Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down (10 page)

PEWS. ORGAN HYMNAL.
Two pillared candles guttering at an altar. A slant of light falling through the stained glass of chapel windows, the sun casting us in blocks of coral, turquoise, honey. We sat with our families. We sat apart. We watched so many faces we knew file in, the faces of our classmates alongside those of adults and children and elderly men and women we'd never seen, every resident of Midvale County who had known Caroline Black's family. We watched them take their seats. We averted our eyes to the pipes of an organ, to the wood graining of pews, to the lightbulbs of lanterns that dotted the rows of a congregation. We bowed our heads. We concentrated on our shoes, worn holes, scuffed spots upon our heels.

Zola sat with her mother at the edge of a back row, her hands folded in her lap. Large photos of Caroline and her parents stood on easels before three coffins. Zola watched her hands so she would not look at the gleam of cherrywood caskets, all three of them solid as fact at the altar. All three of them polished. All three of them closed. Her mother lined an arm along the pew's back and wrapped her fingers around Zola's shoulders, as if just looking at the caskets reminded her of how close she'd come to losing her daughter in the library, a violence of sound and grief that Zola still hadn't found words to speak out loud.

Nick sat with his parents, his brother, Sarah still at home, still unresponsive. He'd stopped by her house just before the funeral,
had driven separately from his family just to see if she'd come. She'd opened the front door, her hair a mess, had shaken her head no. He knew she was hurting and afraid but even still, looking around the church, Nick couldn't believe she hadn't come. The church a cold hollow, Sarah nowhere inside of it, the summer's dense humidity long gone. How she'd been someone else entirely when they'd set off firecrackers in her backyard on the Fourth of July, the remnants still sitting in the trunk of his car outside the church. Black cats and smoke bombs, roman candles, sparklers Sarah had held at arm's length until they sputtered out. How he was the one then who'd needed guidance, Independence Day a holiday he'd never celebrated robustly, how she'd lit off fireworks with her family since she was small. How her slender fingers moved along his skin. How she tilted his hands to the sky. How he felt the timed release of roman candle detonations, quick balls of light, through the intervals of kickbacks radiating through his body. How he could have watched her confidence all night, her hands so close to the flame as trails of light spun out into the dark beyond her.

She was younger. She'd never known Caroline's mother or father, never known Caroline herself. But Nick had. He'd been Caroline's lab partner in seventh-grade biology, had dissected a worm and then a frog under the supervision of her care. Her fingers precise, her handling of a scalpel and pins far finer than his. How when they opened the frog's heart Nick turned away while Caroline forged ahead, her eyes upon the three chambers, the atria, the ventricle. Nick thought of the research he'd done, hours at his computer looking into fatal fires. How skin burned. What was left. What it was that Matt's father had investigated. He looked at the closed caskets and wondered what they could possibly contain and his brother fidgeted beside him and kicked the pew in front of them and Nick felt a hot flash of anger: Sarah at home, her refusal to carry a weight.

Christina crowded into a center pew with her mother, who'd
driven in from Edwardsville. Her father at home. Her brother preserved for funerals to come, for those lost in his freshman class. Their mother: every other weekend, a settlement based solely upon location. An admissions coordinator for Southern Illinois University, her mother had commuted to Edwardsville since Christina was in second grade, and after the divorce had simply moved. Christina had been twelve when they sat her down. Seventh grade. Braces and acne, bad teeth, her bangs growing out. The start of the school year, early September, still a hot, humid day. The living room couch where Christina felt nothing but the faint pressure of her brother's weight beside her as their parents told them they were divorcing, the outside seam of his jeans scratching her thigh. Christina begrudged her mother nothing but even still she missed her proximity, an ache she regretted for its triviality in the church. As trivial as hoping Ryan would call her, even still, long after she'd stormed out the front door of his house. His leg propped up on pillows. Television droning. His lack of presence at every swim meet. His car edging along beside her on the sidewalk.
Get in the car, you fucking bitch.
Christina lowered her eyes and they fell on a family of five sitting quietly beside her mother, three children Christina had never seen. All blond, a stairstep of ages, kids Christina imagined attended the Blacks' same church or a volunteer organization. Aged two, maybe three, up through seven or eight. They crowded into the pew and the smallest stood on the wooden bench and Christina's mother huddled closer to her and placed a palm on her leg.

Matt sat near the front with both of his parents and watched a gathering of people file in and occupy the first rows, what he assumed were Caroline's aunts and uncles: the siblings and nephews of Caroline's parents, cousins and family members who had peppered their daughter's life. She had no siblings. He watched how the church's light fell on the caskets. Rectangles. Empty boxes. Tyler running through the hallway. Caroline's empty gaze. He wanted to tell someone what his father had told him. He wanted to hear
himself speak it, that nothing was left, not a trace of hair or skin. He wondered how many people knew that two of the caskets were fully vacant. How only ten feet and the cherrywood finish of a box separated him from Caroline's body, a body he'd left upon the floor.

I'm sorry,
he wanted to whisper.

He wanted to place his hands upon the wood.

He wanted to pull the scrawled profile from his back pocket where he'd left it stuffed all afternoon and throw it to the flame of the altar's candle, to watch it ignite and dissolve. His father shifted beside him. His mother sat still, her back straight against the pew. Matt thought of Tyler and how they still hadn't spoken, a thought that felt small inside the church's walls, a thought silenced by a minister stepping to the altar.

We heard the organ's hymnal diminish as she stood, the soft scramble of people taking their seats, a hush falling across the congregation.

Where to begin, the minister said. Where is there to begin, to offer words of comfort?

Zola looked above the minister to the light falling through the central stained-glass window. There was nowhere to begin. There was nothing to be said in the span of thirty minutes, forty-five, an hour. There was nothing in the world that a minister could claim, no word pulled from the ether to the grounding of a congregation, nothing proffered or extended or tendered that could change or reverse what was. Zola closed her eyes. Caroline's basement. The cold of a sweating can of Coke. My Little Ponies. Althea and Amy Robinson. A playgroup of four. The cool damp of a windowless cellar in the middle of a St. Louis summer, the heat bearing down upon the house's edges and all four of them inside, protected, safe.

Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.

The minister spoke words of solace. We listened to proverbs and prayers, a making of meaning from the sharing of nothing. Nothing but bowed heads, eyes gripped shut. The sound of quiet
weeping.
The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want,
but there was so much of everything that we wanted. The gasped air of breathing. A clock unwound. Custard stands and midnight movies. The burn of birthday candles. The flicker of a mouth upon ours, a first nearness. Clear blue swimming pool. Slick steam, humid sweat. A flatline of sun sinking into the Midwestern sky above a flutter of cornfields, tassels running for miles, our cars parked within them and the taste of watermelon Schnapps sugar-sweet on our lips. And a voice among ours: a damp palm extended on elementary school risers to help us sing. A trundle bed. A frog's aorta, the urgency of reading Margaret Atwood
.
A peer, a playmate. A study partner. A friend. The minister spoke and we heard none of her words but only the lost voice of a girl who'd been ours.

That the past was something. A noun. A thing that was.

A woman from the first row took the minister's place at the altar. Caroline's aunt.
The apple trees when we were young,
she whispered of her sister.
How you always climbed the highest
. Eulogy as memory, as valediction. A requiem impossible to hear. We listened until the woman's voice failed her, until her hands shook as they gripped the edge of the podium and a man came to the pulpit beside her, a man we assumed was her husband, who brought her back to the pews. The minister stood and extinguished the candles, a flame our chests ached to watch sputter out.

ZOLA STOOD WITH
her mother in the churchyard until Christina emerged from the wooden double doors with her mother. Zola stepped forward and grabbed her hand, their mothers greeting one another in embrace, Christina's palm drained of heat and her face empty of any expression at all. A pale-marbled sky and the sun's afterglow already setting, speckled in tendrils across a wisp of autumn clouds. The trees burnt brown and eggplant, even in the faded light. Zola glanced at their mothers talking quietly, two parents who'd been closer when Christina's mother still lived in Midvale County.
Their daughters best friends since elementary school, a camaraderie Zola knew her mother had always valued and yet she wondered watching them what it was to be a parent, to make friends with the parents of your children's friends only to watch them disappear. By moving away. Zola glanced back at the church. By a home taking to flame. Matt emerged from the crowd and gathered Christina into a hug. Zola scanned the churchyard until she spotted Nick and his family across the entryway, his dress so formal, a suit two sizes too big. He looked like a child wearing his father's clothing and for a moment Zola understood their age, how young they were. Sixteen, seventeen. How old were they supposed to act? He walked over and took her hand as the sun disappeared and the coming night brought the cicadas' hum.

That sound, he said. Such a St. Louis sound.

A Midwestern sound, Zola knew. A sound that had marked every year of her memory. A wave of noise as August burned off into September, then louder still as autumn deepened into October. Zola looked cicadas up once, the summer when she was eleven and they had emerged in droves. They were everywhere. On the news, in the grass, clinging to the sapling branches of trees. She'd descended into the basement cool apart from the summer humidity already swelling into June and had looked them up on the computer, where she learned that they were periodical cicadas, buried underground for so many seasons, sometimes thirteen, sometimes seventeen. That the ones hugging every leaf of her yard upstairs and out the back door were a combination of thirteen- and seventeen-year broods, a concurrence that happened only once every two hundred years and had made St. Louis a spotlight of headline news. That these were separate from singular-season cicadas that came every year, nicknamed dog-day cicadas for their annual arrival in August. Zola had listened to their hum each summer, a drone stretched through the screens of her bedroom windows, a sound that summoned the coming of fall. She had learned at eleven that each year's brood of
dog-day cicadas was first born underground, taking four years to grow and develop before emerging from the soil.

She felt Nick's hand on hers. The hum pressing down all around them. A sound waiting in the earth as they had entered junior high, as Caroline Black turned twelve.

They'll die off soon, Zola said. They're always gone by November.

I've always loved the sound, Nick said. His hand tightened around hers. A trail of lanterns led the way from the church entrance down a set of stone steps and Zola looked beyond them, to the quiet street, circles of pavement illumined by the glow of streetlamps.

I don't want to go home, she said. Not yet.

Home was an emptiness. A quiet bedroom. Home was the soft terror of her mother turning in for bed, a silent house and so many dark hours.

Then let's stay out, Nick said.

And do what?

Anything. We'll find something.

Zola pulled a sweater from her bag. The day warm, evening descending cold. A biting chill that carried an edge, a certainty that the droning sound around them would be gone in weeks. Nick's Honda waited at the curb. Zola's mother hugged her goodbye when Nick promised to drive her home safe, and Zola watched as Christina's mother looked after her daughter wistfully as Christina stepped into the backseat of Nick's car. Matt followed. A row of oaks swayed above the car in the faint light of the streetlamps, casting speckled shadows across the hood. Zola climbed into the front seat.

Where do you want to go? Nick asked.

Christina shrugged in the seat behind her. Beside Christina, Matt looked out the backseat window. Nick turned on the engine and navigated a labyrinth of streets, a planned neighborhood built in the 1960s. Houses with siding. Manicured lawns. Pumpkins and gourds beginning to appear on porches. Streets Zola had driven through so many times with Christina or Matt or Nick, a
neighborhood they'd cut through on their way to Christina's house for yearbook meetings after school. Zola knew who lived in every house the car passed: Josh Weintraub, Caitlyn McMahon, Alexander Antonov. The trees swayed above the street. The low static of the radio billowed through the car, news talk of the Iraq Survey Group that Nick switched for the quiet notes of a jazz trio on community radio. KDHX 88.1. A radio station they'd grown up with, an independent stream that connected every home by filtered waves. The car moved through winding streets and past houses, so many lit squares of windows, so many families inside. And beyond the homes lay the back roads: how easily Midvale County slipped into cornfield. A once-haven for teenage drinking and stargazing, now only a reprieve from the scrutiny of reporters and the hum of FBI officials and police officers on every street. Back roads Zola knew well enough, two-lane paths connecting farmhouses and intermittent mailboxes, where they'd come so many times to sip wine coolers or escape their own homes. Back roads Zola assumed Christina knew far better, cornfields concealing the backseat of Ryan's car. How quickly a suburb gave way to the central plains, cultivated land, and fields of crops. Dense forest edging the fields.