When We Were Animals(62)

That was why, one night, I went deeper into the tunnels than I ever had before. I was reckless with voids made out of possibilities.

Getting lost was not a problem anymore. I’d developed a distinct understanding of the dark, a natural sense of how the tunnels were built and which direction they were going. I could feel, in my bones, the elevation of the earth. I could sniff my way north, south, east, and west. I knew the way the breezes blew through those ancient causeways.

But a human body was something I never imagined stumbling upon. Perhaps I was foolish. I don’t know.

Still, in the middle of a running life, you sometimes discover death sitting peacefully, just around corners. Waiting for you.

It was the body of a girl.

Where I found her was a dead end, but this was unlike the other dead ends I had found. It wasn’t a collapse, it was simply a terminus. The tunnel widened slightly, like a little bulb-shaped room, and then it just abrupted—a round stone room.

I could tell it was a blind tunnel because I knew that the dust hung heavier in the air in caverns that had no outlet. I could feel the end of things in my lungs. I had stopped, leaning one hand against the cold stone and bending double to cough the dust out of me. That’s when the dim glow of my penlight fell on her.

Her hair was like wheat. Like dried hay in a barn. Her hair was like that. Like an empty barn on a day when you walk alone down the hill to discover the world for yourself.

Her hair was like hay, and her skin was brittle and dry, like papier-maché. Her skin was gray—and it was stretched and dried up and petrified by age. It did not give under my touch. When I put my cheek to her cheek, it felt like nothing human. It was the cheek of an old doll. Her skin, her hair—they were kindling for a fire that would burn down the world.

The eyes were closed, the lids glued together by time. The lids were flat and sunken because, no doubt, the eyeballs underneath were shriveled grapes. They did not stare. There was no staring.

Her mouth was the worst thing. And it did not speak.

The skin of her face had dried and shrunk over the bone. Her lips pulled back, exposing two rows of white teeth. Her teeth were dusty. With my finger, I polished them, and they were perfect underneath the dust—rows of pearls. But they looked too big, her grin too wide. And no grin at all, not really. The dead don’t laugh. Their mouths are not expressive, they are just hungry. Her jaw hung open, her gaping maw stretched wide, as though she would swallow you. It looked as though she might be calling to me, as though she had something to say. But there was nothing. There were no words. She was dumb as bones.

Hair like hay and her skin like paper. But her mouth was the worst part. It was the start of a dry passageway that went all the way down into the dry sack of her belly. The girl was her own abandoned mine shaft.

She wore no clothes, but her body was half covered by a burlap sack. The burlap was stuck to her. It and her skin and the earth had all melted together and frozen. She leaned, half sideways, against the cave wall. It was an awkward eternity.

She must have been cold. I tried to pull the burlap up to warm her, but it turned to dry shreds in my hands.

*



I had never seen death so up close. She was dried like a mummy in a museum, and I wondered who she had been in life. She was small—young, like me. I wondered if she had had friends like mine or enemies like mine. I wondered if she came here to be alone, as I did. I wondered if this meant that I was now friends with death itself.

The other thing it meant was that I was no longer just a girl. It was the beginning of awful discoveries.

It was the start of everything that came after.

*



I told Mr. Hunter that I was mapping the mines, but I didn’t tell him about the dead girl. When I told him, I watched him closely—expecting that he might scold me or try to persuade me to talk to my father about my self-destructive habits. But he didn’t. He leaned forward, in the dark of the auditorium, and he said, “Is it beautiful there?”

“That’s not the right word,” I said, because it was something other than pretty.

I liked to tell him things, because he seemed to comprehend what things meant even before I tried to explain them. I felt no need to apologize for myself to him. I told him my stories, and his eyes went distant—as though he were recalling some long-ago memory. Sometimes his eyes even glazed over, and he would turn his head away. Sometimes his breath smelled of alcohol.

At dinner one night, I asked Margot Simons about Mr. Hunter.

“What’s he like?” I said.

“How come?” she asked. “Have you got a crush on him?”

I held my knife in a grip that whitened my knuckles. I imagined driving the blade between her ribs.

After giving my father a playful glance, she responded to my question.

“We don’t see each other that much,” she said. “Mostly he doesn’t hang around with the other teachers. But I like him. There’s something about him. Did you know he didn’t grow up here?”

“I know,” I said, eager to show off the priority of my alliance with him. “He’s from East Saint Louis.”

“But,” she went on, “he doesn’t seem entirely like an outsider. Does that make sense?”

It made perfect sense. But I didn’t like that her evaluation of him was so parallel to my own.

“Miss Simons,” I said, changing the topic. “Did you know that my mother never went breach?”