“What are you doing here?”
Gracie blinked as if she’d never seen me in her life. I could tell she wanted to ask who the hell I was to question her, but instead she said, “I’m visiting. What are you doing here?”
The wind picked up and blew hair across her face. She tucked it back behind her ears real neatly. She wore black Doc Martens and green Army pants, a white T-shirt with a black vest speckled with buttons of music groups. She looked kind of punk, but I could never tell what her style was. She didn’t dress like other girls. Not like the cheerleaders with long hair and made-up faces, and not like the smart girls in sweaters and pleated pants. She once shaved her head in junior high and everyone said she was a witch. I sort of liked her head like that, the skin shining, but couldn’t make myself tell her. And after a while it was like with Jamie. The moment passed, her hair grew in, and I was late as usual.
I nudged the ground with my shoe, not knowing how to answer. The way she said you made me think she didn’t like me. But I had never talked to her—I didn’t talk in general—so how could she not like me? She got tired of waiting for my answer, though, and turned to look at Jamie’s grave.
“Visiting,” I said, after she turned. I was annoyed I couldn’t come up with anything but the same answer she’d given, and crossed my arms over my chest.
Gracie didn’t look back. She kept her eyes on Jamie’s grave. I started to think maybe she was going to steal it. The headstone, that is. I mean, the girl was a known rock collector and a headstone would complete any collection. I wondered if I should call the police and tell them. I imagined them taking her out in cuffs, making her duck her head as they tucked her into the back of the car. I imagined her staring angrily at me through the back window as they drove away. After a while I made myself stop daydreaming and when I did, I found her on her knees sobbing.
I didn’t know how long she’d been like that, but she was going full force. I mean, the girl didn’t care if anyone was around. She cried like a baby, like a total mess. I thought maybe I should say something, but I didn’t know what. So I just shouted, “Hey! Don’t do that!”
That didn’t work, though. She kept on crying. She even growled a little and beat her fist in the dirt.
“Hey!” I said again. “Didn’t you hear me? I said, ‘Don’t do that!’”
But she still didn’t listen.
So I started to dance.
I kicked my heels in the air and did a two-step. I hummed a tune to keep time. I clasped my hands behind my back and did a jig my grandfather once showed me, and when my idiocy failed to distract her, I started to sing the “Hokey Pokey.”
I belted it out and kept on dancing. I sung each line like it was poetry. “You put your left foot in/You take your left foot out/You put your left foot in/And you shake it all about/You do the Hokey Pokey and you turn yourself around/That’s what it’s all about! Yeehaw!”
As I sang and danced, I moved toward a freshly dug grave, just a few plots down from Jamie’s. The headstone was already up, but there hadn’t been a funeral yet. The grave was waiting for Lola Peterson, but instead, as I shouted out the next verse, I stumbled in.
I fell in the grave singing, “You put your whole self in!” and about choked on my own tongue when I landed. Even though it was still light out, it was dark in the grave, and muddy. My shoes sank and when I tried to pull them out, they made sucking noises. The air was stiff and leafy. A worm wriggled half in and half out of the muddy wall in front of me. When I tried climbing out and couldn’t get a grip, I started to worry I’d be stuck in Lola Peterson’s grave all night, but finally Gracie’s head appeared over the lip.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
Her hair fell down toward me like coils of rope.
She found a ladder leaning against the cemetery tool-shed and lowered it down for me. As I climbed toward her she called me a fool, but she laughed. Her eyes were red from crying, her cheeks wind-chapped. When I thanked her for helping, she said, “No problem. I liked your little dance.”
After that we sat down on the path between the graves and she talked about finding Jamie. It was mostly what I’d heard, but the words coming from her mouth felt different. “I’m not interested in it any longer,” she said. “It’s boring, really. It’s the most banal thing in the world.”
“What’s banal?” I asked. I knew, but I wanted to hear her talk.
“You don’t know what banal means?” She laughed. “It was a vocabulary word like four weeks ago, idiot.”
“How do you remember that kind of stuff?”
“It was on the last vocabulary test I studied for,” she said. “The one right before I found him.” She looked down and slipped her hands in her pockets. When she looked back up, she said, “Do you know where I can find any quartz around here?”
“So you really do collect rocks?” I said, and she bobbed her head, smiling.
“Rocks are the best things in the world. No one can do anything to them. You could come over to my place tomorrow and see them. Come around five. My parents will be at marriage counseling.”
“Sure,” I said. “That’d be great.”
Gracie dipped her head and looked at me through brown bangs before she left. A moment later she turned around and waved, her hand held high in the air above her. I waved back as if we were friends, even though we weren’t. Not yet.
I waited for her to leave. I waited until I heard the squeal and clang of the wrought-iron front gates. Then I knelt down beside Jamie’s grave and wiped her name out of the dirt. In place of it, I wrote my own, etching into the dirt deeply. But I wrote my name different. My letters were tall and slanted. My letters were straight and fierce.
I came home and found I’d missed dinner. My mom was asleep, back in her and my dad’s bedroom again, Andy was in the back field smoking a joint, and my dad was in the living room watching the Weather Channel. He could watch the weather report for hours, listening to the Muzak play, watching the words that told us what tomorrow would bring scroll across the screen forever. He’d watch it every night for a couple of hours before Andy and I started groaning. He’d eventually change the channel, but would never acknowledge our groaning was the reason.
After I sat down with a plate of meat loaf, he changed the channel without me asking, and a news brief about the search for Jamie’s murderers came on. I wondered why the anchorman called them “Jamie Marks’s murderers,” the same way you might say Jamie’s dogs, or Jamie’s Boy Scout honors, as if he’d owned or earned them, so I asked my dad what he thought.
He didn’t answer my question though. Instead he started muttering about what he’d do with the killers if it had been his boy. His face was red and splotchy, his plaid shirt unbuttoned, falling away to reveal a patch of hairy chest.
I set the fork down on my plate.
“What would you do?” I asked. “What would you do if it had been me?”
My dad looked at me and said, “I’d tie a rope around those bastards’ armpits and lower them inch by inch into a vat of piranhas. Slowly! That’s important. To let the little suckers have at their flesh.”
He looked back at the TV.
I thought this was a good start.
“But what if the police got them first?” I said, hoping for something more realistic. “What would you do then?”
My dad looked at me again and said, “I’d smuggle a gun into the courtroom, and when they had those bastards on the stand, I’d jump out of my seat and shoot their goddamned heads off.” He jumped out of his recliner and made his hands into a gun, pointing it at an invisible person in the room. He pulled the trigger once, twice, a third time. Bam! Bam! Bam! They were all dead, all the evildoers. Just like that.
I nodded. I felt loved, like I was my dad’s favorite. I kept on making up different situations, asking, “What if?” over and over. What if the judge said they were innocent and you saw them eating at a restaurant afterward? What would you do then? What if they holed up in an abandoned wareh
ouse with lots of firearms and hostages? What then? It didn’t matter what I threw at him; each time he killed them dead. I wanted to buy him a hat with the words Best Dad in the World! printed on it. I couldn’t remember the last time we’d talked. We were really close right then, for the first time in a long time, and I went to sleep that night still thinking of scenarios in which he could exact his revenge.
According to my dad, Gracie Highsmith’s house was a split-level beauty. Whenever we drove past, he’d reminisce about the work his crew had done in the place. The house was white like ours, only with black shutters on the windows, and white wooden pillars holding up the porch roof. They had a circular drive too, black-topped with a maple tree in the center. “Very well to do, the Highsmiths,” my mother always said when she was in a good mood. If she was feeling black, though, she’d just say they were rich snobs.
Their house was nestled in a bend of the railroad tracks where Gracie had found Jamie. She’d been out walking the tracks looking for odd pieces of coal or nickel when she found him. She hadn’t seen his finger poking out of the gravel like everyone said. She thought she saw a glimmer, something shiny, so she’d bent down to sort through the rocks and when she lifted one away his blue eye was looking back at her. All of this she told me in her bedroom on the second floor of her house the next day. The room was painted bright yellow and lined with shelves of rocks, like a room in a museum. Only the bed and the white dresser next to it made the bedroom feel like a bedroom.
Gracie held out a fist-sized rock that was brown with black specks embedded in it. The brown parts felt like sandpaper, but the black specks were smooth as glass. “I found it in the streambed at the bottom of Marrow’s Ravine last summer,” she said. “It’s one of my best discoveries.”
“It’s something special all right,” I said, and she beamed like someone’s mother.
“That’s nothing,” she said. “Wait till you see the rest.”
She showed me a chunk of clear quartz and a piece of hardened blue clay; a broken-open geode filled with pyramids of pink crystal; a seashell that she found mysteriously in the woods behind her house, nowhere near water; a flat rock with a skeletal fish fossil imprinted on it; and a piece of rose quartz in the shape of a heart, which she said was her favorite. I hadn’t realized how beautiful rocks could be. She made me want to collect them too. But they were Gracie’s territory. I’d have to find something of my own, I figured.
We sat on her bed and listened to music by some group from Cleveland that I’d never heard of, but who Gracie obviously loved because she set the CD player to replay the same song over and over. It sounded real punk. They sang about growing up angry and how they would take over the world and make people pay for being stupid idiots, how they didn’t need anyone or anything but themselves. Gracie nodded and gritted her teeth as she listened. Her head bobbed a few inches away from mine, her brown hair splayed out on the pillow.
I liked being alone in the house with her, listening to music and looking at rocks. I felt eccentric and mature. I told Gracie this and she nodded. “They think we’re children,” she said. “They don’t know a goddamn thing, do they?”
Then we talked about growing old, imagining ourselves in college, in midlife careers, as parents then grandparents, then we were so old we couldn’t walk without walkers. Pretty soon we were so old we both clutched our chests like we were having heart attacks and choked on our own laughter. We stared at each other, not saying anything, then looked away, as if we’d turn to stone if we looked any longer.
“What sort of funeral will you have?” Gracie asked a moment later.
“I don’t know,” I said. I’d never thought about funerals much. “Aren’t they all the same?”
“Funerals are all different,” said Gracie. “Mexican cemeteries have all these bright, colorful decorations for their dead; they’re not all serious like ours are. On the Day of the Dead, families go to the cemeteries and picnic on the graves of loved ones.”
“Where did you learn that?”
“Social Studies. Last year.”
“I bet Mexicans never would have had a private funeral,” I said. Too bad Jamie wasn’t Mexican, I thought.
“I see graves all the time now,” Gracie told me. She lay on her back and stared at the ceiling. I watched as her chest rose and fell with her breath. “They’re everywhere,” she said, “ever since…”
She stopped to release a long sigh, as if she’d just made a huge confession. I worried she’d expect something in return, a confession of my own, so I murmured a little supportive noise and hoped that would be enough.
“They’re everywhere,” she repeated. “The town cemetery, the Wilkinson family plot, that old place out by the ravine where Fuck You Frances is buried. And now the railroad tracks. I mean, where does it end?”
I said, “Beds are like graves too,” and she turned to me with this puzzled look. I suddenly wanted to kiss her. Instead I said, “No, really,” and told her about the time my grandma came to live with us after my grandfather died. How one morning my mother sent me to wake her for breakfast—I remember because I smelled bacon frying when I got up—so I went into my grandma’s room to wake her up. She didn’t, though, so I repeated myself. But she still didn’t wake up. Finally I shook her shoulders a little, and her head lolled on her neck. I grabbed one of her hands, hoping, but it was cold to the touch.
“Oh,” said Gracie. “I see what you mean.” She stared at me, her eyes glistening. The look on her face was scary, but I liked it. She saw that I liked it and in one swift motion she rolled on top of me, pinning her knees on both sides of my hips. I almost laughed, but her hair fell over my eyes, dimming the light.
She kissed me on my lips and she kissed me on my neck. Then she started rocking against my penis and I rocked back. I put my hands on her hips for some reason. The coils in her bed creaked. “You’re so cold, Adam,” she whispered. “You’re so cold, you’re so cold.” She smelled like clay and dust. As she rocked, she looked at the ceiling and bared the hollow of her throat. I wasn’t sure if she was acting or if she was really getting somewhere with this, but after a while she let out several little gasps and collapsed on my chest. I kept rubbing, trying to keep the moment, but stopped when I realized it wasn’t going to go any further.
She slid off me and went over to kneel in front of her window and look out.
“Are you angry?” I asked.
“Why would I be angry, Adam?”
“I don’t know,” I said. I wanted to ask what all that had been about, but she didn’t turn around. “What are you doing?” I asked instead. It wasn’t as good a question as, “What are you thinking?” I should have asked that one.
“He’s down there again,” she whispered. I heard the tears in her voice and went to her. I didn’t look out. I wrapped my arms around her, my hands meeting under her breasts, and hugged her to my chest. “Why won’t he go away?” she said. “I found him, yeah. So fucking what? He doesn’t need to fucking follow me around forever.”
“Tell him to leave,” I told her.
She didn’t respond.
“Tell him you don’t want to see him anymore,” I said.
She moved my hands off her stomach and turned her face to mine. She leaned in and kissed me, her tongue searching out mine, her hand cradling the back of my head like she was in charge of everything. When she pulled back, she said, “I can’t. I hate him but I love him too. He seems to, I don’t know, understand me. We’re on the same wavelength, you know? As much as he annoys me, I love him. He should have been loved, you know. He never got that. Not how everyone deserves.”
“Just give him up,” I said.
Gracie furrowed her brow, then stood and paced to the doorway. “I think you should go now,” she said. “My parents will be home soon.”
I craned my neck to glance out the window, but her voice cracked like a whip.
“Leave, Adam,” she said.
I shrugged into my coat and elbowed past her.
“You don’t deserve him,” I said on my way out.
I ran home through wind and soon rain started up. It landed on my face cold and trickled down my cheeks into my collar. Jamie hadn’t been outside when I left Gracie’s house and I was beginning to suspect she’d been making him up, just like the rest of them. Bitch. I thought she was different.
At home I walked in through the kitchen door and my mother was waiting in her wheelchair by the doorway. She said, “Where have you been? Two nights in a row. You’re acting all secretive. Where have you been, Adam?”
Lucy sat at the dinner table, smoking a cigarette. When I looked at her, she looked away. Smoke curled up into the lamp above her.
“What is this?” I said. “An inquisition?”
“We’re just worried,” said my mother.
“Don’t worry,” I told her.
“I can’t help it,” she said.
“Your mother loves you very much,” said Lucy.
“Stay out of this, paralyzer,” I warned her.
Both of them gasped.
“Adam!” my mother said. “You know Lucy didn’t mean that to happen. Apologize this instant.”
I mumbled an apology, rolling my eyes the whole time.
My mother started wheeling around the kitchen then. She reached up to cupboards and pulled out cans of tomatoes and kidney beans. She opened the freezer and tried to pull out ground beef. She couldn’t reach high enough, so Lucy jumped up and hurried over to hand it down to her.
“Chili,” my mother said, just that. “It’s chilly outside so you need some chili for your stomach. Chili will warm you up.”
Then she started in again. “My miracle child,” she said. “My baby boy, my gift. Did you know, Lucy, that Adam was born premature with underdeveloped lungs and a murmur in his heart?”