unsettlingly neat except again for the kitchen table, still covered with paper and pens and paint and brushes and stamps. Lined paper. Blue envelopes with nature scenes drawn on them.

Dario emerges from the pile of fishing stuff and hands me the waders.

I nod toward the table. “Art project?”

He shrugs.

“Pen pal?”

“Just some friends in Pátzcuaro. Family.”

“Huh.” I accept the boots and start for home, then turn hopefully back in the door. “Come get me after you bury?”

“I’ve got it.”

“But—”

“Leigh. Go. Find something else to do.” He gathers the letters in a careful pile.

My face burns.

I stumble blindly home, eyes blinking furiously.

My stomach hurts.

Meredith’s ocean sounds fill the otherwise silent house, and I wander down the dark hallway to her lair, hovering in
her
doorway.

She is perched before her easel, meticulously darkening deep orchid clouds in a stormy, threatening sky, shadows on a roiling green sea.

Her brush whispers, pulling paint across the canvas in tight, even strokes,
wist, wist, wist.

Her waves crash.

My dry eyes still smart.

She squints at her sky. “What’s up?”

“Nothing,” I say.

“Working?”

“Driving.”

“With your father?”

“Dario.”

She looks up at me. I tug my ponytail out. “Isn’t it supposed to be a licensed—”

“Yeah, Wade’s just gonna sign the … thing.”

She shakes her head.

Back to the storm.

Wist, wist, wist.

“Kai off with that kid?”

“Yeah.”

“Huh.”

Wist, wist, wist.

“You like him?” she asks.

“Balin?”

“Think he’s okay?”

“He’s all right.”

Wist, wist, wist.

“Right before I graduated high school, Raymond Montoya moved in a few blocks from us. His family was really big; he had four or five sisters. Oh, was he a handsome devil. Dark black hair, he was short—barely taller than me—and older. Almost thirty. Gramma was horrified.”

Wist, wist, wist.

“He had this red car—I don’t remember what kind, but it was little and really shiny. He would pick me up in front of the school and take me to movies, or Broch’s drugstore for ice cream. My girlfriends were so jealous. We dated all that summer, but then he started getting impatient with—you know, making out. …”

Oh good lord.

“And then I started taking classes at the city college and he
really
started going on and on with the
I love you, we’re going to get married, blah blah blah,
and I thought,
Well hell, if he’s going to marry me …
”

“I get it.”

“So we do it—”

“Oh
jeez.
”

“—and then the next day I call him and his mother says he’s not home. So I call again later, and the next day, he’s not home and he’s not home. This goes on for a week or more, so finally I walk to his dad’s car dealership after class one day and he’s there. But he
ignores
me. Won’t say a word. Laughs at me.”

“Oh my God,” I say. “That’s … Did he really?”

She nods.

Holy crap.

Wist, wist, wist.

“So what did you do?”

“Well. I left. I walked home.”

“What did Gramma say?”

“Oh good God, I couldn’t tell her any of
that,
she’d lose her mind. She was mad enough I was seeing him, let alone …”

“Yeah, okay.”

“But so I come home and I’m, you know, I’m devastated. Sobbing, I can’t breathe, all that. Gramma didn’t ever ask anything, didn’t say a word. The next day I drag myself to class, and when I get home there’s this box on my bed. A dress box. She’d bought me this beautiful swiss dot dress from Macy’s, all folded into this perfect tissue, really pretty full skirt, pale, pale pink, just … oh. I
loved
that thing.
Loved it.
”

Her sky is heavier every second.

“So the next morning, I put the dress on. I’m feeling a little better. I go to archery class and I’m retrieving a wayward arrow—”

“You had an archery class?” I ask.

“It was community college.”

“You wore a
dress
to archery class?”

“—and I’m looking for my arrow, and I fall in the succulent bushes and stain it. The entire front, all green. And we did not have Tide pens back then, so, you know.”

The orchestra behind the waves swells to an earnest crescendo.

Wist, wist, wist.

She’s pulling rain from the clouds down into the ocean.

“I think it’s okay,” I say. “Balin’s a nice guy. I wouldn’t worry about Kai.”

She drops her brush into a jar of turpentine, rubs her eyes, and studies the waves. “I’m not worried about Kai.”

She moves some paint with her thumb, smudges it into the sky. Turns over her shoulder to me.

“Oh,” I say. “Okay.”

She picks up a fan brush. Back to the sea. Softens the pelting sheets of rain to a fine mist.

Wist, wist, wist.

The waves follow me down the hall and will not let me nap.

Dario and I drive the narrow dirt roads through the graves in the cool of each pink sunrise and the shade of the still-warm lawn-scented evening. We dig graves then, too. People schedule funerals earlier and earlier to avoid the heat; I help put the rain tents up as sunshades. Families crowd under them, toss flowers and shovelfuls of soil down onto their people and practically run back to their air-conditioned cars. We bury old person after old person. I keep three fans in the office blowing at my face from different angles. The flowers Dario brings to Emily wilt in a few hours.

“Look what I brought you!” he trills into the office the first morning in August, back from his daily deportation-risking drive just to mail a stupid letter or whatever he’s doing. I lean my chin in my hand—his
look what I brought you
s typically produce skeletons, and frankly I’m not in the mood. From his pile of mail he pulls a disk wrapped in waxy paper.

“Direct from Pátzcuaro!” Chocolate so dark it is nearly black, the chocolate he uses to make
champurrado.
He tosses me a piece. At his instruction I do not chew it; I let it melt on my tongue. Barely sweet, it makes Hershey’s taste like chalk. “From Ana,” he says, breaking a section for himself.

“The grave digger skeleton lady?”

“Artist,”
he says. “Friend of the family.”

“She can be
my
friend if she sends more chocolate.” I sigh in a stupor of what tastes like eighty percent cacao, and accept another, bigger piece.

He smiles at me then. For a long time.

“Want to help me dig?”

I love it when he asks, though he knows he never needs to. I wait wordlessly while he takes a detour to Emily and covers her stone with borrowed lilacs; then we hike to a Pre-Need on the crest of Poppy Hill.

We are a team of surgical precision.

“Spade. Pick. Shovel—no, spade again.”

I hand each tool carefully down and catch the ones he tosses up.

“Seen Elanor lately?”

I pretend not to hear.

“Ella dijo a pedirte que vengas después del trabajo, si te deseas. Ella realmente amaría de verte,”
he calls from down in a grave.

If I want to come after work, she would love to see me—

“Sí. Gracias.”

I concentrate on Emily’s lilacs nodding in the breeze on her distant grave, and on Dario in the one at my feet. He digs.

“Hey,” I say. “What do you think happens when we die?”

He digs.

Fine.
“¿Qué crees que pasa cuando morimos?”

“Leigh”—he smiles from down in the dark—“your Spanish is …”

“Yeah, I know. Sorry. I’m trying.”

“No,”
he says. “It’s beautiful.”

My cheeks burn pink. He’s just being nice.

“¿Qué te parece?”
I ask again.
What do you think?

He digs. My legs dangle down in the grave.

His resplendent Spanish floats up from the grave, some of which my sieve of a brain keeps hold of, but still plenty slips past.

“The Purépechas were the first to live in Pátzcuaro, and they called it Tzacapu-ansucutinpatzcuaro, which in the first language means
Door to Heaven,
but word for word is more …”

“Despacio,”
I remind him.
“Por favor.” Slowly. Please.

I wish I could keep up. Speaking, limping through a conversation is one thing, but I long for more, to hear—understand—at once in both languages.

“It’s something like,
Place where the blackness begins.
It isn’t only for the migration. The monarchs come to our trees because they are the souls of the dead. They’re home to be with us, and never as many as the millions that arrive on your birthday. Because they
know
beginning then, and for all the Days of the Dead, the Door is open. If you listen very carefully, their wings whisper to say they’re with us. They’re not afraid.”

I cannot remember the last time I saw a butterfly.

The lilacs on Emily’s grave unfurl in the light and heat.

And then my breath catches.

People. Two people, acid-washed jeans, matching choppy haircuts, even from here I can see
so
much eyeliner, my heart stops thumping and slows. I stand, dumb beside the open grave, and their eyeliner-rimmed eyes are searchlights, coming to rest on me, an unmoving target—

I do not think. I drop to the ground and into the hole.

Down into the grave.

Mid shovel plunge, Dario backs against the head wall. My hands go to his mouth, and then to mine. My eyes wide and so are his. He is completely still, and my light-headed, incredulous state makes me really wish I could be a third person and get to see this happening, because how hilarious is it that we’re hiding from some stupid girls down in a grave—
Oh my God in a grave in a grave—

I reach up the soil wall, flail for the edge to pull myself out, out of
the grave.

“Seriously?” He lifts me by my waist, up and out, right into the damp black soil pile. I gulp clean, non-grave air.

They’re coming.

“What is
wrong
with you?” he calls up in exasperated English.

Caroline first, Lisa dutifully in tow.

“Help,” I whisper.
“Ayudame.”

“What?”

Too late. Caroline towers above me as I cower in the dirt.

“Hey, Leigh. What’s up?”

Lip liner, too, nearly as black as their eyes.

“Yeah.” Lisa smiles. “How’s things?”

I barely hear them over the thumping blood in my ears. My hands are so sweaty. Why? What can they do? What am I afraid they’ll do? I’m not in trouble; they’re just stupid girls. What is
wrong
with me?

“Fine,” I mumble. “Good.”

Dario stays quiet down in the grave.

Get up here, please help me, what are you doing?

“Great,” Caroline says, snapping a wad of gum.

My hands are shaking.

“My boyfriend’s grandpa is buried here,” Lisa says, “which sucks for him. Kind of a dump.”

“Can I help you?” Dario is up and out of the grave, his full height between them and me. Caroline steps back a little.

“Uh, no thanks, amigo. We’re good.”

He smiles.

“Friends from school, Leigh?”

“No,”
they spit in unison.

Through the trees I hear a car pass the Manderleys. A van.

Rivendell.

“Then you should probably go back to visiting your loved one,” Dario says.

“I said we’re good.”

I wonder randomly in the midst of my panic,
Where is Wade when stuff like this goes down?
He misses everything exciting.

My terrified, pounding heart clings desperately to the new, wholly separate situation of the Rivendell van’s arrival. Lisa and Caroline step closer to me; Dario moves them back; they are talking, but all I hear are Elanor’s boots on the grass. I’ve successfully avoided her for weeks, but still she waves, walks smiling beneath the pines to me, straight into this foolishness, and she is holding a package, sparkly-tissue-wrapped, ribbon-tied. Her smile changes as she nears the sharp voices of the girls.

“Hey!” she says. “Hey, Dario … hi, Leigh.”