Six Feet Over It (11 page)

I CREEP TEN MINUTES LATE
into the office, where Wade sits unnaturally straight-backed, stiff and nervous before a youngish couple slumped near the space heaters.

“Oh, Leigh!” he says, barely masking his totally unnerved, unprofessional relief. It’s been weeks since he’s had to do a sale. “Leigh’s here, here she is, this is Leigh, our … office manager. She’ll be taking care of you now, so I’ll just …” He stands, drops the pen where he’s left off with the paperwork, squeezes my shoulder, and is out the door, with all the class of an Olive Garden waitress,
I’m going on my break now, but Leigh’s here to take care of you if you’d like a refill on those iced teas, more breadsticks, whatever you need!

The woman stares vacantly ahead; the man nods.

I shrug out of my coat, drop my backpack behind the chair, and pick up the pen. “So …” I scan Wade’s terrible handwriting, stalling in my best grown-up voice. “Let’s see where we are. …”

At Need, standard burial—but then crossed out, cremain burial, crossed out. Oh jeez.

“I think we’re having trouble figuring out which … ,” the man apologizes. “We can’t … Could you maybe tell us how they—what it’s like?”

Thanks, Wade.

“You know what?” I’m all pretend-calm, fake-not-panicked. “Let’s take a look at some markers. That’s a good start; then we’ll see how we feel. We can take as much time as we need. Okay?”

What is all this “we” crap? God, these poor people, having to deal with my inanity. But they sit up in the wingbacks.

I haul out the catalogs and guide them through the glossy pages of bronze, granite, extravagant but easily chipped marble, the engraving options—
Emily’s mom paid extra for the pony and the dove
—and they keep turning the pages again and again to little upright stones, lambs and angels—oh no no no, I skim the paperwork once more, birth and death dates still blank—God, Wade, what have you left me with?

Not even a day old.

All those headstones out in the baby section—yes, they had to get here somehow, but aren’t they all from a hundred years ago? Iron lungs, diphtheria on the wagon trail? What about modern medicine?

They are spending more time picking out her headstone than they did holding her. I twist a rubber band around and around my fingers under the desk and share my limited knowledge of the difference between burying an embalmed body and a cremated one. Didn’t Howard discuss this with them? Neither option offers any more comfort than the other. They cannot decide.

The three of us are mired in indecision.

I reach blatantly into the bottom left-hand desk drawer.

“Care for a mint?”

We leave it sort of Pre-Needy: they buy a little space, order the headstone, say they’ll call when they figure out which option will cause the relatively least amount of horrible, horrible sadness. I do not tell them I will be looking forward to their call. I offer them more Yorks for the road.

I pull my coat on, make certain the Rivendell van is gone, and go searching for Dario.

At the top of Serenity Valley, he does not look up when I sit on a granite boulder two up and three over from the grave he is in. He digs. I hover in the warm hypnotic cadence of shovel, toss. Shovel, toss. Shovel, toss.

Shovel, toss. Shovel, toss. Shovel, toss.

For a long while.

Shovel, toss. Shovel, toss. Shovel, toss.

“Elanor really likes you.”

I inhale grave-soil air.

“I could take you,” he says. “To Rivendell. You could go with Kai, or—Wait, how old do you have to be to drive?”

I shake my head.

“Yes! Can’t you take the class yet? When can you do that?”

“Can’t.”

“Why not?”

“I can’t.”

“Don’t you
want
to?”

I close my eyes.

“Leigh.”

Shovel, toss. Shovel, toss. Shovel.

“Would you want to be buried,” I ask, “or cremated?”

“Depends on how old I am when I learn to drive.”

“Oh my God, come
on.
Please.”

He shakes his head at me. Smiles. “We don’t cremate.”

“That’s racist.”

“Hilarious,” he says. “My
family.
We bury.”

“How come?” I ask.

He shrugs. “What about you?”

I am startled to realize I’ve never really thought about it.

So I do.

“Maybe … neither? Oh, could I just be dropped into the ocean?”

“Might wash up later.”

“Oh. Right. Yikes.”

“In my town people die and we bury them the next day. Sometimes we lay them in the living room first, or at the church. People like to come take a look and say goodbye, like a wake. We use our front room. My dad moves the breakfast table into the kitchen and we dress them in clothes they liked; the women pick things out. Then my cousins and my uncles and my father and I go dig the grave. Every town has its own cemetery; there’s no driving to the funeral, no driving to visit, you live near your family. Always. We dig the grave and carry the coffin from the church or the living room, through the streets and straight to the grave, everyone together. When we took my grandmother we had music, a mariachi band walked with us. We bury them, we mix cement, pour it. Some bricks. Then everyone goes back to the house and my dad moves the table back and we eat till we’re ill.

“And then November comes and it’s
Días de los Muertos,
which is a big-enough deal, but in some places like in my town, the first day, your birthday, is for the dead children.
Día de los Angelitos.
”

“Wait,
what
?”

“Day of the Angels.”

Time slows, even the birds are silent.

“Are you making this up?”

“I told you!”

“No,” I say, so sad it hurts. “No. You never said.”

“Best day to be born.” He smiles. “It’s a responsibility.”

Sure. One more I’m spectacularly failing.

Grave soil smells bright. Damp. Cold.

“So my family, for the first November first after a child has died, the godparents go to the parents’ house and set a table for them. Fruit and sweets, candy skulls and skeletons and
pan de muerto,
which is just bread baked into a skull—you know, shaped like a skull. Their soul will eat the good part, not the actual
food
of it, but … like the point of it?”

“Essence?”

“… the heart of who left it there …”

“The essence.”

“Essence?”

“Of it.”

“The
essence of it.
Okay. And we leave crosses and rosaries so the Virgin will pray for them, and there are a million candles. It’s not some happy party, but it’s not like here, either. Americans hate a mystery. They’ve made death so dark and scary. Hateful. It is a door, it is beautiful; it isn’t—it’s not like here.”

Ask that baby’s parents. Ask Emily’s mother—they know it is not beautiful to bury your daughter.

On the highway, cars pass.

“Then the second of November is all dancing and parades in the plaza and the gardens. Everyone’s really happy because it’s finally here, this one day of the year the dead get to walk again with the living, walk beside us. You can feel them. It goes on all day and into the night until midnight, but near my home, my parents’ house, there is our lake, Pátzcuaro Lake, and in the center is Janitzio Island. At midnight everyone floats candles on the water, little golden stars floating in the blackness. … And the
mariposas,
little boats that look like they have butterfly wings because the fishermen use these nets, big wing-shaped nets—they fly in the stars on the water. Little butterfly boats. They float in the dark with the candles and sail to the island. Because on the island is a cemetery, the most beautiful cemetery. You would
love
it.”

Oh, good. He’s turning into Wade. Perfect.

“Everyone brings more candles to the graves there, and food and rosaries. Grateful that they lived, that we had them for the while we did. And then sometimes we sleep beside them all night because really, they haven’t left us. They need us. They are the lights on the water. They need us to help them always stay. They’re in the dark, they’re with us, only … changed.”

All things change. Nothing is extinguished.

Ovid is wrong. There is no metamorphosis. Emily is extinguished.

No wonder he got kicked out of Rome. Augustus was sick of that jerk, too.

The shovel flies from the hole and lands neatly beside the soil pile. Dario’s hands reach up for the edge and he climbs out. Sits beside me on the muddy lawn.

My throat is tight. “I think I hate them.”

“Who?”

“Wade. Meredith.”

“No you don’t.”

“Just him, then.”

“No you don’t,” he says again.

“He’s an idiot.”

“Oh, now—”

“He
is.
He calls caskets
coffins;
people think he’s an idiot!”

“A casket’s not a coffin?”

“Coffins have six sides. Dracula uses a coffin. It’s all caskets now, four sides. Why do I know this and he doesn’t? Stupid.”

The wind chimes are still, the quiet rings in my ears.

“I’m scared,” I say.

“Of what?”

“All of it. Everything.”

“Sure you’re not just lonely?”

I shake my head.

“Well,” he says, “what are you going to do about it?”

What
am
I going to do about it?

We sit for a long time unwrapping York after York, an entire Halloween fun-size bag gone.

“Jesus Christ, what the hell are you
doing
?” Wade screams—
screams
—to Kai at the top of his lungs from his stealthy perch on a leafy branch high in a really tall oak as she runs past, red-faced and intent, hanging back from the front of the crowd of other red-faced intently running girls.

It’s the first cross-country meet of the spring semester, home advantage at our school so at least we could walk to this one, and Wade is reveling in what has become his signature unsolicited “coaching” method (racing from one mile marker to another, climbing trees to holler encouraging obscenities as she passes), which the actual coach has given up trying to quell. Kai is far too valuable and the rest of the team just ignores him, so no biggie. He climbs down, takes a swig of Gatorade.

“Move it!” he calls. “We’ll go meet her at the half!” I dog-ear my place in
To the Lighthouse,
wishing Wade would take a page from Virginia Woolf and maybe execute a little less dialogue.

“I’ll wait at the finish.” I shake leaves from the sweatshirt I am sitting on. He waves, runs off to the shortcut to yell more helpful advice. Meredith is home painting, and I have surrendered a Saturday double depth with Dario to cheer Kai on.

I climb to the top of the concrete bleachers, away from the flapping plastic circus flags of the finish line.

“Leigh!”

I squint into the early-spring sun.

Footsteps on the loose dirt track, dark knotted braids, and she bounds up the tall rise of the bleachers.

“Hey!” she pants. “Thank God, I thought I’d have to suffer this all by myself!”

Black skirt. Pale pink blouse. The boots.

She is everywhere. Or maybe there is just one of her, multiplying, a never-not-cheerful
Fantasia
broom bent on driving me out of my nut.

“Okay if I join you?”

I nod.

She sits beside me, turns her head sideways to read my book spine. “For class?” I shake my head. She smiles. “Just smart.”

I shake my head.

“So,” she says. “School. It’s big. Is this where you have PE?”

“Sometimes. If it’s not raining.”

“It’s nice.”

I shrug.

“How’s work?”

“Busy.”

She nods. “Dario says spring may slow down your winter rush. I
love
that guy, don’t you?”

Shrug.

The crowd cheers, muted in the distance. She turns toward the sound.

“I seriously don’t get it. Do they have to do it so
much
?”

Now I can’t help myself—this is a conversation I’ve guiltily yearned for since Kai got better. “I
know
!” I say. “I love that she loves it, but the
obsession
 … I just want to shake her and say,
Get ahold of yourself!
”

Elanor laughs, leans forward conspiratorially. “My God, every morning, every weekend, he’s
always
sweaty—he pretends he loves it, but I know he doesn’t, not like Kai. But if it keeps him near her … and I guess the usual high school deification of jocks is a bonus. He seems to have lots of friends at school already.”

“Really?”

“They don’t know he still has dice in his backpack.”

I kick a rock down steps. “How’s
your
work?”

“Same. More fun when Kai’s there to keep Balin out of my hair. My dad’s always saying, ‘She brings light to the Shire.’ ” She rolls her eyes.

“What
is
that?”

“Him thinking he’s a hobbit. I don’t know, he’s … well, you met him.”

“No—
the Shire
?”