Burn Our Bodies Down(72)

“What are you talking about?” I say finally. “Stop what? How?”

“I’m tying up loose ends,” Gram says. Not really an answer, but there’s a hoarseness to her voice I don’t like. I frown.

“Loose ends like what?”

“Tess,” Gram says. “Me.” She takes a shuddering breath. “You.”

The rush of air, the white of the stars and the black spread of pain as Gram swings the shovel and brings it down hard on the side of my head.





twenty-six





i come back to nothing. To the sky dark and blurry through a layer of dirt. It’s everywhere, under my fingernails and in my mouth and I gasp, choking on my own hair. This is a grave. I’m in a grave.

Gram’s going to bury me.

A rush of terror takes hold of me. She must think I’m dead, or she wouldn’t have left me half-buried. And she’s not here—she’d have seen me moving. I have to get myself out, have to run, and it has to be now, while she’s gone. Before she comes back to finish the job.

The ground is still loose, and it tumbles away from me as I claw my way free, until I can breathe without swallowing a mouthful of grit. I push myself up, feel something give underneath me. It’s too soft, too spongy to be the earth. It’s something else. My stomach lurches, but I force it down. Keep going, I think. You have to get out.

Finally I crawl from the dirt and tip over onto my hands and knees, feel a breeze brush my cheeks. My head is aching from the hit to my temple, the pain fresh. I’m alive. I’m still alive.

This is not how Gram wanted it. I can picture her with the shovel balanced in her hands, can picture the grim resolve on her face before she lifted it and swung it, hard. A loose end, she said. That’s what I am.

I blink, wait for the world to clear in front of me, but it’s blurry. I touch the side of my face, just under where the shovel cracked against my temple, and my fingers come away bloody. It’s everywhere. Down my neck, in my hair, all coated in dirt. I’m dizzy too, nearly sick to my stomach with it. But I can’t just stay here and wait to feel better.

Come on, Margot. Get up. You have to get up.

I take as deep a breath as I can and sit back on my heels. Long, slow breaths, my hands over my eyes until I get used to the throbbing behind them. I open them to heavy evening, to the winding green curve of trees. The apricot grove.

Gram never brought me here, but I feel like I know it from the way Mom wrote about it in her Bible. Here, where they were just the two of them. Here, where Katherine died. Here, where Mom burned her body.

I can see the remnants of the burned grove in the distance. The trees around me are young, bearing fruit, but as the grove reaches away from Fairhaven, they turn strange, broken and stained dark with ash. Trunks hollowed out, branches too short. The earth there is covered with grass, thick and bright, but that can’t hide what happened here.

That’s in the past, though. And I’m alive. It takes everything I have, but I climb to my feet, steadying myself on the nearest apricot tree, this one living and new. But then I look down at the grave Gram tried to bury me in. Reaching from beneath, pale and rotting, an arm, a hand.

A cry bursts out of me as I scramble back. That’s what I felt under me. A body.

I shut my eyes. Hope it’s not real if I don’t look at it. But haven’t I learned? I have to face this. I tried walking away and look where it got me.

I crouch, tuck my hair behind my ears. Ignore the gummy stick of my own blood, and begin to dig.

I hit skin first. A stomach, full of give and curdle. I recoil, feel a heave in my gut, vomit and acid and a sob building to a break, but I have to see this through. I have to. So I bend over her again, dirt up to my elbows, sweat on my forehead, and I brush the earth away from her face.

From my face. From ours. Because of course we’re the same. Of course she’s me, just like I’m her.

Her neck is bent, too far to be anything but broken, and her eyes are half-shut. Under her lids I can see the pool of black, of liquid rot, clumping in her eyelashes, one tear of it sticking to her cheek. Just like the other girl. Naked, too, like the girl in the morgue, only this time I can’t draw a sheet over her and leave her behind. I have to look. At her eyes, at her hands. At her mouth, loose, drooping down to one side of her face, a hole torn in the skin at the edge of her lips, gaping so I can see her teeth.

Everything else has felt so close. Overlarge in my sight, so I can’t look away from it no matter how hard I try. This—I don’t know. I’m here but I’m not, and it’s not my hand reaching out, steady and still. Not my hand tapping lightly on the gleam of this girl’s teeth.

Until it is. In a rush, dizzy and everywhere and all of my body prickling at once, like coming back from someplace numb. I can’t hide from this. Not even in myself.

I cradle my hand to my chest and stare down at her. Like that moment on the highway, my first day here. Another girl, just like that. I had it making sense. That girl for Katherine, and me for Mom. So who is this?

It comes back to me then. My first night here, kneeling on the window seat. Looking out over the corn and hearing a cry. Hearing it stop. It was her. It had to be her. This girl, with her neck snapped, with her skin still fresh and gleaming. New, from nowhere. Another.

Dread like the slow build and whine of a siren. I have to move this girl, even though I’m terrified of what could be underneath her. How many girls have there been? How many of me has Gram killed?