It feels like I’ve been sucker punched in the gut. I can hardly breathe. “I know. She wore this red dress to her prom. My father nearly had a fit. Said she looked like a prostitute, but she refused to get changed.” I lose myself in the memories for a moment. God, they fought so hard that night. Dad didn’t want her leaving the house “looking like a street walker” and she refused to “give in to his capitalist, archaic, patriarchal bullshit.” They were always butting heads, but it was because they were so alike. Later, at some point while she was away at college, they mellowed towards each other. She was his favorite, and I was okay with that, because she was my favorite, too. She was everybody’s favorite. Full of piss and vinegar, always ready to call you out on your shit. She called a spade a spade, which was a breath of fresh air in our household.
“She always felt so alive to me, even when she was sad,” Natalia says. She looks like she’s about to burst into tears. “I want you to know…if I could have helped her escape, I would have. Things were bad back then, though. My father goes through phases. He was so watchful of me then. He was paranoid that I was going to try and leave myself. I was under constant surveillance.”
I stroke my hand over her hair, sucking in a deep breath through my nose. “I know,” I tell her. “I know you would have. This isn’t your fault.” It’s mine. I should have been watching out for her. I should have been paying attention, not throwing back champagne the night she disappeared. And I should have looked harder for her. I should have stayed down here. I should have figured out where she was sooner.
There are so many reasons to blame myself for this. It’s madness that Natalia would feel even an ounce of guilt herself. I crouch down beside her, taking the red streamer from her hands. I wind it around my own fingers, hating myself more and more by the second.
“I’ll give you a moment,” Natalia tells me. She gets to her feet and heads off, stopping in front of one of the other crosses, placing her hand lightly on the ground in front of it.
“I bet you’re loving how complicated this thing’s become,” I say softly under my breath. “You always did love drama. Remember when we were teenagers, and Dad caught me sneaking out one night to see that girl…god, what was her name? Sarah Goldman. Fuck, Sarah Goldman.” I shake my head, trying not to laugh. “He caught me shimmying down a drainpipe at the back of the house, and he was screaming and shouting, yelling at me, calling me a little punk, and you showed up and just sat there, eating a sandwich, watching us argue, volleying back and forth like it was a goddamn tennis match.”
I almost expect to hear her voice, laughing, telling me I deserved the hiding I got that night, but there’s nothing. No laughter. No elbow in my side. Just the wind teasing the red piece of fabric in my hands, and the mountains stretching on forever in every direction.
Did she ever come up here? Did she ever get to see this while she was alive? I find myself hoping so. She would have really, really loved it.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
MASS
A sour, terrible smell hits the back of my nose as we head back down the mountain. It’s ripe and pungent, and makes my gag reflex work overtime. Natalia takes me by the hand again and tells me we need to hurry back, and I can see that she’s edgy. The smell grows thicker, burning my nostrils as we hike down. At the back of my mind, I already know what the smell is, I recognize it on some level, but I don’t want to acknowledge it.
After a while, the smell disappears. Natalia seems to relax, and I forget about it until we pass through a stand of trees and suddenly we’re faced with a yawning hole in the ground, which is filled almost to the brim with bones. Bones fucking everywhere. And not animal bones. Not the remains of game that has been hunted and killed. No. These are human skeletons.
“Damn,” Natalia curses under her breath. She’s anxious as she looks sideways at me. “I’m sorry. I thought...I thought this was further west. The smell…”
The smell must have confused her. It was coming directly from the west, instead of from down below us, but the breeze is strange today, sending blustery gusts in loops up and down the mountain on thermals, and it’s obviously turned her around a little.
I’m beginning to wonder why there’s even any smell at all—the corpses in the huge, mass grave, are all skeletons—but then I catch sight of something that blows that theory right out of the water. The corpses are not all skeletons. On top of the mountain of bones lie three fresh bodies. All three are women, and they’re naked. They’re in various states of decomposition. The first body has to have been out here for at least a couple of weeks. The skin is nearly all gone, as well as the eyes, and most of the flesh on the skull. The other two bodies can’t have been exposed for as long. They’re bloated and purple, as if they’ve been submerged in water rather than left out on the side of a mountain. Then I realize, the rain yesterday was intense and didn’t stop for hours. And with the bodies resting on top of the pile the way they are, they’re likely to have absorbed an awful lot of fluid.
“What is this?” I can barely speak. I want to double over and throw up. I have seen some fucked-up things in my time, but this? This is something else. Something rotten and evil. Tears streak down Natalia’s cheeks.