Alive (34 page)

And that’s exactly what I would think it was if it weren’t for the swelling ache in the cavity of my chest. If I didn’t feel the pressure of my lungs pushing in on my bleeding
heart.

I crawl to my feet. The fetid taste in my mouth and the never-ending throb have produced in me another wave of nausea. “Do you have a spare toothbrush?” I ask, because brushing my
teeth will give me something to do.

“You can use mine.” Henry blushes. “It’s on the sink.”

I seal my lips together to repress a smile. I’ve never borrowed a boy’s toothbrush before, and the idea feels adult. Not something that high school couples typically do. Not that
Henry and I are a couple.

I wave the blue toothbrush under the water and try not to chew on the bristles like I do with my own. I’m totally swapping spit with Henry. I want to laugh, but when I stare into the
mirror, what I see is a girl haunted.

Literally.

And not by my past or my illness or the choices I’ve made, but by a spirit with a vendetta.

If I repeat it enough times, maybe it will stop sounding so ridiculous.

When I return, minty fresh, Henry has his backpack straps over his shoulders and his laces tied.

“I thought you weren’t going to school,” I say, unable to hide my disappointment.

“I’m not, but we can’t stay here,” he says. “My parents need to think we’re going to school.”

“Do you think he knows where I am?”

“We’ll figure it out.” He tosses me my book bag. “Together. In the meantime, where to?”

I pause, looking around the room filled with books and DVD sets, that smells like Henry and feels safe and known and secure, and I know that I won’t have this feeling again until I win,
but if I’m taking bets, let’s face it, I wouldn’t put the odds in my favor.

A wave of sadness moves through me. “I need to see it for myself,” I say. “I want to go to the cemetery.”

It may be naive, but I’ve always believed the carvings on headstones. Anything etched in stone has the ring of both finality and truth and there’s something
particularly comforting about those three short words
rest in peace
.

A sort of send-off, a fond farewell, like people waving from the shore to a departing ship.

But who knows if any of that is true? With so little peace in the world, why do we suddenly expect to stop on a dime at the threshold to death’s door?

I don’t. Not anymore.

It’s as if I’ve been walking around beneath the cover of a veil for my entire life and now that it’s been lifted I can see the circus of sideshow freaks lurking in all of the
world’s nooks and crannies.

In the silence, I wonder if Henry now feels the same way.

I follow him out of the car. Our slamming doors ring out with a loud aluminum echo in the open air. Together we stand, shoulders touching, and stare up at Sacred Heart with its steeple that
tickles the clouds in the sky and stately graveyard that stretches for a mile back.

“Church twice in one month?” I say, thinking back to the day of Elsie’s christening, where I’d slinked into the back pew, scared to go anywhere near my sister for fear
I’d try to hurt her again. I thought that I’d hit rock bottom. Little had I known I was still on the fifth floor. “I ought to be sainted.” I slide my hands into my back
pockets.

Henry starts off toward the side of the church. “Somehow I doubt that.”

“Oh, right.” I trot after him. “I’m sorry, that’s you, Saint Henry of Seattle. Patron saint of sick girls everywhere.”

He smirks. “Not everywhere. Just one. Just here.”

At that, my heart skips like a stone. “Okay, then, Saint Henry of Stella. It has a lovely ring to it.”

I lead Henry around to the back of the chapel, over a path made of misshapen stepping-stones. A bell in the steeple tower tolls ten times over. I look up at it. The large brass bell swings like
a pendulum. My dad took me up there once when I was a kid so that I could see the whole city on one side and the water on the other. There’s a small lookout with a railing, and he held onto
the back of my shirt while I gripped the railing and looked down at the tiny figure of my mother waving up to us.

When the last bell chimes, I find myself in a garden looking out over the church cemetery. I love that Henry didn’t ask why I needed to come here or how it would help anything to see a
rock with a few words carved into it. He just came.

Gray headstones stretch away for a mile. I stare out at the field, decorated with the physical remnants of death—some arched, some rectangular, others flat squares planted in the
ground—all lined up, an army of graves. I push my side into Henry’s to soak in his warmth. He slides his hand up to the back of my neck and gives it a comforting squeeze.

“Jesus,” he says. “How will we ever find it?”

I cup one hand over my eyes. “Fan out, I guess. Check every one…” There’s no need to finish. We both understand the task at hand.

Henry lets his hand fall from my neck. The cold seeps in, wrapping around me like a scarf. I watch as he trots down the short flight of stairs to the graveyard before following.

The soil is soft from last night’s storm, but not muddy, on account of the lush grass that must be meticulously cared for. A few branches and bits of leaves and other debris have blown
into the cemetery and are scattered around like Easter eggs.

Henry cuts left, so I make my way to the right side, past the gravelly aisle that runs down the center to meet with a marble statue of the Virgin Mary.

As suspected, the first couple rows yield nothing. I linger at a few of the headstones, whose dates span particularly short lengths of time.

April Linley Hayes lived only six years, but her tombstone towers over the others. A wreath of roses and ferns loops over the top like a halo. On the other end of the spectrum, a certain Matthew
James McDougal lived for just three days. His grave marker is one of those plaques dug into the dirt with grass growing over the edges, which probably means no one’s bothered to visit in
years.

I sneak a glance over at Henry. He’s stooped down, brushing his hand across the ground. My breath catches before he quickly moves onto the next.

I experience the same effect each time I come across a name that starts with an
L
. The
Z
last names are much less common, but I do happen upon a Zucker and a Zimmerman, both of
whom died well into old age.

Maybe it’s because my neck hurts and my eyes have glazed over. I suppose that’ll happen after intense peering at etched words, which tend to lose all meaning after around one hundred
or so, but when I’m nearly even with the Virgin Mary, in her frozen head scarf and robe with a look of utter grief preserved in the lines of her forehead, I stop. I trace my steps back two
headstones. I squint, understanding now why I’d stopped.

In careful block letters, carved into a pearly white stone that measures just south of my knees, I read the following inscription:

R
EST IN
P
EACE

L
EVI
M
ICHAEL
Z
IN

T
URN
,
MORTAL
,
TURN
,
THY DANGERS KNOW
,

W
HER
’
ER THY FOOT CAN TREAD
;

T
HE EARTH RINGS HOLLOW FROM BELOW
,

A
ND WARNS THEE BY HER DEAD
.

“Henry,” I croak. He doesn’t turn. He’s several rows ahead of me on the other side of the cemetery. But if I leave my post, I risk losing the placement of the headstone.
I take a deep breath. Something in the cemetery’s atmosphere begs me to stay quiet, maybe in solidarity with the dead. I hold my hands around my mouth like a megaphone and yell.
“Henry!”

A small flock of pigeons launch into the air nearby. They chirrup and flap, knocking into each other as they rise to the level of the trees. Henry’s head snaps up. I exaggerate my gesture
of waving him over. He cocks his head. I point at the grave in front of me, afraid to shout again.

Finally, Henry must understand. He bows his head and jogs toward me, zigzagging through the gravestones.

“I found it,” I say when he arrives. Now that he’s here, though, the whole thing feels a bit anticlimactic. We stare down at the rock, which seems cold, dead, and as lifeless
as the corpse buried underneath.

Henry circles the headstone like he’s in search of a trapdoor. “All this time and his body’s been right here.” He trails off into silence and then: “Now what?
Should we whip out the Ouija board? Hire an exorcist?”

“Call Ghostbusters?” I add. “I’m glad my eternal damnation is a joke to you.”

My legs have taken on the consistency of jelly. Rustling leaves fill the air with white noise, and pretty soon the same wind picks our cheeks raw, and Henry and I are left cold and shivering.
Who knows how long we’ve been standing at the grave of Levi Zin lost in thought? Long enough for Henry’s nose to turn reindeer red.

Without thinking, I move toward him and burrow my nose into the soft spot below his throat. He cups my head and I think I feel him smell my hair again. I let him. I’m exhausted and
he’s Henry, and I’d been wrong about us all along.

“At least one person doesn’t think I’m crazy,” I say, fracturing our silent vigil.

“Oh yeah? Who’s that?”

I pull away. Henry raises his eyebrows, but the crinkling at the corners gives him away.

I shove him and he stumbles back a step and I return my attention to the gravesite.
Thy dangers know, wher’er thy foot can tread,
I read once more with a shiver.

Scoping the surrounding tombstones, I spot a large bouquet of long-stemmed roses nestled in the grass nearby. I stoop down and from the flowers, I shimmy one rose free, careful not to prick
myself on the thorns.

Standing at the foot of Levi’s grave, I cross myself from my forehead to my chest to my shoulders. Here lies the boy who has given me his heart. This is why I wanted to come here, I
realize. To pay my respects to the person who has given me the greatest gift I could ever ask for.

“Thank you,” I whisper. Crouching down, I lay the rose gingerly on the spot where he’s buried.“But you forgot the most basic rule,” I say, standing up and brushing
my hands free of dirt. “No take-backs.”

And just like that, I declare war. There will be no going back, no surrender, no chance for diplomacy. We play for keeps.

“Busy signal,” I tell Henry when he ducks out of the car, carrying two cans of Coke that he picked up from the Quickie Mart. I’m sitting on the hood, hands tucked into the
sleeves of his Duwamish sweatshirt, which is so big I can tuck my knees inside it. The moon is a fingernail sliver hanging above. The sun, sunk below the horizon, has left a bright smear across the
lower half of the sky that now lingers noncommittally between silver and navy blue. “Are you sure you’ve got it on the right station?” I ask. We’re parked at an access point
somewhere between two rickety piers. Unseen below, the Duwamish Waterway splashes and churns. Wisps of sea breeze still reach us up here, where we can taste the salt that clings to our cheeks and
tangles our hair so sharply that we may as well be sitting on the beach. The car sinks under his weight.

“This isn’t my first
Lunatic Outpost
rodeo.” Henry pops the top and hands me one of the cans. I slurp bubbles off the rim.

“Busy signal still,” I say. I check my messages. None from my parents, which means they still believe the cover story that I’m sleeping over at Brynn’s.

“Try again in a few minutes,” he says.

I twist to peer through the windshield. The doors to Henry’s car are open, the windows down. Static buzzes through the stereo system.

“What if he’s not taking calls tonight?” My arms feel too tired to move. At some point, I’d fallen asleep in Henry’s car while he researched how to become Henry the
Spirit Slayer on his phone or something. This, I’ve learned, is my standard defense mechanism. If life begins to overwhelm me, no matter where I am or what I’m doing, I will inevitably
choose to take a nap. After the five-oh-eight pain, it’s like a hole has been punched through my chest.