_*_ 39 _*_
Dad and I had spoken only a few words to each other since the bonfire incident. This was becoming more of a habit, the not-talking, but it still made me uncomfortable. Nottalking with him was like trying to walk after my foot had gone to sleep. Everything felt weird and heavy.
I took a deep breath and knocked on his door. “You awake?”
The door opened. He was dressed in jeans and a longsleeved Syracuse Orangemen shirt and he was freshly shaved, to my surprise. Over his shoulder, I could see an open email on his computer screen, but it was too far away to see who he was writing to or what he was saying.
“You’re home late,” he said. “Everything okay?”
He smelled of soap. Not weed or booze, not even cigarettes. This was another part of his apology, maybe, for what had happened on Saturday.
“Where’s Gramma buried?” I asked.
His eyes opened wide. “Don’t remember the name of the place. It’s near the river. Why?”
“I want to go there,” I said. “Now.”
“Can’t. It’ll be dark soon.”
“I don’t care.” Pins and needles shot through me, that dreadful, awkward feeling of something waking up inside. “I really want to see it.”
“We’ll go tomorrow,” he said. “After school.”
“You don’t have to come with me. If you draw me a map, I can ride my bike there.”
“What’s the rush?”
“I was at the nursing home after school,” I said, “for my volunteer hours. It made me think of Gramma and I don’t know why, but I really want to see where she is. It’s important.”
I hadn’t planned on telling him the truth. It had become easier to lie about most things because it didn’t hurt as much when he ignored me. In my defense, I hadn’t planned on finding him clear-eyed and sober, either. It was hard to know how to play the game when the rules kept changing.
He looked over his shoulder at the window. “We’re gonna need jackets.”
The old headstones at the front of the cemetery were so worn that the blue jays and chickadees mocked me for trying to read them. We walked quickly for a few minutes, then Dad stopped at a crossroads where the stones were easier to read. He was squinting against the falling sun, trying to figure out the right path. I studied the family plot.
abraham stockwell 1762–1851
rachel stockwell 26 feb 1765—22 feb 1853
thaddeus stockwell 1789—12 nov 1844 rest in peace sarah d. 1827
Four small headstones topped with stone lambs lay on
the other side of Sarah.
baby 1822
baby 1823
baby 1825
baby 1827
“Know what they call this?” Dad asked, his voice back in teacher mode.
“A graveyard?”
“No, silly. This time of day.”
“Sunset?”
“When the sun is below the horizon, but it’s still light enough to see, it’s called ‘civil twilight.’ There’s another word, too, an older one, but I can’t remember it.” He reached up with his right hand and rubbed the back of his neck. “They’re farther back, I think. Next to some pine trees. Let’s hustle, it’s almost dark.”
“They?” I asked. “Who’s they?”
He was already six strides ahead, despite the limp. I caught up with him at the top the hill.
“Found them,” he said quietly before heading down the other side.
I shivered. A wide valley of the dead spread out below me, hundreds of them gently tucked into the ground in neat rows, their whispers frozen into the stones above them: I am here. I was here. Remember me. Remember.
I zipped up my jacket and jogged down the hill, past graves decorated with flowers—some plastic, some real and faded—and small flags on wooden sticks. Dad was waiting by a headstone speckled with pearl-green lichen near a row of tall, dark pine trees. He knelt and tried to brush off the lichen. It was stuck fast, like it had been growing for a long time. He took out his pocketknife and scraped at the words and dates with the blade:
rebecca rose rivers kincain 1978–1998
barbara mason kincain 1942–2003
“I didn’t know that she was here.” I pointed at the top name. “My mother.”
(The word sounded like a foreign language. Like I had pebbles in my mouth.)
“Becky got along so well with Mom that it seemed like the right thing to do,” Dad said. “Your grandmother taught her how to cheat at bridge. That’s what I imagine they do in heaven.”
“Where’s your dad buried?”
“Arlington. Mom didn’t want him there, but he insisted. Always had to do things his way.”
I studied the names again, waiting for tears to bubble up. It was hard to figure out what I was feeling. Confused, maybe. Lonely. I wondered if Gramma could see us standing there, looking lost as the shadows grew deeper around us. I tried to picture her. I didn’t remember what she looked like and that made me more upset than anything. “Do you miss her?” I asked. “I mean, them?”
“I miss everybody.” Dad stood up, folded his knife and put it back in his pocket. “Doesn’t do any good to dwell on it.” He brushed his hands together to clean off the lichen. “Should have come sooner to clean this up.”
I pointed to the headstones in the next row. “How come those have vases built into them and ours don’t?” “Mom ordered the stone when Becky died,” he said. “She didn’t like cut flowers, my mom. Preferred flowers that were planted. Maybe that’s why she didn’t order the kind of grave marker that came with a vase.”
“We should do something to make it look nicer.” “I guess.” He stood next to me and pointed to the empty grass to the left of the grave. “That’s where you need to put me when my time comes.”
I swallowed hard. “You’re not going to die.” I leaned my head against his shoulder. “Not for a hundred years.” He put his arm around me. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath of pine and damp earth. Only a few birds were singing and far away, an owl called. Leaning against my father, the sadness finally broke open inside me, hollowing out my heart and leaving me bleeding. My feet felt rooted in the dirt. There were more than two bodies buried here. Pieces of me that I didn’t even know were under the ground. Pieces of Dad, too.
“Gloaming,” Dad said.
“What?”
“That word I couldn’t remember. Gloaming. That short, murky time between half-light and dark.” He hugged me quickly and let me go. “Night’s here, princess. Let’s head home.”
_*_ 40 _*_
Finn texted me Tuesday morning to ask if I wanted a ride to school. I was kind of surprised, but I said yes and then I put on a cleaner shirt. By Thursday, we had fallen into a sort of pattern. Right around six thirty in the morning, he’d text:
?
and I’d text:
K
and by the time I got to the corner a block south of my
house (no way was I going to let him pick me up where Dad might see), Finn would be sitting there, his engine smoking because he hadn’t fixed the leaking oil valve yet. He also slid into the habit of eating breakfast burritos and drinking chocolate milk at first-period lunch with me and Gracie and Topher, in addition to meeting me in the library after school to try and convince me that precalc wasn’t some enormous joke that got out of hand.
I was beginning to understand why people were horrified when they learned that instead of attending school from grades seven thru eleven, I’d been riding shotgun in my dad’s semi. It wasn’t that my life was ruined because I never sang in a holiday choir or that I missed the thrill of reenacting the Battle of Gettysburg with water balloons and squirt guns. It was that I didn’t know The Rules.
I hadn’t even known The Rules existed before that week. I was not a totally ignorant feral recluse. Watching Animal Planet had alerted me to the existence of mating behavior. Plus, having eaten a lot of bologna sandwiches in truck stops, I’d heard the kinds of things that grown men say to other grown men about these issues. But I was pretty sure that the blue-footed booby’s courting dance wasn’t going to get me anywhere with Finn, and if I approached him in the way that truck drivers recommended, it wouldn’t end well. Things were complicated even more by the fact that there was something weird about Finn. Not zombie weird. He was more of a cyborg with a vivid imagination. But he’d spent enough time around the zombies to adapt some of their ways. He knew The Rules. I didn’t.
Finn would show up at my locker one day and then he wouldn’t the next. Was I supposed to return the gesture and go to his locker before he could take the next step, make the next move, whatever that might be? One minute we’d be riffing about conspiracy theories, the next we’d be arguing so loudly about mandatory military service (I was for it; he, being a privileged wuss, was not) that we got kicked out of the library. And then we didn’t say a word to each other the whole drive home.
Which was another thing—I couldn’t talk about this to him. And/or he couldn’t/wouldn’t talk about it to me, assuming he wanted to, assuming the entire drama wasn’t a product of my estrogen poisoning or a symptom of a brain tumor caused by eating so many gallons of artificially colored, high-fructose corn syrup–enhanced plastic food products when I was younger. (Truck stops are not known for their selection of organic fruits and vegetables.)
I watched all the couples and almost-couples around me, frantically trying to understand how this stuff worked and was more confused than ever.
Gracie was no help. The situation at her house went to DEFCON 4 when her dad moved out. The next day, her little brother refused to go to school. Mrs. Rappaport carried him out to the car and tried to shove him in, even though he was kicking and screaming. Gracie grabbed her mom’s arm to make her stop and Mrs. Rappaport turned around and slapped Gracie’s face. The neighbor who saw the whole thing called the police.
The only relationship I’d ever seen my father in was with Trish and for most of those years, he was on the other side of the world from us. When he was finally discharged, the two of them turned our apartment into a battlefield. Even if their relationship had been less than awful, there was no way to talk to him. The gloaming that closed over us in the cemetery had crawled inside his skin. He didn’t want to talk or eat. He just sat in front of the TV.
So I couldn’t talk to Finn about what I wanted to talk to him about, I couldn’t talk to Gracie about anything other than how awful her parents were, and my dad was a bigger mystery than ever.
To make matters worse (was that possible?), I wasn’t exactly sure what I wanted with Finn. Did I like him? My opinion about that changed several times a day. Did I want him to like me? Ditto. How could I like him, how could he like me, if we didn’t know each other? The little I was able to learn about his family (perfect, middle-class people, apparently) made me pretty sure that he’d run screaming if he ever met my father. That would be a logical reaction, of course, but did I really want to fall in love (fall in “like”?) with someone who didn’t give my dad a chance? We had to get to know each other. Gradually. Baby steps. In order to do that, we’d have to break down and talk about things that were more significant than font size in online newspapers and his fevered delusions about his time studying telekinesis with a group of monks in a Himalayan ice cave.
I had no idea how to do that.
I started to cyber-stalk him late on Wednesday night, but it made me so disgusted with myself that I played hours of Skulkrushr III instead and thus flunked the next day’s Chinese vocab quiz. I wrote an apology note to my teacher in Chinese. She told me that I had actually written something about pigs and umbrellas.
At one level? None of this mattered. It was hard enough surviving day to day, both navigating the hordes at Zombie High and listening to the bomb that had started ticking inside my father’s head. A little flirting with Finn? That wouldn’t hurt. But I concluded that it couldn’t go any further. When we met after school for precalc tutoring, I made sure that there was always a table between us. And when I was in his car, I kept my backpack on my lap, my face turned to the window and my attitude set to the frost level of “Don’t Touch.”
Despite this strategy, the hordes gossiped about us. Girls in my gym class asked me flat out what Finn was like. That’s how I found out that his family had moved to the district only a year earlier and that he had led the swim team to the state title, but decided not to swim this year and no one could figure out why. I also learned that those same girls were pissed off; they’d assumed he was gay, because why else wouldn’t he have tried to hook up with them before?
I dialed up my serial killer glare and eventually they walked away.
Even the teachers noticed. Mr. Diaz walked past my locker when Finn was there and said, “For the love of all that is holy, you two, please don’t breed.”
Seriously?
The sex thing, that was the undercurrent, the electrically charged wire that ran through all of this nonsense. I’d been eavesdropping on zombie sex conversations since school started. Most of them, I thought, were totally made up. But now I found myself doubting that conclusion. What did The Rules say about this? If everyone was really having sex, then why was it paradoxically a hush-hush-whisper thing and a scream-it-online-and-in-the-cafeteria thing? If everybody was really having sex, why weren’t more girls sporting baby bumps? I knew the statistics. I also knew the closest abortion clinic was more than a hundred miles away. Most of my classmates couldn’t remember to tie their shoes in the morning. I had no faith in their ability to use birth control. Either nobody was getting laid and everybody was lying about it or the school was putting contraceptives in the oatmeal raisin cookies.
No wonder the zombies were crazy. They thought they were supposed to practice breeding before they learned how to do their own laundry. They talked about it, thought about it, maybe did it, all while going through the motions of attending class and learning stuff so that they could go forth and become productive adults. Whatever that was supposed to mean. It was enough to make me want to flee into the mountains and live out my life as a hermit, as long as I could find a hideaway that had a decent public library within walking distance and toilets that flushed, because Porta-Potties were the worst.
Then I’d see Finn in the hall, or I’d catch a glance of his profile out of the corner of my eye while we were driving to school, and he would turn to me and smile. And I didn’t want to be a hermit anymore.