Six Feet Over It (10 page)

Okay, first of all, he wasn’t there; the test
was
stupid! And,
“Esfuerzo?”

“
Effort.
Tú eres inteligente, un poco perezoso es todo.”

Perezoso?
Wade calling me lazy is one thing, but what does Dario know?
“¿Usted va a juzgar mis hábitos de estudio desde abajo en una tumba?”
The words come without thought, which is pretty awesome because who knew I could say
You’re going to judge my study habits from down in a grave?
in Spanish till right then, but also, what is his problem? He doesn’t know me
or
my homework ethics! What does he think I’m doing hour after hour in that stupid office? (Well, when I’m not spying on people or reading novels for fun. But other than that.)

He reaches up to lay the shovel on the grass, pulls himself up and out of the grave, and brushes off his knees, still smiling.

“¿Cuándo aprendiste hablar español tan bien?”
he asks.

I consider his muddy jeans, the pile of velvety soil, his perfect grave. “I
don’t
speak it well. I’m faking it.”

“Well, not bad for fake.” I hover at the edge, peer down into the black. Once a casket in a liner is in there, people lie just inches below our feet. Emily beneath the grass. She was so small. Is she in a child-size coffin?

The wind chimes sing. She is eleven rows away.

“There are about a billion butterflies in my town right now. In Mexico.” English. “Well, not
in
my town—mine is Pátzcuaro. But near—Michoacán. You know about the butterflies? The migration?”

“Not really. But I bet it’s magical and symbolizes something significant.”

He makes sure I know he’s ignoring me.

“Monarch butterflies. They leave Canada and fly three thousand miles to the forests in Michoacán. Oyamel forests. Balsam firs. Really tall, old pine trees and oaks. They come in autumn right around Días de los Muertos and you can’t see the branches, even the trunks, just
wings.
It’s crazy, they’re all moving and fluttering, but slowly, and you stand there and look up into the branches and the sunlight and they fly, they settle in the pine needles and fly again. The air is full of them, the sky. … You would love it.”

He collects his shovel and moves wide, flat plywood pieces to cover the empty hole until the funeral. He unfolds the traditional big blue tarp—protection against the threatening clouds gathering low beneath the winter white sky so close, barely above our heads. Why are these tarps not green? Knowing Wade, it’s all about the blue ones being cheaper. It looks so tacky, the hills dotted with bright blue plastic tents on rainy multiple-burial weekends.

“Do you miss it? Miss your family?” I ask.

He leans on his shovel, wipes the back of his gloved head across his forehead. “I do. But I love it here.”

I hover beside the grave. Step onto the plywood. Bounce a little.

“See?” he says. “Just a grave.”

Cloying fallen-tree wood-chip sweetness from a mountain of fresh flowers two rows over.

He tosses the shovel on the back of the tractor, pulls his gloves off, and reaches under the seat. Hands me a flat plastic bag: fun-size York Peppermint Patties.

“I was going to leave these on your desk. I snuck a few.”

“That’s okay.”

“They really help,” he says. And then he hugs me.

I stand stiff, arms at my sides. Blood thunders in my ears.

His clothes smell like soil. Soil and soap.

I close my eyes. Clench my toes tight inside my shoes.

“Las cosas será bien,”
he says. “You’ll see.”

He drives slowly up the hill toward the shed. I watch until he is gone.

I could see Emily from here if I try. I don’t.

I rip open the Yorks.

Será bien,
my ass. It is too late for things to turn out right.

SPANISH ONLY
becomes the unspoken rule for digging graves. He is worse than Señora Levet, who won’t even let us go pee if we ask in English. My brain, occupied with vocabulary and syntax, has less room to be scared and actually think about the fact that
I’m digging a dead person’s grave,
and Dario knows this. It’s February and freezing.

I can’t bring myself to help him bury, but I watch the graveside services from the safety of the office or from behind one of the babies’ angels so I can help move the flowers afterward. He always stands at the back of the cluster of mourners during services, near enough in case one of them loses it and makes everyone else domino down the path of out-of-control weeping. In those cases, he moves in swiftly, quietly comforting in two languages, and they lean willingly into him, a stranger in a Sierrawood Hills T-shirt. He waits for them to leave before he touches his shovel. Which often takes for-absolutely-ever, because they stand around talking after the religious part, and then once they move the party down to their cars, they stand around chatting it up some more. It reminds me of waiting around after Kai’s cross-country races, she and Wade recounting every step of the six, thirteen, twenty miles she has just run:
“… and then at the five k I had this cramp …”
What about the reception? Aren’t there seven-layer dips and Bundt cakes these people need to get to?

When at last they’re gone, heavy belts and pulleys and a whirring, groaning motor ease the casket into Dario’s perfect, careful grave, fitting it into the liner. Heavy cement lid on top, shovelfuls of soil until only the slim dark mound remains, waiting to be covered in a combination of tightly arranged, boring, from-out-of-town funereal bouquets and the wilder, admittedly beautiful Rivendell ones.

It is mostly the At Needs who stay till the end; and sometimes they insist on watching him bury. At Needs want every single last second they can get before their person turns to past tense. The Pre-Needs mostly take off and he buries them without an audience.

Pre-Need, as a concept, drives Dario nuts. He gets so worked up about it, he has to repeat his rapid-fire Spanish over and over before I get his drift, which is essentially that Pre-Need takes the ritual out of death. Takes away any reason to get out of bed when a person dies. You buy your own grave, schedule the funeral and the flowers, do it all yourself, and what have you left your loved ones with? A blank emptiness where you used to be, and no space to go through the motions of grief without the tangle of emotion. A person needs things to do, he says; a list of chores (
Schedule burial! Buy mini quiches for reception! Pick out headstone!
) gives you air to breathe. Flowers and food and choosing a space—a person needs those tasks.

“I don’t know,” I sigh one afternoon as we pile flowers on a fairly well attended Pre-Need woman. “For one thing, it’s expensive.”

“So why not just leave the money?”

“Because! It’s
sad.
They’re just trying to be nice. It’s hard.”

He shakes his head, carefully drags a giant pot of overly romantic red roses to the mound.

I’m not so sure choosing a casket to put Emily in provided her mother “breathing room” as much as it probably gave her a permanent broken heart. His logic escapes me.

Shag Haircut’s nighttime lawn meltdown is what comes of At Need. Hasty, ill-advised decisions, and not that anyone wants to Pre-Need their own kid’s grave just in case, but still. Did Emily’s mom put her in some itchy, fancy dress instead of the Mendocino County Spelling Bee Finals T-shirt she wore and washed so many times all year it was super soft and pulling apart at the left shoulder seam? Did she watch Jimmy bury her?

I clutch a paper-wrapped bunch of Rivendell chrysanthemums by their blossoms. Dario eases them from my grip.

“What if they do it wrong?” I say.

“Who?”

“At Need. What if it isn’t what you want?”

“Well, I think you have to give people a break and know they’ll take care of you.”

“But what if they don’t? And what if you don’t have anyone?”

The flowers are in place. Aside from the chrysanthemums and misguided roses, either her friends and family are all totally cheap or this woman was a lover of gas-station carnations and baby’s breath.

“They will,” Dario insists. “There’s always someone. Everyone has someone.”

“What about homeless people?”

“Everyone.”

Emily’s grave is lonely. No flowers. By unfathomable chance, here she is, here I am, and what good is it? I can’t go near her, near her headstone. Seeing it once was an accident. Going back again, bringing flowers … that’s
visiting.
That’s tending. And then she really will be dead.

Mourning Emily, tending her would leave Kai without my singular attention, vulnerable to every falling tree in the world. I chose Kai. It’s done.

This whole situation is a snake eating its own tail. I can’t tend Emily to protect Kai, and I can’t betray Emily by replacing her with Elanor.

He folds the blue tarp neatly, respectfully as a flag.

“Why are you here?” I ask without thinking. “This can’t be the only job in California. How can you be here every day doing this?”

“How can
you
?” Dario asks.

“I have no choice.”

“Of course you do.”

“No,” I sigh. “I don’t.”

“Well, whose fault is that?”

“Uh … Wade’s? Meredith’s?”

He shakes his head. “Your job. Your responsibility.”

“I’m a minor!”

“You’re a patron saint. Act like it.”

He pulls his canvas gloves off, shakes the soil from them. Walks me home.

Grave after grave sold in English, dug in Spanish.

The grave-buying public at large seems to mysteriously decide en masse to do their shopping not in the morning with Wade but in the afternoon with me, on
my
days, which thrills Wade and leaves me fatigued and somewhat apathetic—can’t fight patron sainthood, apparently. My handwriting takes over the grave binder, every name carefully written first in pencil, then, once they are safely in the ground, in ink. I twist the knife and watch Emily’s grave from the office to see if anyone has left her flowers. Never any. I keep my distant, careful vigil over her unvisited body and remind myself I am securing Kai’s happiness.

“I’m sorry,” I say to strangers across the desk day after day. “I am so sorry for your loss.”

And I am.

While I keep my own loss properly quiet. Nondramatic.

Suppressed grief suffocates,
Ovid whispers,
it rages within the breast and is forced to multiply its strength.

I am circling the drain. Surrendering to a life of At Need sales in this office forever and ever until I wind up middle-aged, alone, living in the house by myself while Wade and Meredith travel the beaches of the world and Kai spends her life polishing Olympic track and field medals, with her husband, Balin, and their three adorable, well-behaved children.

My three-days-per-week after-school office schedule becomes generally understood by everyone involved as an every-day-per-week after-school-and-weekends-too schedule. Kai still secretly rendezvousing with Balin, Meredith gone to Mendocino, Wade being … Wade, and no one seems to care at all, or even register the change.

Well. Except Dario.

My fear of never getting out of the graveyard is eclipsed by his fear that I’ll never want to leave. He begins delivering occasional spontaneous, pleading lectures along the lines of “This isn’t good for you. Please, please go do something—anything—else. Come with me to Rivendell!” and tossing me “You should be trying to make friends and get a life” looks every chance he gets.

“I won’t bother you,” I promise. “I’ll stay in the office.”

He drops back down in the grave he is digging.

“Oh, Leigh,” he sighs. “That’s not it. At
all.
”

He keeps me supplied in Yorks without my ever having to ask.

“Leigh!” Elanor calls, running toward me as I walk through the Manderleys after school this cold, gray Valentine’s Day. I manage to keep my anxiety to a dull hum—her visits are predictable, bright, and brief.

“Did she tell you?” she says, breathless. Pale pink dress, gray cardigan sweater. The boots.

“Who tell me what?”

“Kai, about Balin? He’s enrolling in
school.
I knew it; I kept telling my parents, but all they ever said was, ‘There’s no way, he’s too sensitive!’ Oh my God,
sensitive.
He’s a big baby and he gets what he wants whenever he wants it—I don’t mean that, it’s just—if he thinks I’m picking up his slack around Rivendell, he is sadly mistaken.”

“Regular high school? He may want to hide his dice.”

I’ll never see Kai again.

“I know! My parents are all,
Why would he want this?
Which is ridiculous, it’s like they’re pretending not to know.”

Kai is still infuriatingly mum about her Rivendell exploits, but the flowers have gotten more frequent and pretty blatant, so even navel-gazing Wade and Meredith have gotten the gist of what’s up, and it seems just fine by them.

“I like that kid!” Wade bellowed after her this past Saturday as Kai jogged by the mausoleum on her way to Rivendell, under the guise of yet another “long run.” She laughed, kept running past the Manderleys and off to Rivendell, and then he turned to me and said, “What the hell kind of name is
Balin
? You name a kid a thing like Balin, you’re asking for it!”

“Asking for what?”

He just grunted and walked off into Serenity.

“He’s joining the
track team,
for Pete’s sake,” Elanor says, rolling her eyes. “The guy who can’t be bothered to shake the chip crumbs off his sheets, let alone ever actually make the bed—
he’s
going to get up at the crack of dawn and go running? Yeah.”

“Do
you
want to go?” I’m already exhausted just imaging hiding from her every single day.

“To school?” She makes a face. “No. I see the kids downtown sometimes. I watch them, the way they act, they’re just … No.”

Assholes,
I think.
The word you’re looking for is
assholes.

I search the green. Dario’s in Serenity Valley with the backhoe.

“Oh well. It’s his funeral.” She brightens, jumps around to keep warm. “Love is in the air!” She gags dramatically and waves, off to pester Dario. “Come visit sometime! Happy Valentine’s!”

Last year Emily’s mom let us bake on Valentine’s Day. Cinnamon rolls from scratch. With yeast. We had to let the dough rise and everything.

“No raisins,” Emily said.

“Yes,” I said, “and no nuts.”

Her mom acted personally insulted. “Raisins and nuts are the whole point.”

“Disgusting.”

We ate them hot from the oven, straight out of the glass baking dish, pulled them apart with forks—ribbons of cinnamon dough steeped in cream cheese frosting.

“See?” Emily crowed. “Perfect.”

Her mom ate three just by herself, smiling sadly in a stupor of sweet warmth. “This is terrible for our teeth. I’ll miss baking with you,” she said.

Emily frowned. “When are we not baking?”

“When you both have boyfriends and you spend Valentine’s with them instead.”

“Oh God, as
if
!” Emily moaned. “Every single boy in the entire eighth grade is
still
stupid; you said they’d grow out of it by now.”

I dredged a roll through a puddle of frosting. “Sing it, sister.”

“Okay, we’ll see what happens next year. I would love to bake our way through puberty, but I’m not holding my breath.”

“Oh God,” we moaned. “Disgusting!”

“That woman needs to date some guys or something; she’s the world’s biggest martyr!” Emily whispered later in the secrecy of her bedroom. “She wants me to stay forever and be all ‘her and me against the world’ … am I supposed to feel bad about growing up? Because it’s kind of not my fault.”

“You’re all she’s got,” I sighed, envious. “It
is
you and her. You’re a team.”

“Not when she’s super down in the dumps and making me feel guilty about regular junk. So I get a boyfriend someday, big deal! A normal mom would be happy about that, not
Ahhh! You’re leaving me!
Feels selfish.”

“Oh, brother,” I said. “She doesn’t mean in that way.”

“She’s obsessed.”

“She loves you.”

“It’s annoying.”

I couldn’t imagine.

Her mom had poured glasses of cold milk, and we toasted to Kai, at home and still not well. To St. Valentine. To baking. To love.

Up in the graves, Elanor sits with Dario in the backhoe. Talking, laughing. I put my hand on the office door.

“Leigh!” she calls once more. “Remember, anytime—seriously, any day, whenever. Okay?”

She’s got a death wish and she doesn’t even know it.