*
I hear the birds first. Where I live, they are drowned out by passing cars, by pedestrians on cell phones, by scraps of music that float through car windows and the beep of horns and the artificial chirp of street signs indicating it’s safe to walk, by the chatter of my own thoughts as I go through my day. City noise. To reach Consolata Cemetery, where Jeremy is buried, I have driven fifteen minutes west from the Cash Magic, hooking south of the high buildings of Lake Charles and south of the lake. Now, on the western outskirts of the city, what is man-made struggles while the natural world gasps: run-down farm-equipment-repair shops and Laundromat signs, the grass on both sides of the road crushed by rusted trailers. Birdsong bursts through, like the way the line of a melody flits over the undertones below, counterpoint and lightness.
The trees must draw so many birds. Consolata Cemetery appears through the concrete like an oasis of arranged beauty, wide oaks with bright fluttering leaves and steady brown boughs. An artificial calm. No upright gravestones here like I’m used to from the Northeast—less than fifty miles from the Gulf of Mexico and surrounded by lakes, the water table would topple them—and without them there’s little to disrupt the land’s flatness. One stone bench stands vacant under a lone oak tree, waiting.
I step to the grass. From this angle, I can see what the sun and my angle of vision obscured: dark metal plaques dot the lawn, flush against it. The dead. That their markers are so low and unobtrusive reinforces the quiet. Yet the birds keep chirping. In them, at least, Jeremy has company.
“Can I help you?” a man calls out to me from behind the spoked wheel of a golf cart.
“Thanks.” I walk toward him. “I’m looking for a grave.”
“What’s the lot number?”
The question catches me off guard. “I don’t know.” I’ve carried his story with me for so long that part of me expected intuition would lead me there, that I would just walk around until I recognized his name. But the plaques are so flat there’s no way to read them until you’re hovering right over the dead. “His name was Jeremy Guillory.”
The man’s face registers nothing.
What did I think—that while I had been driven here by this mystery, he, too, would have the name of a boy dead two decades on his tongue?
“I’ll call it in,” he says. The location crackles back over the speaker and he starts the motor and motions for me to get in. “When did he die?”
“Ninety-two.”
“An old man?” This must be cemetery small talk. To our left, an expanse of graves appears, rows and rows of little black plaques dotting the earth. The cemetery is larger than I realized, and for a minute its size stills my chest. I’ve come here in search of one person. One story. But there are so many buried around us.
“No,” I say. “A child.”
“That’s a shame.”
We drive along in silence. The sky has become a more concentrated gray, the birdsong become more urgent, spiked with shrieks, and I wonder whether the birds are heralding something. Graves keep coming at us, rows and rows of metal plaques, rows and rows of unseen names and the buried bodies beneath them. Suddenly I want the man to know a little more of the story. To know whom he’s keeping watch over. “Jeremy was murdered.”
He whistles low. “What year did you say?”
“Ninety-two.”
“That’s a shame,” he says again. “A real shame. Around here?”
“Iowa.”
He shakes his head. “I wouldn’t remember it, then.” The cart stops. “This row, down on the left. Want me to show you?”
“Thanks, but I’ve got it.”
He drives off.
Which leaves me and Jeremy alone. The silence comes shockingly strong once the engine is gone. It’s the birds, I realize. They’ve fallen quiet. The spot the worker pointed to lies against a curb, in the first row of this section of the cemetery. Beneath my feet, the grass is damp and spongy. The concrete curb juts up against the grass and picks up again across the street, a paved lot over which a big red gas station sign announces the mundane world of the living. The entrance to the cemetery was lush and green, but with the concrete all around, this patch of grass feels tucked away.
JEREMY JAMES GUILLORY. He’s a plaque like all the others, set into the grass. I step closer. In the left corner, a child engraved into the metal reaches his hand up. From the top, two larger hands reach down. THE LORD REACHED DOWN FOR JEREMY’S HAND. Then that date: FEBRUARY 7, 1992.
No words for everything that date ended. No words for everything that date began. I stand here, where Lorilei once did in her blue blouse, and it starts to rain.
Twenty-Four
The day Lorilei buries her son, it rains. The rain begins in the early morning, when the Hixon Funeral Home in Lake Charles is open only to the family. The rain sops the wide lawn into a marsh; it slicks the white railing and the white columns and darkens the red brick of the building; it jewels the leaves of the tall trees. The rain is still falling as the reporters arrive, and they pop their wide black umbrellas open. Assistants hold tarps over the cameras while the on-air talent crouch to freshen their lipstick and straighten their ties. A week has passed since Jeremy’s body was found. The community is still in shock. One of their own, taken. For the cameras, the reporters pull their faces into solemn masks and intone that one hundred people have shown up, that the mother is here. Later the newspapers will raise the number to 250. The day has the feel of a quiet conclusion. They’ve been reporting on the missing boy every night for two weeks now.
Lorilei steps out to acknowledge the reporters. In the rain her heels sink into the sponge of the grass and the blue blouse that the newspapers note dampens, even through the coat her brother, Richard, must have hung over her shoulders. He stands beside her with an umbrella. All day Richard will use his body to shield her, any trouble between them forgotten.
She looks up at the reporters. Her glasses must fog a little. “I knew it was gonna rain,” she tells them. “But I’m kind of glad, because it’s like the angels in heaven are crying.”
The funeral parlor is thronged with people she doesn’t know, people she hasn’t seen in years, people she sees every day. Their arms come at her, their cheeks, she must feel herself wrapped into their hugs and held nervously at a distance between their palms. She is surrounded by a buzzing, like she’s wandered into a colony of bees.