Six Feet Over It (17 page)

Silence. They turn to her.

Then Lisa: “Who is
this
?”

“Okay, definitely time to go—” Dario moves his arms to them, sort of herding them back and away.

“Do not
touch
me!” Lisa screeches.

“Leigh?” I give Elanor the best “Let it go” look I can muster.

“Are you okay?”

Caroline steps from Dario’s orbit into Elanor’s. “Nice hair, Corky.”

Lisa laughs.

Elanor is puzzled. “Friends from school?”

“No!” they shriek once more.

Dario moves again to herd them.

“No, wait,” Elanor says. “I know you.”

Caroline narrows her Magic Markered eyes. “No,” she spits. “You don’t.”

“Yes.” Elanor nods. “Yeah, I do. Both of you!”

Lisa is confused. “Uh, in your dreams.”

“No.” Elanor shakes her head. “I do, I see you all the time. You’re
those
girls. You’ll be knocked up and on welfare before you’re eighteen, and living in a mobile home that you’ll burn down by leaving a lit cigarette in the baby’s crib, causing you to move all your kids into the cramped quarters of a two-door Datsun. You’ll spend the rest of your lives working for tips in a strip club but strictly as waitresses, since no one will want to see skanky stretch-marked middle-aged moms gyrating their hoo-has on a pole with the raging yeast and urinary tract infections you’ll have, since you’ll never learn to stop wearing your pants so tight no matter how fat you get on all that government cheese.”

She’s going to get us killed.

But they don’t seem angry as much as they are confused.

“I’m clairvoyant.” Elanor shrugs. “It’s kind of my thing.”

Dario is charmed.

“And on that note …” He smiles, turns Caroline and Lisa sternly by their shoulders, and marches them, against their shrill protests, all the way to the Manderleys.

“Nice to meet you!” Elanor calls cheerfully. “And you’re welcome!”

Dario stands at the road and makes sure they keep walking.

“Oh gosh,” Elanor says. “You must
really
love school.”

She peers down into the open grave. “Looking good in there.”

Still sitting in the dirt pile, I breathe in. Out. In. She sits beside me. In a clean dress. Right in the grave soil.

“Working a lot? How’ve you been?” she asks.

“Sorry, I know it’s been a long … Yeah. Tons of work,” I say.

Dario is chatting with Elanor’s dad.

“Hey,” she says. “It’ll be okay.”

I moan, miserable.

“They’ll forget about it in a day,” she says. “Everyone worries so much what other people are thinking about them—‘Are they plotting against me? Do they think I’m lame?’ and whatever—but the thing is, they aren’t. They’re just not; no one is. People can’t be bothered, and you know why? They’re too busy thinking about themselves. You wait; they’ll forget all about you.”

I drop my head to my knees.

“Oh, Leigh. It’s a
little
bit funny. … They’re ridiculous!”

My head is pounding. “I know, but you can’t just—
do
that.”

“Do
what
?”

“
Say
stuff like that to them. It’s not …”

“What? What are you supposed to do? Shut up and take it?”

“No, but—”

“They’re just jealous! You’re so smart and funny, and they’re … nothing. That is the truth. Those girls are nothing.”

“That’s not how it works.”

“Okay, are there special rules for them we all must follow?” she asks.

“No, but … I mean, there are ways to get by.”

“So they’re to be protected so they’re free to treat people like crap.”

“It’s hard to explain.”

“No, I get it. No one’s allowed to upset them, hurt their fragile feelings?”

“Elanor. They’re going to kill me now.
Kill
me. They’ll come here or they’ll wait till school starts, but they’ll kill me.”

She frowns. “You’re being metaphorical, right?”

How does she not get this? “It was bad before, but now it’s … You’ve made it so much worse.”

She is stung. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think.”

“It’s just—school is hard.”

“Of course. I mean, I’m sure it is.”

“It’s not like being home every day where everyone loves you.”

“I know.”

I press my aching temples. “But you don’t.”

I feel her turn to me.

“No, you’re right—because being homeschooled makes a person sheltered and naive.”

“No,” I stumble.

“It’s okay.”

“I only meant that school is more … It’s real life. And it sucks most of the time.”

She sits up. “School?
School
is real life.”

“Well … yeah,” I say.

“So then my existence is—what, fake life?”

“No …”

“Because in
real life
everyone spends all day, every day in … God, it’s tuberculin quarantine with thirty other people all the same age sitting in rows of desks doing mindless work sheets, bells ringing to tell you where to go and what for, and when and for how long.
That’s
real life?”

“No, but—”

“And because I’ve not been made to feel insignificant for not winning the approval of a mindless peer group and have therefore made it through adolescence with an actual personality and my self-esteem intact, and can subsequently afford a modicum of sympathy for said mindless peers, I am not aware of the actual suckiness of this
real life
?”

“Elanor—”

“What?”

I don’t know what. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

We sit and watch Dario help her dad unload the van at the mausoleum.

“I’ve tried so hard to be your friend,” she says, low.

“I know.”

“I don’t understand what I’m doing wrong.”

“
Nothing,
you’re not doing anything wrong,” I say.

“Feels like I am.”

“No.”

“Are those girls your friends?”

“No.”

“Do you have any friends?”

I want one,
I want so badly to say.
I wish it could be you.

But I hear myself say just “No.”

“Oh.” Her voice is high.

“Okay,” she says, and stands, brushes off the back of her skirt. “Maybe someday I’ll be able to demonstrate how quickly I can access the hive mind and
then
I’ll be friend material. I made these for you.” She lays the tissue package in the dirt.

I let her walk away. I do not call her back. Her narrow shoulders are down, her usual straight, strong posture curved inward. Wilted.

My stomach burns.

She goes to the mausoleum and helps Dario and her dad finish hanging wreaths. Then Dario waves at the van moving slowly back out onto the highway.

My hands are muddy, but I pull the ribbons anyway, unfolding the tissue of Elanor’s gift.

Socks. Knitted. Narrow rows of blue and gray and white stripes.

Cotton. Not scratchy at all.

Dario comes back through the trees, carefully around the graves. Sits beside me at the open grave.

“Elanor,” he says. “I love that kid.”

I nod.

“You all right?”

I shake my head.

He puts one arm around me and pulls me close to him.

I give in, laying my head wearily on his shoulder.

The pines sigh.

“Well,” he says, “I’ll tell you one thing: those girls were
total
bitches.”

OUR NEXT PREDAWN
driving-straight-to-my-death session is all arm patting and “Great turn signal!” Dario chooses abundant kindness over rehashing the awfulness of The Bitches. Elanor’s voice
I’ve tried so hard to be your friend
and the socks and skirts and Caroline and Lisa and
God, am I really as mean as they are?
and Emily all run a constant crowded loop in my head as I park beside the shed. Dario hands me a celebratory York, and something silver—not a mint wrapper—catches the light.

“What is that?” I reach for his arm. A bracelet. Wide, flat band of silver. He pulls it off, hands it to me. I hold it to the light.

It gleams in the sunlight, polished, etched with pine boughs. “Since when do you wear jewelry?”

“Isn’t it beautiful?”

“It’s a
bracelet.
”

He smiles. “Ana made it—friend of the family.”

Again with this “friend of the family” song and dance. Why does he always qualify her?

“Catrina Lady.”

“Yes! She’s a real artist. All kinds—Catrinas and jewelry from silver, bracelets and necklaces, everything. She works the metal herself and does all the details, the etching. She liked this one. She didn’t want to sell it, so she sent it to me.”

A nameless unease slides into my stomach.

He pushes the bracelet back over his hand and walks cheerfully off to bury someone in Harmony Haven.

In the office I draw skirts on people’s Pre-Need file folders. Socks. Boots like Elanor’s.

Emily may have worn that spelling bee T-shirt like a uniform but always with a cute cardigan sweater. And jeans that fit. Sometimes a skirt, or a sparkly barrette in her dark curls.

I bet Ana the Jewelry Lady wears skirts. And those gauzy, off-the-shoulder embroidered blouses women always wear on TV when they go on cruises to Mexico.

I fall into the cool of the house for a lunch of grapes and water, the only things my stomach can handle after yesterday’s mayhem in this suffocating heat, and find Kai languishing on the sofa, cool damp cloths on her forehead. Bob Ross is painting on TV.

“It’s your own little world,” Bob murmurs gently from his televised art studio. “Just tap a little paint into the bristles; we don’t need a lot.”

I clutch my bowl of grapes and drop myself onto the rattan love seat. Meredith’s favorite thing in the entire world besides painting is watching other people paint. I have forgotten Bob Ross until just this second, amazing given the hours and hours we spent lying on the sofa watching him when we lived at the Sea. I am five years old again and home in Mendocino.

“Oh, Bob, you devil!” Meredith would sigh. Not one for seascapes, Bob focused mostly on cabins in clearings in the woods, but still Meredith worshiped him. A microphone clipped to his canvas picks up the supple whisper of his paintbrush and his voluminous brown Afro bobs, his soft voice reminding us that “We don’t make mistakes; we have happy little accidents.”

Saturday afternoons home from the beach in Mendocino, Kai and I freshly hosed off on the front lawn.
No sand in the house!
We lay together—Meredith, Kai, and me—dozing with the distant crashing waves and Bob’s tranquil, breathy soliloquies: “Let’s pick up a little cadmium blue,” Bob whispers. “Just a dab—and we’re going to gently sweep in the sky … just softly. Back and forth, back and forth. Just that way. Beautiful … that is a beautiful, happy sky.”

My eye wanders to the wallpaper of Meredith’s seascapes, Bob’s voice curls around them, and oh, I think I get it.

Meredith’s weekend life in Mendocino is not a secret
other
life—it’s just her old life. She has no friends here. She has a house in a graveyard and two happy little accidents and no ocean. No wonder she wants to be alone there with her art friends and the Sea, free to paint without us ruining the time-machine illusion with our crying and cancer and crankiness.

Kai chokes back an onslaught of tears. I move instinctively to her side.

“What?” I whisper. “You’re okay, what is it, what hurts?”

“It’s my fault,” she sobs.

“What is?”

“Bob Ross! It’s my fault we left. She’s going home. She won’t come back. It’s my fault. That’s why she won’t take us with her. I made us leave in the first place. I’m sorry!” She holds on to me, cries enough for us both.

“Listen,” I say. “First of all, really? Cancer is your fault? You want to pin blame for that crap, look at Gramma’s genetics—
all
those people had cancer back in Ye Olden Days, but unlike you, they were wusses and totally died. Well, wusses
and
they had no modern medicine, but still. And number two, Meredith is a grown damn adult and seriously, she lets a
graveyard
slip under the radar? Wade is not that stealthy. If she’d paid better attention, we’d still be home right now. Let’s be pissed at
them
!”

She sniffles. Nearly smiles.

“And okay if we had gone home, yes, obviously awesome, but …”

“I would never have met Balin.”

“There you go. To every season …”

I can’t tell who I’m channeling more, Dario or Ovid. And why can’t I make
myself
believe any of this? Would I exchange Kai for Emily? The ocean for Dario?

“Hey.” Kai sniffs and wipes her eyes with her sleeve. “Did you see Elanor yesterday? She and her dad left for here, and when they got back to Rivendell, she was crying.”

Oh God.

I shake my head.

“Weren’t you working?”

“Was she
crying
crying? What did she say?”

“She didn’t say anything, and yeah,
crying.
She just went straight to the house; we didn’t see her anymore all afternoon.”

“Jeez. That’s … I hope she’s okay,” I say.

Kai stretches the full length of the sofa. “Me too. You need to stop hiding here with Dario and get to know her. You would love her.”

“I do not
hide
with Dario—”

“All right.”

“You just want me there so you and Balin can make out uninterrupted.”

“Maybe you don’t want to go so you and Dario can be alone here and not be interrupted.”

I get up from the couch. “You are both stupid.”

“What?”

“You and Meredith, you think everyone … just because you’re boy crazy and she ruined her dress, you think I can’t have a friend who isn’t a girl, it has to be about making out and—”

“She ruined what? Leigh, I was kidding.”

“You are not! And neither is she. I’m sick of it.”

“I am not
boy
crazy. Just Balin crazy.”

“I don’t care!” I say.

“Okay.”

“I have to go to work.”

“Okay.”

“I do!”

“Okay.”
She pulls the bowl of grapes to her chest and closes her eyes.

What is wrong with me? We were having such a nice time; why can’t I keep my trap shut?

Elanor was
crying
?

I ruin everything.

Bob signs his masterpiece, tucks his brush into his Afro, and says, “Happy painting, and God bless, my friend.”

I let the screen door slam behind me.