Don't You Cry(64)

“I want to see her,” she says then, and I ask, “See who?”

“Genevieve,” she says.

“You mean the ghost? Genevieve the ghost?” I ask, feeling utterly absurd as I say it. Needless to say, it’s a strange request. She wants me to summon the ghost of Genevieve. I’ve played Ouija once, a long, long time ago, but I’m absolutely certain that game is gone. We could hold a séance, I guess. Light candles, sit around holding hands and all that crap. Try and channel Genevieve’s spirit. Sounds like a bunch of BS to me, but I’m guessing there isn’t any request Pearl could make which I wouldn’t oblige.

But still, I’m more than a little bit relieved when she says no.

“No,” she says. “I want to see her grave. Where she’s buried,” Pearl adds.

“It’s the middle of the night,” I say, not to mention that the idea is a bit bizarre. Why in the world does she want to see Genevieve’s grave? Why now?

“You’re not afraid, are you?” she asks me, smiling as she slips her hand out of mine and rises to her feet. She stands before me with her hands on her hips, waiting for me to reply. It’s a dare.

I shake my head. I’m not afraid. I rise up to my feet, too, dusting off the seat of my pants with my hands. What kind of ninny would I be if I passed up a midnight rendezvous in a cemetery with a woman? “Live for the moment,” she reminds me then as we scale the window one at a time and return outside. “Enjoy life.”

“Enjoy life,” I parrot as we walk down the street. The night has grown cooler in the short time we were inside; the wind has picked up speed. It’s cold, but somehow, with Pearl walking beside me, closer than she was before, I feel warm. I reach out again and hold her hand. I don’t think twice this time; I just do. She doesn’t pull away, and so we walk like that, hand in hand, down the middle of the street and to the cemetery in town. She’s got to be ten years older than me, but not for a second does it feel weird. It feels right. We don’t talk, we don’t shoot the shit. We don’t say anything. I lead, planning to show Pearl where the cemetery is, though every now and again I get the sense that Pearl is the one drawing me there. She wants to see where Genevieve is buried.

The cemetery is old. One of two in town, and this is the older of the two. It existed before the public cemetery was built over a decade ago. The only reason I know Genevieve is buried here is because this is where the boys and I used to play ghosts in the graveyard when we were little kids. Of course, it’s not really a game that has to be played in a graveyard, but somehow it made it all the more fun. This old cemetery belongs to a church, a small old-world building that sits off to the side. We cross the lawn and take aim on Genevieve’s slumping tomb. There’s no more space here to bury the dead and those who are here, entombed six feet below, beneath brittle, moss-covered headstones, are often forgotten, their offspring buried on the other side of town where visitors tend to go. I haven’t been here in years. Not since I was a boy, maybe eight years old, and I would walk past all the headstones, wishing my mother was buried beneath one. Oh, how I wanted her to be dead. Because that would have been better. Dead would have been a better excuse than just plain gone. I’d take death over abandonment any old day of the week.

But this is where Genevieve is buried, with a small grave marker, the kind small enough for a dead pet. It’s a beveled marker, gray with black details, sunken into the browning, moribund lawn.

On the grave is an offering of flowers, black-eyed Susans pulled from someone else’s lawn, nothing more than withered-up seed heads lying on the ground. Bird food masquerading as flowers. But who would leave flowers here, beside this grave? Far as I know, no one comes to visit any of these graves, other than on the annual Halloween cemetery walk, meant to be spooky and not commemorative in any sort of way. Strange, if you ask me.

Pearl drops to her knees in the sodden lawn and picks at the black-eyed Susan stems. She runs her fingers over the chiseled letters, slowly, thoughtfully, as if memorizing their details, the slope of the G, the curlicue e, the hurtling V. I stand a foot or two back, watching, seeing a sadness in her eyes and thinking to myself that it is sad. Knowing that a little girl has died. It’s sad whether or not either of us ever knew Genevieve. I’ve heard the stories; nearly everyone has heard the stories. But I’ll never know Genevieve. Pearl will never know Genevieve. But still, it’s depressing, thinking that she’s down there, just a rotting corpse, lying beneath this spot where we now stand. It’s depressing and weird.

But then things get even more weird.

Pearl, kneeling down on the wet lawn, now lies down. She folds over sideways, in the fetal position, and lies on Genevieve’s grave. As if holding the little, dead girl. As if embracing her. As if comforting her in some, odd way.

She says to me, “Alex. Come here, too,” and I do, but I can’t bring myself to lie down in a cemetery. Instead, I sit. Or rather, I squat. I squat down on the lawn so that my calves begin to burn and I listen as Pearl begins to recite a prayer for the dead Genevieve.

“Now I lay me down to sleep,” she says, and I credit empathy and compassion for the tears that drip from Pearl’s eyes, but maybe there’s more to it than that.

Maybe she’s just plain crazy, though it doesn’t make me like her any less.

In some weird way, it might just make me like her more.