Six Feet Over It (9 page)

Emily is out in the dark. She is in the ground,
Poppy Hill Row L, Space 23,
only yards from where I sit drinking weird hot chocolate in a trailer with a guy I hate. How did she get here? Why not Mendocino?
Why here?
I am so disoriented. Did Shag Haircut’s crying bring on a hallucination of Emily’s name on the stone in the dark? She’s out there by herself, she doesn’t have any flowers, there were no flowers for her, where is her mom?

My throat is closing, and the tearless crying that’s been going on since summer burns in my chest. Real crying, the kind that makes Wade and Meredith roll their eyes, may be happening somewhere inside me, but it will not come out.

Dario still says nothing, and for the longest time the only sounds are the heater buzzing and my muffled nonsobs, choked raggedly into my sleeves. He does not comfort me. He does not ask me what my problem is. He just sits and drinks his drink, and I do not sob and do not sob and he brings me Kleenex and a damp washcloth and still he says nothing and I pull my head up and stop trying to hide my face. I sit and not-cry until finally I really am empty, my throat is
really
killing me now, and Dario pours more magic chocolate. This time it does not taste weird. I drink it all and ask for more. He empties the saucepan into my cup and I nurse it, sad this is the last.

“Family?” he says.

I close my eyes.

“Friend?”

Not hallucinating if he saw it, too.

I nod.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

My head throbs. Dario sits nonplussed, as though people come to sit at his table to not-cry and drink
champurrado
every day of the week.

“Okay?” he says at last. I stand. He nods toward the bathroom door and I lock myself into the tiny closet, run the water ice cold and splash my face, which is red and swollen from trying so hard and for so long to either cry or not cry, or whatever I’m doing that I cannot seem to stop doing. I tie my hair back and open the door. Dario is holding a big coat for me.

He is so tall.

The wind rages, branches and leaves cluttering the dark path. He helps me into the truck and drives me home, which is silly; the house is about two hundred yards away. Still. I climb out and he says, “It’s six-forty-five.”

“Okay,” I say.

“Right?”

“Sure. Is that … Do you need to be somewhere?”

“Put it on your timecard. Overtime after six.” I think of the shoe box full of Wade’s stupid icing-on-the-cake cash and manage half a smile. I pull his coat off and lay it on the seat.

Over the mistake headstones, into the house where Kai stands in the kitchen eating a banana,
I was about to come get you!
Meredith invisibly painting, Wade does not look up from the TV to watch me move my weary body up the stairs to fill the tub with hot water and about a gallon of bath gel. I yell to Kai through the locked door that yes, I am fine, just tired. I stay in until my fingers and toes wrinkle and try desperately to not think of the dove and the pony, Emily’s sleeping face down in her grave—and to reconjure my hatred of Dario.

AFTER SCHOOL THE NEXT DAY
I lurk near the Manderleys to watch Dario spinning in Serenity.

No gloves. Hands still probably warm.

I run to the house, do not stop until I’m in my bedroom, where I take ragged breaths and lock the door behind me. I need more exercise. All those hours sitting in school, then the office. I’m skinny-fat. My muscles are ribbons, my lungs pathetic.

Meredith’s ocean sound track features a string quartet today. I pull open my closet door. Piles of random school papers, overdue library books, T-shirts. Beneath the pile, my wicker wastepaper basket. Nothing too icky to rummage through and thank God, because of course I find it, finally, at the very bottom, beneath tissues and nail clippings, cotton balls and Q-tips,
Please let it be here please it has to be I never empty this thing which is disgusting but in this case please,
and then there it is, here it is.

I hold it tight in my tremory hand. Meredith’s waves roll beneath a mournful cello.

Luckily for Wade, a lifetime of his and Meredith’s misguided
pretend everything is okay and it will be
Jedi mind trick garbage has soaked into my psyche, so the insane idea of returning to work in the graves after finding Emily there seems just—what I must do. After all, Emily is the dead one, not me. I have nothing to be whining about. I go right back to selling graves and grinding my teeth.

And with no fanfare, starting the morning after finding Emily, whenever I am working Dario is now somewhere near the office at all times.

My feigned annoyance with this new development is dwarfed by my secret, embarrassed relief.

All week I schedule burials, sell a few Pre-Need plots, avoid Emily’s grave on The Walk, and when grief and self-pity strangle me, I search the grounds and find him there every single time: spinning, digging graves, planting trees.

Caretaking.

Non-endowment.

Safer than school.

On Friday, the moment the last bell rings, I race to the graves, slowing to a walk only when I see Dario out among them.

He waves.

I raise my hand. Duck into the office.

My ears ring in the quiet. I turn the heaters on high. Wade could leave them on when he leaves, keep it warm for me, but then that’s an extra fifteen cents of electricity, so you know.

The file cabinet practically hums; it knows what I want to know.

I make a neat stack of Yorks. Unwrap each one carefully, a tower on the desk calendar.

Dario’s mowing buzzes comfortably in the background, gives my mind a crutch to hold on to, keeps Emily and the pony and the dove and the trees safely tucked down.

I watch him watch over me.

The file cabinet has three drawers. Alphabetical.

A–J.

Half the York stack in my mouth.

Pipey McPipe Smoker’s handwriting is tiny. Very slanted, textbook cursive. Feminine. A sexist thing to think. Dudes can’t have nice handwriting? What is wrong with me?

ABCD. E.

My hands sweat.

Put the file on the desk. Rest of the Yorks in my piehole.

Dario is still there.

Ellison, Emily M.

M,
really? You go to the trouble of a bird and a pony but
Marie
is too much to bother with?

Date of birth: 13 December

Date of death: 2 June

The day we arrived in Pixley. My heart sinks.

Date of interment: 12 June

Mortuary: Chapel of the Pines

Horribly ironic.

Cause of death: Blank

With a pencil, not pen—that would be way too dramatic—I fill in the empty line with my very best cursive. My first, middle, and last name.

Patron Sainthood.

Poppy Hill Row L, Space 23. Single space. Single depth.

Date of Service: NA

No service. No funeral. Nothing.

Pre-Need. Paid in full January 5, 1962, along with a double depth beside her.

Married couple,
Martin.

Okay. Unused plot her mom didn’t have to pay for. Martin. The WASPs, East Coast by way of … Hangtown?

I am in no mood for solving mysteries. This is insane. Why this town,
this
cemetery, and by the way, is life really such a giant screwy web of chance and coincidence, because if it is … I don’t know. That is just f-ed up.

Responsible party:
I recognize her signature, all the school permission slips she signed for me so I wouldn’t have to bother Wade and Meredith.
Responsible
party. She couldn’t even be bothered to go to Wade and Meredith and tell them herself; had they not seen the article in the paper, would Emily have simply disappeared until I found her in the ground? Why would she do this? Where
is
she?

Contact information:
Same old Mendocino phone number. Useless. Still, I pick up the office phone. Dial for the millionth time.

The number you have reached has been disconnected or is no longer in service.

I put the file back in another drawer, shove it somewhere between
L
and
Q.

From the
M
s I pull the
Martin
file. Both dead, interred 1963, 1968. Ancient phone number, different prefix than Hangtown’s current, but I try it anyway.

The number you have reached …

I get hard-core. Mendocino County coroner. The morgue.

I am not family.

Chapel of the Pines.

Nothing.

Howard the County Coroner is still taped to the desk. His card.

“Howard,” I say. “Let me ask you something …”

Nothing.

Gone.

How, in this century, can a person vanish so completely?

So easily.

Painful tight breaths, I put my head to my knees.

The mower stops.

I rush to the window.

He’s still there. Pulling weeds.

I breathe.

At home in bed that night I read with a flashlight until my eyes grow bleary, then switch it off and drop it into the drawer in my bedside table. It lies there among ballpoint pens, Emily’s newsprint face, and, tucked in the back, nestled in a bed of wadded-up tissue, my Catrina, her flowers a little flattened from her time in the trash basket but still sparkly. I take a last look at her and shove the drawer closed.

Blessedly, finally, it is winter break from school. I push my locker closed at the last bell and Kai’s beautiful face floats to the surface of the mob of kids, runs breathless to me, pink-cheeked. It is disorienting to see her here. She grabs me in a smothering embrace.

“Take these home for me,
please,
don’t let mom and dad see, put them in the office?” A brown paper cone of softly limp, pale lavender roses. “I’m late for practice; I can’t bring them—okay?”

I nod.

“Aren’t they beautiful?”

I’m not typically a fan of roses, especially lately; they’re just so—funereal. But these are gorgeous. Not too sweet, just enough. There is a card. I don’t read it, though I’m dying to.

Rivendell.

Elanor called it.

“I can’t tell you who they’re from yet, but I will. Soon. I promise, okay?”

“Sure,” I say, maybe too brightly. “Sure, I’m—That’s exciting. A mystery!”

She is windswept, blissful.

“I love you!” She squeezes my face, kisses my cold cheek, and is gone.

I clutch the roses, shuffle into the library to perform, one-handed, my weekly Internet search for Emily’s mom, for the Martins. Only the
Mendocino Beacon
article:
No services will be held.
Nothing else. Never anything. I’m no inter-webs genius, but it’s becoming pretty clear that if someone is either a hippie-hobo single mom with no computer or a distant relative by marriage of said hippie who was long dead before computers were even a thing and with a name as common as Smith, odds are I’m not going to find them.

I give up.

I walk slowly out the school doors, stung that the Balin situation has progressed to flowers and still Kai has not confided in me, then ashamed at my selfishness because look how happy she is. That’s all that matters.

My stupid heart whines about
Why can’t we go back before all this crap?
Back home to the ocean, before Kai was sick, before Emily so I could not know her and then not have to be alone without her. Before this patron sainthood nonsense. Through the Manderleys, past the babies, past the trailer Christmas tree lights, over the headstones. I stash the roses in my backpack and fall into a kitchen chair.

Silence. No waves. Laundry room empty.

“Meredith!”
My voice is hoarse.

“What?”
Wade.

“Where is your wife?”

The toilet flushes. He comes downstairs, pulling work gloves back on.

“Mendocino,” he says casually, heading out the door.

Takes me a second.

“Wait—what do you mean,
Mendocino
? Where is she?”

He holds the door open with his foot. “
Men-do-cino.
She needs a break. It’s been a rough change for her, being … here. She’ll be back in a couple days—What time is it? Get down to the office!” And he is gone, back out into the graves.

I bite the inside of my cheek. Hard.

I march dully out beneath the trees, over the headstones to the office,
Mendocino
chasing maddening circles in my head.

Kai and I have missed home, haven’t touched seawater since leaving for Pixley, but clearly that is immaterial—the ocean is Meredith’s thing. She is building an entire personality around missing it. Our childish longings have nothing to do with the actual pain and misery she feels being so far from the waves; can’t we
see
that, for God’s sake?

Dario is digging Shag’s husband’s grave.

Two weeks it’s taken Shag to decide on a date. Howard’s been driven to distraction storing the guy so long, but now soil flies gracefully from the hole, tossed over Dario’s shoulder onto the pile from the backhoe. So unlike Jimmy, who just backhoes and takes off, always a big mess left in the grass. Dario is taking his time down in it with a shovel. He pulls out stones, probably makes the bottom flat. Smooth. Perfect.

My stomach burns imagining Jimmy lazily digging Emily’s grave. She deserved Dario.

I steel myself, stride over lawn and headstones to Shag’s grave, and step, unbelievably, to the edge.

My knees are jelly. I watch him carve the walls, the sides, precise corners among the grass and tree roots.

Down in the dark, he shades his eyes from the sun-bright clouds, smiles up at me. Waits for me to say something. The grave hypnotizes.

“¿Cómo estuvo la escuela?”

Six feet looks so much deeper from directly above.

“Hey.
¿Cómo estuvo la escuela?
”

Damp cold comes right up from it.

“Leigh.”

“What?”

“La escuela.”

School. How was school?

“I don’t know.”

“Sí, tú lo sabes.”

Yes, you do know.

“Uh … I may have failed an algebra quiz.”

He frowns.

I frown back.

“¿Cómo estuvo la escuela?”
he says again.

Rich black soil. No wonder the lawn is so green.

“Leigh.”

“I said! Algebra!”

“Español solamente.”

Spanish only.
Oh jeez. “Um …
¿Creo que … no pasó una prueba de
algebra
?
”

“Agradable. ¿Te incluso estudiaste?”

“Okay, wait—
Lo siento.
Slowly.”

He calls up loudly and way slower than he needs to,
“¿Estudiaste?”

Did I study?
What the hell—

“¡Sí! ¡Por supuesto estudio! ¡No es mi culpa que la prueba era estupido!”
I yell down into the grave. A shovelful of soil sails dangerously near my head.

“La prueba no era tonto, simplemente no quisiste poner el esfuerzo.”