Moonlight & Vines (25 page)

“But your cousin . . . ?” Ash began.

“He . . . he didn't kill them. They just . . . died. . . .” It was getting harder and harder for Jenny to get it out. Starting had seemed tough, but going on was worse. Her chest was so tight she could barely breathe. She couldn't see because she was blinded with tears. Her throat felt thick, making her choke on the words before she could get the words out.

“None . . . none of them died easy. Not my own family. Not my grandfather from cancer, a few . . . a few years after I came to live with them. Not my grandmother . . . she had Alzheimer's. By the time she finally died she didn't even know who I was anymore . . . .”

She finally turned her face toward them. “Why did they all have to go
like that? Why not me? I should have died with them. Instead, I've just got this emptiness inside where family's supposed to be. I feel so . . . so lonely . . . so guilty . . . .”

Ash came and sat beside her and put an arm around her, drawing Jenny's head down to her shoulder. Bones took her hand. She looked at him. Even through her tears she could see that crazy light in his eyes, but it didn't seem so strange anymore. It felt almost comforting.

“You've got to talk to those spirits one more time,” he said. “This time you've got to tell them what you're feeling. That you don't want to die—not till it's your time—but you do want to live until it's your time. You want to be alive. You want to dream. You've got to ask them to help you let it all go.”

“But she said the reason they came to me was
because
I don't dream. What's the point of me telling them what you're saying I should? Wouldn't they already know it?”

“The thing with spirits,” Bones told her, “is they want you to work it out on your own. Then, when you ask them for the right gift, they might help you out.”

“And . . . and if they won't?”

“Girl,” Bones told her, “you've got a lot of strong medicine tucked away inside you. Everybody does. Those spirits don't want to help you, you come back and talk to me again and I'll see what I can do about waking it up for you.”

“Why can't you just help her now?” Ash asked.

“Because these are spirits we're talking about,” Bones said. “You don't mess with spirits unless you've got no choice, Ash—especially not spirits that are working their medicine mojo on someone else. There's no way I'm getting in between them until they get off this wheel and I can climb on it. That's the way it is.”

So here I am, waiting for Death to show.

I'm trying to feel brave—or at least project a little courage even though I have none—but I don't think it's working. I don't know which I'm more afraid of: that I won't dream, that I know I'll never die and have to go on like this forever, or that maybe he'll take me away with him right
now. Except in the end, it's not Death that joins me in my bedroom, but the middle fate, the spare-change girl.

“Where is he?” I ask her.

“You've decided to dream once more,” she says, “so he's gone on to deal with other matters.”

Harvesting other lives you mean—but I don't say that aloud. I don't know whether to feel relieved that it's not me this time, or angry that he even exists in the first place.

“Why can't he just leave us alone?”

She shakes her head. “Without his gift, what would you have?”

I'm sick of this idea that without death, that without knowing we're all going to die one day, rich and poor, whatever our creed or color, we can't appreciate life. Even if it is true.

“I wanted to talk to him,” I say.

She gives me a long considering look. “Did you want to talk to him, or to the eldest of us?”

And then I understand. It hits me like a thunderclap booming under my skin. It's been her all along.
He's
the middle fate, Life; she's the one that cuts the thread and ferries us on. My heartbeat gets too fast, drumming in my chest. All my resolutions about facing the past and my fears drain away and I want to tell her that I've changed my mind again. I don't want to dream. I don't want to be more alive if it means I have to die.

“Is this it?” I ask her. “Have you come for me?”

“Would that be so bad?” she says.

She projects such a strange aura of comfort and happiness that I want to shake my head and agree with her.

“I'm scared,” I tell her.

“Fear lets you know you're alive,” she says, “but that doesn't mean you should embrace it.”

“You're starting to sound like Bones.”

“Ah, Bones.”

“Do you know him?”

She smiles. “I know everybody.”

I want to keep her talking. I want to put off the moment for as long as I can, so every time she finishes speaking, I try to fill the silence with another question.

“How do you decide when it's someone's time?” I ask.

“I told you,” she says. “I don't choose when or how you die. I'm only there to meet you when you do.”

“Do people get mad at you, or are they mostly just scared like me?”

The eldest fate shook her head. “Neither. Mostly they're too concerned with those they left behind to be angry or frightened. That old homily is true, you know: it's always harder for those left behind.”

“So . . . so my family wasn't mad at me because I didn't die with them? And my grandparents . . .”

“How could they be? They loved you as much as you loved them.”

“So I don't have to be scared of meeting them in . . . wherever it is I'll be going?”

“I don't know where you'll go or who you'll meet when you're there,” the eldest fate says. “And I don't know what they'll say to you. But I don't think you have to be scared.”

I take a deep breath. “Okay,” I tell her, wondering as I'm saying it where I've found the courage. “I'm guess I'm ready.”

I wonder how it'll happen. Maybe I'll be lucky. Maybe I'll be one of the ones who just drifts away in her sleep.

“I'm not here to take you,” the eldest fate tells me.

I don't even have time to feel relief, I'm so confused. “But . . . then why are you here?”

“I came as a friend—to finish our earlier conversation.”

“As a friend?”

“You know, returning a kindness,” she says.

“But . . .”

“I'm everybody's friend,” the eldest fate explains. “Most people just don't know it.”

I think of what Bones told me. I think about what I can't let go of, how I'm always so afraid, how I'm too scared to get close to someone because I know they're just going to die on me, how most of the time I feel so lost and alone. I think about how sick I am of the way I've lived my life, how I want to change it, but I can't seem to do it. Not on my own. I think about all of this. I look in the eldest fate's eyes and I see she understands.

I'm not going to live forever. I know that. I don't expect that. I don't even really want it. All I've ever wanted is the chance to be normal, to have a piece of what everybody else seems to have: a respite from the hurt and pain. I don't have to die to find that.

“I could use a friend,” I tell her.

Beauty exists whether a person has the eye to behold it or not. That principle also applies to ugliness.

—William Arthur Herring
    from
A Horse of a Different Color

There are only a pair of old-fashioned cemeteries left in the Crowsea-Foxville area. All Souls, over in Crowsea, hasn't been used in fifty years, but it's under the protection of the Crowsea Heritage Society. Unfortunately, that protection only means that bodies haven't been moved, mausoleums, crypts, statuary, and other stonework haven't been torn down to make room for condos. The place is seriously run-down and overgrown, and the only people hanging there are drug dealers.

Foxville Cemetery is still a working graveyard, as witness the fresh grave I've just laid flowers on. Neither's a fun place to be, but then being here isn't about fun. It's about closure.

I think the same architect designed both places—someone with a serious jones for New Orleans-style graveyards. Has to be that, because Newford's certainly not under sea level, so we don't need the crypts and mausoleums. The closest we get to New Orleans is the seriously watered-down Mardi Gras that's organized every year by the owners of the Good Serpent Club. The parade they put together never gets to be much more
than a big block party, but you can't fault them for trying. It's not like we have a French Quarter here, primed and geared to be party central, or the tradition of Mardi Gras. The people who observe Lent in Newford aren't thinking along the lines of a carnival Fat Tuesday, and to everybody else, it's just another weekday.

I look down at the bouquet of six red roses lying on the freshly turned earth at my feet, then my gaze rises to the small stone and its incomplete inscription.

ELISE
Born,. . .–Died, July 23, 1994
R.I.P.

No one claimed the body and the police never did identify her beyond what little I had to tell them.

I was working late in my office the first time I met her. No, let's be honest. I was pushing papers around, killing time—trying to make myself so tired that by the time I did get home, I'd just fall into bed and sleep.

There was nothing left for me at home anymore. Peter took everything when he walked out on me.

What I missed the most was my confidence. My self-esteem.

Thursday night.

My business card says:
FINDERS, LTD.—IF YOU NEED IT, WE CAN FIND IT. KIRA LEE, PROP.,
followed by my e-mail address, my phone and fax numbers, and finally my office address. The office is the least important part of the equation—at least insofar as dealing with clients. It's basically a tiny hole-in-the-wall of a room in the old Sovereign Building on Flood Street that barely manages to hold a desk, swivel chair, and file cabinet, with another chair parked across the desk for a visitor. A computer takes up most of the desktop—the tower sits on the floor beside the desk while my printer and fax machine are on a table over by the window. There's also a phone, stacks of papers and files, and, inevitably, a cup of coffee in some stage of depletion and usually cold.

I don't worry about clients coming by the office. With the kind of
work I do, they don't have to. I get my contracts by phone or messenger; I get paid when I deliver the goods. It's a simple system and helps me keep my overhead low because usually by the time a client contacts me, all they're interested in is how fast can I get the job done, not how pretty my workspace is.

That night I'm sitting behind the desk, feet propped up on a corner while I flip through a fashion magazine. The window behind me's tuned to the usual dull channel: a nighttime view of an inner-city block, shops on the ground floor, apartments above them. The most predominant piece of color is a neon sign that just says
BAR.
Looking at all the models preening on the glossy pages propped up on my legs, I'm thinking that maybe what I need is a makeover. My idea of work clothing is comfort: jeans and hightops, a T-shirt with a lightweight shirt overtop, blonde hair tied back in a ponytail. About the only thing I have in common with these models is my height.

Of course a makeover means maintenance and I don't know if I have the patience for it. Shower, brush my hair, dab on some lipstick. Anything more and I'll be running even later than I usually am in the mornings. Then she comes walking in, drop-dead gorgeous like she stepped out of the magazine I'm holding, and I think, why even try?

Dark hair cut stylishly short, eyes darker still. The makeup's perfectly understated. The clothes, too. Custom fit, snug black dress and heels, clasp purse, and tailored silk jacket, also black. Her only jewelry is a short string of pearls.

“I need you to find someone for me,” she says.

“That's not exactly my line of work, Ms . . . ?”

She lets my question hang there as she sits down across the desk from me, tugs her skirt down.

“It's extremely urgent,” she says.

I have to smile. “It's always urgent, but I still can't help you. I don't do people—only things.”

“I don't understand. Your card says . . .”

Well-manicured fingers take my business card from her purse and place it on the desk between us.

“I'm sorry if it's misled you,” I tell her. “It just means that I find objects.” She looks confused, so I go on to explain. “You know, like tickets to
Cats
for a visiting businessman. Props for a theater company or a film
crew. Maybe some long out-of-print book. The kinds of things that people could find on their own if they had the time or the inclination. Instead they've got money and I do the legwork for them.”

Now she takes a package of cigarettes from her purse.

“But it
is
an object I need you to find for me,” she says.

It's my turn to look confused. “You started off saying you wanted me to find someone . . . .”

“I do. She stole my heart and I want it back.”

The woman lights her cigarette and places the package and matches on the edge of the desk. I turn in my chair to look out the window. The same channel is still playing out there.

Well, this was a first. No one's ever contracted me to find a broken heart before. I want to send her right back out the door, except I start thinking about Peter, about how I felt when he walked out and took my heart away with him. So it was a woman who took hers instead of a man. Big deal. It had to hurt the same.

I turn back to look at her. “I have to level with you. I'm not really sure I can be of much help. What you really want is a private detective.”

“I tried a few of them, but none of them would help me. The last one gave me your card.”