The sun was setting, its rays filtering through the brown and red leaves of the trees in Forest Hill Cemetery. Kane and I walked down Canterbury Lane, glancing around us, waiting for a safe moment to hop over the cemetery’s fence. It was past visiting hours and the cemetery was closed. I would have waited until night settled, but I wasn’t sure I could find my way to Isabel’s family’s mausoleum in the darkness. In fact, I wasn’t convinced I could find my way there during the day, either.
Sinead was in the hospital, waiting by Isabel’s side. The doctors said she wasn’t in immediate danger, but were keeping her sedated. Our hopes that she would be able to guide us to the crystal were evaporating. We would have to trust my hunch that it was in the mausoleum, and my ability to find the place by following my hazy memories from our childhood.
I shivered, but not from the cold. I didn’t want to be here. I didn’t want to touch those memories, that dark time of my life. Did other people have that part in their past? A cluster of memories that felt like a stormy sea that would wash over you and drown you if you waded close to it?
Most kids who lived on the streets surely did.
I pushed my apprehension away and glanced at Kane. He gazed at the cemetery, avoiding my eyes. I followed his stare to the cracked gray tombstones protruding from the thick layer of brown leaves. The graves were scattered in a seemingly random manner, some bunched close together, some standing alone. I turned my eyes back to him.
“Thanks for coming with me,” I said. “For helping me after…” I couldn’t end my sentence.
He nodded curtly. “Let’s find this thing and get your daughter back.”
I didn’t correct him, didn’t say I wasn’t getting her back, I was simply trying to save her life.
“Where is the mausoleum, exactly?” he asked.
“I don’t remember… yet.”
“Better figure it out.”
“Yeah.” Would I? How long had I left those memories untouched, to rot and crumble and dissipate? Were they even still there, hidden in my skull?
I glanced to both sides. No traffic. No dog walkers. It was time. “Come on.”
I went to the waist-high fence. With practiced ease, I climbed it and hopped—
—to the other side, Isabel already waiting for us impatiently in the cemetery grounds, her hands in her pockets, her hair a tangle of dreadlocks. There was a light drizzle, just enough to make it a bad night to sleep outside. Usually, we’d go to a shelter, but Sinead had found a stray kitten, which she was looking after. The shelters wouldn’t let us in with a pet. And then Isabel, staring into the distance, had said she knew of a safe place.
“Lou, can you help me with her?” Sinead said, holding out the small bundle. I took it from her gingerly. The bundle meowed piteously. Sinead had wrapped the kitten in a blanket from her pack. The rest of her pack was slung on her back, along with her guitar. She always carried more than the rest of us. She would joke that while Isabel and I were homeless, she was a snail, her home on her back.
She climbed over the fence and jumped, landing in the wet grass, the leaves crunching under her feet.
“Okay, you can hand her back.”
I did, hesitating just for a moment. We kept telling Sinead the cat was nothing but trouble, but now, holding her, I realized there was something special about her. She was so helpless, so small, so light in my hands. She wasn’t something one could simply abandon.
“Okay.” I hunched my shoulders against the rain. “Where to, O wise one?”
“Through here.” Isabel began to cross the long stretch of grass. Sinead and I walked side by side, following her, passing near a tall gravestone shaped like a—
—cone, an intricate engraving of a cross on top. I was lowering my head, as if trying to protect my face from a rain that did not exist. I looked around me, trying to remember the exact path, but it was impossible. Like trying to remember a dream that was already fleeting away. I walked over the leaf-covered ground, smelling the unmistakable scent of the cemetery, a smell of wet earth and of foliage. The stench of the city was somehow left outside the fence, among the living.
“We used to come here some nights,” I said. “It was safer than sleeping in the streets; we weren’t hassled by cops or threatened by drug addicts.”
“You were homeless?” Kane’s voice was flat, but there was an edge of curiosity there. He was still angry, but he wanted to know more. And I wanted to talk. I’d forced Kane to reveal his past. Telling him about myself would, perhaps, be the first step in making amends.
“Yeah. Sinead, Isabel, and me. Before we joined Breadknife’s gang.” Focusing on the memories wasn’t only helping me find the way. It was keeping the fear at bay. I let them flood my mind—images, smells, and sounds from long ago.
“And you slept here? In the cemetery?”
“The dead didn’t bother us.” Not usually. “We could sleep deeply here. When you sleep on the street, you never really sleep well. You’re always tense, listening to faint sounds, trying to figure out if someone is coming for your stuff, or for your body. But here, there was no one. It was peaceful.”
“Peaceful,” Kane repeated.
I let out a small smile, remembering. “Sinead had a small kitten. So tiny. Sinead called her Trouble, because we kept telling her she was only trouble.”
“Wasn’t it cold? Living in the street, in Boston?”
“You wouldn’t believe how cold it could get.”
I brushed my fingers against one of the—
—gravestones, looking at the name. Anne Rose. Her remains were here, somewhere below. Along with countless others.
“Did you ever hear the story about the lady in black?” Sinead asked me.
I looked at her. She wore the purple parka she had received one morning from an old lady who felt sorry for her. Underneath, she had her orange T-shirt on. Sinead had three shirts. The orange T-shirt with the torn collar, the off-white T-shirt with the ketchup stain, and the green T-shirt with the faded print of an alien smoking a joint. Lately she avoided the green one. She had been wearing it when a drunk had lunged at her and groped her, and she said she could still smell him on it.
“What lady?”
“The lady in black. So this Confederate soldier was being held prisoner at Fort… what’s it called? The one on the island.”
“Fort Warren,” Isabel said. She walked ahead of us, and we could hardly see her in the settling darkness of the night. Just a silhouette of a kid, walking purposefully, occasionally stopping to focus on something that neither I nor Sinead could ever see or hear.
“Right! Fort Warren. This Confederate soldier had a wife. Her name was Mrs. Lanier.”
“Didn’t she have a first name?”