People Like Us(31)
She looks disappointed, almost disdainful. “Hamlet. He couldn’t kill himself, because no matter what torments this life holds, the afterlife could be worse. We can’t do it if we don’t know.” She looks so earnest that I nod, although she’s dead wrong. Hamlet might not have been able to do it, but some people can. Megan did. I kind of doubt Shakespeare could have saved her, even if all his words covered all her walls.
“What if each of us dies and goes to an individually designed hell filled with our deepest and darkest fears?” Nola says, flopping back onto her bed. “If that’s true, you can’t possibly allow yourself to die one minute sooner than necessary.”
“Sure.” I try not to think of death too often since Megan and Todd passed away, but when I do, I like to frame it in more optimistic terms. “But it’s just as likely that the opposite is true. Maybe when we die, we instantly enter our own dreamland. A rerun of all our best memories.” A smile crosses my lips, thinking of Todd and me as kids running around the backyard on the Fourth of July, the smell of hot dogs and burgers filling the air, fireflies and sparklers illuminating the twilight, the grass slick under our bare feet. That would be one to add to the reel. I hope he’s somewhere like that right now.
“It’s probably nothing,” Nola says. “But still. It gives us pause.” She sighs and looks back at the computer screen. “If Jessica knew I buried Hunter, she knew exactly where his body is. You know what we have to do now.”
A sick feeling churns in my stomach. “We?”
“If you want the rest of the passwords, that is.” She eyes me challengingly.
I stand, pulling my hair into a tight ponytail, and slip my coat on.
9
It’s a clear night, but bitterly cold, with occasional gusts of wind that sweep the breath right out of my lungs. I decide the freezing trek around the lake and into the woods is worth wearing my Todd coat, and if we run into anyone carrying a corpse, I have more to worry about than fashion. The woods are on the far side of the lake beyond the main road, and we make the walk silently, me with my chapped red hands shoved deep into my pockets and Nola swinging her arms occasionally and doing half pirouettes now and then. As we spend more and more time together, I notice these things about her. She dances when she walks. Just little bounces and glides scattered here and there. Her gestures are graceful, and she sometimes stands en pointe, casually, as if without realizing she’s doing it. She also speaks lyrically. Her speech pattern falls into a rhythm at times, and she taps her fingers and feet when she sits still for too long. When all is quiet, she begins to hum under her breath, and now I have to shush her once or twice, because if I don’t, her voice will gradually rise until she is singing out loud, and eventually we’ll be caught traipsing through the woods with a sack full of cat bones, merrily belting out show tunes.
“Are you sure you can find your way back to the spot?” I ask her as we beam our flashlights around the dark wood.
“I think so,” she says. “There were landmarks. An old red barn on the right, an abandoned tractor on the left. A boulder with the initials IKC carved into it. A pink property-line ribbon and a hiking-trail marker, and three trees down, the stones.”
I glance over at her in the dark, my flashlight bobbing low. “Good memory.”
“Well, I had to trace my way out again,” she says.
I pick my way slowly over the roots and stones, careful not to slip on the slick, frosted leaves. The last thing I need is an injury once I get the season jump-started again. We round a large downed oak tree with enormous, rotting branches sticking up from the ground, and Nola halts.
“Right there,” she says, pointing.
I look where she’s indicating but can’t see anything. She makes her way across a small clearing, her sneakers brushing frost-encrusted leaves aside, and then begins removing stones from a small pile. I hesitate. I don’t want to touch it. If there’s a rotting corpse underneath, those stones are probably crawling with disease. I hang back and fumble with the zipper of the canvas backpack she decided we would use to transport the body. I shift my weight back and forth from one foot to the other as she rapidly removes the stones and discards them behind her. At any moment the body will appear. It’s been there for quite a while and I don’t know what to expect. It could be pretty macabre. I haven’t seen many dead bodies.
Jessica was freshly dead, cuts and skin preserved by the icy water and the newness of her death. Megan was cremated. Todd was painstakingly made up to look like he hadn’t been crushed by Megan’s brother’s truck. His rib cage was reconstructed under his brand-new navy suit. His hands were painted and powdered and fastened together to lovingly hug a football to his chest. They covered a big laceration on the side of his face and sewed his lips and eyelids to make him look peaceful. And then layers and layers of paint and powder, paint and powder. The most grotesque Halloween costume of all time.
I had begged my mother not to make me go to the wake, not to make me look at Todd’s body, but she’d just stood there wordlessly, watching my mouth move. She was on so many pills, she couldn’t comprehend a thing I said. It was all too much for her, Aunt Tracy had explained. I would never, ever know the depths of her despair. And yes, I had to go. It was expected. But when I stood there, staring down at the wreck of my brother’s body, I thought maybe I understood the depths of my mother’s despair a little. Only it didn’t feel like sadness, or a pill that emptied my mind, or rage that made me shout things about lawyers or hell or revenge, like my dad did behind doors before I heard his sobs break through the house as loud as laughter. For me, it felt like little pangs, little jolts of impulsivity. Reach into the casket and try to reposition Todd’s cold, posed hands. Drain Dad’s bottle of special bourbon. What is anyone going to do about it? And later, at Bates. Run against the team captain sophomore year. Make the new girl eat a dead spider or write Coach a love poem or fake a seizure in the middle of chapel. Steal the prettiest clothes from the locker room and wear them around campus, because if you don’t hide it and you don’t back down, no one is going to call you on it. Jump into the lake after the Skeleton Dance. Whatever pops into my mind. Just to see what happens. Who’s going to stop me? What’s anyone going to do? Why does any of it even matter?