Shallow Graves (4 page)

IT BEGAN TO RAIN
as dawn crept over western Nebraska. Within minutes I was soaked through, head to toe, but it was another few miles before I skated into a small town and found shelter in the local McDonald's.

My shoes skidded on the tile floor when I stepped inside. Shivering with cold, I went into the bathroom to change into the clothes I had taken from a Laundromat before leaving Chicago. The jeans were so long I had to roll them up, and the Wonder Woman T-shirt was meant for a little girl with a flat chest. I couldn't do anything about the shoes; I didn't have another pair. I finger-combed my hair into a ponytail, wrung out my scarf, and wrapped it again around
my neck. It was clammy and uncomfortable, but it was better than letting people stare at the bruises.

My grandmother used to say, “You look like death warmed over,” when my mother was tired or sick or worn down. I always thought it was a funny thing to say; I imagined coffins lined up on a baking sheet, sprinkled with sugar and frosting and ready to go into the oven. Grandma Elaine had died when I was eight. We went to San Francisco for her funeral, an open casket service, and I remember looking down at her thin white hair and pale face, stiff and unnatural beneath the heavy makeup, and knowing better than to ask my mother if it was time for Grandma to be warmed up now. It was cold in San Francisco that spring, rainy and gray everywhere we went, and I was worried Grandma would feel that way forever.

I didn't look like death warmed over. My face wasn't going gray. My skin wasn't shriveling up. My nails weren't yellowing and long. There were no hollow holes of rot opening in my face. I looked like a drowned rat in ill-fitting vagrant-chic clothes, but otherwise I looked like myself. There was a faint flush to my cheeks and my eyes were bright. I looked alive.

The cashier behind the counter raised her eyebrows when I walked up to order. “Get caught out?” she said.

“A little bit,” I said.

“What can I get for you?”

“A small coffee, please.” I dug into my backpack for the twenty the friendly stoner had given to me when we parted ways in Iowa City.

“And?” She was a middle-aged woman with graying hair and
deep lines around her eyes. Her fingers twitched over the register.

“That's it,” I said.

I can't eat anymore. Everything tastes like dust.

I walked to a seat by the window. My shoes squelched. I felt the familiar tug as I passed a group of old men and women chatting over coffee and Styrofoam plates of pancakes:
killer, killer
. Their shadows were old and frail, spider-web wispy. The men were veterans. One of them was wearing a POW/MIA hat, another a US Navy jacket.

One of the old women, too:
killer
.

That would have surprised me before, when I was first feeling out the limits of my new sense, but an old lady in a pink cardigan is just as likely to be a murderer as anybody else.

The woman caught me staring. I turned away.

The rain showed no sign of letting up. Trucks passing on the interstate sent waves of water over the guardrails. I sat at my table by the window and shivered. I tried not to think too much about what I was doing and where I was going. I would worry about that when the rain stopped.

I took the notebook out of my backpack and unhooked the pen from the spiral. I turned to the third page and wrote:
Duncan Palmer. Little boy with a baseball bat.

I breathed in the scent of the coffee to chase away the phantom smell of peanut butter.

The only other words on the page were:
Man by grave. Family of five with shotgun and knife.

One didn't mean anything, but two was a body count. I was
tempted to number them, neat digits at the front of each line, but I didn't want
1
and
2
to imply there would be a
3
and
4
.

Instead I turned to a clean page and drew a long vertical line down the middle, another line across the top. At the top of one column I wrote
REAL,
and atop the other I wrote
NOT REAL.

On the first line of the first column I wrote:
Whatever I am.

Below that:
Ghosts.

The Not Real column remained empty for now.

I drank my dust-flavored coffee as slowly as I could, but soon the cup was empty. It was still raining, I was cold and filthy and uncomfortable, and I smelled like a bum who had been sleeping in a Dumpster. There was grime underneath my fingernails, and my hair was tangled in knots. The nighttime exhilaration of racing along country roads in the darkness was gone. I wasn't sure how long I could hang around McDonald's before the employees asked me to leave.

I found Danny's blue flier, unfolded the paper, and smoothed it down on the tabletop. Church of the Prairie. I had no idea where I was in relation to that cross on the map. Nebraska had a lot of prairie and a lot of churches. I didn't need help. I definitely didn't need a hot meal. But a shower and clean clothes would be nice.

I grabbed the flier and walked over to the table of old men and women.

“Excuse me,” I said. I held out the blue paper and tried to look as pathetic as possible. “I didn't mean to bother you, but I was wondering . . . Do you know where this is? Is it near here?”

One of the women smiled. It was a kindly grandmother's smile,
crinkling up her face and warming her eyes. I wondered who she had killed. Her guilt was delicate and sharp, like brittle rose thorns in an old, old garden.

“It's not too close, sweetie, but it's not too far either,” she said.

“Can you tell me how to get there?”

She took the flier from me. “Oh, we can't let you go out in that storm again. You're so little you'll get swept away.”

They all laughed, and I laughed too. They invited me to have a seat. I looked harmless.

I DECIDED SHORTLY
after waking up that I needed to take a rational approach to figuring out what happened to me. The first page of my notebook contains the record of that brief burst of scientific enthusiasm.

On the top line in block letters I wrote:
RESEARCH
.

And beneath it:

Preliminary research indicates that subject is not a living human person anymore. A review of the available literature is unclear on whether this state is permanent.

By “review of the available literature” I meant I had googled “how do I not be undead anymore” and come up empty.

Subject is still able to breathe, but respiration is not necessary. A similar situation persists with the circulatory system. The subject's heart will beat if instructed to do so, and sometimes when subject is not paying attention. There are no negative consequences to stopping the blood flow. Experimental evidence suggests this state can persist for at least six hours and forty-two minutes. Longer time periods have not yet been investigated as the subject grows bored with testing. In spite of the intermittent blood flow, there are bruises on the subject's skin that have not faded and show no signs of healing or yellowing. The bruises are arranged in a ring around the subject's neck. The pattern of bruising suggests the injury occurred

My scientific report on my own apparent mortality stops midsentence. I told myself as I was writing that I found my own affected detachment silly and mildly embarrassing, the same way it became embarrassing to play make-believe with friends long after you knew it wasn't real but long before you were ready to admit it wasn't fun anymore.

I keep my notes in an ordinary seventy-page wide-ruled spiral notebook. On the cover is the NASA seal and a picture of the space shuttle
Discovery
. I've had it since the summer after sixth grade, when I wrote an essay about what space exploration means for the
future of humanity and won a trip to a two-week space camp in Houston. They gave us the notebooks on the first day, but I never used mine except to write my name inside the front cover:
BREEZY LIN, ASTRONAUT
, in outrageously bold block letters. I didn't want to ruin the rest of the clean empty pages with my looping childish handwriting. They gave us NASA pens too, which didn't even last the full two weeks, and pins and stickers and patches to iron onto our backpacks.

When I got home from space camp I put the notebook in my desk and forgot about it. After I woke up in my backyard grave and went home, it was still there, sitting at the bottom of the drawer beneath a pile of birthday cards and postcards, notes Melanie and I had traded during ninth grade geometry, bad poetry and embarrassing lovesick letters sent to me by a persistent crush. The notebook and a pen were the only things I took from my room when I left. Nobody would miss it.

On the first page there are a couple of blank lines below the paragraph, then:

I've been missing for one year. I woke up buried in somebody's backyard.

I don't remember dying.

I don't remember.

THE LIST IS
on the next page.

      
1. Sleeping pills

An entire bottle, choked down in several handfuls. In retrospect, it was a pretty stupid thing to try. If you can't sleep when you're dead, you definitely can't sleep deeply enough to never wake up.

That's also how I discovered that all of the things I had learned in anatomy class about the digestive tract being controlled by the autonomic nervous system didn't apply to me anymore. I can make myself breathe, can make my heart beat, but I haven't quite figured out how to make myself digest what I swallow. It sloshes around in
my stomach until I make myself throw it up. My gag reflex works just fine.

      
2. Drowning

Lake Michigan is right there. I entertained brief and undignified thoughts about a future as a deep-sea treasure hunter while I was beneath the surface, but otherwise suffered no ill effects.

      
3. Rat poison

Our neighbor Mrs. Feely left her garage open one night. Same result as the sleeping pills, only with more self-induced vomiting.

      
4. Gunshot

Heart, not head. The biggest risk was the number of houses I sneaked into before I found a loaded weapon in somebody's bedside drawer. I was trying to be undiscriminating in my search, but it turned out the middle-aged white guy with the pickup truck and the racist antigovernment bumper stickers did not responsibly lock his weapons in a safe. I was so shocked.

      
5. Electrocution

It only occurred to me afterward that if I hadn't picked the right spot, completely by chance, I would have given some train operator or security guard a heart attack. I ruled out public locations after that.

      
6. Hanging

Boring. Also: hard to get down once I was dangling there.

      
7. Stabbing

Bathtub, kitchen knife. I knew by then nothing was going to work.

I couldn't die. No matter what I did, the wounds healed. They
hurt, every single one, pain like I had never felt before. They bled, they burned, they left scars. But they healed. The list was pointless, but it was all I had. I didn't have any answers. I didn't even have the right questions. All I had was data, and all the data told me was that sometime between the moment I had died and the moment I woke up, I had become something unnatural, something not alive but not dead either, and I wasn't going to figure it out sticking knives in my stomach and watching my blood trickle down the drain.

THE OLD WOMAN'S
name was Helen and she insisted I let her buy me another cup of coffee. I smiled shyly and sat with my backpack in my lap, my skateboard leaning against the side of the plastic booth. I told them the story about the irresponsible roommate and the change of plans. I only needed a place to get cleaned up, I said, and a ride to the nearest Greyhound station.

They made the appropriate noises of sympathy and agreed that while they didn't know anybody who attended that church—they were Methodists, you see, and went to First Methodist on Grove Drive when they went to church at all—Pastor Willow at the Church of the Prairie sure seemed like the right person to ask for help.

“We'll get you set right up, Katie,” said Helen. “Don't you worry.”

Katie was the name of Melanie's older cousin, the one who had run off years ago to be a jazz musician in New Orleans and stayed after Hurricane Katrina to rebuild houses for charity groups. The real Katie was tall with dyed red hair and had a voice like an alcoholic gospel singer.

“I don't want to be any trouble,” I said. That was the only protest I offered. I had willingly gotten into the car with a murderer the day before, just to see what would happen. I wasn't worried about accepting help from strangers.

Helen patted my hand and volunteered to make the call when I admitted I didn't have a phone. Her skin was liver spotted but her touch was warm, and I let myself be reassured. For two weeks I had been on my own with my secrets. It was a relief to have somebody else take over, if only for a little while.

Even if she was a killer.

Helen couldn't hurt me. Her frail old shadows barely felt like guilt at all.

Her car was a boatlike brown Buick that coughed and trembled. We drove north out of town, away from the highway, until there was nothing but muddy fields striped with young crops as far as I could see. Helen never pushed the car above forty-five. We made awkward small talk during the long, slow drive. She was happy enough to chatter about her children and grandchildren who were coming to visit in a few weeks, even though they always complained there was nothing to do in Nebraska in the summer. Riding bikes and climbing trees in the sunshine and fresh air wasn't good
enough for kids anymore, not like it had been when she was young.

She didn't mention a husband. I wondered if he was who she had killed.

The better part of an hour passed before Helen slowed the car and said, “Here we are.”

The sign beside the road announced the Church of the Prairie in bold white letters, and below that: “Jesus is help in times of hardship. Sun Service AM,” but there was no time specified. There was a cross atop the sign, the name and number of a Bible verse painted on the wooden frame.

Helen put on her blinker and turned off the road, over a culvert running with rainwater, and into a gravel parking lot. The church was a boxy wooden building, topped with an old-fashioned spire, white paint peeling and faded. Beside the church the heads of white crosses and gray headstones peeked above the grass. An old man stood at the edge of the cemetery, shoulders hunched in a blue jacket, head bowed beneath a brown fisherman's hat.

Next to the cemetery was a small playground wrapped in a chain-link fence. The structures were metal, rusted, paint falling away in patches, and the swing set was crooked, as though half its double A-frame was sitting on quicksand. Two kids kicked on the swings in the rain. A woman in a red raincoat watched them from beneath a black umbrella. She turned as we passed, but she didn't wave. Her face was shadowed by the hood of her jacket.

At the end of the muddy driveway was the farmhouse and barn, both surrounded by a quivering cluster of cottonwood trees. The house was desperately yellow, weathered, as badly in need of
fresh paint as the church. The windows on its upper stories looked toward the road like twin rows of eyes. Small purple flowers poked out of the wood-chip mulch in front of the porch.

“Oh,” I said. I swallowed and rubbed my palms over my knees. “It looks nice.”

It was anything but nice. It was bleak and cold and unwelcoming. It was the ugliest shade of yellow I had ever seen.

There was nothing nearby. No other houses, no farm buildings. I couldn't even remember when Helen and I had last passed another car on the road. My heart was thudding and I felt a nervous twist in my gut. I wanted to tell Helen to turn the car around and take me away.

She parked in front of the house, but she didn't turn off the engine. “This is the place. They're expecting you.”

I hesitated before putting my hand on the door handle. “It's kind of in the middle of nowhere, isn't it?”

“Right in the heart of God's country.” Helen's smile was brief and watery. “Go on. No need to be shy.”

I forced myself to return to smile and thanked her for the ride. I ducked into the rain and jogged to the front porch of the house.

As I climbed the porch steps, the door opened.

“There you are!”

The girl in the doorway wore a long flower-print dress with an old-fashioned lace collar, and her red hair was split into twin braids over her shoulders. She could have been cosplaying
Little House on the Prairie
, but I had a feeling this wasn't dress-up. She was in her twenties, fresh faced and pretty in a forgettable way, except for her
astonishing green eyes. The color was so startling I wondered if it might be contacts.

“Hi,” I said. Behind me Helen was already leaving. I fought the urge to run after her.

“You must be Katie,” the girl said. She waved at Helen, received a brief horn tap in response. “Pastor Willow said you were on your way. Lunch is just about ready.”

Then she smiled, and I nearly missed the last step.

I recognized her. I had seen that smile before.

My mind flicked through
school
and
camp
and
summer,
but nothing fit. I knew I had seen her before, that smile and that pretty red hair, the freckles across her nose and those green eyes, but I couldn't remember when or where.

“Yeah, I'm Katie,” I said. For the first time since I had left Evanston, I felt guilty about lying to a stranger.

“I'm Violet,” she said. She stepped aside to let me in. “I hope you like potato and cheese soup. I know it's more of a winter food, but it's so gloomy today I thought it was right. Come on in.”

The front hall of the house was just as virulently yellow as the outside. The walls were papered with an alarmingly cheerful sunflower pattern, and an array of photographs in white frames marched in neat lines down the hallway and up the stairs. There were dozens of photos, more than I could count.

“Those are all the people Mr. Willow has helped,” Violet said. “We keep the pictures around to remind ourselves how important our work is.”

“Wow. There are a lot of them,” I said.

Some of the photographs were old, with faded colors and fashions right out of the seventies or eighties, but most were more recent. They were all posed portraits of men and women looking toward the camera, but rarely directly at it, distracted, their minds elsewhere in spite of the photographer's best efforts. Some were smiling vacantly; most weren't.

“Mr. Willow has been helping people for a long time,” Violet said. “That's him and his father.”

She pointed to a photograph of a broad, unsmiling bear of man in a winter coat, standing beside a much skinnier teenage boy in corduroy and a patterned button-down, with a tragic bowl haircut and a vague frown.

“His father founded our congregation,” she explained. “It's a very sad story, but Mr. Willow always says that adversity is an opportunity for us to learn our true strength.”

The men in the photo weren't touching. They didn't look much like father and son. In the corner somebody had written the date: 1973.

“What happened?” I asked.

Violet's smile softened. She wasn't a killer. She had no shadows clinging to her. Her smile was so light, her expression so kind, I wondered if they would even dare. “It's better that he tells you. Do you want to get cleaned up before lunch?”

“I guess I should. Do I really look that bad?”

“You can do laundry too,” she said with a laugh. “I have some
clean clothes you can borrow. I'm glad you're here. It's been so quiet this week. Usually there are a lot more of us. Oh, here's Esme. Say hi, Esme.”

In the front room there was a woman sitting in a wheelchair with a blanket folded over her knees. Her face was slack and she was thin in a wasted, unhealthy way, and she had a faint scar stretching from the corner of her eye down to her chin. Her shoulders hunched under a threadbare bathrobe and her hands were clenched on the arms of the chair. There was a towel tucked into the collar of her shirt; somebody had covered her up to help her eat but had forgotten to take it away when they were done.

The woman turned her head when Violet said her name. She stared at me, her wide brown eyes unblinking, until I looked away.

“She's a little shy,” Violet said, and she smiled again, that same friendly smile, and I remembered where I had seen her before.

Not in person. We had never met.

But I had seen her face and her smile, and I had heard her voice.

That's what I remembered most clearly: the sound of her voice when she screamed.