What the Dead Want(38)

It was a better idea than living at home. But we both knew it was an impossibility, the church and our families would never allow it. We sat in silence.

I remembered that moment when I first came along with him, to help lead people from the woods. How we were hunkered down, terrified. Any noise could mean our capture—and our friends who had worked so hard for their freedom being sent back to a life of slavery and abuse. He had taken my hand there in the complete darkness—and with his finger had written on my skin, drawing invisible letter after invisible letter.

I love you, he wrote. I love you. I love you. I love you.





NINETEEN


OUT IN THE LOOPING DRIVEWAY HOPE LOOKED URGENTLY at Gretchen and Hawk, motioning for them to throw the box of photographs in the back. Hawk jumped in the car with the box and Gretchen leaped into the front seat just as Hope peeled out.

Once in the safety of the car speeding away, Hawk reached forward to touch her shoulder and Gretchen reached back to squeeze his hand. Dust kicked up around the windows as Hope drove down the dirt road. She flipped the sun visor down.

“Why are we heading away from our house?” Hawk asked.

“We’re going into town,” she said matter-of-factly. “The funeral home called. Esther’s ashes are ready to pick up.”

Suddenly the mood turned grave.

“It’s all so crazy,” Gretchen whispered.

Hope said, “I don’t know what the two of you saw in that house. But you’re not crazy. People all over the world think they’re crazy when something bad goes down. Think how people felt when strangers with different skin and odd language came and threw them onto a ship and took them far away. They felt like they were going crazy. One day eating lunch with their family—the next being beaten and sold and then beaten again. There was crazy shit going on—but it wasn’t in their heads. That crazy lasted so long we’re still feeling the ripples of it.”

“You sound like Mom,” Hawk said.

“I am like Mom,” she said. “We learn history so we can break with the past, not repeat it.”

Gretchen had never heard a kid talk like this in her life. Besides Janine, Hope was the most level-headed person she’d ever known.

“Amen to that,” Hawk said.

Hope looked back at the house through the rearview mirror. “Let’s just hope we get the chance,” she said.



They drove on in silence. Forest gave way to town via a poorly paved country road, which in turn widened into the smooth black asphalt of Main Street. There were large, pastel-painted mansions on both sides. Bric-a-brac and wind chimes dangled from porches; leafy potted ferns hanging from eaves troughs. A Saint Bernard lay sprawled in a patch of sun on a neatly mowed front lawn. American flags flapped gently from flagpoles. After where they had been, it was a blank, strange shock, a postcard of peace and prettiness and prosperity: brick storefronts and slickly painted green benches, a bright-red fire truck parked in the driveway of the Mayville fire station, looking so clean that Gretchen wondered if it had ever been used. There was a gazebo, and in it, a mother reading a storybook to four blond children. Even the funeral home looked pleasant. The hearse outside somber but perfectly polished.

When they pulled into the parking lot, Gretchen took a deep breath. She shook off the image of ghostly children painting the walls with blood, and then opened the car door and planted her Doc Martens firmly on the ground.

The second she did this she started to laugh. Something about the whole thing was comical. Her haunted ancestral home, this weird town that seemed like a stage set, almost everyone already hiding in their homes to avoid being the victim of a random anniversary accident. Hawk seeing ghosts and Hope driving them around in her vintage car, giving history lectures. It had not even been two days since she left the city and yet everything in her world had changed. No, not just everything in her world, but her whole understanding of the world had changed. She wished Simon were there.

“I’ll come in with you,” Hawk said, breaking her from her reverie.

The funeral director was not what she expected, given the quaint and buttoned-up nature of the town. He was wearing a dark suit, but he had wavy shoulder-length hair shot through with strands of gray and a not-so-perfectly trimmed beard. He was wearing glasses and on his wrist was a macrame bracelet with a little pale-blue bead on it. She half expected him to be wearing Birkenstocks.

“My daughter made it,” he said, catching Gretchen looking at his bracelet. “Meant to ward off the evil eye.” He had kind, pale-blue eyes himself.

“Does it work?” she asked.

“So far,” he said, giving her a nervous look.

When they sat down at the desk he said, “I’m so sorry for your loss. Everyone’s loss, really, I remember seeing Esther Axton’s work in the paper and in magazines the whole time I was in school. She was an amazing woman.”

“Thank you,” Gretchen said.

“This is never an easy time,” he said, pulling out a leather-bound binder. “I’m sorry to rush you through this, but we’ll be closed for the anni . . . for tomorrow, and I’m sure you’ll want to get this taken care of sooner rather than later.”

“Yes,” Gretchen said. “Thank you.”

The binder was filled with pictures of ornate boxes and urns. She and Hawk sat together flipping through it. Her eyes glazed over.