A Gracious Plenty (6 page)

Everyone suspected that the mayor wished it was Leonard who’d died. Probably even Leonard knew it, because after that, he got fat, like his body was trying to take up enough space for two boys—not just one. And after that, I felt sorry for Leonard for a little while and I didn’t laugh so much when he was teased.

Nobody knew what had happened to Marcus. The family said he’d died in the night. On his death certificate, the doctor wrote “failure to thrive,” and in my mind, I compared it to the tiny pines I’d found near the river and moved into the yard. I’d watered them, tended them, and they died anyway, like Marcus. I considered it “failure to thrive” when they dried up and the small needles broke away from the stick of their trunks. But I knew that I may have watered them too much, or stepped on them by accident once or twice.

It wasn’t until years later that I thought of Marcus Livingston again. I was fifteen, without friends, with no figure to speak of, no talents or plans for my life, and with my ma just past buried. I had Papa to take care of, but he kept busy all the time to keep from thinking. He took up motors, tinkering with them late in the nights. He fixed the lawn mowers and tractors himself in the little shed behind the house. He put them together and took them apart, and greased all the pieces and went back to work.

I did my lessons after school and walked down to the river. I had a bike, and sometimes I rode it between tombstones. I planted my flowers and picked them for Ma’s grave, and in the nights, I had dreams of vases and flowers in all sizes and shapes. In my dreams, I had to arrange them, and I arranged them over and over: daisies in blue glass and roses in clear, gladiolias in buckets, mums and phlox in old soup cans, again and again, like puzzles. Some nights as soon as I’d get an arrangement finished, it’d burst into flames. I’d have to put out the fire with the water from other vases. Then the flowers from vases without water withered, and so on.

I cooked sometimes, but mostly we ate sandwiches. We bought hams and turkeys, cut them to slabs, and ate them on white bread with mustard.

In the evenings, I’d sit in front of the mirror with slices of meat, plastering them damp to my face and imagining what I’d look like with skin unwithered. The meats we bought presliced were best, though the turkey was too white, the ham too pink. They did not make pressed beef—or at least they didn’t sell it where I grew up, and it would have been too dark anyway. But in the evenings, in front of the mirror, I could smooth it to my face and neck and pretend.

I went through a stage where I slept that way, thinking that maybe the cure had never been discovered. Maybe burns could be cured with ham on the cheek, bonded with jellyish fat to my skin. I tricked myself into thinking that perhaps I’d wake up with skin thriving, and I began to wear the wedding-dress veils so that when I woke, I could pull back the veil and be surprised by the evenness of my face.

I was disappointed each morning. And if my soul could have divorced my body, it would have. Every day that I woke up burned and stinking of meat, I saw myself uglier, a remnant of a girl. I looked to the ground, uneven like my face, and took consolation in the textured earth. But after a while, I grew too ugly to go to school, to go to the store. After my ma was dead, there was nothing left to prove. I could go ahead and admit how ugly I was.

“You’re pretty as a picture,” Papa would say, and when I’d cry about my face, he didn’t understand. “You been this way for a long time, Finch,” he’d remind me. “It looks better than ever. Ain’t you used to it yet?”

He didn’t know what to do when his words made me quiet. So he grew quiet, too. Together we walked to Ma’s grave, and he’d stop by trees, take my hand, say, “Feel,” and rub my palm against the bark. “Your beauty’s like a
pine’s
,” he’d say. It was all he could do. It was all he could muster. He found more comfort mowing the grass and trimming hedges than he found with me.

The boys from the high school drove by in their Fiats and Volkswagen Bugs, rolling down the windows and hollering out that so-and-so wanted to take me on a date.

Papa’d look up from his newspaper and ask, “Do you wanna go out with that boy, Finch?”

“They’re making
fun
of me,” I’d snap.

“Now, you don’t know that,” Papa’d say. “Maybe that boy wants to take you to a show.”

But one night, some boys dared each other to break into the cemetery, climb into my bedroom window, and kiss me good night. It was a rite of passage for some club they were forming, and we didn’t have any haunted houses in the neighborhood. I was the next-best thing.

But they clanked the ladder against the house and woke us up. Papa met them outside, just as I stuck my head out to see what was going on.

The boy on the ground ran away, yelling terrible things, but Papa caught the one who’d been climbing.

Papa had strong arms and shook the truth right out of him.

“Why
my
daughter?” Papa asked him.

“Just ’cause,” the boy said.

“None of that,” Papa scolded, the boy’s hair waving as Papa jostled him.
“Why my daughter?”

And I called to Papa, “Just let him go,” because I was worried that the one who’d run would come back with friends. Because I didn’t really want to hear the boy’s answer.

“ ’Cause—you know—of the way she looks.”

“And how does she
look
?” Papa asked him.

“She’s …”

“How does she
look
?” Papa asked again. And the boy twisted beneath his grip.

“She looks like somebody’s bride,” he answered, and he began to snicker.

But Papa was quick about turning that laugh to a whimper. “Tell her you’re sorry,” he demanded, “or I’ll jerk this arm out the socket.”

“Sir, I think you’ve done that already,” the boy said. “What’s your daughter’s name?”

He didn’t even know my name. I think that’s what did it for Papa—because he didn’t give the boy time to apologize. He began beating him, and the boy ran off, with Papa chasing him, furious.

And then when I knew I’d embarrassed Papa, too, then the world was too much to bear.

I wandered around the cemetery, wishing to be buried. I studied the ground, and the bones in my neck grew curved, my spine caning. I walked through the stones to the river and back, and my world was as silent as I needed it to be. It was good that I needed it to be.

And after a while, with the world so quiet, with just the crickets chirping and the toads, I began to hear voices in the nights. I’d sit up in my bed, with sliced ham on my face, the veil from Ma’s dress over my head, and I’d think I’d hear her singing. I’d think I’d hear whole conversations, just faint. Sometimes I’d hear voices saying my name.

Being so lonely, it was only natural for me to track down those sounds.

So I started sleeping on Ma’s grave, but the voices were always just out of reach. It was like hearing someone through a vent, someone in another room. And I wasn’t sure if the voices were outside or inside my head. It took a long time to tune my ears, to cut off the outside and dive to the sounds.

Then one night, I chased down my ma’s voice. She said, “Something smells like meat.”

“It’s me,” I said. “Don’t you see me?”

I took off the veil and peeled back the ham, and I saw my ma there, though it was like I saw her through a screen. I saw my ma digging mud from beneath her toenails. Ma squinted her eyes and said, “Finch?”

“Hey, Ma.”

“You’re here?” she said.

“I guess so,” I answered.

“For good or just visiting?”

“Visiting,” I answered, though I wasn’t wholly sure. “Who’s that crying?” I asked.

“Marcus Livingston,” she said. She was exhausted from hearing him already.

“Is it really that bad here?”

“Not so bad,” she said. “Except I miss you,” and she reached to kiss me, but there was no way. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I’m just so sorry.”

“It’s okay, Ma,” I told her.

“You shouldn’t be here,” she warned, but I stayed.

“There’s a price,” she said. “If you borrow time here, you’ll have to pay for it.”

“I don’t care,” I told her, and she comforted me, with just words, because I couldn’t reach her.

Oh, if I could have reached her, if she could have reached me. I lamented all those nights when she came to my bed, her hands on my face, feeling into my collar, tracing ridges. I wished I’d grabbed her then and held on. I moaned above her grave for the touch I couldn’t feel, rolling like a cat in the dirt where grass had not yet grown.

I
’M GOING TO
green Finch’s ivy,” Lucy declares.

The workday is over. The Dead are having free time, playing poker and making necklaces with clover flowers. But Lucy’s not ready to quit.

“Her ivy’s green already,” the Mediator replies. “And besides, it’s almost dark.”

“I won’t be gone long,” Lucy tells her. “The new leaves, they need speckling.” And she darts across the graveyard, hurdling over tombstones, following me home.

I’m tired. I spent the whole day laying bricks around a war vet’s grave. It was something his grandson had seen in a magazine and requested. He wanted an ugly little pen for his grandpa and sent a check to pay for the bricks, the mortar, my labor. But there is no way to charge him for the ache between my shoulders and in the middle of my back at the one place I can’t reach.

“I don’t know where you get all that energy,” I holler to Lucy, who’s now up ahead.

“I borrow it from the universe,” she answers. “Didn’t you take physics? Energy is neither created nor destroyed. It just changes shape. There’s a law about it. It goes something like that.”

“I see,” I tell her. “Listen, I’m glad for the company, but when I get home, I’m going in to take a bath.”

“That’s fine,” she says. “I’m just here to green your ivy.” And she giggles to herself and does a somersault as she makes her way into my yard. She’s just like a child sometimes, begging for my attention.

I go on inside and run myself a tub. I put in eucalyptus soap and lots of warm water, and I sink to my shoulders there and steep.

“Hey, Finch,” Lucy calls from outside the window.

“Hmmm?” I say.

“You asleep?”

“Nah,” I mutter.

“I need a favor,” she whispers.

“What?” I ask. “Why
did
you follow me home?”

“I need you to talk with Mama again,” she tells me, seriously now. “I need for her to know I killed myself.”

When I open my eyes, I can see her in the mirror, her elbows propped up on my windowsill, framed in the ivy growing around it.

“Lucy, how many times you gonna ask me to do this?”

“Until she admits it,” she says. “She’s gotta admit it.”

“I got one question for you: What does it hurt for her to think you were murdered? If it’s easier for her to accept murder over suicide, then why do you care?”

Lucy doesn’t answer me at first. I see that she’s studying my body, staring at me laying there, and I almost pull the shower curtain when she catches herself.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “Your scars are just so—”

“Ugly,” I answer for her, and I lay my wet washrag over my burned shoulder, like it’s big enough to hide me. I’d need five or six washrags to cover all I need to hide. I’d need a whole towel.

“Stop it.” She laughs. “Let me see.”

“No,” I say, rolling my back to her.

“Finch, let me see. They’re not ugly.”

And so I remove the cloth and return to my back, almost defiantly, almost daring her to say the wrong thing.

“It’s strange not having a body at all,” she tells me. And it takes me a while to digest that, because I can only see her when I remember the shape she held in the past. But that’s about
my eyes
—not her presence.

Then she asks me, “Have you ever flown in an airplane?”

I shake my head no.

“If you ever get a chance, fly. From the air, the ground looks a lot like your skin. You wouldn’t believe how intricate and detailed and beautiful …” and she trails off, color spreading up her face.

“Tell me about your mama,” I say to get her back on track.

“Oh, I don’t know.” Lucy sighs. She buries her head into her arms, then looks back up, into the mirror, speaking to my image. “Do you know how many times Mama took me to the beauty parlor to get my hair teased up and sprayed, when all I wanted to do was jump on Charles Belcher’s bed? Or how many times she made me walk around the house with books on my head when I wanted to play softball? I swear, Finch, it just makes me so mad.

“Do you know that I took piano lessons instead of playing softball because I couldn’t show off softball skills to judges in an auditorium? I sat in front of lighted makeup mirrors and learned where to put the blue eye shadow and where to shade with purple. And if I got a zit, she screamed at me for eating chocolate.
Of course
I ate chocolate! And then if I gained a few pounds, she’d keep me home from school to make sure I didn’t eat. If I fell off the side of my high-heel shoes, she’d make me wear them to school. It’s like I did everything that she wanted—because she insisted on it—and most of it was against my will.”

“I hear you,” I say. “I really do. But tell me what that’s got to do with hurting your mama this way. Is it really that important?”

“Yes,”
Lucy replies. “Yes. Because the running away I
chose
. And my life up north might not have been all that impressive, but it was still mine. And my death was my choosing, too. It might’ve been a bad choice, Finch. It might’ve been the worst one I could make. But it was
mine
.”

And I want to ask her if she really thinks it matters anymore which choices were hers, which choices were not. Even
I
know that things happen for reasons, if you let them happen.

But she’s Lucy Armageddon, and she’s stubborn with my heart.

“Do you love your mama?” I ask.

“Of course I love her,” she says.

V
ACATION
B
IBLE SCHOOL
has just let out, and the children race down the street towards Lois Armour’s house. It’s her day to serve refreshments, but she doesn’t do it in the Fellowship Hall like the other hosts. She’s prone to seizures and afraid to leave home. So she invites the children onto her concrete lawn, one age group at a time. The punch and pound cake sit on her metal glider chair, and a small girl is pushing the chair back and forth, watching the punch slosh as Lois greets the sixth graders who’ve just arrived.