Six Feet Over It (12 page)

“
Oh.
Lord of the Rings. Frodo. Rivendell.”

I frown back.

“Really? Tolkien?”

“Nope.”

“Oh, man.” She stretches her booted legs out in the new spring sun. “Well, no worse than dungeon mastery.” She exhales. “Rivendell is the Elven Outpost in Middle-Earth.”

“Yikes.”

“Oh yeah. It’s where the flipping
elves
live. You seriously have not read these books?”

I hold up Virginia.

“All right. So,
elves
live in Rivendell and it’s all otherworldly peaceful waterfalls and trees and they live forever, kind of. And they’re tall I think. But the Shire is this forest valley where the hobbits live, and they’re like people but smaller and more … hobbity. The Dungeon Master calls every place he likes the Shire. Our house. The movie theater. Bread aisle at Safeway.”

“You live
in
the nursery?”

“Up behind the trees in back. It’s a super tiny house so in summer you can’t see it.”

“Huh.”

“Yeah. It’s my grandparents,’ their nursery, my mom grew up in it. They left it to her when they died. Balin and I were born in the house—literally
in
it. In their bed, on a quilt they still have. Gross.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah. I do love it, I love the house, the trees and all, it’s just—the whole Shire thing. They’re obsessed.”

I think of Meredith, her pounding waves, the seascapes on every inch of drywall. I nod.

“And of course they had to name us Tolkien-y. Balin’s a dwarf. I’m a hobbit.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. Though thankfully hobbit girls are all named for flowers, so really”—her voice gets dopey-dreamy—“I am a wee golden flower that grows in the fields of Lothlórien.”

My every afternoon is swimming in names—first, middle, surnames listed in books, carved in stone, written in grave maps. I’ve seen some bad ones. I am an authority.

“It’s a good name,” I assure her. “Classic.”

She smiles. “Better than Balin, I guess. Can’t get around the dwarf thing too easily.”

“At least they thought about it. Wade pulled mine from a hat.”

“He did
not.
”

“Might as well have.” After giving Kai the ultimate homage, Meredith surrendered naming rights, let Wade have the leftovers.

“Well, it’s sort of—letting the chips fall where they may? My parents are way too much the other way, super high-strung. Clingy.”

Like Emily’s mom.

My parental deficit is too deep to imagine disliking clingy.

I study my shoes.

“So,” she treads carefully, “how long was Kai sick?”

I kick another rock.

“Forever. Three years? Three.”

Maybe if I just open Virginia and start reading …

“You’d never know it.”

I nod.

“I mean, she’s really …”

“Yeah.”

More distant cheering.

“You know,” she says, “she and Balin could talk about running all they wanted if you came over; like sometimes Dario gives her a ride if he’s coming anyway, and we could—”

The crowd swells. They’re getting closer.

“Not that it’s real exciting at Ye Olde Rivendell, but we could find
something
to do. …”

The longer I sit saying nothing, the more panic rises in my chest—

“But I totally understand if you’re busy, it’s no big deal. …”

My throat burns. “No,” I say, “it’s not …”

The crowd is a frenzied, cow-bell-ringing clump moving toward the finish. We stand.

“Well,” she says, “here they come.”

We cheer from where we are, clapping, calling their names, my throat still tight. Balin’s height gives him a long, loping stride. Kai leads the girls by practically minutes.

We climb down the bleachers. I see Kai in the middle of the field, hands on her knees, head near the grass trying to breathe.

“Leigh!” Wade hollers. “Come help your sister!” He’s forcing little paper cups of water on Kai (who we all know won’t drink for another hour or so but he thinks she’ll die of dehydration so he tries anyway). She bats him and his cups away from her face, sees me on the bleachers. Waves.

I wave back, try to smile. Elanor squints, searching for Balin in the crowd, and then there he is with their parents, a blur of ponytails and scarves and tie-dye. She sighs and makes a move toward them, when we see Balin bound over to Kai, rub her back, help her up off the grass, hold her hand.

“Huh,” Elanor says. “Guess the hobbit’s out of the bag.”

We shield our eyes from the sun to see them entwine in a smothering embrace. Sweaty. Ick.

“Thought he was a dwarf.”

“Hobbit’s funnier.”

I nod.

“She may be an amazing runner, but she’s clearly got questionable taste in boys. Let’s go.”

She grabs my hand. She’s a big hand-grabber.

Her parents move through the crowd toward Wade, toward Kai, Balin’s arm around her bird-wing shoulders. Elanor’s hand pulls me to them all, and for the millionth time my breath is shallow. I can’t do it. I want to go home. I want Dario.

I want Emily to forgive me.

My hand slips from Elanor’s as she moves into the jostling crowd. I pry myself free and hurry back to the graves alone.

MEREDITH HAS TAKEN OVER
the entire house. It’s gone way beyond the constant sound track of waves and the seascapes—it is sand-colored rattan garage-sale furniture, fish-shaped soaps resting in polished abalone shells in the bathrooms, seashell wind chimes swaying and plinking in every window. We eat off ceramic clamshell dishes, drink from mugs shaped like nautiluses, even the salt and pepper shakers are wee mermaids: Salty’s hair naturally blond, Pepper’s a flowing cascade of black tendrils falling modestly over her tiny ceramic bosom. Our bedrooms are still our own, but even Wade is smart enough to know that the rest of the house, while we are all free to roam anywhere in it, belongs to Meredith.

And worse, emboldened by her winter escape, she has taken to jaunting off for more weekends back home in Mendocino, shacking up with one artist pal or another at what she has asininely begun referring to as The Sea. Kai and I jealously endure her breezy comings and goings, aching for the ocean ourselves but not permitted to say it out loud.

We’d harbored a fragile hope, Kai and I, that maybe the real Meredith would come back—the way she was before we left the ocean. Before Kai was sick. At home she had been this self-assured dynamo of exultant energy. Social and confident, she’d been more likely to whisk us off to a full moon tour of the botanical gardens (
My God, have you ever seen such gorgeous rhododendrons?
) or pay-what-you-can belly-dancing class on a school night (
Loosen up, just do your homework in the morning!
) than to offer daily balanced meals, and we’d loved her for it. She was the exciting mom. The “no time for sensitive parental interaction, but how about let’s go full moon tide-pooling at midnight” mom. At the ocean she’d always seemed to like going places, doing things with us. Being with us.

But her self-absorption, once part of her charm, has begun to wear. On Kai. Sure, it must be really,
really
horrible to watch your kid suffer with cancer. But “Oh please,” Kai moans, “try actually having the crap happen to you, then whine about how tired you are. Jeez!” Still, she nakedly grieves the loss of Meredith’s inimitable brand of mothering.

“Why can’t we come?” Kai whines, lying next to me on Meredith and Wade’s lighthouse appliquéd bedspread, watching Meredith pack her suitcase. Spring break and the woman can’t get away fast enough.

“You’d be bored to death,” she says, tucking several carefully folded bras in among a bunch of beach-themed blouses. “Your father needs your help here, and besides, I’ll be gone all day painting and then we’re going to dinner every night for more silly art talk. You’d hate it.” She holds a turquoise sweater under her chin, surveying the effect against her blue eyes in a full-length sand-dollar-framed mirror. “Go to your girlfriends’ houses for slumber parties every night, why don’t you?”

Slumber parties. It’s like she’s never met me before.

Kai heaves an enormous, quivering sigh, tears hovering. “I can’t. My friends are all going away. On vacations. With their
parents.
”

Balin will be off camping all week; Kai’s been weeping about it for days.

Poor Kai, having to navigate her first boyfriend bon voyage without Meredith to help her. Though what am I even saying? Meredith and Wade’s “relationship” is not really any kind of nautical metaphor to model a dating scenario on. Kai’s better off skippering her own
Titanic.

Meredith rummages through her jewelry box for appropriate seashell earrings. “You kids are so dramatic.”

Kai is dumbstruck, unaccustomed to being denied.

I echo Meredith’s sigh with my own, sharper one. Her turning Mendocino into her own private artist retreat with her old goofy painter pals while we’re left behind would normally not bother me so much, but Dario has asked Wade for a few days off to go fishing in Lake Tahoe.

“Absolutely!” Wade had gushed. “Take some time, hang out with the guys, toss back a few cold ones, right?”

“What are ‘cold ones’?” Dario had asked me later as he organized his fishing lures in the toolshed.

This whole spring break is shaping up to be the dumbest thing to happen since … huh. Since being made to live in a graveyard.

“But what about Easter?” Kai whimpers.

“Oh, you guys,” Meredith moans, worn out from the futility of trying to rally the troops. “Make an effort! You can make Easter dinner, can’t you? Color some eggs, do whatever you want. Baby, sit on this for me.” Kai drags herself up and sits on the suitcase, smashing it together so Meredith can zip it up, toss it down the hall, and go to the bathroom to pack her nautilus-shaped toiletry bag.

Early Saturday morning, Meredith and Dario take off for their respective graveyard furloughs and I sit watching Kai through the open office door—with school and track practice on hiatus all week, she’s given in to Wade’s “offer” of employment. She assures me being in the graves isn’t giving her the I-almost-had-a-headstone-myself creeps. But she misses Balin. Misses her whole other Rivendell family. She jabs a trowel listlessly at the soil, pretending to plant flowers in the newest valley being readied for graves, the still unnamed Meadow of Melancholy. Harbor of Heartache. Cadaver Canyon. Whatever. Wade will come up with something awesome.

“Hey! It’s looking good!” he calls to Kai, saluting her with a double thumbs-up.

She gives him a halfhearted single in return. Not with her thumb.

Wade steps into the office and rubs my aching shoulders. “Maybe next time, okay? Don’t worry. We’ll have fun!”

I fold a York wrapper as a bookmark and set Ovid aside.

“Hey,” I say. “What do you think happens to people when they die?”

“What?”

“When we die. What happens?”

“What do you—like, how it feels?”

“No,
after.
After we die.”

He surveys his kingdom of hills and headstones. “Why the jack are you worrying about
that
?”

He gets the look-iest look of all looks.

“Well,” he says, “I’ll tell you what. When I was ten years old, my brother, Will, was seventeen. He had this girlfriend, Maxine—”

“Wait, hold on—your
brother
?”

“Yeah. My brother, Will. So Maxine was fifteen, I think, and she and Will …”

“This would be Will, your
brother.
”

“Shut up, I’m telling you something!
Yes,
my brother, Will, and this teenaged Maxine wanted to get married. So of course her parents were pissed off. My dad told Will he was acting like an idiot, and he was right; I mean, who the hell gets married when you’re still in high school, right? Don’t you or your sister ever pull a stunt like that. That’s a bunch of crap.”

“Preaching to the choir.”

“All right. So Will whips out a trump card; the next thing you know, Maxine’s knocked up. Now my parents
have
to let them get married, right? Okay, so they get married, and Will quits school and goes to work for the county sanitation department, and a sewage pipe bursts one day in town, it’s pouring rain, I mean
buckets,
and the guys are all down in this big hole and the rain’s coming down and it’s all mud and mess, and then the whole thing caves in.”

“What does?”

“The
hole,
the hole they’re in! Will’s down in it, and the mud slides in and a guy tries to pull him out, but he feels Will’s hand slip from his—Jesus, I’m telling you, it was awful. An awful, awful thing.”

“Oh my God.”

“Oh yeah,” he says. “It was this whole big disaster. Maxine heard something was up; she’s over at the school in third-period history or some junk. They wouldn’t let her leave, but she busted out with a couple girlfriends and she shows up just in time to see them pull Will out with a crane, an actual
hook
—so there’s Maxine in a raincoat, pregnant, and Will’s hanging from this hook, all muddy, rain dripping off him.”

“Oh my God.”

“Sure, and then to top it all off, she goes into labor right there and loses the baby! Terrible day. Awful. My mother was never the same.”

“Are you making this up?”

“What the—
no!
Why would I make some horrible thing like that up?”

“You never, in our whole lives, ever said you had a brother!”

“Well, I didn’t. Not after that.”

“What?”

“The
point
is—life is screwy. You’re going along fine, and out of the blue shit like that happens. Look at all these people.” He looks out at the headstones. “Look at your sister; that could have been the
worst
—Look at your little friend, what’s her face … ?”

My chest burns. The indifference stings.

“Okay, but what
happens
to you? After?”

He shrugs. “Who knows? Nothing. Nothing happens. Science debunked all that heaven and hell garbage forever ago. Sleep without dreams or something, I don’t know. Nothing. That’s what’s so jacked up, but that’s also why you gotta just do whatever the hell it is you’re doing and not worry about stupid people and what they think because who knows what’s coming. Have fun, do some stuff, work hard—live your goddamned life.”

He moves in for a high five.

I hold my hand up.

“All right!”

He troops happily off to the toolshed.

“Not after that I didn’t”?

Seriously?

If Kai had died, he’d have gone around denying he’d ever had an older daughter? She just never would have come up again in regular conversation, ever? That is such junk. He is insane, but I don’t believe that for a second.

At least I don’t think I do.

All morning, people come and go. They visit graves, bring flowers, tidy headstones, chat and sit and mourn. But no one comes to buy a grave. And no one comes to visit Emily.

“I’m going up to pee,” Kai calls through the open office door. It’s noon and the sun is blazing. I stand and stretch, and I walk to the new Rivendell angel to sit in the shade at her feet.

She is the babies’ main angel, the tallest and most beautiful. She is young. Flowing, wild hair frames her face, which turns sadly toward the graves beneath her feet, eyes lonely, empty holes. Lonely for the babies and children resting inches beneath my knees. Here is a mother who misses her children, stays with them always, never sends them away or leaves them, wants so much to be near them she keeps watch over even their sleeping bodies, mourns them.

Dying is such a grown-up thing to do.

“Hey.”

Dario is haloed by the sun, backpack on one shoulder, tackle box, wet hair combed.

I pull my ponytail out, worry my faded T-shirt. “I thought you were gone.”

“On my way.”

“Okay. Have a good time, Grizzly Adams.”

“Who?”

“No one. Nothing.”

“What are
you
doing?”

I shrug.

“Your mom leave?”

I nod.

He reaches down and pulls a dandelion out by its roots.

“Kind of unfair you didn’t get to go.”

Thank you!

“Move off that kid’s head,” he says. “Stay under the feet, above the head.” He demonstrates, walks an easy grid between the graves, always moving along the top edge of the stones, right where everyone’s feet would be.

Sorry, people’s heads. I should have known better.

“Well,” he says. “I’m off.”

He pulls me up and hugs me. Hard.

My arms stay limp.

Soil. Soap.

Hard to swallow.

Don’t leave me here.

“Hold on.” He climbs back up over Poppy Hill to a weekend Pre-Need heaped with springtime blooms. And then he walks across the graves toward Emily.

To
Emily.

He kneels on the damp lawn in clean jeans. He clears the weeds from her tin cup, fills it with pink and white sweet peas. He stands, brushes mud from his knees, and comes back for his pack.

“Okay?”

My heart thunders, full and spilling, swelling, an unfamiliar sharp warmth.

He starts for the Manderleys, waves over his shoulder. “See you in a few days!”

I wave back, light-headed, watching him walk until I can’t see him anymore.