Six Feet Over It (6 page)

I DO NOT SEE DARIO
the day after he kills my birthday. Which is to say I do not speak or participate in actual eye contact with him, though yes, I do visually
see
a lot of him. Watch a lot of him, plot ways to avoid him for the next four years until I can leave for college, join the circus, become a hooker—whichever will get me out of here fastest.

It is Sunday but I’m in the office, doing my spying through the grimy windows because Wade’s got the nerve to make me to “fill in” while he’s off in Sacramento investigating some asinine waterfall feature he’s dying to install. I turn two space heaters (Who needs central air? Not Wade!) up as high as they can go, even though they encourage pipe smell seepage from the carpet and wood paneling. Too cold not to. Dario waves as he passes on the riding mower, salutes as he troops past in the trees, cheerfully lugs shovels, rakes, lengths of irrigation line.

I watch Kai return from a run into town; she jogs through the Manderleys, past the office, and straight through the graves to Dario, who pulls her into a hug. He offers her his water bottle, which she accepts; then he walks beside her up the hill toward the house. They talk; she smiles, laughs. She has recovered overnight from her despair at my abandoned birthday. Traitor.

I pull the York bag to my lap and turn to Ovid for consolation.

We can learn even from our enemies.

Okay, screw Ovid.

Headfirst into algebra’s refreshingly nonsentimental variables and coefficients, I ignore faint door-tapping and do not look up until Dario is standing at my desk.

“Hello! Working?”

I hate it when people sneak up! Knock louder!

I nod.

“Okay!” he says. “I’m going up. To my place. Are you going up, too?”

I shake my head.

He points to the clock. “No? Six, we can walk together?”

Shake my head. I’d rather walk up alone in the dark.

“Okay. See you tomorrow. Happy birthday—day after!”

He closes the door behind him.

Four years.
College or circus or hookering can’t come soon enough.

I keep my anti-Dario vigil sacred, skulking around while he tends the grounds. I watch him chat with visitors,
sit
with them. He holds Real Nice Clambake’s hand on Wednesdays, talks with her about what a great show
Carousel
is, rights leaning framed photographs piled on graves, untangles wind chimes. The Rivendell crew, of course, adores him. He helps place arrangements and they yammer endlessly about lord knows what. I hide in the office and watch them; even Elanor is too distracted by his magic to bother me, so at least there’s that. Kai gallops over the headstones to him for big hug-fests, the same hugs he greets the mourning families and a delighted Wade with, the way he surely would greet Meredith if she could ever bring herself to acknowledge his existence. Kai natters happily on about how he is “super nice, and funny, and he asks all the time if you’re mad at him.”

“What’s there to be mad about?” I sigh. “I don’t even know the guy.” Well, besides the penchant for ruining birthdays, and what the hell is the deal with all the hugging? Monitoring and avoiding his whereabouts makes the hours spent in the office much more exhausting. I can only relax when he is busy digging graves, which keeps him in one place for long periods of time, or when he has a day off, which he spends mostly in and around the silver trailer.

Right away he’s making that thing a home. From the depths of the toolshed I watch him rototill the soil all around it, planting grass seeds and a million flowers and young trees among the already tall pines. He hangs tin candle lanterns from sturdy branches and strings a tidy row of tiny, colored Christmas lights all along the eaves and around the trailer windows. A path of smooth river pebbles lead to his door. The twinkling lights could easily make it a gaudy circus hiding behind the graves, but despite my wanting it to be awful it just isn’t. It is cheerful and pretty, the colors sparkle, and it makes me hate him more.

His English, already nearly fluent if a bit noun-filled, improves daily. A radio tuned forever to NPR rests in the open trailer window while he works in the niches nearby or in the shed repairing the lawn mower or prepping liners, and the verbs and adjectives come rapidly. Wade adores him—the son he’s always whining about missing out on. He has not only accidentally hired an overqualified dream of a groundskeeper/grave digger, but a very patient person who endures Wade’s endless pointless lectures on random crap Wade knows nothing about but loves to relate to a clearly uninterested Dario anyway (the proper way to still liquor in a bathtub, how to clean fireplace andirons). Theirs is a unique relationship based upon Wade’s love of being a know-it-all and Dario’s enjoyment of absorbing Wade’s crass, slang-laced vocabulary, which, despite the constant taking of the Lord’s name in vain, provides a nice contrast to the sedate, properly constructed sentences NPR tends to offer.

“That
kid
!” Wade sighs contentedly after dinner practically every night. “He’s got a way with people you wouldn’t believe. They just take to him right away, you know?
Man!
Did I find the perfect guy or what?”

“You sound like you guys are dating,” Kai says. “Leave him alone, he probably has friends he wants to hang out with.” She is so post-cancer sassy.

Wade scowls. “Baloney! He loves working lunches! That kid is going places!”

“Do you have to call him a
kid
?” I say, voicing my and Kai’s joint distaste. “He’s got to be at least twenty; if he wasn’t from Mexico, you totally wouldn’t call him that. It’s gross.”

“Oh for Christ’s sake, I would, too!” Wade hollers defensively. “He
is
a kid—you’re all kids! My Sierrawood Hills Kids … how did we get so lucky?”

Exactly what I’d like to know.

Sierrawood Hills Kids. We’re all very special people living in a very, very special group home.

“Kind of dark in here,” Kai says, stretching her legs before a black office wingback. I toss her a bunch of Yorks. She’s right. Winter in a graveyard is just as depressing as one would imagine. It is super dingy, but I refuse to turn on the overhead fluorescent lights. Too clinical. Morguey. Freezing December rains flatten the muddy lawn and send old people to us in droves, two or three a week, nearly faster than Dario can dig. The graves lie cold beneath blankets of brown pine needles; the hum of Wade’s leaf blower never shuts up. People come wrapped in twenty-seven layers of sweaters and coats. The poor ducks hang around hiding in the withered blackberry bushes, and I wish they would get the clue to migrate: they’re too used to the stale bread Real Nice Clambake feeds them every week. I’m just waiting for Dario to announce that “December twenty-fifth is the festival of the rare skin diseases!” My birthday is one thing; if he comes near Christmas, I’ll kill him.

It is weird, Kai sitting here. She’s messed up her calf muscle and has been sent home early from track practice to sit in a bath and rub it. Which is what I remind her she’s supposed to be doing instead of lounging around in here yakking with me, but she just unwraps her Yorks, chews. “How is it? You okay?”

“Oh yeah,” I say fake-casually, staring aimlessly out at the graves. Clambake tosses an armful of pine needles and dead leaves in the Dumpster behind the office as she goes. I can see the perfect rectangle of cleared lawn over her sister. “It’s nice, actually. Wade was right. Hardly anyone comes in, better than the library. Look—rubber pencil!”

She pulls more Yorks from the bag and watches my admittedly excellent rubber penciling. “Yeah?”

She can run a million marathons over Hell’s half acres all she wants; to me this remission will always feel unsure. Precarious. I will not disrupt its magical, invisible hold.

“Yes,” I say. “It’s fine.
I love it.
”

“What about school?”

“What about it?”

“You don’t have any friends.”

“Do too.”

“Oh, really?” She settles in for a formal inquisition.

“Yes!”

“Who?”

“You don’t know them. They’re freshmen.”

“What are their names?”

Oh jeez. “Well,” I say, “their names. Are.”

“Yeah.”

“Lisa! Lisa and Caroline.”

“Seriously?”

I would never, ever burden her by saying it, but I wish Kai would at least try to be near me once in a while during the school day. Sophomore classes, alternate lunch schedule, and it’s like she’s on the moon. But I am grateful she is kept safe, buoyed above the high school humiliation crap by her own firmly established self-esteem, track team friends, and an admiring school administration who hang banners in the hallways reading “Congratulations, Kai, Division IV Cross-Country Championship Qualifier!”

Months into the school year and I remain a friendless parasite in this unfamiliar labyrinth, adored by teachers but virtually unnoticed by my classmates except for the few who mock the low-hanging fruit of our living in a graveyard. And then there’s Lisa and Caroline, aggressively lip-lined freshman ringleaders who at the start of the year seemed to have enough fun mocking my still poverty-stricken wardrobe, but who now actively hate my guts for breaking stupid standardized test curves in every class we have together, putting their stellar cheerleading careers in jeopardy. They shove me into cold metal lockers between classes, and I am amazed they haven’t yet come to Sierrawood to mess with me.

“Mrs. McKinstry,” Lisa had huffed this afternoon in English Lit, not bothering to raise her hand. “Can I move to a new seat?”

“
May
you
please
do what?”

Lisa rolled her eyes. “
May
I
please
move?”

“Why?”

She’d snapped an enormous wad of gum. “Be
cause
I can’t concentrate! Leigh has worn those same jeans like ten days in a row, and the smell is making me ill. For real. They’re filthy, there’s like, mud or something on them. Formaldehyde.”

Mortuary. You’re thinking of a mortuary.

Mrs. McKinstry peered over her glasses at me, then back at Lisa. “Formaldehyde?”

“Yes. Can I—
may I
—just move?”

“No, you may not.”

“Then can you move Leigh?”

“Spit that gum out.”

Lisa growled and inched her seat as far from mine as she could, pulled her shirt collar up over her mouth and nose. Caroline laughed hysterically, cried her mascara off.

I squirmed and pretended to read, my eyes stinging, stomach burning.

I
have
worn these jeans for ten days. I’ve been wearing them since before summer and they were my only pair then, too, and now they are also too short. But they aren’t dirty. I wash them. All the time. They’re just all I’ve got. I could remedy the situation, but the thought of asking Wade and Meredith or spending that much horrible icing-on-the-cake grave money still gives me hives. I can’t do it.

In the Mendocino Cancer Pink Sweatpants Era, Emily’s mom begged me to let her take me shopping with Emily. Her well-intended generosity mortified me. “It’s just until Kai’s better,” I pleaded when she was on the verge of calling Meredith to discuss the “obvious-neglect-come-on-Leigh-this-is-ridiculous” situation with her. “It’s not a big deal, I
like
these pants, right now is just not a good time. …” I put her off month after month, embarrassed, until Emily finally got her to stop offering. But when the pink sweatpants’ elastic waist inevitably gave out and I began hitching them up with a big safety pin, her mom wordlessly handed me a J. C. Penney bag one day after school. I hid in the bathroom to pull on a beautiful brand-new pair of slightly too big jeans. I wore them every day and we never said a word about it. I’m wearing them still.

I will not disrupt Kai’s happiness at school, and not even in retrospect will I ever let her know my time, care, and attention have ever been divided, that while she lay suffering I was sometimes purposely away from her, wearing new jeans, happy with Emily, cared for by Emily’s mother.

“Lisa and Caroline are completely made-up names.” Kai says.