“It helped,” Apollo said. He tapped the head of the shovel against the dirt. Almost there.
The shovel dug into the dirt, and a dull thump played in the graveyard. Apollo brought the shovel down again. Once more a solid thump.
Apollo bent forward and brushed at the dirt until a flat gray surface appeared.
Beside him, above him, Patrice perked up. Apollo went to his knees, wildly brushing with his hands. But then this horrible choking noise rose out from the hole, a sob of turmoil. Apollo raised a hand and slapped at the buried thing.
“It’s not the casket,” Apollo said. He sounded undone, almost unraveling.
“Tell me what you see,” Patrice said.
“It’s concrete!” Apollo pushed himself onto his knees and cleared more of the dirt. A flat block of concrete, like a panel of sidewalk.
“That’s the grave liner,” Patrice said. “There’s two kinds, solid concrete and sectional panels. The panels are cheaper, easier to break through. Which one do you think your mom paid for?”
How early would the Nassau Knolls maintenance crews arrive? This was the question. How long before the sun rose just enough for a neighbor to open her second-floor bedroom curtains, peer out at the day, and see two black men at an open grave?
Apollo used the shovel to push himself onto his feet. How long would it take to chop through it? And how loud would that noise be?
“Drop me down that thing,” Apollo said to Patrice. “The one I was using.”
A large silhouette moved, and a moment later the mattock fell into the grave. Its head landed on the sharper end, the one shaped like a pick. The thing made a loud popping noise when it landed and sank right into the concrete, like a thumbtack going into a bulletin board. Apollo pulled at the mattock, but it was stuck. He crouched and leaned back and wrenched the tool out, and when he did, a sound like ice cubes being cracked out of a tray played in the hole.
Apollo tamped at the concrete liner with one foot and felt it waver. He brought the mattock down to another terrific chorus of cracking concrete.
Four blows with the mattock, and the sectional liner turned to dust. And there lay a child’s casket. White. The decorative hardware—handle rod brackets, caps, stamped metal corners—all antique nickel.
Apollo crouched and ran his hands along either side of the casket, searching for the groove between the lid and the base. He couldn’t bear the idea of chopping through the top of the casket. He just couldn’t do it. He found the space and slipped the pick end of the mattock inside. When he wrenched it open, the locking system groaned and finally came apart with an almost wet snap, like a tooth being torn out of a jaw.
He pulled at the small lid. Halfway up it caught, and he dropped the mattock, used two hands to pull it the rest of the way. He heaved and bent low in the posture of a supplicant. The dawn light reached along the top of the gravesite though it remained darker down in the hole. And finally, for the first time in four months, Apollo saw his child.
The mortician had done his best, but Brian Kagwa’s face still bore the burn marks. The skull showed through at the top, gray as grief. His tiny body had been wrapped in a light blue blanket. In the chaos of opening the casket, dirt and stones fell onto the pillow, across the blanket, across the body. Apollo looked down on his son, once sealed away clean but now soiled.
“Look what I did to my boy,” Apollo whispered.
He’d been wrong to think Cal and Emma had been anything but insane. They’d convinced him not to follow common sense. Maybe he hadn’t wanted to be sensible. Better to believe in monsters than that your child is dead. He closed the lid of the casket, then opened it once again. He couldn’t bear the thought of his baby boy lying there with dirt on his face, pebbles in his hair. The least he could do—the very least—was to wipe his son’s face clean.
He touched the baby’s forehead, and with that, he broke the spell.
THORNS.
His fingers caught on a knot of them.
That’s how it felt. Sharp enough to tear skin. So surprising he pulled back, and only after the seconds of shock passed did he realize his ring finger was bleeding. The tip had been cut when he caressed his dead child.
Apollo steadied himself, and when he clutched at the body again, he made sure to touch only the blue blanket it had been buried in. Inside the grave the world remained lightless, but above him Apollo found the glow of the rising sun. He lifted the body from the casket, lighter than he remembered and smaller, too. Through the fabric of the blanket, he felt a knotty mass, as if he held a wasp’s nest instead of a baby. He’d become so used to the smell of dirt after hours digging this hole that he could smell nothing else.
Above him, at the surface, Patrice coughed and said, “That’s foul.”
He looked over his shoulder. Patrice looked more frightened than him. He wondered at the sight he must’ve made just then. His skin dirtied all over—his face and neck, his back and stomach, his hands—everything was coated in earth, entirely soiled. And he was carrying—what? He rose up from his knees and brought the baby higher. And in the dawn light, he saw what he held.
It looked like clotted hair. The stuff you’d fish out of the bathtub drain in a house that had been abandoned, overtaken by the elements, matted and gnarled. What made it monstrous was the size, as big as a six-month-old. Pounds and pounds of hair—fur?—looped and twined so tightly, it looked more like barbed wire.
How had he mistaken this for a child?
For his child?
He held it but felt a rising impulse to throw it back down into the dirt, to clean his hands with holy water. He wretched, stooping forward, nearly dropping the thing. He looked down at this bundle and wretched again. Despite the blanket, his skin itched with repulsion.
“What the fuck.”
Patrice staggered back from the grave. It was too much to see. Inadvertently he stood on another grave, that of a woman named Catherine Linton.
The Scottish called it glamer.
Glamour.
An illusion to make something appear different than it really is.
This was what he’d been feeding and changing and hugging and holding? This was what he sang to at night when Emma wouldn’t do it anymore? This was what he took to the park with all the other dads so early in the morning? He thought of Ida, holding her false sister, a child made entirely of ice, loving it as if it was alive.
He found he couldn’t drop the thing, but at the same time he wanted—he needed—for it to be far from him. He extended his arms. Now the blanket fell away from the body so it draped backward over his hands. Fully exposed, top to bottom, it really did look like a wasp’s nest, gray, and the hair so tightly ground together it looked woven. There was more mingled within the layers of hair. He’d thought he’d cut his finger on a thorn, but that was wrong. Now he could see it. Jutting out, here and there, were fragments of teeth and splinters of bone and shards of fingernails.