Burn Our Bodies Down(73)

I crouch, empty stomach clenching as a wave of dizziness crashes over me. Get a grip on her wrists and tug, my legs barely staying underneath me. She’s so heavy. Dirt pouring across her face and into her mouth. I’m sorry, I want to say, but she deserves more than that.

I get her just free of the grave, her torso sprawled on the grass, her legs still half-buried. And there. Underneath her. Another. My face. Gram’s, and Mom’s, and Katherine’s.

This one’s dressed, wearing a T-shirt and shorts. Nothing like the stained party dress I’ve still got on, but I recognize them. The same sort of clothes in the dresser in my room. I bite my lip and reach around to tug the shirt collar to the side. There, right where it was on every other T-shirt in my dresser. My mother’s name.

This girl was inside Fairhaven. Gram kept her. Dressed her and fed her and then she ended up here. Just like I did.

I knew it. I knew it. But that doesn’t make it any easier to bear. Heat races over my skin and I could throw up but I feel more like crying. I push the tears back and dig until I see her more clearly.

She’s younger, this girl. Like me when I was thirteen, fourteen. My freckles before they faded, my hair before the gray really grew in. But her eyes belong to the girl in the fire, to the girl buried above her. Black and dripping, her flesh bloated and splitting, her clothes ragged, half-gone. And worst of all, pieces of her palm, sliced up separate like kernels on a cob of corn. Some have come loose, scattered in the earth around her. Pink at the root, white and tough at the top, black spread like blood from the hole left behind.

Like the harvest, the one Gram and I brought in. I try to breathe deeply, try to keep myself whole and here, but the trees are pressing in around me, the ground swaying under my feet. This is too much. I have carried so much and how am I supposed to understand this?

Easier to keep going than to think about it. And I’m so tired, so so tired, but I bend down, and I take hold of her arms. My sweat drips onto her brow. I smooth it back, but my touch strips her skin from the bone, pulls it clean away from her forehead.

I clutch my stomach, gather myself away from the grave and scream into the back of my hand. Every move I make, worse and worse. Every touch just hurting someone else. I should never have come here. I should never have climbed out of that grave.

But I did.

I lived, and they didn’t. I’m still here, and they aren’t, and whatever they are—sisters or something else—I have to bear witness. Have to see them, the way I wanted Tess to see me.

I turn around, make myself look. This is what happened to you. It was real then, and it’s real now.

I keep digging. Bodies and bodies, younger and younger, stacked so close and all of it wrong, the smell too clean, too chemical as they decompose. One girl with bruises around her neck, skin pulling away from her bones, draping like fabric. Another unmarked like she died in her sleep, maggots dotted like rings on her fingers. And the deeper I get into the ground the less of them is left. Flesh pebbling to nothing, the roots of the apricot trees winding through their ribs. Until I find the last set of bones. Too small to be anything but an infant.

I sit back on my heels. My hands have finally started to shake. Gram put me here, where she put the rest of me. All those bodies, all of them living once, hidden in that house one after another. No wonder it was so easy for her to swing that shovel. She’s done this over and over. Kept these girls and killed them.

Just the way she thought she killed me. And the girl in the corn, the girl whose body Eli carried that day, she was no different. Gram called the fire an accident, but I know what it was. A last resort. The only way for her to catch a girl who had started to run.

I wrench myself away from the grave and stagger down the path, farther into the grove. Toward the burn, the blackened reach of what’s left of the trees. Tears hot in my eyes, but I don’t know what they’re for, because this isn’t actually happening. It can’t be.

I stop short when I see it. A small, flat white stone alone in the grass. A marker for a grave, I think, suddenly certain. And I don’t need to dig it up to know who it must be.

Katherine. The only one of them—us, a voice whispers to me, us us us—anyone wanted to remember.

I kneel by her headstone and rest my palm against it, flinching for a moment as I remember the skin of the bodies behind me. Above us, the apricot trees reaching down. Some of them burned and some of them bearing fruit. I reach for the lowest of them, pluck the fruit from the branch.

Gram, with a hundred of them in her freezer. Why?

Carefully, I find the seam with my fingertips and pull the apricot apart. There, nestled in the center, in the gentle curve where the pit should be, is a perfect white tooth. Like the one I saw in the garbage at Fairhaven. There is no blood. No nothing. It never came from anywhere but here. Nielsen women, growing in everything.

I go cold with it. Waver and slip, and my eyes are open but there’s nothing in front of me.

That story in Mom’s Bible. About Gram giving birth in the apricot grove. And no father, not then and not ever, and not for me either. Did we all come from here? Is there another girl growing in the earth under my feet? I read Mom’s diary, the passage she left me, and I came from her, I thought I did, but maybe I’m like the girls I dug up.

Or am I like Tess? Like Mom? Is my body waiting to bloom?

Tess. I get up, brush the dirt from my dress and peer through the apricot trees, try to spot the Miller house. Gram found out Tess was pregnant, said it had to be stopped now that it was spreading.