Six Feet Over It (5 page)

I nod.

“Dario,” Wade plows on, “this is my youngest, Leigh!” He gathers me in a smothering one-armed embrace. “And today is my baby’s birthday! Lucky fifteen today, how do you like that? Brand-new coworker, not a bad birthday present!”

So much for talking slowly.

“¡Quinceañera!”
Dario says to my blank expression; then abruptly joyful, he clasps both my hands in his before turning to run back up the hill. “Wait for me!” he calls. “Wait!”

Wade is practically bursting with the awesomeness of it all; he can barely contain himself.

“What do you think?” he says, grinning like a fool. “He’s from
Mexico
!”

“Yeah, I got that,” I hiss.
“You don’t have to shout it.”

“He saved every penny he had,” he says near my ear, fast, “worked his whole life on a farm … or landscaping, I don’t remember which, but this kid is industrious and
smart,
knows what the hell he wants, gave all his money to one of those jerkwads, what is it, a coyote? Who of course took it all and bailed halfway to the border when the feds caught up. San Diego border patrol swarmed them,
for real,
he said, helicopters and everything! So there’s ten guys stuffed in the back of the coyote’s van and they all scatter, this is the middle of the damn night, and he hides in some rusted-out car in a ditch, right under the hood! Jeez Louise.”

“I thought you said he doesn’t speak English.”

“No, I said he had some words.”

“He told you all this?”

“Yes!”

“Okay, that’s not ‘some words,’ that’s … all the words.”

He rolls his eyes. “
Any
way, so he crawls through a bunch of drainage ditches and barbed wire for, like, ten hours till he crosses into San Diego and he scrapes a few bucks together somehow or other, I didn’t ask, and he buys a bus ticket and twelve hours later he’s in Sacramento. Can you believe that?”

“No. When was this?”

“I don’t know, like a year ago? It’s true! He’s been staying on people’s sofas, friends of friends of cousins …”

“
Cousins?
Really?”

“What?”

“Like all Mexican people are related?”

He tosses his hands, and his voice jacks right back up to full volume. “I’m just telling you what he said, he
told
me this!”

“All right.”

“He did!”

“Okay.”

This Dario person answered Wade’s ad in the
PennySaver
classifieds the first day it ran:
Yard Work. Xlnt Pay.
(Cash, of course, under the table)
Bnfts.

Yard work. Jesus.

I’m just relieved my “interpreting skills” may not be needed after all. I’m perfectly happy letting Howard the coroner keep translating for Spanish-speaking clients over the phone for me, which he’s only had to do twice anyway and both times for At Needs who seemed content to just sign on all the
X
s, write a check, and call it a day, no chitchat necessary.

Dario comes jogging briskly back over the crest of Poppy Hill, his left arm raised over his head, hand clenched in what looks like triumph.

“Happy birthday!” He offers me his open palm, a tiny clay skeleton balanced there.

A little dead woman, top-heavy in a hat dripping sparkling flowers, bony smile, empty black eyes. I feel the heat and color drain from my face.

“You have the best day!” he says. “The Day of the Angels!” My blank silence confuses him. “
Días de los Muertos
—the Day of the Dead! Your birthday, the Day of the Dead!” He moves the skeleton closer to my face. “
La Catrina
—she is you, this is you, Our Lady, the patron saint of death!”

I accept the skeleton, hold it in a loose fist.

I have the unsettling sensation of seeing this scene outside myself—it’s a movie, my entire life revealing itself at once in all its predestined glory in real time,
in this moment.

Patron saint.

Of course.

Creepy death/birth? Check. Living in a graveyard? Check. Kai and Emily and oh sure, born on the Day of the Dead?
The Day of the Flipping Dead?
Check. Check!
Check!

And that makes … everything. Every single moment I’ve been alive is directly related to and for the sole purpose of celebrating, defining, facilitating death.

All around me people get sick, they drop like flies, and I remain untouched.

Proximity to me is poison.

Patron saint. Of
death.

I
belong
in a graveyard. I’ll never get out of here.

“Thank you,” I barely whisper. “Excuse me.”

And then I walk.

Away from Wade’s calling to me to
get the hell back here, where the shinola do you think you’re going?
I walk and walk and think. First about how Wade’s reports of Dario’s English are about as ignorant as his insistence on Dario’s having “just gotten here”; a year isn’t “just,” and obviously the guy speaks pretty good English, easily better than Wade himself, who tends to split infinitives, mix metaphors, and double his negatives like nobody’s business.

And second, I think about how Dario has given me so much more than a stupid skeleton; thanks to him I can stop being baffled about the seemingly random losses and sadness and deathiness I leave in my wake.

Not random at all.

Patron saint.

Fantastic.

I toss the skeleton into the wicker wastebasket in my closet, crawl back into my unmade bed, and lie awake in my clothes for a long, long time until Wade bangs on the door and demands to know “What the Bo Jangles is wrong with you? Get out here!”

“Get lost,” I hear Kai tell him, and he grumbles off. She unlocks the door with a bobby pin and barges in against my weary protests.

“Birthday lunch, let’s go!” She jumps on my mattress.

I pull the covers up over my face.

“And oh, PS,” she whispers, lying beside me. “Did you meet him?”

I nod.

“I
like
him! He seems very … like he knows what he’s doing. Dad better cool it so he’ll stay.”

I close my eyes.

“All right, so get up. Mama Dicarlo is waiting!”

“Can’t.” I duck back beneath the blankets. “I don’t feel good.”

She pulls the covers away, presses her slender wrist to my forehead.

“You feel fine.”

“I don’t feel
hot,
I feel
awful.
”

“Just power through.”

I shake my head. “I don’t want it.”

“What, lunch? So we’ll stay home, that’s all right—cake for dinner! Presents!”

The house smells like chocolate. I shake my head.

“Leigh!”

“I don’t want it. Just let me sleep.”

“You don’t want
what
?”

“Anything. Any of it. A birthday.”

She squints at me, searching the horizon for the ship of what I actually mean.

“You don’t want your
birthday
?”

I curl like a shrimp.

“Why?”
And right on cue, her lovely almond-shaped bright blue eyes brim with tears.

Even before the leukemia unintentionally depleted Wade and Meredith’s entire supply of patience and empathy for anyone but themselves and her, Kai has always been a big crier. They may roll their eyes at my “theatrics,” but “sensitive” Kai can cry whenever, wherever, about whatever, however much she wants to. Which is pretty much all the time about everything.

Go to her for sympathy and you’ll wind up comforting her proxy grief instead.

“It’s all right,” I say dutifully, rubbing her arm as she weeps.

“What about presents?”

“Maybe later, okay? Please?”

She finds a package of tissue in the clutter on my floor. Blows her nose.

“But
why
?”

“Just don’t feel well. Okay? Okay?”

She nods. “I’ll bring your present later, can I?”

“Yeah, sure, thank you.” My chest aches.

“You want Mom?”

“No.”

She closes the door behind her, goes sniffling off to relay the message to Wade and Meredith, who do not come to my room. A relief. Sort of.

I lie staring at the glitter-infused popcorn ceiling (whose idea was that?), toying briefly with the idea of abandoning my soiled day in exchange for what was supposed to be my
real
birthday—somewhere around late January, early February. I have no problem sharing with, say, Martin Luther King Jr. or Abraham Lincoln. Even stern, ponytailed George Washington would be better than a stupid, creepy, empty-eyed skeleton. I give up, settle on no birthday at all, and seethe.

Dario.

That a-hole has ruined my birthday, dropped it into a double-depth grave of stupidity. Not
a
birthday, but every birthday forever, the actual day of my birth. Like the liners and urns and fresh, upturned grave soil, my birthday is now just one more thing I never want to touch. It is, if his out-of-control excitement was any indication, the Super Bowl of death holidays.

My birthday is dead and buried.

My blame knows no bounds. Or logic. This Dario person is not just the messenger; he is the Grim Reaper.

Or no, wait—that’s me.

IN RETROSPECT,
kudos to Wade for dragging us to live in a graveyard, a genuinely logical next step in my already death-soaked existence. Wade says I’m super-dramatic. Wade is the one using headstones for a walkway.

Only five months ago we’d been safe beside the ocean. Home.

Kai and I were born in Mendocino, a cluster of East Coasty–looking cottages hidden among redwood and cypress trees perched on the edge of insanely beautiful cliffs above the wild coast of Northern California. Meredith painted seascapes in oil to sell to tourists. She raised us to believe we were mermaids and made certain, even as toddlers, that we fostered a deep appreciation for the ocean, for this most beautiful place in all the world. She chose Kai’s name for its literal Hawaiian translation:
ocean.
We practically lived in salt water, our diapers and hair forever filled with sand. Heaven.

Until out of the blue—leukemia. Every day turned suddenly sad. Kai’s thirteenth and my eleventh birthdays and all the days and months that followed I spent beside Kai, lying on the couch all day, dying. Sleeping, crying, drinking lukewarm 7UP. The house lost its misty ocean coolness; it turned warm and salty and bitter. It smelled of pills and vomit and sweat. She pulled loose, streaming fistfuls of hair from her head until it was gone. She slept. Her friends stopped coming around. I became Kai’s best friend and lost mine in the process.

There was not a Taco Bell within a hundred mile radius of our town, let alone a decent medical facility, so there were a million road trips back and forth to San Francisco. Wade scavenged enough commissions at the real estate office to keep us well supplied in food, chemotherapy, spinal taps, and little else. I could not bear to bother him and Meredith for things like lunch money or new clothes, so I made myself Land O’Frost lunch meat sandwiches and wore the same pink sweatpants and T-shirt day after day, sometimes weeks between the Laundromat visits we resorted to when first the dryer, then the washer stopped working and we couldn’t afford to fix them. At school I hid, embarrassed and unnoticed, alone in the library at recess.

For two years Kai languished but lived. Radiation left her so sick no food would stay in her long enough to matter, until the Halloween I fished a York from my pillowcase stash and we discovered it settled her stomach. We ate pounds of them, hardwiring in us a chocolate-and-mint-flavored Pavlovian sense of relief. Comfort.

Every day I held her clammy hands and read aloud for hours. She loved Laura Ingalls Wilder and begged me to read the Christmas chapters again and again. “Do the one on Silver Lake. Which one do they get tin cups and pennies?”

Wade and Meredith tended to her medication and hospital visits, gave her every ounce of care and attention they were capable of, and by late afternoon each day were left with nothing, passing the baton to me the moment I stepped in the door after school. I helped her with the schoolwork the district sent home with me each week. Half-watched hours of television went by while fog swept past the windows, sea grass and pounding waves marking every sick, sad minute.

Lonely.

Until one year ago (just as the saga of
Kai’s Got Cancer: Year Three!
began), I trudged off to the first day of eighth grade, and the tide had turned: Emily moved to town.

Already small, she’d skipped a grade so seemed even littler. Alone and new in Mendocino, easy prey to incessant bullying by jealous classmates for being a year younger but eons smarter, Emily resorted to lunch recess library hiding, too.

“Are you in trouble?” she asked, surveying my pile of books.

“No,” I said. “I’m poor.”

She didn’t care that I couldn’t invite her over, wasn’t embarrassed by my secondhand, ill-fitting pink sweatpants wardrobe. We took a collective breath, she grabbed my hand, and we left the library to brave the schoolyard.

“Nice pants!” mean girls screeched across the tetherball court. I tugged my shirt down over the pink sweats, moved to pull my other hand from Emily’s—she held tight.

School became a secretly welcome escape from the illness-laden dreariness of our house. Emily showed me tap-dance routines on the smooth cement of the playground; we read books in the stairwell, passed notes in class, and spent every recess sitting on the edge of the grassy soccer field watching crabs skitter in the tide pools below. I wished Kai could be there and was consumed with guilt for the relief I felt, for being happy in Emily’s company.

After a while I stopped resisting Emily’s daily invitations to come over to her house after school. Fear of Kai’s loneliness let me stay only an hour or two each day before I was back at her side, never a word to her about Emily, wet washcloth on Kai’s face, bucket near her mouth. But the gloom didn’t dampen me the same way now.

Emily never knew her dad, who had died before she was born, his whole family far away back East and not interested in her or her nomadic “hippie” mom who kept her own last name, and Emily used it, too, ditching what they referred to as the “very WASPy sounding
Martin
” of her dad’s family. No siblings, no cousins, just each other. They moved all the time, and luckily for me had found their most recent stint in San Francisco too expensive. Their rented Mendocino cottage was small, but near enough to walk to school and it was cheerful and tidy and smelled like clean laundry.

Her mom worked as a dental assistant and was often there when we got home from school. Emily and I ate macaroni and did our homework and her mom called me sweetheart. “How is your sister doing, sweetheart? Are your parents okay?” I shrugged and gratefully accepted another cookie. Homemade.

I made up study hall excuses for where I was spending my after-school time. Emily and her mom never met Kai, but they sent me home with brownies for her, wrapped warm in paper towels. Wade and Meredith’s one brief meeting through rolled-down station wagon windows after a class field trip to the Fort Bragg tide pools was the extent of their contact with Emily or her mom, but they were glad for the free babysitting.

Six months ago, once more without warning, Kai’s health swiftly turned. The radiation and the pills gained traction at last; she climbed into a mystifying but definite remission. And almost immediately, maybe just because she could, she started running. Peppering her vocabulary with phrases like
sub forty at the five,
putting miles between herself and the sickness, daring it to try to keep up.

She wasn’t even annoyed when Wade pulled an “I’m still young and kicky!” move, laced up his shoes, and joined her. Meredith and I watched them run five- and ten-kilometer races where, always tiny, Kai’s efforts were often dwarfed by the long strides of the other girls competing in her age group. Enter Wade (the self-crowned champion of fairness), who shaved a few years from her birthdate on the registration forms, pitting her growing strength and endurance against kids who still napped. She won every time. Still, I screamed myself hoarse cheering when her bald head flew past to the finish.

Eighth grade ended, and summer loomed deliciously hopeful; Kai would not die and Emily had invited me to go with her to Girl Scout sleepaway camp, even though I was not a Girl Scout.

“You can be my distant cousin visiting from France,” she said. “Just say
bonjour
a lot and they’ll leave us alone!”

But Wade and Meredith had other plans. They were exhausted, having fallen at last over the finish line of the endless marathon of yanking Kai back from death day after day, year after year, and they “needed a break.” They announced that Kai and I were off to our own personal camp: summer with Meredith’s parents.

Secretly devastated to miss camping with Emily, to be free for even just a few days from Kai’s orbit (then again instantly guilty for such a selfish thought) before I even got the chance to ask, I hustled Wade and Meredith into a hushed powwow in the kitchen. “Please,” I begged, “please can’t we stay home? Kai’s not ready to be away for so long; this is ridiculous!”

“Kai!” Wade bellowed above my frantic whispering. “You okay going alone to Gramma’s? Because apparently Leigh’s not up for it.”

I gave myself a headache glaring so hard at him. Meredith busied herself unloading the dishwasher.

“You’re not coming?” Kai’s scared face peered around the kitchen door.

Eyes still slightly sunken, the skin beneath still the purple of a fading bruise. Tears welled there, not on purpose. Genuinely scared to be without me.

“Of course I am,” I sighed, hopeful images of canoeing and roasting marshmallows with Emily vanishing in the instant.

The night before we left, I read Kai to sleep, then snuck out for a consolation secret sleepover with Emily.

Her mom ordered pizza; we made popcorn and did not waste a single minute sleeping. Well after two in the morning, we lounged in the pretend camping cabin we’d set up with blankets beneath their dining room table, drawing Magic Marker ponies and doves on the underside, reveling in the delicious scandal of it.
A costly piece of furniture! Defaced!
We’d learned from an Ed Emberley’s Drawing book that ponies and doves were the easiest, best-looking animals in our wheelhouse and therefore graced the covers of all our school textbooks and spiral notebooks and every note we passed in class with them. They livened up the underside of the table, for sure.

“Don’t go,” she pleaded, “I’ll be so bored. I won’t survive without you.”

“What will I do without
you
?” I sighed.

She reached up, added a windswept tail to a trotting pony.

We vowed to write actual letters twice a week, at least.

All summer I received just one letter, a yellow envelope addressed in black Magic Marker cursive. Another envelope came later with two one-way Greyhound tickets, and when Kai and I stepped off the bus we found ourselves far from the ocean and living in a graveyard.