The Secrets of Lily Graves (2 page)

Instead, I walked in on Mom and her boyfriend, Perfect Bob.

They were in the kitchen—back from a brisk run, judging from their glistening red cheeks and coordinated spandex—chopping mounds of brightly colored autumn vegetables. Lots of purple beets, orange carrots, and the revered dark, leafy kale.

Mom and Bob were insane about kale. If they weren't stir-frying it or pulverizing it and sneaking the glop into brownies, they were baking kale leaves in the
oven and crowing about how the bitter, dried, nasty green flakes were
sooooo
much better than potato chips—a blatant lie.

“Hi, sweetie,” Mom chirped as she dumped a handful of red peppers in the wok. “It's late. We were getting worried.”

We?
I cut my eyes to Bob, who bit into a raw carrot and nodded. Bob was what I suspected every single woman in her forties craved. He was tall and fit, with a distinguished smattering of silver in his closely cropped hair. He ran thirty miles a week, helped with the cooking, fixed dripping faucets, and never forgot to lower the toilet seat. That was what made Bob perfect.

That he was also chief of police made him impossible.

Bob zeroed in on my bloodied arm before I had a chance to cover it. “What happened there?”

“Nothing,” I lied, as Mom gasped.

“That's not nothing,” she cried, rushing around the center island to inspect the damage. “How did this happen?”

I mumbled something about an accident as Mom dragged me to the sink and turned on the water, squirting Palmolive over my wounds.

“Ow!” I yanked my arm back, but Mom was faster, gripping my wrist and forcing me to endure more.

“You've got to get those cuts clean and Palmolive is just as good as anything,” she insisted, using a damp dishcloth to remove the dried blood. “Was it some sort of animal? God, I hope it wasn't rabid. Those shots are awful. Did you see if it had a tag?”

She was firing questions so rapidly, I couldn't answer.

“It didn't have a tag,” Bob said coolly. “It was a human.”

“What?” Mom flipped off the water, for which I was deeply grateful. She glanced over her shoulder at Bob, then at me with alarm. “Lily, is this true?”

I remained silent. The last thing I needed was Mom making a call to the parents of a classmate, like back in fourth grade when Erin's best friend, Kate Kline, spread rumors that our living room was filled with rotting corpses. With that move, Mom pretty much clinched my title as an outsider.

Bob stepped closer and squinted at the gashes. “That must have been some catfight. Who's the lucky fellow?”

Due to the disgusting sexism of his question, I refused to form a real response.

“You wouldn't understand, Bob,” I said, laying another sheet of Bounty on the cuts. “It was random.”

“A and B is hardly random.”

Assault and battery. Bobspeak.

“Do you want to press charges?” he asked.

I shook my head.
No way.

“If this incident took place at school, you might have to report it under the new antibullying ordinance.”

“It didn't,” I said. “It was in the cemetery.”

“The cemetery!” Bob arched his eyebrows. “What were you doing there on a Saturday evening?”

This was why I had a problem with cops. God forbid you should be found in a graveyard under the age of twenty-one.

“Sacrificing infants to Satan,” I replied. “As one does.”

“I volunteered her to do some yard work,” Mom said, leaning against the sink and signaling with her pursed lips that I should tone down the sarcasm. “I want the name of the person who did this to you, Lily. And don't tell me it's none of my business. I'm your mother and you've been injured. I have a right to know.”

I sighed at my mother's constant overprotectiveness. “Okay, but you have to swear not to immediately get on the phone or go to the principal claiming that I'm a victim of bullying.”

“I'll do whatever I want, thank you.”

My arm was bleeding through the paper towels. I ripped off another sheet and covered it. “Erin Donohue.”

Mom dropped her jaw. “That lovely girl did
this
?”

“She's not so lovely, Mom. I've been trying to tell you that forever. Seriously, she is Lucibitch.” I made a mental note to share this incredible new nickname with Sara, my best friend and fellow Erin Donohue victim.

Bob said, “Who?”

“You remember Erin,” Mom said. “You gave her a Crime Stoppers Award last spring for turning in those kids who were ‘selling' pot.”

They were hardly selling. They'd brought a bag to school with about enough marijuana in it to stone a squirrel. Erin had jumped at the chance to rat them out in order to add another accolade to her college résumé.

“Oh, yeah. The skinny redhead. I liked her drive.” Bob smiled. He was a big fan of ambition. “Isn't she the one who started that virginity group?”

I rolled my eyes.

“The Purity Pact,” Mom said, adding pointedly, “Now,
there's
a good Catholic girl.”

As if I should have been ashamed for not leading a clique of hypocritical whack jobs espousing an antiquated, sexist, and quite frankly primitive philosophy
that squarely defines women as chattel.

Bob turned to me. “You're not in the Purity Pact, are you?”

“Dude, seriously. Do I seem like the type to join a cult of virgins?”

The tips of his ears turned pink.

Thankfully, this interrogation was cut short by the sudden ringing of our business phone. Mom answered it and retrieved a stack of yellow Post-its and a pen we keep at the ready.

“You want to know how much to
burn a body
?” she repeated for our benefit.

Bob made a face.

“Um,” Mom continued, “when did your loved one pass?”

We watched Mom's expression transform from mild annoyance to downright shock.

“So, your grandfather hasn't died yet, but you're in the ICU and the doctors assure you it will be any time now.” She scribbled doodles on the Post-it. “You're from out of town and just doing some comparison shopping while you're here.”

To Bob's credit, he flipped the caller the bird.

“I see,” Mom said, her brown ponytail bobbing with outrage. “Well, then, I suggest you go with Riccoli and Sons. They're a very reputable funeral home
that excels in speedy and affordable cremation.”

If by “reputable” you mean a twenty-percent markup on everything from obituaries to caskets
, I thought, admiring my mother's ability to sound so gracious when she was actually applying the screw.

Mom slammed down the phone and fumed. “I know with business slowing I should have taken that, but . . .”

“You have your ethics,” Bob said, going over to her. “And that's why I love you, Ruth.” He kissed her lightly on the forehead.

Normally, Mom and Bob's PDAs left me mildly nauseous, but I was so grateful the attention had been directed away from Erin and me that I took advantage of the situation to slip away. I figured that as long as I was careful to keep my cuts out of sight, out of mind, the cemetery claw fest would become a nonissue.

But by then, of course, I'd already dug my grave.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

T
he call that changed everything came the following afternoon while I was crammed into a casket, up to my eyeballs in white eyelet.

It was one of our more expensive models, solid walnut from the pricey Perpetual line. Oma pronounced it a “real beaut,” with intricate inlay and artistic detailing, all of which was about to be completely undone by a mouse that my grandmother claimed to have seen hiding in one of its padded corners.

“Lure it out with cheese,” Boo urged, slipping a slim piece of cheddar into my outstretched hand, “and I'll put a bag over it and take it outside.”

Boo was a softie when it came to both the dead and
the living and rarely left a movie without dabbing her eyes and blowing her nose, even comedies with sappy romantic endings. Upon seeing my cuts, for example, she'd wrapped me in a bear hug and murmured, “Tell me who did this, sweetie, and I'll get a guy I know to break both his legs.”

It was strangely comforting, in a mildly violent way.

Oma found an empty urn and held it over her head. “Well, I for one am not about to stand around waiting for it to crawl up my dress,” she announced. “I'm going on the offensive.” At that very moment, the tiny critter reemerged and scrambled over the toes of her new Anne Klein shoes. Oma didn't even notice.

“There it is!” Mom shrieked, hopping onto a stool and pointing hysterically.

The mouse went for it, dashing across the carpet toward the sanctuary of the curtains.

“Die! Die! Die!” My tiny grandmother, who was in her seventies and about the size and height of an Oompa Loompa, brought the silver urn down from over her head and tried to smash the mouse. Boo stepped in for the block, the urn bouncing on the carpet and missing the rodent by a mousy gray hair.

“That was cruel,” Boo said. “It has a right to live, just like everything else.”

“Eeep! There it is again!” Mom screeched as
the creature scuttled out from under our prize blue Potomac coffin, the one no one ever bought because it cost more than $5,000.

The funeral home phone rang. Mom gingerly stepped off the stool and ran on her tiptoes to her office to get it.

Oma retrieved the urn and chucked it bowling ball–style. I could have sworn the mouse was a goner.

“No!” Boo gasped, rushing to scoot the terrified little thing into a paper bag. She finally caught it and went outside to let it free in the garden, while I got out of the casket so Oma could inspect it for mouse poop.

“Normalcy,” she said, “is far too underrated by you people.”

I didn't know if by “you people” she meant teenagers, or Boo and me. I suspected the latter.

Something made us stop, and we both turned to see Mom, her lips set in a firm line, clutching the phone.

“Pickup at the Donohues',” she said flatly.

Oma covered her mouth. “The father?”

Mom shook her head slightly. “The girl who's in Lily's class.” And then, with a look I'd never seen before, one with so much pain it almost made me afraid, Mom whispered, “I'm sorry, Lily. It's Erin.”

“Huh?” I said, my muddled brain assuming Erin was the one who'd called it in.

“About an hour ago,” Mom said, “her parents came home and found her dead upstairs.”

My peripheral vision went black as though I'd stepped into a tunnel. Time slowed. My ears rang. Nothing made sense.

“Not Erin,” I said, feeling confused. Surely, she meant some other Donohue. A different Erin. Obviously, Mom had gotten it wrong.

“I'm so, so sorry,” Mom said again. “This is absolutely horrible.”

The floor rose up and I teetered. Thinking quickly, my mother scooped me up with one arm and kept me steady. My breathing was heavy and I realized I was disassociating. It was as if my soul had left my body and was now watching from above, totally detached.

I've heard that when you die you see your life replayed like a movie. In this case, I saw Erin's, starting with when she'd appeared in the cemetery Saturday and going backward. There she was climbing the steps of our high school's stage to receive yet another award junior year. At the junior prom being crowned queen by Matt. Introducing an assembly about the dangers of underage drinking. Leading a prayer group after the school shootings in Virginia. Delivering a vicious spike in volleyball. Whispering behind her hands when Sara and I passed by her in
the middle school cafeteria. Slipping a nasty anonymous Valentine into my decorated shoebox in fourth grade. Pushing me off the swing in second grade.

Erin Donohue had been a thorn in my side for thirteen years. That she was gone was simply impossible. It had to be a mistake.

“Accident?” Oma asked.

“Nooo,” Mom said carefully. “Appears to have been a suicide.”

Suicide.

A wave of guilt hit me broadside. Erin had taken her own life because she'd gotten it into her head that Matt had dumped her for me. It was crazy, because Erin had everything—looks, smarts, drive, friends, even money—but you never knew, did you? More often than not it was the little things that brought you down.

Oh God, I was going crazy myself.

“Lily?” Oma asked. “Are you okay?”

“I think she's hyperventilating,” Mom said. “We need to . . .”

My knees gave out then. My mother's arm kept me upright, and for once I appreciated her rock-solid stability. “This is all my fault,” I said. “She killed herself because of me.”

“Nonsense,” Oma commanded. I tried to focus, but
my grandmother came in blurry. “Clearly, the child was plagued with demons. First she attacks you, then she takes her own life. If there's anything to blame, it's some underlying mental illness.”

“Oma is right,” Mom said, lifting my chin with her slim finger. “This is a devastating tragedy, and it's only natural to want point the finger, even at yourself, but please don't go there. That doesn't help anyone.”

Their words, while well-intentioned, began to lose their meaning. Whatever Mom and Oma were saying didn't matter. At the core was the truth. That's what I needed to discover.

The truth.

“Lily?”

Mom was peering at me earnestly. Oma was nowhere around and I was on the pastel floral couch in our front office. I didn't even remember how I got there.

She handed me a glass of water, which seemed like such a cliché.

“I'm not thirsty,” I said, pushing it away.

“Yes, you are. Drink it. Just a sip.”