Cancel the Wedding (38 page)

The five of us, dirty and sweaty and tired, walked over and stood around our prize. Our little wooden treasure box that we had spent all night freeing from the ground. This symbolized the end of that life for my mother. The end of Janie Jones and Huntley, Georgia. All packed into a tiny wooden box.

Graham pointed to the small metal box next to it. “What's that?”

We all shrugged. We had no idea what that metal box was.

Logan picked up her shovel and said, “I call the first shower when we get home.”

Leo gave me a sympathetic pat on the shoulder as he walked back and started filling in the grave. The rest of us fell in line with our shovels putting the dirt back where it came from.

It didn't take nearly as long to put the dirt back in as it did to get it out. Although it didn't exactly fit either. We had a huge mound of leftover dirt. It was almost sunrise and we needed to get out of there before anyone came by. We did not have time for expanding dirt. We ended up spreading it out around the base of the oak tree and covering it with pine straw.

We tucked Oliver's casket into the back of my car wrapped in a plastic tarp and then did the best we could to cover our tracks. When we finished it was after six thirty and the sun was up enough that we could see very clearly without our flashlights.

I took one look at my clothes and my hands and my legs and started walking toward the lake. I was covered in dirt. Dirt from an actual grave. It was all over me. In my hair, my mouth, ground under my fingernails.

Georgia called out. “Where are you going?”

I just pointed to the water.

When I got to the bank I ran into the lake and dove under the water. I stayed under as long as my lungs would let me and then burst up for air. Georgia was right behind me. When she came up she was laughing.

“I can't believe we just did that.”

I couldn't believe much of anything. “I can't believe he was actually in there. That it's all real. I thought we were going to keep digging and there would be nothing there.”

Georgia was scrubbing the dirt off her hands. “William is not going to believe all this.” I knew her husband, William, would be most upset at being left out of the dig. She added, “I'm glad it didn't smell like a dead body.”

“I can't believe you just said that.” My shoes felt squishy filled with the muddy lake water. I reached down and took them off then threw them on the shore. Georgia did the same. Then I took off my socks and my watch and threw them next to my shoes. I was making a pile of garbage.

Leo had walked down to the edge of the lake and was rinsing his hands in the water. He said, “William is going to be so pissed that he wasn't here for this.”

I had to laugh. “Georgia was just saying the same thing.”

Leo smiled at me; all the things we needed to say for the moment had been said. He stood up to leave, to walk back up the hill to where his rental car was parked in the shadows. Yes, maybe someday we would be able to be friends. He waved to us over his shoulder, walking away without a word. I just watched him as he became smaller in the distance and then drove off into the first hazy break of dawn.

Georgia was taking off whatever bits of clothing she could safely toss too. I reached into the pocket of my shorts and pulled out my new cell phone. I had forgotten about that. I held it up and watched as the water drained out of it. I just tossed it over my shoulder into the lake.

I floated on my back and looked at the bowl of mountains cradling the water. I said to Georgia, “Do you think Mom . . . I don't know, ever got over it?”

“Obviously not.” Georgia was squeezing the water out of her hair. “You did a good thing here, Livie. I mean finding him and figuring all of this out. You got to finish what Dad was trying to do for her. It's good we know it now.”

I said, “Elliott figured most of it out.”

I wasn't sure what her thoughts were about Elliott, but for some reason I didn't want her to blame him for my breakup with Leo. I said, “It wasn't his fault. I mean everything that happened with Leo and me. It wasn't because of Elliott.”

She was making a big show of digging the dirt out from underneath her fingernails clearly unsure how to handle this phantom man named Elliott. “I know that, Olivia. You've had doubts about Leo for a while, whether you knew it or not. He did too. It just took some time away from each other for you two to see it. I know that Elliott wasn't a part of that. I wouldn't hold that against him.”

It was either brought on by sadness or exhaustion, but I started crying again. I said under my breath, “I don't think it really matters anymore.”

She didn't seem to have heard me. She asked, completely off topic from my love life, “What do we do with the body now?”

I shook off my tears. I had been thinking about the second half of this little excavation while we were digging. Buddy had planted the idea in my head when he said we could legally move the body ourselves, in our own car. “I think we just take the casket straight over to Mary Frances at the cemetery and tell her we are burying him in that grave next to George.”

Georgia agreed. “We should have a proper funeral for him.”

Logan yelled down to us. “Graham's going to drive me back to the house.”

Georgia called back up to the two of them. “Be careful driving, Graham. I know you're tired.”

Logan rolled her eyes. Graham said, “Yes, ma'am.”

I would have checked my watch for the time but I had already tossed it. “The funeral home won't be open for hours. What now?”

Georgia said, “Showers and sleep. Lots of sleep.”

We got back to the house and showered in a haze of fatigue. No amount of water or soap could get the stains of the red Georgia clay out of our hands and the smell of dirt out of our hair. I finally gave up and collapsed in a wet steaming heap on the bed for a few hours of sleep before Georgia and I took the tiny casket to the cemetery.

Mary Frances was very kind about us pulling in with a new addition to their cemetery. I had to believe that it wasn't every day that two women pulled up with a filthy dirt-caked casket in the back of their car and asked to have it buried, but you would never know it to look at Mary Frances.

We had copies of little Oliver's birth certificate and death certificate. We had the letters from our father about moving him to the Rutledge family graveyard and his plans to have his final resting place be the Jones family plot in the cemetery. We gave her our proof of little Oliver's lineage so that he could rightfully be buried in the Joneses' family section with his father. I was tossing papers at her so fast she was having a hard time keeping up. I mentioned quickly and offhandedly that we had the permit from the disinterment but I had left it at home. I was becoming quite the accomplished liar these days.

We made the necessary arrangements for the burial to be held the next day. When we handed Mary Frances our credit card to pay the bill she went over the line items one last time. She was going to explain the cost of the vault to us, in case we didn't know about the policy to have each casket placed in a vault. Georgia held up her hand indicating that we were fully versed on the topic. Then Mary Frances pointed to the charge for the “grave opening and closing” and explained that was the fee for the men who dug the hole.

Georgia smiled as she signed the bill. “A backhoe is worth every penny.”

Mary Frances misunderstood the comment and thought Georgia was feeling blue about the idea of the grave being dug. She patted Georgia on the hand and then looked at me and said, “Bless her heart.”

With that Georgia and I broke into a fit of inappropriate giggles that we could not control. We were punch-drunk and exhausted and laughed in that unhinged way where you can't control it. Where your eyes water and your nostrils flare and your face turns red. We laughed the whole way back to the house.

When Georgia and I walked in the door we found Logan and Graham in the kitchen. I asked, “What are you guys up to in here?”

Graham held up a carrot and a knife. “We're making a lunch.”

I turned on my heel. “Scary.”

Georgia and I packed up some of the research into boxes to make room to sit down and eat. The four of us sat around the dinner table eating an enormous salad and overly buttered French bread while rehashing everything we had gone through the night before. We all had that nervous energy associated with a shared traumatic experience. We had the need to discuss each tiny bit of it ad nauseam in order to process the whole encounter.

Graham was particularly enthralled with the winch on the truck he had borrowed and he kept re-creating the noise it made as it pulled the lid free.

Georgia said hypnotically, “I can't believe we pulled that off.”

I found the stem of a bell pepper in my salad and held it up. “Do you mean digging up the grave or eating a meal prepared by Logan?” Logan fished an ice cube out of her tea and threw it at my head.

Georgia ignored us. “I was referring to the grave thing.”

Logan said for the fifth time, “I wonder what's in the metal box.”

The small box that had been buried in the vault with Oliver's casket remained on the coffee table, covered in dirt and locked up tight. It was a black-painted metal box that Logan had declared was the exact same size as the shoebox from her Ugg boots. Apparently there is the English method of measurement, the metric method, and then Logan's shoebox method.

There were deep scratches and dents all over the dull, black surface of the box. Where the paint had been scratched off, dark red rust had formed.

The hinged lid of the box was locked with a silver-keyed lock. Looking at it made Logan mention again that she, and she alone, had spotted it and recovered it. Graham was talking on top of her about the hoisting powers of the winch. The rest of us were yawning. We were four very tired and punchy people.

We tried in vain to open the lock, but we didn't have any tools, we were all exhausted, and our hands were sore and blistered. We decided to deal with it after the burial in the morning. We'd blow it up if we had to, but we would get it open.

It wasn't even three o'clock in the afternoon, but the four of us were ready to call it a night. As Logan walked Graham out, I followed them to the door. I called after him. “Graham, you know you can't tell anyone what we did last night, right?”

He and Logan shared a look. He said, “Yes ma'am, I know.”

I knew what that look meant. “Did you already tell him?”

Logan answered for Graham. “Elliott had a right to know. He's the one who figured everything out.”

My hand instinctively went to my pocket for my phone. I had forgotten that I had lost another one to the waters of the lake. I couldn't explain my urgent need to see him considering the fight we had had, but it was immediate. He knew that we had found the baby, that he was right about everything. For some reason I had to talk to him about it. I felt awful that I hadn't been the one to tell him. I turned to Georgia and said, “I'll be right back.”

When I got to Elliott's house he was sitting on his porch, waiting for me. Somehow I knew he would be. On the way over there I had realized the improbability of Graham being able to get his hands on a truck with a winch in the middle of the night. That had to have been Elliott's doing.

I wasn't sure what to say, where to start. Elliott's eyes were red rimmed, as if he had been up all night. It made them look even more green. My stomach hurt to look at him. I made my way slowly up the stairs, the two of us locked in a silent stare.

Finally I said, “Thank you for sending Graham with the truck. We couldn't have gotten into the vault without it.”

He didn't answer; he just nodded.

“Where did you get it?”

“It's Jimmy's. He let me—Graham borrow it.”

I dared to move closer and took the last step onto the porch. “How did you know about Oliver? How did you figure it out?”

It took him a long time to answer. “I'm not sure. It just hit me when you said that thing about being a good boy, that you would cook me dinner if I was a good boy.” I felt queasy as he said that, remembering the fact that I wasn't able to cook him dinner because I was busy having all of the lies I had been living blow up simultaneously. He continued. “I realized that we had never looked for a baby being born after they were married. It all seemed to make sense. It was the only person I could think of that would be so important to Janie that your father would go to all that trouble to find and to move.”

“Did you know I would do it? I mean, go in and get him out?”

“I thought you might. You knew your father was never able to get permission to move him. I wasn't sure you'd actually go through with it though.”

“I'm sorry, Elliott.” I couldn't think of a single other thing to say.

Elliott kept talking as if I hadn't interrupted him. “But I guess, well I guess I thought that I had pushed you away. Pushed you to the point where you would want to get out of town as soon as possible. Look, I feel . . . I feel really awful that I said that about your mother. I know that hurt you. I'm sorry for that.”

That comment about my mother had hurt me, but maybe it just hurt because it was accurate. I said, “It's true though. She had a whole life she never talked about, and then there I go, following her lead and lying to you.”

He was wringing his hands together. “I know you weren't . . . I know you didn't keep it from me to be cruel.” Elliott stood up and I leaned back. I was pinned in between him and the porch rail. “Olivia, how could you not tell me? How could you keep that from me?”

I was trying to hold on to calmness and reason, but it wasn't working very well. I just had to fall on my sword. Apologize. How could I have handled this so badly? Warm trails of tears rolled down my face. I kept brushing them off with the back of my hand but I was having trouble keeping up. I was so tired, and hurt, and upset. “I didn't know how to tell you. I wasn't doing it to hurt you.”