Six Feet Over It (13 page)

The next morning is Easter Sunday, and to his credit, Wade does his best. He buys bags of Cadbury eggs and a precooked ham with pineapple slices on top, and after a healthy debate wherein Kai and I at last successfully convince him of the absolute tackiness of an Easter egg hunt through the graveyard, we instead watch
My Fair Lady
on television and we all like it, especially Wade, who enjoys the song “Why Can’t a Woman Be More Like a Man” a little too much and totally misses the irony of it, but still, it is pretty good, especially since not one song mentions a clambake. He shows us how to make two tiny holes in a raw egg and carefully blow it hollow.

“How do you know how to do this?” Kai asks, light-headed from the effort.

“Boy Scouts or some shit, I guess.”

Wade and Kai go for an evening run and I hide in Meredith’s laundry room with my hollow egg, put on a record called
Sea for the Senses FX,
and paint vines of pink and white sweet pea winding, curling all around a bright sea-blue shell.

Emily’s mom made me an Easter basket last year. Emily brought it with her to school the Monday after spring break—green plastic strawberry basket with pipe-cleaner handles, Easter grass, chocolate eggs. Little chocolate bunny. Emily saved the bunny from her own basket and we went to the field at recess to eat them and compare notes.

“You guys have ham?”

“Turkey.”

“Did Kai eat?”

“Just Jell-O.”

“Better than nothing.”

I nodded.

“My mom is crazy. She goes from never wanting me to grow to guess what she put in my plastic eggs?”

“Lithium?”

“Fake nails. Press-on.”

“Classy.”

The bunnies were hollow dark chocolate. Our favorite.

I wrap the sweet pea eggshell in tissue in a tiny box and go to bed early to lie awake and start waiting for Dario to come home.

Tuesday morning Wade comes clomping through the graves in a T-shirt and his Japanese flag running shorts, which feature the rising sun directly in the center of the front—definitely the worst place for it. So gross.

“How’s things?” he asks from the open office door.

“Fine.”

“I mean, not just work. Are you … everything all right?”

I narrow my gaze. “What do you want?”

“I’m just asking!”

“Oh, really.”

“Yes! So, you okay?” he asks.

“Sure.”

“How’s school been?”

“Terrible.”

“Fantastic. You busy?”

“Yes.”

I prop up my library copy of
Wuthering Heights
to block the view of the flag. Kai is out there weeding lilacs, still doggedly moping Balin’s absence. Jimmy digs a Pre-Need I booked last week. The poor mourners will be here soon, unaware they’ll be missing out on a far sincerer burial experience with Dario, but then who knows if it even matters to them one way or another. Eleven up and twenty-three over from the open grave, Emily’s sweet peas flutter, still pink.

Wade sits in a wingback. I peer over the top of my book.
“What?”
I say.

And in this moment that I am so especially desperate to demonstrate my gratitude to Dario,
for
Dario, for his flowers for Emily, to attempt to be a person worthy of anything, my chance arrives. In ashes.

My At Need/Pre-Need/Can’t Decide Baby has come back in a tiny metal container, heavier from grief than from the few token bone fragments that rattle dully against the sides like the cubes in a Boggle game when Wade hands her across the desk to me.

“Think you could take care of this?” he asks.

“What?”

“I’d do it myself, but to be honest, it sort of creeps me out.”

I just sit, blank-faced.

“Or I could ask Jimmy, it’s just—that guy charges an arm and a leg. He’s got a one-hour minimum, and this’ll take fifteen, twenty minutes tops. … You know, on second thought, maybe I’ll just drop it in myself, how hard can it be …” And he reaches to take her back.

I snatch her away, hold her to me.

The bones shift to the bottom.

First of all, I want to yell at him to grow up, him being the adult who bought this cemetery on purpose, so what is he talking about being “creeped out.” And (b), there is no way in hell I am going to let him be in charge of the final resting place of this barely born girl. She’s already been ripped off on life span; she doesn’t deserve a grave shoddily dug by a guy who is “creeped out” by it.

“Just show me.” His ability to paint me into corners is beginning to rival Meredith’s seascapes.

My eyes move to the window, to Emily’s blossom-heaped stone.

“Twenty minutes tops, soup to nuts,” he says. “Use your gardening trowel, maybe finish with the shovel, and you’re done. Ooh, got a little liner for you, too. I’ll go get it!” He reaches over, taps the metal box, and squeezes my shoulder on his way out.

“Hey,” I say, “don’t tell Dario.”

“Tell him what?”

“This.”

“What for?”

“Just don’t. Or Kai. Please.”

“Why?”

I don’t know why.

“Just don’t,” I say. “Please.”

He shrugs. “All right.”

“No, I mean it. You can’t tell either one of them, not ever. Promise right now or I’m not doing it.”

“You’re a team player.”

“Promise.”

“Jeez, okay, I promise!” He laughs, ducks out the door, sticks his head back in. “You know what this means, right?”

That things have gotten worse than I thought they ever could?

“Bonus! Little something extra in your paycheck if you know what I mean …”

My head drops to the desk and he hikes up the lawn to get the liner, practically flaunting those stupid shorts, right past the arriving Pre-Need family.

I have never suffered more muscle fatigue than the Wade-caused eye-rolling-related strain I’ve got happening.

I wait until the Pre-Need funeral is over, until Jimmy is gone, until Kai and Wade are in the house for dinner. I lock the Manderleys.

Dario placed her stone weeks ago, and here it is with the other babies, smooth granite, grass already grown up around its edges. Just a few inches tall, the name and one date etched below a sleeping lamb carved on top. Wade is right—the actual digging only takes twenty minutes. I conjure Dario beside me and take extra care to remove every pebble, pull out every root, make the sides smooth. The Rivendell angel watches me dig, sees me place the ashes carefully down in the liner, press the damp soil all around her with my bare hands.

I am the last person to hold her.

I keep the lawn patch in one piece and replace it when she’s under, hose the extra black soil away, and when I’m done it looks like nothing’s there. Or that it’s always been.

The chimes ring.

Maybe I don’t want Dario or Kai to know because they are the ones I would want to know the most, and this is not for anyone but her. Just this child. Because she needed me to. Because only I could do it the way it needed to be done.

The baby’s family comes in the morning dressed in layers, light sweaters, khaki pants. Cotton skirts. Blue and brown, no black. Five or six people and a guy in a white shirt sporting a whole bunch of beaded necklaces doing some talking, reading from notes. I think of the baby, too late for the NICU.

I think of myself. Two pounds is so little.

“Your whole body was the size of my newborn head!” Emily liked to say.

“Only because
you
weighed ten ridiculous pounds,” her mom loved reminding her. “My God, Leigh, you tiny little thing—and look how perfect you are. Modern medicine is unbelievable.”

“Modern medicine nothing,” Emily said. “Leigh knew what she was doing.”

Out on the lawn, the mom stands by herself, arms limp across her deflated belly. She doesn’t hold anyone’s hand.

I rip open a new bag of Yorks.

Stars are scattered above the trees when I lock the Manderleys.

In Mendocino at the beach, Kai and I once found a nest of newly hatched snowy plovers in the sand, blind, still shaking off bits of shell. Meredith ran to pull us away. “If you touch them, the mother will know. She’ll never come back to take care of them. They’ll die.”

Dario’s sweet peas are fading but still there, still marking where Emily lies. But they are neutral; they are Dario handling the baby plovers with gloves on. His kindness is for Emily, but he is taking care of me. Non-endowment.

Through the pines the Christmas lights sparkle. He left them on for me.

If I take care of Emily, will her mother know? Will she never come back?

A heap of wildflowers covers the baby. Ducks softly peep and waddle from the pond in a wobbly line, strolling and pooping all over the graves and around the cement angels, around the Rivendell angel gazing fondly down on their plump, feathered bottoms, just more children to watch over.

Sunday morning I am out of bed at dawn to see if Dario is back yet, which is stupid because who gets on a Greyhound bus at five a.m., but still.

A sliver of sun pulses orange behind thick clouds, warming the soaked grass. Steam rises from the graves and winds silkily around the black trees. Maybe we do live in the “Thriller” video. Trailer is empty. I sulk back over the headstones.

“What are you doing up?” Wade turns from the kitchen sink, where he stands eating cling peaches from a can with a fork.

“Nothing.”

“Kai still asleep?”

I nod.

“Rivendell kid’ll be back soon; that’ll cheer her up. Man, those are some good peaches. De
lish
!” He tosses the fork with flourish into the sink, empty can rattling into the trash. “Get that dishwasher unloaded before your mother gets home, all right?” And he is out into the mist, risking his own run-in with red-leather-jacketed zombie Michael Jackson.

The sun reaches the tops of the pines and burns through the clouds, and Meredith shows up, windswept and refreshed. She strolls in, tosses a bag of jelly beans on the counter, and announces, “The headlands are so beautiful this time of year!”

Her breathless accounts of beach strolls and brunches on the bluffs tempt my gag reflexes almost as much as the enthusiastic, welcoming embraces Kai smothers her with. Where is her anger? How about some healthy teenaged resentment? She clings to Meredith’s seawater-soaked apron strings; her sloppy, desperate need for Meredith’s increasingly arm’s-length love makes me sad and pisses me off.

“Hey, baby.” Meredith smiles, folding me into a smothering hug. “Hot enough for you?” I pick through the jelly beans for some red and orange ones, comment politely on her newest seascape, and let the screen door slam behind me to go see for the millionth time if Dario is back.

“Hey!” he calls from inside the trailer.

I shove the pot of lip gloss I’ve smeared on my lips into my back pocket, run to sit in his doorway, keep my arms in their static no-big-deal place at my sides while he hugs me, try to downplay my joy:
You’re home you’re home you’re home!

“So,” he says. “How was the week? Anything fun?”

I have a dream that one day medical science will invent a surgery that allows eyeballs to roll all the way to the back of a person’s skull. Because then I could give an accurate nonverbal response to questions like this. For now I just lie.

“Fine. Same. You?”

“Oh yeah,” he says. “Rented a boat. Fished. Camped.”

“Alone?”

“I like the quiet.”

“You work in a graveyard,” I say.

“Different quiet. My birthday was Easter.”

“It was?”

“Yes.”

“Easter
Day.
”

“Not every year, but this year.”

Rebirth, hope springing eternal, the holiday of
life.
Of course.

“Yours is better,” he insists, meaning it. Weirdo.

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

He shrugs.

I think of the sweet pea egg, now happily a perfect birthday gift—then wither in shyness. He is an adult, a
man
—he has no use for a flowery painted eggshell.

“So how old are you?”

“Twenty.”

My chest clenches.

“Oh,” I say, “now you can buy liquor. In South Korea.”

“Really?”

“Sure.”