Six Feet Over It (4 page)

“What’s your father doing?”

I shake my head.

Wist, wist, wist.

Poor Kai. Between Wade and Meredith it’s a miracle she ever makes it home before midnight. She’s on the track team at school. They practice all the time, which is partly what absolves Kai of any obligation to help in the graves, but on the downside has left her more than once waiting on the curb outside school for Mr. I Love My Graveyard! and Ms. I’m Painting Some Seagulls! to remember to pick her up.

“Just please make sure someone goes to get her, okay? Don’t make her wait in the dark by herself. Again.”

Meredith nods, already back at the shore.

Waves crash.

I lug my backpack upstairs, turn the water on in the bath, and retreat to the cool dark of my room, where moving boxes are still waiting to be unpacked, piled against the walls, stacked in the closet. They still smell like the ocean. I did not pack them and have no idea what’s inside—a situation clutter experts say means I should just get rid of it all. Which would leave me with one drawer of clothes, a few pens, and some library books.

Meredith’s waves crash over even the sound of the filling tub. I pour in some kind of seashore-themed soap, drop my clothes on the floor, turn off the light, and sink into the dark, hot water. My hip bones knock awkwardly against the tub, Yorks lately being one of the few foods I can stomach. My head beneath the suds, the waves finally give it a rest.

“Leigh.”

The bathwater is tepid.

“Sorry, I
really
have to pee,” Kai whispers. “Don’t listen!”

“Don’t
look
!” I pour more soap, swish the water around.

She rolls her eyes, laughs. Still in her track shorts. The sun is nearly set.

“Did you walk?”

She shrugs. “Not dark yet.”

“I
told
them—”

“Oh, awesome.” She smiles at the mirror. “I
am
a girl!” Six months, three days of remission and the dandelion fluff on her head is just now growing back in silky curls, different from the stick-straight it used to be and finally long enough to hold back with a barrette. I’ve missed her hair: fair like Meredith’s, her eyes as dreamily blue. “I’ve got chemo curls and chemo boobs,” she says, clutching her definitely bigger bosom through her sports bra. “It was good for
something.
”

Of all of us, you’d think Kai would be maddest about living here, but she’s just—not. Yes, she misses the ocean, too, but she is able to attend school again at last, and she loves this big house; having her own room instead of a towel-covered sofa near a plastic vomit bucket is her actual dream come true. Living in the cemetery, she’s never felt so alive.

“Well, sure. That and the whole ‘not dying’ thing. Close your eyes.” I sigh and stand up in the lukewarm water. She smiles, blindly wraps a towel around me.

“You’re too skinny,” she says.

“Look who’s talking.” An empty thing to say. She is not skinny. She is Meredith all over—small but not wiry like Wade and me. Lean. Two years my senior, but I’m three inches taller so people always assume she’s younger.

She ignores me. Gnaws at my admittedly bony elbow.

“Go put a sandwich in your piehole, dummy. I need a shower.”

I have mortgaged my sanity for hers. I’ll sell graves every day forever keep her this happy.

I pull on clean pajamas and summon the energy to eat a bowl of cereal, get in bed, and finally make a decent effort to try to figure out what the hell Ovid is getting at. Because it is true—I do have a quiz tomorrow.

“OHHH, LOOK AT THAT
goddamned angel!” Wade says. “We need that one!” It’s early Saturday morning, and we’ve left Meredith and Kai sleeping, sun not yet above the dense hillside pines above Hangtown’s Main Street, hiding Rivendell Nursery.

I yawn. The angel probably wants to, too. It waits patiently beside a perplexing gate made of what looks like bent willow branches, soon to be one of millions of weeping angel statues that Wade, the vocal atheist and self-proclaimed card-carrying Communist, has become obsessed with sticking all over Sierrawood. It’s getting a little hackneyed, not to mention crowded, but he insists. “People love that religious shit!”

I follow him along a winding forest path over a rickety bridge to a heavy wooden door.
Rivendell Awaits
is set deep in the stone wall of what was once a mill house for the creek flowing beneath our feet. Sagging, toothless jack-o’-lanterns ooze white wax; gauze ghosts swing from low branches. It was Halloween last night.

Still no mention of my birthday.

Tiny brass bells ring in the hazy, pine-filtered light of the mill house and the thrum of a choir of angels … Wait, no. It’s just Enya. Plants everywhere, dusty boxes of bulbs crowd beneath rickety wooden tables laden with pots of flowering vines, shiny, waxy leaves and blossoms. In the thick glass of every window sparkle crystals suspended from silver threads spinning lazy circles in lavender-scented air; rainbows skim across the ceiling, the mossy stone floor, my hands—everything very definitely alive.

“Wade! How’s things?” Overalls Mom steps from a dark recess to shake Wade’s hand. I follow as they climb over the plants and out a back door into a wide expanse of grassy field, maybe an entire acre—encircled by a ring of tall,
tall
trees. Mostly pines. I close my eyes and breathe the cold, dusty morning air.

“Leigh.”

Wade, arms loaded with six-pack planters of blossoms, jerks his head toward more flats stacked in the grass. “Little less daydreaming, for crap’s sake. Let’s go!”

Overalls Mom lifts flowers into my arms. “Everything okay?”

I nod.

“You’re Wade’s oldest, right?”

I shake my head. “Just taller.”

“Oh yes, you’re the one in the office.” She tips her head back and yells, “Hey! Elanor! You two are the same age; you should get together—
Elanor!
Where
is
that girl … ?”

She drifts off to search and I make my escape, lugging the flowers back through the cloud of Enya, over the bridge to the truck. I set them gently inside and make a move to get in the cab, but not before—

“Leigh!”

She knows my name. Princess Leia rushes out the door, still the tall boots, still the white apron, but this time over an orchid print dress, dark braids still wound behind each ear. She’s
fourteen
? Looks twelve.

Over the bridge she comes, wide smile. “Hi!”

Emily.

Out here in the daylight it’s even more evident; anyone could see the similarity not just in her face, but also … sort of
exuding
?

I can’t breathe to speak.

“I saw your dad. You look just like him!”

I nod.

“Come inside, we’ve got cider from last night.”

Wade is nowhere. “I think we’re just here for the flowers, we need to get back to Sierra—”

“You’ve got a minute. My mom’s showing your dad some angel fountains. If
my
dad wanders out there and gets going, you might have an hour.”

She reaches out. I pull back instinctively—she grasps my hand in both of hers.

“Oh my gosh, you’re freezing!”

She leads me stumbling back over the bridge. Inside the mill house she pulls down rubber bats hanging from strings tacked to the ceiling and tosses them onto a pile of fabric on the counter. Heaping it all over a sewing machine in a corner beneath a stained-glass window, she goes to a hot plate behind the register, pours cider from a pot, puts a clay cup in my hands. No handle and a wobbly rim. She sees me notice.

“My brother made that. Sorry. He’s not the greatest potter. Boys.”

The cider is sweet and clovey.

“Thank you,” I say.

“Of course! Did you guys go out last night? Bet you got tons of trick-or-treaters.”

There were limp festoons of toilet paper all over the Manderleys this morning, a few soda-can bongs, and a smashed pumpkin beside the pond. All in all Wade was thrilled by the narrow extent of the vandalism.

“We stayed in,” I say into my cider cup. “Watched movies.”

She nods. “Us too. We watched
The Shining
 … well, I listened to it. I was at the door handing out candy. I hate scary movies, but it was on so loud I heard the typing and
redrum
and all that. I thought I’d be okay not actually
seeing,
but it may have been worse. I had horrible dreams all night.”

The back door sends the brass bells swinging for a tall, black-haired boy—an older, male version of Elanor, probably the potter, who calls over Enya, “Where
are
they?”

Elanor smiles brightly. “Dad says, ‘Get out back and finish training the pumpkin vine before it dies or you’re in so much trouble I don’t even know what.’ ”

“Elanor, I swear to—”

“Balin, this is Leigh. Her parents bought Sierrawood.”

Balin the Potter pushes his hair away from startlingly blue eyes and reaches to shake my hand. “Lucky you.” He climbs over baskets of flowers to search the counter. “Give them back. I don’t want you touching them; I
need
them right now!”

“Oh,
need
!” Elanor rolls her eyes. She pulls a velvet pouch from a metal cash box, tosses it to him and misses. A clatter of tiny things rolls across the stone floor. Balin is horrified.

“Every single one back in this bag or you’re dead!” He holds the pouch open and Elanor crawls good-naturedly to scoop the things from beneath planters and tables and baskets of bulbs.

“Sorry,” she says sincerely. “I didn’t mean to huck your toys so hard.”

“They’re
not toys.
”

“Oh, really? Dice—for a
game
?”

“It is not a
game.
It’s—”

She stands to smooth her apron, picks up her cup, takes a long draw.

Balin glowers, clutches his bag of dice, and storms back out into the trees. The brass bells remain stubbornly cheerful.

“Sorry,” Elanor says. “I’ve sort of got this—I’m compelled to wind him up and I know I shouldn’t but it’s just so
easy.
” She refills my cup. “He’s two years older than me but you wouldn’t know it, right? Stupid dice. My dad’s a Dungeon Master so it means a lot to them.”

“He’s a master?”

“Dungeons and Dragons.”

I shake my head.

“It is
so
awful. Really, you don’t … ? It’s like a game.
Is
a game—ten-sided dice, lots of note-taking … seriously, you’ve never seen this? You are
so
lucky. We homeschool and most of the other homeschool kids around here are Christian and their parents think it’s evil so it’s hard to find people to join their thing … dungeon, coven, whatever. The Master made me play till I got old enough to refuse … Oh God, sorry—you’re not Christian, are you?”

Homeschool.
Morning deliveries. Pottery. Sewing … she probably makes those aprons.

“No,” I say. “Not anything.”

“Oh, thank goodness … I mean, not that there’s anything wrong with … I kind of figured, even though your dad’s got his thing with the angels, but the way he talks about them, and then look who’s selling them to him in the first place, talk about glass houses … Still, I shouldn’t—sorry. I need to
think.
My mom tells me that all the time, I need to
think
first.”

I nod.

“My parents don’t want us going to the Christian kids’ houses to play anyway. Bad influence, they think we’ll come home lacking any kind of cohesive logic skills or you know, become born again. Which is pretty judgey if you ask me, but … so mostly I’m just here with the Dungeon Dragons. And working. Lots of weddings. Landscaping. Funerals.”

At least Elanor’s voice is nothing like Emily’s. Elanor’s has this sort of lilt, and she’s got swimmer’s lungs. Her words pile into one another without stopping for breath.

Emily would love her. Which makes me feel even guiltier for wanting to, too, like I’m trying to replace Emily, an impossible task and not my aim at all. Besides which, being friends with me didn’t work out so well for Emily. Elanor is better off.

My head pounds.

Enya sings.

“Anyway.” Elanor brightens. “So where did you live? Before here?”

Where the hell is Wade?

“Um. Mendocino.”

Her eyes widen.
“No.”

“Yes.”

“I have always, always wanted to go there! My parents never take time off. I’ve begged for us to all to go to the ocean together—and Mendocino is so close—but they think the plants won’t survive without them. It’s ridiculous. The second I can drive, that’s the first place I’m going. You must miss it.”

I nod.

“You go to school, yes?”

I nod.

“What grade?”

“Ninth. At the high school.”

“Is it fun?”

I shake my head.

“My mom says you have a sister.”

I nod.

“Younger?”

“Older. Sophomore.”

“I would
love
a sister. My dad says Balin really wanted a sister when he was little but now all we do is fight about dice so I guess be careful what you wish for.” She takes my empty cider cup and drops it with hers in a sink full of terra-cotta pots.

The bells ring once more, and Wade finally backs in lugging a last flat of flowers. “Okay, you ready?” he says, as if he’s been waiting all this time for me to wrap up some lengthy business.

I follow him to the truck. Elanor tags along.

“Well. Maybe I’ll see you at Sierrawood sometimes. You work every weekend?”

I shake my head.

“Just after school?”

I nod. She smiles.

Her mom and dad come out then to lift the bored willow gate angel carefully into the flatbed beside the flowers. The dad wears baggy purple patchwork pants and has a long gray ponytail that I have an impulse to snip off with some pruning shears. He lifts wire-framed glasses and wipes sweat from his eyes.

“Wade’s daughter?” He extends a calloused hand. I nod and offer him my own cider-warmed one.

“Pleasure to make your acquaintance, milady,” he moons, bowing deeply.

In the periphery I see Elanor’s head drop into her hands.

I nearly smile.

“We’ll call when the cherubs come in!” her mom trills, waving as Wade moves the truck slowly past the willow-bough gates. Cherubs. She’s got Wade dialed. He honks.

I rest my head against the door and roll the window down for air, my stomach easing up the farther we get from the trees of Rivendell, from Elanor’s earnest, eager urgency. In the rearview mirror she stands in the road beneath the pines, waving.

“See?” Wade says, claps my knee. “How fun was that, right?”

The angel is so heavy she nearly breaks my back, but we get her to Sierrawood and planted safely in the lawn and Wade is right. She is perfect here in the daycare, watching over the babies. I lug the flowers from the truck.

“Let’s go to Mama Dicarlo’s tonight,” Wade says. “Birthday spaghetti, yeah?”

Amazing. He remembered. I wonder if Meredith will put her paintbrush down to fulfill her time-honored tradition of box-baking our birthday cakes. Duncan Hines, canned frosting, number-shaped candles. Last year I had two cakes: one coconut made from scratch with Emily and her mom after school, one devil’s food from a box at home with the Fools.

For the first time in months I think I may be hungry.

“Okay,” he says, and cranes his neck past me, squints into the rising sun, searches the graves. He smiles, bouncy and excited. “Ready for your surprise?”

“What?”

“Birthday! Birthday surprise, are you ready?”

“No.”

“Want to guess what it is? Do it! You’ll never figure it out—guess!”

“I don’t know.”

“Guess!”

“I get to quit?”

“Close! No. Not really. Not at all—trust me. You already love it.”

Someone is spinning headstones. For the longest time I thought spinning meant actually
spinning
each stone, but really it involves wearing big goggles and swinging a loud weed-whacker spinning-blade type thing to cut the grass around each stone, crop it close. Headstone haircut.

Wade waves. The person waves back, tugs off the goggles, silences the spinner.

“Okay, listen … you are now Sierrawood Hills’ official interpreter! You ready?”

“No. Wait,
what
?”

The person is walking through the graves toward us.

Wade gets all sotto voce. “He got here last night. He’s got some English words, but I don’t know how much he understands, so just
talk … really … slowly.
”

I wince and wipe my sweaty hands on my jeans.

“Dario!”

He is taller than Wade and a lot younger, but older than me and dark—dark hair, dark skin, dark eyes—smiling in blue jeans and a brand-new blue T-shirt,
Sierrawood Hills Memorial Park
in loopy white script across the shoulders. This is Wade’s idea of a uniform for us all—members of the most ridiculous softball team in America. “Leigh, say hello to Sierrawood Hills’s brand new director of grounds maintenance!”