Shaking out the Dead (14 page)

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“We're all related,” Geneva said, waving the copper-headed brush in the air. “Trees, plants, dogs, cats, you, me. We all evolved from microbes.”

The yard was south facing and made the most of the sun. Geneva and Rachael prepared for the barbecue in a percussion of melt dropping from windowsills, rooftops, and gutters. The snowdrifts against the garage grew soft and hollow as the snowline in the tiered flowerbeds retreated. The scent of mud rose up from beneath winter's clean, fresh breath. Rachael poured sunflower seeds into a cupped hand made of stone that hung by fine chain links from a thumb-sized jut off the trunk of the apple tree. Geneva had been scraping the grill and rhapsodizing, caught up in spring's false alarm.

“What's a microbe?” Rachael said, hauling the bag of seed back to the tiny patio.

“The microbe,” Geneva said, “is the mother of us all.”

Rachael stashed the seed in an old, metal milk box.

“At the beginning of time,” Geneva said, “our time, anyway, microbes floated in ancient oceans. Everything evolved from microbes.”

“What did they look like?”

“Microbes?”

Geneva thought for a second, not knowing the answer for sure. Rachael pressed lightly with a pointed toe on a fragile film of ice where a small puddle had formed in a dip of the bricks in the patio. Bubbles jostled beneath the ice's surface.

“Well,” Geneva said, “you or I couldn't see them with our eyes. We'd need a microscope.”

“Do they look like bugs?”

“Not really,” Geneva said. “More like a flower, I think. No faces or butts.”

Rachael scrunched her brow.

“How'd they know where they were going?”

“Well, they weren't going anywhere,” Geneva said. “They just floated around, and that was good enough.”

Rachael imagined the flower creatures, spinning and drifting. She considered what costume a kid might wear to be one. She idly spun slow circles and decided on her color. Seafoam.

“Know what a fish calls planet Earth?” Geneva said.

“What?”

“Planet Water. It's all perspective.”

Paris came through Tatum's back door just as Ron cut through the hedge carrying a blue ceramic platter. Rachael stopped spinning and stomped on the ice sheet. The cold water penetrated the exterior of her boot but stopped short of her skin. Paris. Vincent. Her father. Rachael put them together in her mind. But she knew Paris was different. He wanted to be here. Rachael wasn't sure but thought maybe it meant that he was less important.

Geneva, Paris, and Ron greeted one another. Geneva admired the blue ceramic plate laden with cut red and yellow peppers and broccoli florets that Ron had carried through the hedge. He said he made the plate himself. That he had taken a class.

“Everything's organic,” he said, as he placed the tray on the card table.

“Wonderful,” Geneva said. “Even the yellow peppers? They must have cost an arm and a leg.”

“Seven eighty-nine a pound.”

Rachael, again, spun in place, floated in an imaginary sea. She was more restrained than before, arms closer to her sides, chin closer to the chest. She tried to make it look as though she were examining the ground and not that she was imagining herself a flower, drifting without intent. The cool air around her was water, and it rippled through her petals. She stole a peek from beneath her brow. Paris was watching. Rachael thought he pretended to be drifting too, but that really, he was swimming. They were both on the Planet Water. In it.

“I once bought an organic cabbage at Earth's Bounty,” Geneva said, hand on a hip, pointing with the copper brush. “Four dollars and ninety-nine cents. For one little head of cabbage. I ate it to the core.”

“Well, it's worth it to me,” Ron said. “I never shop for produce at the regular supermarket, not since being fooled by a peach.” He turned to Rachael. “So, you're the birthday girl.”

“Geneva too,” Rachael said. She liked Ron well enough. When he looked at her, he smiled like she proved his point. “How could you get fooled by a peach?”

Ron folded his arms across his chest, glad to be asked. His legs were planted widely, in the at-ease position.

“Like I said, I don't buy fruit at the supermarket,” he said, “but there were these peaches. Gorgeous, humped beauties. I bought six. They had a little give but weren't quite there. So I left them in a brown paper bag for two days, and next I looked, brown spots. They were heading south. So I cut into one. Hard as a rock right below the first inch of give. Not a speck of flavor. Fooled by a peach.” He said it as though it were both unbelievable and unforgivable.

“Seduced by a mirage,” Geneva said, turning knobs on the gas grill. “But even when the senses are fooled, the body never is. Can't extract nutrition from cardboard.”

“Gave me cause to pause,” Ron said. “Shouldn't our animal instincts protect us from impostors?”

Flames kicked up from the grill. Geneva adjusted the heat.

“First the peaches,” Paris said, deadpan, from where he sat on the steps, “next it'll be the cantaloupes.”

“No joke,” Ron said, shaking his head.

Tatum emerged through her back door carrying the mushrooms in one hand and a bowl of chips in the other. She wore her hat and gloves.

“For all we know,” Geneva was saying, “we may have all eaten our last good peach and not even know it.”

“And you call me negative,” Tatum said as she came down the stairs.

Rachael noticed that as her aunt stepped past Paris, he extended one finger from where his hand rested on his knee to touch the fabric of her skirt as it rustled past. He never looked up.

“Look at all the colors,” Tatum said to Rachael, referring to the red and yellow peppers and the green of the broccoli florets, all assembled on the blue ceramic platter. “Why don't you get your camera?” she said. “This could be a good picture.”

Rachael's camera sat on the table among the plates of food. She came over and picked it up but did not take a picture. Tatum pulled up a plastic lawn chair and took a seat. Rachael took a chip from the bowl.

“What are they teaching you in school these days?” Ron asked Rachael.

“Multiplying,” she said. “What we want to be when we grow up. State things, like the state bird and state tree.”

“The state tree,” Ron said. “The P-pine. Nothing like it.”

“It's the Ponderosa Pine,” Rachael said.

“They were darn near fireproof,” Ron said, rocking back and forth on his heels. “Their canopies are so high brushfires never touched them. Then we decided to protect them by putting out fires that needed to burn. We ended up with a lot of fuel on the ground. Little trees. Fuses. They took the fire right up to the canopy and the dry needles. They called it ‘managing' the forests,” he said with a laugh. “Now, when the state burns, it burns hot and fast. Did they tell you about that?” he asked Rachael.

She shook her head no. “The grizzly bear is the state animal,” she said.

“We've managed to get rid of most of them too,” he said. He looked up through the barren branches, letting his eyes slide across the baby blue sky. “We've taken so much from this place,” he said. “Trees, gold, silver, minerals, coal, wildlife. There are places I look at, and all I can see is the beauty that's gone. Clear cuts. Subdivisions.”

“And yet, there's so much beauty left,” Geneva said, not wanting to go too far down that road.

“True,” Ron said. “But it's hard to watch what you love disappear.”

An awkward silence followed.

Tatum reached out and touched Rachael's fingers.

“You cold?” she said.

“Aw, hell,” Ron said.

“I've got hot apple cider,” Geneva said, abandoning the grill. She pointed a finger at each of them. “Yes, yes, yes?” she said, getting a count.

“Do you need another sweater?” Tatum said to Rachael.

“I can get it,” Rachael said as she climbed the steps to their back door.

Her bedroom was at the rear of the duplex, and having failed to close the solid door, she listened to the adult conversation drifting in through the screen. She looked through her bedroom window at Tatum sitting beside the table. She couldn't see Paris, but she could see Ron's back, his gray hair messy above his pullover. She heard Geneva next door. Music starting up and spilling through the walls. A woman's voice and a piano. “. . .
And I think to myself, what a wonderful world
.”

Rachael aimed her camera through the window at Tatum and clicked.

Geneva reemerged into the yard carrying a tray of mugs with steam rising into the air. She slid the tray onto the table

“I think living in a beautiful place inoculates one against runaway consumerism,” she said. “It satisfies. It's un-American.”

“Beauty is a tourist attraction,” Paris said from the steps.

Tatum looked in the direction of Paris's voice. Rachael watched from the window. She could see that her aunt was more than listening to Paris. She was looking at him and thinking secret thoughts.

Then Tatum looked up to the window and caught Rachael watching her. She neither smiled nor waved. Rachael could tell she was thinking secret thoughts about her, just like she had when she had looked at Paris. Rachael turned away from the window, put down her camera, put on a sweater, and rejoined the party.

The group then stood around the card table, skewering vegetables, scallops, and small chunks of chicken. The afternoon wore on, full of aimless talk punctuated with expressions of amazement at and gratitude for the warmth of the day. Geneva placed skewers on the grill. During cracks in the conversation when silence snuck in, glances and small smiles were exchanged in recognition of the thin layer of melancholy shimmering at the edges of the afternoon, making it all the sweeter.

The sun slanted too soon. The thin mountain atmosphere fought futilely to hold the heat. They would eat the cake inside. Rachael went in while the grown-ups cleaned up. In the kitchen, she pulled a glass from the dish rack and placed it on the table. She retrieved the half-gallon carton of milk from the refrigerator. It was one of the things that was different here, like calling adults by first names. Her mother didn't let her pour from the carton unless she was in the kitchen too. The milk poured smooth and formed a perfect, white surface, white as snow.

The previous weekend, when the snow was new, Rachael and Tatum had walked the six blocks to the north hills to watch the dogs crisscrossing over the sparkling fresh blanket. Owners trailed leisurely behind with leashes bunched up in mittened fists.

“What do you think new snow smells like?” her aunt had asked her. “Do you think it smells like the sky?”

Rachael had watched the dogs burrowing through the drifts. They looked back at her now and then, staring out from frosty muzzles. Her aunt had started spinning slow circles, arms extended, looking up at the sky.

“My sister loved new snow,” she told Rachael. “She'd get mad at me if I tromped through it first.”

At some point, Aunt Tatum's stories had stopped being about “your mother” and were instead about “my sister.” Tatum's sister was a child, not unlike Rachael herself.

The phone rang in the background of Rachael's thoughts. But she was remembering new snow and how back at home when a fresh blanket fell, she was allowed to play only on the side of the house with the fewest windows so her mother could look out at smooth, white perfection. The phone continued to ring, intruding upon Rachael's thoughts. She had never answered her aunt's phone before, but she stepped toward it and tentatively picked up.

“Hello?” she said.

Silence.

Then, a hesitant “Is Tatum there?”

It wasn't her father. It was Vincent. She was sure of it.

“Hello?” he said again.

Rachael held the phone in one hand, her milk in the other. She hung there until she heard a click and the line go dead. She replaced it on its cradle.

But she didn't step away. She watched the phone, waiting for it to ring again. Outside the window, she heard the drip of icicles, slowed down from earlier that afternoon as the ice firmed up as the temperature fell. Rachael thought of the dogs with their frost-dusted backs leaving belly trenches in the surface of the snow yet somehow not ruining it. Then the phone rang again. Rachael let it ring. She turned her back to it.

Rachael stood in the kitchen, holding her glass and listening to the ringing. The sound both soothed and stirred her, like the sensation of hiding while hearing someone search for you. Your name is called. You hear your own breathing. They cannot see you but are reaching out with antennae. So it's more than your body that you have to hide. The game played in Rachael's head. An unnamed He was looking for her. But whoever it was that was looking, she thought, he would have to wonder where she was, what happened to her, and be worried.

The back door opened, and the sound of music and voices drifted in. Tatum's head was cocked as she entered the kitchen, carrying dirty plates and empty platters.

“Did I hear the phone?” she said.

Rachael looked to the phone, but it was silent. Just a moment ago, it had felt good to let it ring and walk away. But now she felt a slow, creeping panic. She had made a mistake, though she couldn't name exactly what it was. But she knew she made Him go away. She flushed, the inward terror clear on her face, and her glass slipped through her fingers, crashing on the linoleum.

Tatum jumped back when the milk and glass splattered.

“Oh no,” Tatum said, “what's wrong?”

Large, curved pieces of glass sat sharp edges up on the floor. The back screen door opened and fell closed. Paris came up behind Tatum, looking over her shoulder at the mess.

Rachael looked at the lightning bolt of milk across the blue linoleum.