Come Little Children (11 page)

“Yeah. The one beside it’s Bethlehem, then Mount Calvary. They’re not all biblical, though. The next one’s got castles.”

“The detail is remarkable,” Camilla said, perking up a little. She moved to a casket that was carved to look like the canopy of a rainforest. The one below it had men in top hats spinning women in long, elegant ball gowns. “Where do you get these?”

“I make them.”

Camilla turned and surveyed Peter anew. Never in a million years would she have guessed that he was a gifted woodworker. “They’re beautiful. And that’s what I
actually
think.”

“Thanks. Pick one.”

“What?”

“Pick a box.”

Camilla cocked an eyebrow, and Peter cocked one back.

She turned to the wall again and perused the selections like a shopper hunting for the right pair of shoes. She reached up with two hands and took down a chest with carvings of female aristocrats laced in corsets and carrying parasols.

“Good,” Peter said. He picked up an urn that was resting beside him. “Now follow me.”

“What? Where? I’m—I’m not…”

“What?”

“I’m exhausted. I need sleep.”

“It’s eight o’clock.”

“I’m not feeling fantastic right now.”

“I know. Now stop making excuses and follow me.”

The Vincents’ crematorium was a small antechamber attached to their embalming room. As Camilla stepped inside, a cold draft blew through and sent goose bumps rippling up her arms. She looked around at the cement walls and noticed there wasn’t a single window.

“Your oven vent is open,” she said when Peter entered the room.

“Maddock’s airing it out.”

Fair enough
, she thought. “How’s he related to you again?”

“That’s a good question,” Peter said, placing his urn on a workbench and moving to the giant brick oven. “Our family adopted him before Luke and I were born. It’s a sad story, actually. His mother was in a car accident when she was still pregnant, but the paramedics arrived in time to save the baby. Uncle Jasper had known her quite well, I think, so he stepped in before the orphanage did. Everybody at home agreed to the adoption,
but I’m pretty sure my uncle signed the papers, so technically that makes Maddy my cousin. Only cousin, actually.”

Peter reached through the retort door and pulled out the sliding hopper, a retractable plank used to charge caskets into the shaft at the right time and temperature, and picked up a small cardboard box that was resting on top. “Hello, Ms. Beaudry.”

“As happy as cremains usually make me,” Camilla said, “I can’t say this is helping.”

“It’ll take two seconds,” Peter replied as he carried the ashes to the workbench.

While he emptied the human soot into the urn, Camilla sauntered over to the oven and examined the blood-red bricks in the edifice.

“You know,” she said, “if I crawled in, you could flip the switch and it would solve a lot of problems. Your mom would approve.”

“Funny,” Peter said, tapping the last of Ms. Beaudry—the chronic chain smoker—into her eternal ashtray. “I used to crawl in there when me and Luke played hide-and-seek. God that was, like, fifteen, almost twenty years ago.”

“Really?”

“Really. And the doofus never caught me. I tied a rope to the roof and hung it down the chimney so when I heard him coming I’d be able to crawl away.”

Camilla stuck her head in the smoke shaft and stared up at the tall, dizzying darkness of the crematorium. “That’s at least fifty feet to the ceiling.”

“Yeah, and the rope got greasy after a few months. I doubt it’s even there anymore.”

“If your mom knew—”

“She would have murdered me. But dad would’ve thought it was genius.”

A little different from my own dad
, Camilla snickered. He used to call her a genius too, but only facetiously.
Hey, genius, grab me a beer. Go wash the trailer, genius. Yeah, genius, change your clothes, you look like a fucking Christmas elf
.

From the crematorium, Peter led them back to the outer hallway, then down another stark corridor until they reached a heavy steel door.

“The freezer,” Peter said, pointing. “Holds close to thirty on the racks.”

He opened a closet beside the freezer room and set Ms. Beaudry’s urn inside. Camilla heard the closet jimmy shut again, but she wasn’t paying attention to Peter anymore; she was busy examining another door, a plain, splintered surface with an old iron keyhole.

“Where does that go?” she asked.

“The basement. It’s gutted.”

Camilla’s hand hovered over the doorknob. She wanted to open it—wanted to keep exploring every corner of the house—but she couldn’t think of a good enough excuse, so her hand dropped away.

“One more stop,” Peter said, taking off again. “Keep bringing that chest.”

He led them back through the hallway—past the freezer, past the garage’s loading zone and the embalming room—to a door that swung open on the kitchen.

Camilla wasn’t expecting the kitchen to be on the other side of that wall. Before she could even blink, her eyes plunged to the back exit, expecting to see the wet six-year-old boy standing in the doorframe…

But the room was empty.

“Carrots or no carrots?”

“What?” Camilla turned to see Peter pulling open the fridge.

“Carrots it is. Bring the box.”

Camilla carried her chest to the kitchen island and set it down. Peter took off the lid and started loading it up with food from the refrigerator: a bag of carrots, half a baguette, a bowl of cucumber salad, a few prewrapped sandwiches, and a couple of butter tarts.

“Where’d all this come from?” Camilla asked incredulously, remembering the bare refrigerator from the night before.

“I had a hunch mom would be too busy to make dinner tonight, so I put something together.”

“A salad and two sandwiches are going to feed everyone?”

“No,” he said, avoiding eye contact. “I was thinking it, uh, it could just be us.”

Right
, Camilla thought,
there it is. The moment a guy says something about what he’s thinking without actually saying it. Now I feel stupid
.

“Sure.” She felt herself blush as bright as her hair color.

“I also thought you could use another break from the house.” Peter picked up the chest of food and moved past the oak cabinet—the one that Camilla knew kept the mysterious stack of towels—toward the back exit. “Even if it’s only a stone’s throw away.”

He gripped the latch on the patio door and twisted the handle at the same time, swinging it open to reveal the beautiful back courtyard.

As Peter and Camilla stepped off the veranda, the ugly porch light went out and they were immersed in full, velveteen darkness. Camilla’s eyes dilated and took in a much softer glow: the
moonlight washed down from above, complemented by beads of fireflies burning in and out on the breeze. Tiny lawn lights stitched their way along a stony path through the length of the enclosure, and had she not known that there were bars on the shed’s windows, she wouldn’t have noticed it now; the beautiful lighting illuminated a lot, but it obscured a lot too.

Fountains played as Peter and Camilla passed them by, the water dappling off the stonework, and then the walking path curled along the edge of the pond and led them deeper into the night. It wasn’t until now that Camilla got a sense of how big the pond actually was. It was easily the size of a public swimming pool—not Olympic dimensions by any means, but still a very large, slightly oblong basin that was dark enough to be a lot deeper than anyone would think.

Here the soil rolled up with the roots of the tree that towered near the outer edge of the Vincents’ plot. It was massive up close. Its branches hung over the pond, ancient arms reaching out to snare something in the darkness, and the leaves were fully flushed like an emerald mink.

They reached the base of the tree, and Peter set their picnic box on the ground. He put a hand against the black trunk and took a step up.

Camilla squinted and noticed a series of planks nailed into the bark: it was a ladder that snaked up to a tree house camouflaged in the cover of the leaves. In the blink of an eye, Peter was up the steps and inside the house.

“Incoming!” A wicker basket with a rope tied to the handle launched out of the window, soaring through the air, and flopped to the ground. “Load the food and come on up!”

Camilla placed their picnic inside the basket and gave the rope a tug, then braced her body against the tree and hoisted herself up the first two planks.

The higher she got, the more of a rush she felt. The stress of the crummy day stayed grounded while she clambered up and up alongside the floating basket, lost in the allure of the adventure.

Peter poked his head out of the tree house and offered his hand. She took it, noticing the tail end of the tattoo on the inside of his wrist again, and was pulled up through the entrance.

The tree house was totally bare, not even a bird’s roost or squirrel’s nest packed into the corner.

“Welcome to the palace,” Peter flourished.

“Very impressive. And what’s on the royal menu?”

“A sublime cucumber salad,” he said, pulling items out of the basket as he listed them, “and the lady’s choice of chicken or tuna on brown.”

“Exquisite.”

Peter took a tablecloth from the bottom of the chest and rolled it out on the floor. As he spread around the food, Camilla reached over and touched the ornately carved box again.

“These really are beautiful, you know. How long does it take you?”

“Depends. An urn? Maybe three or four weeks. I can etch portraits too, but that takes longer.”

“A portrait? Could you etch me?”

“Why, do you plan on dying soon?”

“People rarely plan on dying. It’s good to be prepared.”

Peter laughed. He ripped off a chunk of baguette and passed it over. “Take and eat.”

Camilla stuck the bread in her mouth and bit down, closing her eyes. It was bliss. When she opened her eyelids again, she looked out of the tree house window and leaned back, savoring the view as much as the bread.

The scattered lights of Nolan were twinkling in the trees like the night’s freshest stars, and under the open black sky—which seemed deeper and spookier than it ever had before—the Vincent manor sat like a sleeping giant. Camilla and Peter were on top of the world, literally, and the whole planet was spinning around them.

“Dad built this tree house under mom’s nose,” Peter said. “Claimed it as our hiding spot. We kept it secret for almost a year too, which…well, you know my mom, wasn’t easy.” He watched the backyard with a smile on his face, almost as if he could see the memories playing out below. “In the winter, he’d set up tombstones on the ice and teach us how to skate around them. Crazy how small things like that stick out.”

Camilla imagined her own father stumbling around their trailer yard, attempting to build her a tree house, but it was like watching a toothless beaver trying to build the Hoover Dam—it would never, ever, ever work.
Pump up your own bike tires. Hang that hammock. Pitch your own tent. Grab me another beer, genius
.

Flashes of the trailer park came back so fast that she couldn’t block them out. Fields of flat, dead grass and the constant slam of screen doors; brown glass shattered on the roadsides; smells of the septic pipes as they burped up a rank sludge when it rained in the spring.
Out! Your mom’s busy!
Camilla was heaved out of her own trailer, down…down…into the sludge. Then she looked up and saw her mother’s face in the kitchen window, looking back, looking sorry. She was still aware then, or at least aware enough to show regret, but gone enough to just let
it all happen. And suddenly the face was pulled away from the window. Then her mother was really gone. Physically. The rest would go too, and almost as fast.

Camilla pushed the images out of her head, her heart beating but her breath still under control. It had been a long time since that big of a flash had gone off. Even longer since the images were that vivid.

“Think fast.” Peter tossed Camilla a sandwich—she caught it at the last second.

As she unwrapped the plastic, Camilla heard Moira’s voice echoing the quote that “blood was thicker than water.” She looked down at the funeral home and recalled the way Jasper had marveled at the family portrait in the north parlor, and the way the relatives’ urns were lined up precisely on the mantelpiece. Even though she hadn’t shed a single tear when her father was finally tried and convicted of domestic abuse (among a panoply of other minor summary offenses), it suddenly struck her how profound the loss of Peter’s dad must have been. To lose such a kind person—moreover, the fulcrum of the family—would have been devastating.

Then another image popped into her head: Moira marching down an aisle in a wedding dress, scowling, on her way to marry whomever this man had been. “Happiest day of my life” was the invisible tagline floating underneath, and Camilla couldn’t help but snicker.

Peter shook his head. “You’re always smirking, and I never know why.”

“Me neither.” She tapped her forehead. “It’s weird up here.”

They sunk their teeth into the sandwiches, enjoying the taste, and ate in silence. After the sandwiches were gone, they moved on to the carrots.

“I’ve been wondering, how did Laura and Lucas meet?”

“They’re the same age,” Peter replied, “but since we were homeschooled, it wasn’t till we hired her to help with admin work.”

“And the wedding’s in a month?”

“Yeah,” he smirked. “Weird. Ever since Luke turned sixteen, the whole family’s been on him to find a girl. Now I suppose all that attention’ll turn to me. They’re relentless, you know. Sometimes I think mom hired Laura just to set him up—I mean, how many people are qualified to do that job, yet she chooses the youngest, prettiest one…”

Camilla quickly brought a carrot to her mouth as Peter’s sentence trailed off, both of them seeming to realize that the situation they were in was possibly premeditated.

“Oh God no,” Peter scoffed. “I didn’t mean—no, don’t give her that much credit, please.”

Blushing, Camilla curled her hair around her ears and looked out of the tree house again.