Grave (51 page)

“I loved it there,” she told me. “The other life, I mean, the afterlife. Even as eaten up as it was, the second we first set foot on it, I loved it. That very second. It felt like somehow, I had always been meant to be there. Like I was meant to stay there. As some kind of... I don’t know. Some kind of guardian. Or custodian.”

So far beyond me. So far beyond all of us. So unlike that scared, angry girl, a fugitive from her own town and her own self, that I found cowering in fear of a lost dog—and yet, she still was what she was. She’d gone beyond humanity but her humanity was still there, intact, waiting to be reclaimed: a perfectly ripe apple that would never bruise or go to rot, dropped from a single tree in an endless, sealike orchard and just lying there, patiently, until she decided once more to pick it up. Just like his, her stranger-twin’s. And perhaps just like all of us, living, dead, undead, dead living, all along. Maybe that’s all people ever meant, when they talked about a soul.

“Goodbye,” Amy said. She reached down to Naomi, shaking her hand like that of some precocious foreign dignitary. “Goodbye, Naomi. Take care of my Lisa. Have a good life.”

Naomi had tears in her eyes again. She made a little choking sound, then broke away and ran over to Nick, hanging onto him for dear life. He licked her face, his tail thumping on the sand, and waited in silent, otherworldly patience until she finally let him free.

“Goodbye,” Naomi said. A nearly inaudible, little record-scratch of a sound.

Lucy was embracing me now, Stephen suddenly full of adolescent awkwardness as he leaned forward to kiss me and then thought better of it, clumsily shook my hand. The goodbyes and farewells and till-we-meet-agains were floating all around me but I couldn’t quite seem to hear them, and then they were walking together up the duneface, Amy and Lucy and Stephen and the man who once was Death. Nick trotted close behind them, breaking off only to caper in little circles of canine happiness. Walking away, away forever, without looking back—

“Come back!” I shouted, starting to cry again. “Amy! Please come back!”

I knew she wouldn’t. Even as the words flew out of my mouth I knew she wouldn’t stop, wouldn’t turn around, but I couldn’t help it. I didn’t even know if she’d heard me, if she’d closed her ears as determinedly as she’d turned her back, and now my useless pleadings were lost to the wind. Come back, Amy, Jessie, Karen, Linc, Renee, Mom, Dad, Jim, everyone, please, just stop this horrible foolishness and
come back
—

They were up on the ridge now, near the white gravel road that snaked around the front face of the lab. Beyond my pleas, beyond earshot. They were walking toward the building now, and nobody could stop them. As they went I saw another set of figures, shadowy, undefined, though one of them seemed to be a man, the two others women. They were coming
out
of the lab, down the ridge, toward us, three afternoon-long shadows with the clumsy, staggering, entirely extinct gait of the walking undead. Closer and closer to us, to me, and yet no matter how close I couldn’t manage to
see
them, to make out their faces or features. At this distance, I should have known them by sight—

I closed my eyes hard and shook my head; I didn’t know what I’d just seen, or if I’d really seen it. I looked up to the ridge again, to Amy, her mother, Stephen, Nick, but they were gone. While I’d been distracted chasing shadows, chimeras, they had vanished. No goodbyes. No last look. No more.

Gone. They were gone forever.

I could hear someone crying, sobbing loudly. Not Naomi, who stood there beside me stunned and silent. It was me. I choked back the sounds coming out of me and fought harder than I’d imagined possible to regain my composure; I had to remind myself over and over in the space of seconds that Naomi was right here, depending on me, Naomi who had also lost all her own family and Nick, the nearest thing she’d had to a pet, who she’d grown to love. Naomi had already seen me cry enough. I breathed in hard, between my teeth, and managed to get myself under control.

Was it still possible, in this new world, for people to cry and really mean it over someone they never even knew? Would that be at all possible, for Naomi’s generation? If it were, then maybe we weren’t quite as far in the shit as I’d thought. Just a bare inch higher up in the sewer, but enough to breathe in actual air. Fresh, clean air.

“It’s all right,” I said, when I felt like I could talk again. It felt better, it would feel better for years to come, simply not to look toward the ridge, up at the lab. Easier and better to turn my back. “It’s all right.” I cleared my throat, hoarse and sticky wet from all that crying, and straightened my shoulders, pretending everything was sorted, settled. Fake it until you make it. “It’s been a bad year or two. A terrible year.”

A year.
One
year. Could everything really have changed that much in a
year
? Summer, last summer, that was when the disaster really began. It couldn’t be. It would take all the rest of our lives, to get used to things being what they were. “A terrible year. But things are getting sorted. They wanted to go. They’ll protect us.” Please let me be right. I couldn’t handle it, I really couldn’t, if I wasn’t right. “We can start again, and move forward.”

Another year. I got almost another whole year with my sister, her friends, a year I’d never have had. I can remember her dying peacefully, willingly, not stumbling across the landscape a prisoner of her own rotten body (
just like all of you,
I know she’d say,
just like all you humans face up to it or not
—but let’s face it, her perspective was a little warped). I’d never have met Amy, never have had her in my life. I’d never have found Naomi. I could believe I might see Karen again, someday. I had three daughters now, not just one. I’d just have to picture the other two working outside the country. Away at school. Naomi stared up at me, her eyes shadowed like they were bruised and her shoulders sagging with weariness. All of us, children included, we were all just so tired.

“They’ll protect us?” she asked.

“Yes. They’ll protect us.”

“Just like Jesus? And that man, the old man, the angel?”

“Yes. Just like Jesus.” What place was there for Jesus, Mary, anything I’d believed in, in anything I’d just seen? I couldn’t think about that now. Those thoughts were outside the country, away at school. “And we’ll make everything right. We’ll start all over again.”

Those words brought a worn-out doubt to her face, that all the talk of angels hadn’t. “
How
?” she asked.

How? I’d be asking myself that the rest of my life. But Naomi didn’t have to know that, didn’t need to struggle with my own anguish on top of her own. Somehow, I had no idea how, I had to give her the room to be young, to be a little girl again.

“Slowly,” I said. “One step at a time.” I managed a smile. “My grandmother used to say, how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. Just think about that, when it all feels like too much. Think about... elephants.”

She considered this absurdity for a few silent moments.

“I like elephants,” she said. “I had a book with pictures of them, that I got for my birthday.”

I’d find her another one, in what remained of the county libraries, the ruins of bookstores. My own small, private project. A book with elephants.

“I thought we could go to Cowleston,” I said. “That little town outside the other beach, where that woman Tina lives? You liked Tina, didn’t you? And after everything that happened, they could probably use our help.” A tornado came through. I’d just keep telling myself that: a tornado came through, knocked everything over and sideways, killed some people and destroyed some neighborhoods but you could rebuild, after a tornado. We’d been doing it long before the plague ever arrived.

Could I stand it, to live less than a mile down the road from Cowles Beach, all those memories, all those ghosts who’ve atomized and dispersed themselves elsewhere? Could I stand to stay here? Too many memories all around me; there was no place to run, no place to go that was free of them. Welcome to life. Welcome to answered prayers.

Was Tina even alive, after what had happened? I hoped so. I even prayed so. I had promised.

“So, what do you think?” I glanced down at Naomi. “Should we go back to that other beach, stay there? Have a house of our own?”

Naomi gazed into the distance, her brow furrowing: no wandering attention, she really was thinking it over. Weighing our options. Then she nodded.

“Will you be mad,” she said, “if I do prayers with Tina? On Sunday?”

I shook my head. Please be alive, Tina. I promised. Let her give Naomi back those last things she learned from her mother, her first mother. It was only fair.

“I’m so tired of walking everywhere,” Naomi said. “And now we have to walk back.”

“I’ll carry you,” I said. I stroked her hair. “I can’t promise when, but maybe someday we can have another dog—”

“I don’t want another one,” she said. Her face contorted for a moment, but she didn’t cry. “Just Nick. But he was Amy’s so he had to go with her. I don’t ever want another one—”

“Someone else there might,” I said gently. “If they do, you could play with it.”

Naomi thought that over. Nodded. A picture book, Tina, a dog to play with: already my promises were piling up, all these promises I had no idea if I could keep. But that was all right. The grandiose promises, the almost demented determination somehow to fulfill them, that was all part and parcel of loving a child. Of loving anyone. And sometimes, every now and then, you actually could live up to your word.

Naomi gazed up at the ridge, at the lab building, and a small shadow of disorientation crossed her face; she closed her eyes hard, shook her head like a dog shaking water from its coat. Then she turned away.

I forced myself to look too. I raised my head, turned mine eyes to the ridge; I took in the white gravel road cutting through the knee-high uncut grass, the sandy stone like Lego brick, the rundown crumbling open-air columns of the aquatorium on the opposite side. The few scrubby, lonely, wizened trees at the very top of the sand, too foolhardy to put down roots in the dirt and grass. The thick, knitted swaths of nearly untouched woodland behind the aquatorium and the lab, too far back from the dune bottom to be much more than a long horizontal shadow overlaid with shifting, frothing bands of green. The lake itself, the way it looked bluer and darker and somehow less frenetic here than on the shore in Cowles County. The broken-down Chicago skyline, so sharp and clear in the noontime sunlight that you could imagine yourself walking right over the horizon on glassy, solidified stepping-stones of lake water, slipping into the shadow of the Sears Tower. The Tuskeegee Airmen statue, its copper going patchy green as though mold encroached, sitting by the aquatorium’s wide-open entranceway. I drank it all in, trying to memorize the sight of everything, because once we set out for Cowleston it might be years, might be never, before I ever saw it again.

Goodbye, Jessie, Amy. Jim. Everyone. Goodbye.

It was a long walk to Cowleston, over the county line. Miles to go before we slept. And never mind just our little village-to-be; there were so many people, living people, needing things rebuilt and remade, whether it’s homes or farms or cities or themselves. A long life ahead, a whole lifetime of hard work. Even when the enormity of what had just happened finally hit me, brought me crashing down to the ground again and again every time I tried to get up, there would be so much work to do. I would struggle to my feet, bruised, bleeding, aching in every muscle and bone. Fight. Fly right. Live.

I reached down and took Naomi’s hand.

“Ready?” I asked.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

To Michelle Brower and Jita Fumich, for their constant work on my behalf. To Kate Sullivan and the entire staff of Candlemark & Gleam, for allowing me to complete and share with the world the story I began in
Dust. 
To all my readers who sent both praise and criticism, asked for more and waited, with admirable patience, to get it. To the employees and volunteers of the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore and the Indiana Dunes State Park, for vital information and inspiration. To all my family, loved ones and friends, for their love, encouragement, pep talks and occasional short sharp shocks. To everyone who picks up this book, now or in the future, and finds something in it that speaks to them: I started this story, but all of you together finish it.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

JOAN FRANCES TURNER
was born in Rhode Island and grew up in the Calumet region of northwest Indiana. A graduate of Brown University and Harvard Law School, she lives near the Indiana Dunes with her family and a garden full of spring onions and tiger lilies, weather permitting.