THEY SAT IN the dark inside the Honda Odyssey and listened for police sirens that never came. They did hear one car cruising down Port Washington Boulevard but dismissed it, someone on their way home, that’s all. But then, after a minute of silence, the same car, at least it sounded like the same car, prowled past in the other direction. Its engine had a grim, grumbling quality to it, a powerful engine, barely restrained. The pharmacy blocked their view, so they couldn’t see the vehicle. Was it some random car or a police cruiser? Neither of them was going to walk out to the corner to check. They were like two fish taking shelter in a cove because a shark might be in the open water.
Patrice’s iPad had gone off so he turned it on again. The lock screen showed Patrice and Dana on their wedding day. Bride and groom, in tuxedo and gown, stood below an indoor basketball hoop.
“You two got married on the court?”
“We made it work,” Patrice said, looking down at the image, his face lit up by the LED screen and the memory. After a moment he swiped right, and the homescreen appeared, a familiar grid of apps. He swiped from one screen to the next.
Apollo and Patrice heard the same car for the third time, prowling Port Washington Boulevard. Apollo rolled his window down, leaned out, and this time saw the faint glow of the car’s headlights as they lit up a storefront on the opposite corner. They paused there, as if the driver of the car were idling in the street. That vehicle sat on the other side of this pharmacy, and its engine grumbled and its lights played in the darkness. To Apollo’s ear, it sounded—almost, nearly—like whatever he’d heard on the island that night. Whatever had been lurking in the copse of trees.
With his head out the window, he looked up at the sky as if some great object might be coming down on their car right now, flung by something impossibly strong. But the only thing visible in the sky was the moon and a sprinkle of stars. And then the car—who drove it?—trundled on again. Maybe it had just been waiting at a red light. Apollo didn’t roll the window up again until the guttering of the engine passed on.
When Apollo pulled his head back in, Patrice had the Google Maps app working.
“Nassau Knolls Cemetery is almost four hundred acres,” Patrice said. “Three million people buried here. It’s big enough that there’s got to be some part of the fencing that’s easy to slip through.”
Patrice had become so occupied with his Google Map, he didn’t realize Apollo had swiped back his keys until they were in the ignition and the engine turned on. The Odyssey roared even as it sat in park.
“We can just drive around the perimeter,” Apollo said. “You don’t need to rely on computers for everything.”
Patrice reached over and turned the car off. He spoke to Apollo with aggravated patience. “The two of us are not driving around slow in a suburban neighborhood at midnight. Somebody’s going to call the cops on some shit like that. And I did not survive Iraq to get shot to death by some Suffolk County cop who ‘feared for his life.’ You feel me?”
Patrice watched Apollo now.
“Then let’s get out and walk,” Apollo said.
Patrice nodded. “Two black men walking through white suburbs at night. Never heard of that going bad.”
Apollo gave an exasperated laugh.
“?‘We can be heroes,’?” Patrice said. “But heroes like us don’t get to make mistakes.”
Patrice typed in “Nassau Knolls Cemetery.”
“Street view,” Patrice said, licking his lips as if he’d been given a salty treat.
“That’s what I’m talking about,” Patrice finally said.
He lifted the screen for Apollo to see. The image captured on a sunny afternoon. A portion of the cemetery fencing looked as if it had been torn open, a gap wide enough to fit a truck through.
“Something big did that,” Apollo said softly.
“Maybe a truck or a car?” Patrice said, closing the iPad. “Big accident?”
“Maybe.”
Apollo leaned out the window to listen for the prowl car. How long did he wait? He couldn’t quite say. Too long, probably. Which is when he realized there might be another reason he wasn’t gunning the Honda.
There are some things people aren’t meant to see. Even with all he’d experienced on the island, Apollo understood that whatever lay buried in that grave existed as the farthest landmark on this new map of the spectral territories. Ultima Thule of grief. Would he go insane if he opened that casket? Would he burst into flames? Turn to stone? Despite all this, he finally turned the key. He pulled the Honda out of the parking lot and drove down Revere Road, not going too fast or too slow, nothing to cause concern among the locals.
In those old stories, the myths and fairy tales Cal had talked about, the heroes did what they did but you never knew why. In the stories, at least, they had no interior life. Their job was simply to act. Gods and gorgons allied against them, and still they bore the spear and shield. Still they walked into the deep, dark forests. But did those heroes ever feel like Apollo did now? The real people, not the characters they became. They were human beings too, after all. They must’ve shivered in the shadow of the world’s great horrors. They must have wondered how they would ever see the quest through. And somehow they persevered. Maybe that was the point of telling those stories again and again, one generation to the next.
If they could be brave, then we might be, too.
THE MODERN GRAVE is only four feet deep, not six. In the past bodies were buried six feet deep to compensate for their eventual decomposition and, sometime after that, the casket collapsing in on itself, leaving a sinkhole. But the modern casket is much thicker and sturdier, and many have steel reinforcement, so that it produces no sinkhole. As a secondary precaution, caskets are now buried inside concrete grave liners, like a casket for the casket. This concrete vault is the other reason that being buried four feet deep is fine in the modern day. Patrice explained this as they walked through the cemetery, a dash of research done on the quick, as the two men padded across the dirt in the dark.
Patrice looked up the location of Brian Kagwa’s burial plot. Nassau Knolls was so large, they could’ve wandered for half a day without stumbling across it. But the cemetery’s website included a handy pdf.
They used the community mausoleum—a white building that looked like a banquet hall—as a kind of North Star. Brian’s grave lay behind the building. There would be a road they could follow on the other side.
They weren’t thirty yards into the graveyard before they heard the rumbling engine of the prowl car again. Both stopped moving and turned back toward the fence line. There were no trees here, but the moonlight was weak. They heard the car, it coasted, and soon its lights played through the fence posts like cards being run along the spokes of a bike tire. The light raked at the graveyard dirt. Apollo and Patrice didn’t dare even to crouch. The car reached the big break in the fence line, and there it stopped. Apollo saw the silhouette of the car but couldn’t be sure whether there were police lights on the roof. The car idled there, then they heard the mechanical hiss of a window sliding down. Could it be Kinder Garten at the wheel? How would he have known they were here?
Another moment.
Another moment.
Then, achingly slowly, the car moved on.