American Girls(38)

I turned the music up louder before realizing that I should have asked first.

“But the first single isn’t out until next month—I just heard Karl Marx say so. On a podcast, I mean. Is this a CD or just the music? How many songs did you get?”

I was babbling like a deranged toddler.

“It’s ten songs. There’s a promo case back there somewhere. Here.” He pushed a button and skipped to the next song. “This is going to be the first single.”

I had officially died and gone to heaven. Karl Marx’s low voice half chanted, We’re all just part of the void. Travelers on a lonely path. Lost in space. Lost on Earth. No looking back, no looking back.

“This is amazing,” I said. “Amazing. Can I play some for my friend?”

Jeremy shrugged, which I took as a yes. I recorded the next verse and texted it to Doon.

He smiled, and if it weren’t almost too crazy to allow in the realm of possible, I think he put his hand on mine and squeezed.

“Killer song, right? Every song is that good.” He moved his hand like he was going to give me the Chips Ahoy! salute, but stopped himself.

I gave him my very best “Hey buddy, old pal” smile, so he’d know that I wasn’t crazy enough to think that he’d really be attracted to me, that his hand on mine was an accident we could both forget.

“Look,” he said, leaning across me and pointing out the window on the passenger side, “That’s where we’re going.” He pointed to a stretch of rolling hills just off the street. We were outside the heart of Los Angeles, but other than that, I had no idea where we were. “Holy Cross Cemetery,” he continued. “It’s where my grandpa is buried.”

I had no idea what to say. If you had asked me where we were going that day, I think a cemetery would have been about one millionth on the list.

“Really?” I said. “Do you go and talk to him?”

“Sometimes. Sometimes I just go because it’s peaceful and they don’t allow photographers. Low stalking factor. When I was a kid, my grandpa took us there because we loved Dracula. You know who Bela Lugosi was?”

“Was he Dracula?”

“The best Dracula.”

“I know who he was,” I said.

“Did you know they buried him in his cape? Josh and I used to plan how we would try to come back one night and see if he was still there. We were gonna steal the cape if no one was around. Obviously, never happened.”

“It’s kind of a funny thought,” I said. I had spent so much time watching him play a kid that I almost forgot he had been an actual kid.

He parked the car, and we went to walk the grounds. I hadn’t really spent any time in a cemetery, and maybe it was the kind of place that would be scary at night, but during the day it was beautiful. Los Angeles stretched out below as we passed through beautifully twisted iron gates. The hills had shrines carved into them, the votives inside both burning and burnt out, and statues of the Virgin Mary kept watch over the dead. I didn’t know much about Catholics, but I did know that they were crazy about Mary.

In places, the landscape was like something out of Middle-Earth but without the hobbits. At the top of one of the hills, two trees grew out of a hole cut in the side of the minimountain, and under the trees a shrine had been hollowed out. Inside the shrine, ten or twelve candles in long cylinders had been lit and left to burn.

“It’s beautiful,” I said to Jeremy, who was walking ahead of me but had stopped. “And so quiet.”

“I know,” Jeremy said. “I think my grandpa is probably happy here. My grandma is pretty loud,” and we both laughed like I knew exactly what he was talking about. “I remembered something the other day, and I thought you might think it was cool.”

We started walking down a gently sloped hill pocked with smooth granite graves that vanished into the grass if you weren’t looking. There was a cemetery in downtown Atlanta that I had been to with my mother once, and it seemed like even in death, Southerners were trying to outdo each other. Every grave was bigger and showier than the one before. But this was the exact opposite. Whoever designed it had made sure the gravestones almost disappeared into the ground, but the weird thing was that it made me think about death even more.

“Are we going to your grandfather’s grave?” I asked.

“Definitely,” Jeremy said. “I always light a candle for him when I’m here. But I’m looking for something.” He scanned the ground and finally pointed to one of the identical gray-black stones that we’d been walking around. “Sharon Tate,” he said.

Once, when I was singing in chorus and it was hot outside, I had been standing too long with my knees locked and before anyone knew it, even before I could figure out what was happening, I had this feeling like I was on fire and drowning at the same time, and I passed out completely. The next thing I knew, someone was giving me water and propping me up, trying to decide whether I needed to go to the hospital. When Jeremy pointed to that gravestone, I had the same feeling, like something in the ground had buckled and I was going to collapse.

“Are you okay?”

“Fine,” I said, kneeling in case I fell. “It’s just so real.”

I said “real,” but that wasn’t the word I was looking for; the word I meant was “sad.” The kind of sad that would swallow you whole if you sat beside it too long. The gravestone marked four bodies. The top read “In Loving Memory of” and the left side continued with “Our loving daughter and beloved wife of Roman, Sharon Tate Polanski.” The dates she lived were separated by the thin slivers of a cross, 1943–1969. Beside that were the dates for her mother and, at the bottom, her sister. But as haunting as it was, the name that knocked me down was just below Sharon’s, “Paul Richard Polanski,” followed by “their baby,” and no dates beneath the name. No dates below this tiny person who both was and wasn’t, but who had a name. I thought about Birch and the way he had kicked inside my mom when her belly was so big that I could line up Cheetos on it, the way he already had a name, and a face that we could see in his little ultrasound pictures, and how much I had been looking forward to meeting him.