Some Kind of Happiness (14 page)

Jack leads me through the first floor. What used to be the living room has no roof, but the brick chimney is still mostly standing. There is a flower-patterned love seat stained gray and yellow, stuffing spilling out of the cushions. A tiny bookshelf still holds a few books, but most are on the floor, burned black and crisp, scattered in piles. There are heaps of trash,
charred planks of wood, a ceiling fan with two blades missing and the lightbulbs shattered.

Except for the chimney, that far wall of the house is completely gone.

“Upstairs is worse,” Jack says quietly. We walk back through the living room and up the stairs. Jack puts a hand on my arm when we get to the landing, and I jump.

“Careful.” He points to a missing part of the floor. “Don't step there.”

We scoot around the hole and into the only remaining bedroom. It's dark up here, and Jack turns on a flashlight. Piles of trash sit along the walls. They remind me of shadow monsters you might see in a junkyard, full of torn clothes, melted plastic toys, pieces of wall, pieces of doors, pieces and pieces and pieces of someone else's life.

The beam from Jack's flashlight hits a shard of glass, mostly hidden beneath a mound of clothes and a graveyard of stuffed animals stained with ash.

“Wait, over here.” I crouch by the window, where Cole dangled Kennedy's MVP medal out for me and Gretchen to see. Jack follows me with his light, and I dig until I find what I'm looking for.

“It's a picture,” Jack says, looking over my shoulder.

“A family picture?” The glass is cracked, and the photograph is stained from water or fire or maybe something else. I try to wipe some of it away, and through the smoky stains I
see a man with blue eyes, a woman's smile, a kid's feet in two pale pink shoes.

(Child's size 11. For the left foot.)

I squint hard. “It's a man, a woman, and a kid. She's little.”

“Three people,” Jack says. “Three graves?”

We look at each other for two seconds before hurrying downstairs and out the back door. On our way out, I grab a towel, an ice scraper, and a bottle of water from our bucket.

“Where are y'all going?” Gretchen asks. “Come watch me kick Cole's butt at War!”

“Don't you dare wander off, Finley Hart,” Kennedy calls out. “You swore you wouldn't!”

Jack and I ignore them, picking our way through the trash-filled backyard to the sound of cicadas pulsing in the trees. A train horn wails in the distance.

Once we're under the big oak tree, we find the gravestones and get to work, yanking off weeds and scraping away moss. Jack doesn't speak, and neither do I. He looks serious in the flashlight's glow. A grasshopper flits against my leg, but I don't even scream.

We scrub at the layers of caked-on mud until the towel is ruined and we run out of water. My fingers and leg muscles ache, and I am getting eaten alive by mosquitoes, but I don't much care.

“Finley?” Flashlights bob through the leaves, and the others
join us. I hear the buzz of another grasshopper, and Kennedy shrieks.

Jack tells them all to hush. “Don't make so much noise. We don't want to disturb them.”

“Who?” Gretchen peers around us to see the work we've done.

“The Travers family,” I answer quietly, and point at the gravestones. Some of the engraved letters are hard to make out, and we could not clean everything completely, at least not tonight, but we can see enough to read their names:

CYNTHIA TRAVERS,
born
March 24, 1986 |
died
April 17, 1994

JOY TRAVERS,
born
September 3, 1958 |
died
April 17, 1994

FRANK TRAVERS,
born
March 1, 1954 |
died
April 20, 1994

“Holy God,” Gretchen whispers, creeping closer. “One of them was a
kid
?”

“Seriously, guys, this is messed up,” Cole says. “I told you not to touch these things.”

“It's fine, Cole.” Jack shows him the framed picture we found. “Look, it's them.”

“Oh. Great. So you found a creepy picture of dead people. Is this supposed to make me feel better?”

“Come on, don't you get it? Now we know the names of the people who used to live here!”

Cole grabs Jack's shoulders. “I did
not
want to
know
this. It's
freaky
.”

“The dad died a few days after the mom and daughter,” Kennedy points out, trailing her fingers across Frank Travers's gravestone. “Why do you think that is?”

Gretchen stares at the graves. “Mom said my dad never wanted to be buried. They burned him and sprinkled his ashes across the farm where he grew up.”

Everyone grows quiet.

“Your dad's dead?” Cole asks.

“Yeah, but I was really little. I don't remember him. Can you imagine? Being
buried
? I wouldn't want to be stuck underground for all eternity.”

“You'd be dead,” Jack points out.

“Yeah, but I'd still know.”

“How?”

She glares at him. “I'd just
know
, okay?”

“I don't like this.” Cole edges back toward the tree's outer branches. “Maybe we should go home.”

“Wuss,” Jack declares.

Cole cusses at him, but I am thinking about what Gretchen said and not really listening.

Being buried—the weight of all that dirt and rock on top of you, and you yourself sealed into a coffin. No air, no breeze, no sounds.

I am not sure I have ever imagined anything so terrible.

I want to leave.

I must leave. Now.

I cannot breathe.

No matter how hard I try to force down the feeling, my chest is shifting and sliding away from me.

It is a cascade of things:

Being spooked by my surroundings.

Imagining the body of Gretchen's dad being burned, and wondering if part of you, even if you are dead, can still feel things like that.

Wondering why Frank Travers died a few days after his family, and what kinds of horrible things he must have been thinking during that time, all alone, with no one around to ask him if he was okay.

Any sadness I may feel is nothing compared to what he must have been feeling, or what Stick must have felt when her husband died.

I have no right to my sadness when there are dead families and burned houses.

The memories of all the sadness I have ever experienced come rushing back to me in a stream. Days when I could not smile, when I felt heavy and pushed down. Nights when I could not sleep. Mornings when I could not wake up.

These moments of sadness seem so small, now. They seem pathetic.

“Finley?” Jack nudges me.

I jerk away. In these moments, when I am close to losing myself, one of the worst things that can happen is for someone to unexpectedly touch me.

When I am like this, my body feels stretched tight. Like it
is working extra hard to keep me together, and the slightest touch might send me cracking open.

“Are you okay?” Jack says. “You look funny.”

I do not answer him. I crawl through the branches of the oak and escape into the open backyard, but not even fresh air can get rid of this fear living like bugs underneath my skin.

This fear that I have no reason to feel.

There is no reason for the heaviness I can feel pressing down on me. Like when you step outside before a storm and the air feels heavy and damp, like you're drinking it instead of breathing.

Like that, but worse.

It seems wrong to feel these things while standing in front of this poor, broken Bone House.

I ought to be able to get rid of these feelings—right?

Shouldn't I be able to live in my beautiful, clean house (which is not burned) with my family (who are still alive) and be happy about it?

I ought to be able to get rid of these feelings.

I
will
get rid of these feelings.

I walk circles around the house, close my eyes, and listen for the sounds of the Everwood trees, back in the thick part of the forest. I focus on pushing these feelings down to a place where they cannot touch me anymore.

I will push on them, and push on them, until they have nowhere else to go but out of my head entirely.

I
T IS
W
EDNESDAY MORNING.
T
HE
house is quiet because Kennedy, Dex, and Ruth stayed over last night, but they are still asleep.

I did not fall asleep until four in the morning.

Since exploring the Bone House and cleaning off the Travers family gravestones, I have had trouble sleeping. Once my head hits the pillow, my thoughts start spinning and spinning. I think of being buried, and being buried alive, and being burned alive, and Hart House falling down around me, and what my parents are doing, and what the Travers family looked like, and what the Bone House will look like once we clean it, and what the upcoming school year will be like, and what story I will write next about the Everwood, and how quiet the house is around me, and how everyone else is sleeping, and why I can't seem to sleep, and

and

and

My brain just will not stop.

I creep out of my bedroom, my mouth dry and my head heavy. Soft, cheerful music and the smell of pancakes drift up
the stairs. In the kitchen Grandma stands at the stove wearing her pearls; her white apron is spotless.

“Grandma? I have a question.”

Grandma clucks her tongue. “How about, ‘Good morning, Grandma'?”

“I mean, good morning. Sorry.”

“Did you sleep well, Finley?” asks Aunt Dee, passing me a bowl of strawberries, ones I picked out with Grandpa.

Aunt Bridget swirls her glass of orange juice in one hand. “I hope Dex and Ruth didn't keep you up too late. You all seemed to be constantly whispering last night.”

I am quite certain Aunt Bridget's orange juice has alcohol in it. Aunt Bridget hardly ever drinks something that does not have alcohol in it; her drinks smell bitter and sour, even drinks that are supposed to be sweet, like orange juice.

Even though Aunt Bridget smiles a lot, her eyes are thorny, like she is always picking apart everything she sees, to make sure nothing is hiding from her. Maybe she knows this, and matches her drinks to her eyes.

“I slept fine,” I lie.

Uncle Nelson looks up from his newspaper. He is working on a crossword puzzle before leaving for work, so I scoot closer to see.

“Kennedy hasn't been able to stop talking about these games y'all have been playing,” says Uncle Nelson. “I told her she was too old for that kind of thing, but she told me I
was being ridiculous. She's probably right.” He frowns at the puzzle, appearing to be stumped.

Eight-letter word for “family tree subject.” I have to think about that one.

“They call it the Everwood.” Aunt Bridget looks at me over the top of her glass. “Isn't that right?”

The word sounds so strange coming from Aunt Bridget that I consider denying it, pretending that Dex and Ruth are silly eight-year-olds.

Aunt Dee starts folding a pile of fluffy, cream-colored hand towels. “What's the Everwood, sweetie? Is it some kind of code word?”

“No,” I say. The crossword puzzle is distracting me. “It's a forest full of witches and trolls and things.
Ancestry.
” I tap the newspaper. “The word is
ancestry
.”

Uncle Nelson smiles. “Hey, you're pretty good at this, kiddo.”

“I collect words. Dad does crossword puzzles all the time. I help him.”

“Does he? Tell me, Finley,” says Aunt Bridget, “did your dad ever tell you he felt bad for keeping you away from your family all your life? Did he ever mention that?”

I freeze.

Aunt Dee stops folding.

“Bridget,” says Grandma, her back to us. “That's enough.”

The pancake batter sizzles in its pan.

“I'm sorry,” says Aunt Bridget, although she doesn't sound it. “I
just think it's ridiculous that this is the first time I'm seeing my niece. You know, if he and Gwen weren't having problems, I don't think they'd have ever brought her—”

Grandma slams down her spatula. “Bridget, that is enough!”

The sound is an explosion. No one in this house yells, unless it is to call someone in from another room, and even then Grandma makes whoever it is stop at once.

She leans heavily against the countertop, her face pale.

“Mom?” Aunt Bridget sets down her drink and hurries over, Aunt Dee right behind her. They hover around her like birds.

“What is it?” Aunt Dee puts her hand on Grandma's forehead. “Your skin's clammy. Have you eaten yet?”

Grandma waves her away. In a flash she looks like herself again. “I'm fine. Just a little dizzy.” She tugs her apron straight and smiles at my aunts. “Good thing it's almost breakfast time, I suppose. I had such a light dinner last night.”