“We’ll be long gone by the time it blows up, anyway.” Kyle rolled off the cot and shoved his pillow into his trunk suitcase, bouncing on it until it clicked shut. “Your bags in the truck?”
“On top of the tools.” Ben sealed the last envelope and tugged at the front of his shirt. It was a dry, cool summer night, the kind that didn’t happen much near the ocean, but Ben was sweating buckets. “Help me lift?” Ben grabbed the handle on one end of the trunk and Kyle grabbed the other, and Kyle whistled as they hoisted his worldly possessions into the flatbed of his truck. Ben slid in on the passenger side.
The truck rumbled to a start. No one in the house came out; no one asked where they were going, and Kyle didn’t bother to look back.
“Post office?” Kyle said.
“Yep,” Ben replied.
They cruised by the darkened Powder Neck branch of the post office and dropped the three envelopes in the nighttime slot. With the wheeze and slam of the handle, Mira’s words were out there. No turning back.
Ben didn’t anticipate how dark the cemetery would be, but Kyle’s vision was freakishly sharp, a cosmic balancing for years of near-deafness. They came to the Cillo plot and decamped, carrying the shovels and file from the back of the truck swiftly, like men for whom grave digging was an everyday thing. Ben rubbed his hands together to dry the sweat (so much sweat) and they set to work, each to his own task.
Bats pinwheeled low above their heads. After a while, the mosquitos found them, and Ben’s bites had bites. The moon was a lucky break: it shone with a clear ferocity so that when the shovel slipped from Ben’s raw and clumsy hands, he spotted the long white outline of its handle and lost no time. Three hours later, sweat soaked their shirts, and every part of their bodies burned, including, inexplicably, Ben’s crotch. But there was no stopping until they hit bottom, because once the letters telling Mira and Francesca’s story had been dropped, everything else had to follow.
“I hit something!” yelled Ben. He went into overdrive, dropping to his knees and digging around the small box with a hand spade. Kyle dropped his file and kneeled beside Ben, using his hands to dig. When they cleared enough dirt to lift it out of the ground, they stood, swaying like drunks, taking in the unearthed treasure. Ben would have liked to stand like that for a while, honoring whichever sister it was. But Kyle brought him back.
“Time, dude,” Kyle said softly.
Ben rubbed his chin, squinting at the urn.
“Dude?” Kyle said, louder. “They deserve to rest in peace. This is not peace.”
Ben held his mouth, unsure.
“Ben: it’s time.”
Ben kicked the ground like a horse. “Yeah. I know. They deserve to rest in peace,” Ben relented, repeating the words he and Kyle had told each other over and over that summer.
They worked together, digging up the second plot, and soon the box revealed itself. When they set them both in the flatbed and slipped into the safe carriage of the truck, reality set in, and Ben was relieved to get away from the girls. Kyle seemed spooked, too, gunning it so fast out of the long cemetery road that Ben was mashed up against the door. Ben tried not to think about the urns knocking around inside the boxes: it was unconscionable for the urns to be left loose inside these things not unlike plaster beer coolers, with nothing to protect them.
The boys fell quiet. Ben’s wet shirt stiffened, and the dirt on his arms and legs dried to a floury paste. They hadn’t made a plan for getting clean, but Ben couldn’t think that far ahead when they still had so far to go. He blinked and rubbed grit from his eyes until the headlights of oncoming cars bled together. Cars roared past and the truck rattled, but the noise did nothing to mask the klunk! in the flatbed.
Ben shivered uncontrollably.
Kyle looked over at him. “You all right?”
A sedan with pink LED lighting on its undercarriage cut Kyle off. He slammed the brakes.
Klunk! and a rattle.
“I’ve got a confession to make,” Ben yelled. “I used to hate driving with you.”
Kyle grinned, teeth gleaming in his grimy face. “Oh really?”
“You were the worst driver. I deliberately wouldn’t talk the whole time so you wouldn’t take your eyes off the road to watch my lips, or give me your good ear, or whatever it was you used to do. But somehow, I think you’ve actually gotten worse.”
Kyle laughed. “And here I thought you were always quiet because my driving made you carsick.”
“Still does.”
Ben noticed Kyle’s right hand resting on the seat next to him. The hand looked wrong, bent at a strange angle and twitching, like its nerves were frayed and accepting the wrong signals.
“Your hand any better?”
For three hours, while Ben had dug, Kyle had worked the file like a demon, sparking as he grated the rough edge against the granite. By the time they’d finished, they had both used up every part of their bodies, and they were starting to become unglued. Ben’s shoulders screamed, lactic acid already seeping inside the tears in his muscles. But Kyle had it worse, performing the same motion on the bench for hours, filing the girls into anonymity.
Kyle regarded his hand and whistled through his teeth. “When am I ever whole?”
Ben laughed. “You’re right about that.” Maybe she can fix it, Ben wanted to say.