Everything and everyone here is dead. I’m surrounded by wet, decaying grass, loose dirt, and graves. They go on for acres to the left and to the right. I’m in the middle of dead nothing. The mud dripping off my construction-grade boots, the squelching sound of the earth pulling me in – these are the only noises for miles. This is where she is.
Like the crossroads, where demons make deals, this place is secretive and hard to navigate. The names are in no particular order, and the dates jump from civil war deaths to baby boomers saying goodbye. It’s a labyrinth and I’m supposed to feel lost; there are too many headstones to count. No one wants to feel death as being organized. Chaos is more fitting.
I try to keep my thoughts more upbeat. She’d want today to be about life. It’s not her funeral; today is her rebirth.
I carry everything I could need in the duffel bag draped on my shoulder; the bowl, the knife, the incense and candles. I got the dried sage and althaea leaves from Natalie. She offered to give me blood, too. The spell called for a virgin’s, but I still fit that category and I’m related, so things will run more smoothly if I go in alone. Natalie would have me, she’s the only one who believes in me, but she’s not who I want.
I stole the book from an occult store on the main road. The guy behind the counter wouldn’t let me buy it because I wasn’t eighteen. Guess it has some inappropriate illustrations. Doesn’t matter. It was easy to lift and hide in my sweatshirt. I’m a big guy. Finding the boline knife was a tricky matter, what with needing a credit card to buy it online, so then there was the matter of finding my mother’s and making the charge look like it was from a cooking site, but the how is not the important part. It’s the why. Her.
Laura was my cousin. Is my cousin, I remind myself. We grew up together.
My first memory is of myself pushing her down to retrieve a Lincoln log under her feet and the sound of her crying. I felt so upset that I cried too. I hadn’t meant to hurt her. When we were nine and she started hanging out with girls instead of me, I was a mess. I started having nightmares that made me pee the bed, about her disappearing into an inky mass of black goo. I would cry out her name and she would yell back that she hated me. I sabotaged some of her friendships to get her back. I’m not proud of these things.
When she got her license I bought her a really expensive cheesecake with all the money I had. It had two layers, with chocolate swirls and flowers made of sugar spelling out “Congrats!” I loved her more than my own parents, who were usually distant from me, in a way that they sometimes forgot I still lived under their roof. They aren’t mean or abusive; they’re just unable to remember who I am. When my birthday is. What food I am allergic to.
Finding her memorial isn’t hard. Her father had a statue made in her likeness. He came from money. My aunt was lucky to snag him. Her body, sculpted and swathed in marble, is polished and smooth. As I look at her, I’m sure she’s glistening just for me. She’s watching. Right now. Urging me on.
The sun is dropping down below the tree line as I lie at her feet. Her stone dress hides her toes and is caught in a permanent sway around her hips. She’s looking up at the sky, one hand reaching towards her face, like she can’t believe how beautiful the clouds are. Like she knows what’s up there waiting for her.
But it wasn’t supposed to be her time.
None of my friends think this will work. I didn’t bother telling anyone in the family. Not if my best friends, the people I thought knew me the best, looked at me scared, and branded me a loon. Magic is fake, magicians are cons, witchcraft is some silly thing preteen girls do in their closets to get kissed, blah, blah, blah. There is nothing that could stop this. The damp ground under my back is telling me nothing is solid. Nothing is definite. I feel very poetic under her feet.
She didn’t die right. That’s how I know she’s meant to come back.
She died alone. No one saw it, but her body was splayed so perfectly, so elegantly when they found her, it was like she floated to the ground on a breeze and was frozen.
It was a mix-up. She took three pills from an aspirin bottle her mother kept in the bathroom’s mirrored medicine cabinet, not knowing that’s where her mother put her Valium tablets from her postpartum depression days. Laura had backaches from the gymnastics training she had done when she was younger, so she often needed three to kick the pain. She took them with water. She didn’t notice the different letter on the tablets. She trusted an aspirin bottle to be an aspirin bottle.
It was such a small chance that they would affect her so strongly, that her body would have such an adverse reaction. It was a fluke on top of coincidence. And it was wrong.
I can’t sleep.
I haven’t slept for more than an hour or two at a time in the past three months. I ate but it might as well have been mud in my mouth. I was shrinking and becoming a pale nothing that people avoided like a sickness. I wasn’t always this pathetic. I didn’t walk around in graveyards and ignore girls who looked at me. Natalie asked me out and before Laura died I would have said yes. She’s a sexy thing with big hair and big breasts and a proclivity for laughing like a banshee. She is happy all the time. I would have eaten that up and asked for seconds.
I would have taken almost any girl to keep my mind off Laura. When we were caught kissing behind a tree at my twelfth birthday party she got hit with a belt. My parents didn’t say much to me, only that it was wrong. But I wanted her. She wanted me. Her hair was soft in my hands and I can still taste her tongue if I concentrate and think of the apple smell of her.
I’ve never had sex, not because I don’t want to, but because in some sick part of my head I was waiting for her to be my first.
It’s dark now. I pull out the book and the bowl, light the incense and the candles, and roll the sleeves of my sweatshirt up over my elbows. The curved knife is thinned to such a point that I know it would take nothing at all to bleed all over the ground.
If this doesn’t work I don’t know what I’ll do. Maybe I will let myself bleed out. Maybe I will buy some drugs off Mark at school and take them all at once. Maybe I’ll stay under this statue, looking at her face, until I starve. Melodramatic gestures, sure, and Natalie will probably come looking for me, but in all honesty I can’t imagine going about my life like this. Nothing is right. The world is tilting and discolored and no one is noticing. I’ve been told by counselors and friends and strangers at her wake that I will feel better. I just need to wait out the storm and the walls will look white. Right now I only see red.
I sprinkle the herbs, crushed by hand earlier this morning, over her grave. I hold the book two inches from my face, struggling to pronounce the strange symbols in the candlelight, stumbling over the letters like a toddler. A wind picks up and I tell myself this is good, this is working. She will come back and we can leave. We can run away. I emptied my savings, brought a few clothes. We’re good. Nothing will stop us. I even snuck into her room and brought her the jeans she loved so much. She’d drawn a robot on the pocket with a sharpie during geography.
Everyone will still think she’s dead, and I’ll just disappear. It will take my parents a few days to realize I’m gone. I never leave my room now. I’m quiet. I’ll dye my hair and wear different clothes. I won’t touch Laura’s long, dark hair. Wouldn’t dream of it. I want her back just the way she was.
When it’s time to cut my hand I grind my molars together, shut my eyes, and drag the tip of the knife down my palm fast. I don’t feel it until two seconds later and then I’m holding back tears and my arm is shaking. I look at the cut, thinking I might have hit a nerve or something, but the blood is flowing and I picture Laura, her cheeks pink and warm because of my blood and it seems a small price.
I hold my hand palm-down over the grave and walk in a circle like the book tells me to. I repeat the strange words over and over until I’m screaming them and feeling ever more grateful that this place is so large and that no one comes here. Our town is very out-of-sight-oriented. I pour everything I have into the words, hoping I am saying them right, that I can hold her again, her slender body against my thick frame and bury my face into her neck. Smell her apple body spray. Hear her voice, always so serious and so thoughtful.
I don’t know where she is but she belongs here, with me, and I repeat this to myself inside where it counts as I scream the words. The wind blows out the candles and the incense cone is knocked over. It starts a small fire in the dead weeds but I stamp it out. When I stop shouting I realize other things were shouting with me. An echo fades out. Birds were cawing and the wind was howling through the barren trees, still empty from winter storms. I shiver and pull my sleeves down. I clench my bleeding hand into a fist and look up into Laura’s marble face, her stone dress. Her bare toes are the last thing I see before I pass out.
***
It’s light out when I wake up. I can hear rustling on the grass near me and think for a moment of snakes before I realize where I am and what I’ve done.
My eyes open and I see her marble toes. Breath leaves me and I feel an ache in my throat as I realize I’ve failed. But they move. Her toes grip the dead grass slightly and her feet shuffle. They are dirty. A delicate green fabric brushes her ankles. Green, not stone.
I look up, and the sun spikes into my eyes. My head pounds but I cannot close them, because she is here. She is standing, leaning against her marble replica, her arms at her sides. She is looking down at me, but the sun makes it so that I cannot see her face.
“Laura?” She kneels and it’s her. Her soft eyes, her long dark hair, her pink cheeks. It’s all here. It’s perfect. I sit up and grab her to me, cupping her head in my hand and rocking myself back and forth, clutching her tightly, trying not to sob. Tears leak from my face anyway and I find myself whispering, “Oh my god, oh my god, Laura, I can’t believe it.”
I feel nauseous from blood loss and my head is spinning but she feels so good against me. I pull back only enough so that I can kiss her but the look on her face stops me. It’s not radiant or excited or confused. It’s just, she’s just…blank.
She darts her gaze back and forth between my eyes, and I realize that she isn’t holding me back. Her fingers are brushing the grass by her ankles.
“Laura?” I ask.
“Is that my name?” she responds.
I pull away, my knees sinking in the overturned earth where she had risen from the ground, and look at her, wondering where the flaw is. Trying to find the mistake I’ve made. I followed the book. I did everything it said. I stole and lied and cut myself for this. For her. And she doesn’t even know her own name.
“Laura. Do you know who I am?” I hold my breath while she concentrates on my face. A small line appears between her eyebrows while she thinks and it’s adorable but even while I think this I can feel something inside me shriveling and crumbling like a dried prune.
She shakes her head no, looking around her at the graves.
“Am I dead?” she asks.
“No. No, you’re not dead. I…” And then I stop.
I see her crying as a toddler, and eating cheesecake and kissing me behind that tree and I don’t know what to do. She’s everything to me. She knows me better than anyone else on the planet. She’s held me together my whole life. What if I am now nothing to her? A blank face with no meaning; our history lost. But then, suddenly I am seeing it a different way.
A new history. A story I can write. I can make all the rules. We’re lovers, or husband and wife. We live alone in the middle of nowhere with only each other for company. I can tell her that I am her everything.
“You last name is Andrews,” I lie, testing her.
“Oh. Okay.” Her voice is soft and windy and she looks around her again, her eyes drawn again and again to her stone likeness.
She would believe anything. Do anything I told her. A hundred fantasies play through my mind; ways I’ve wanted to hold her and kiss her, places I’ve wanted to make love to her. She’ll never want for anything with me. She’ll know only me. I can tell her everything about herself.
A sour taste hits the back of my mouth.
What if I get it wrong? What if I don’t know her as well as I think? I know her favorite ice cream flavor, her favorite books. I can tell her about all the parties she’s gone to. Even the names and addresses of all her friends, but…then she would be this person I made. I don’t know what she thought of every minute of every day. I can’t tell her those things. She would be only what I know of her. She would be this thing I put stories in, like a box with no bottom I could fill with lies forever and ever. Even if they were truths, this isn’t Laura, this is her empty box.
This empty shell didn’t stand in line for three hours to buy me tickets to my first concert. This shell isn’t the girl who liked to trace the lines on my hands with her fingertips. Filled with my thoughts of her, would she still be her? I’m so confused I don’t notice her stand up and climb the small dais of the monument and touch her cheek against the statue.
“It’s me.” It isn’t a question, but I reassure her anyway.
“Yes. That’s you.”
“So, I am dead.” Her voice isn’t sad or angry, just flat and soft; wondering. I’m crying now and I can’t seem to stop myself. My face is hot. What have I done, what do I do, this isn’t what I wanted, this isn’t Laura. Just her body.
With one last hope I stand up and pull her from the statue. Her body is light. I kiss her. Her lips move automatically but this kiss is not Laura. I pull away, crying harder. I have lost her all over again. She looks frightened and pulls away from me. Holding my hands out to her, showing her I’m harmless, I motion for her to sit.
And I tell her a story.
When she walks away a few hours later I’m still shaking, and now I am dizzy and misted in sweat. She’s heading towards the bus stop. My duffel bag is lighter two thousand dollars.
Her name is Laura Stevens again, only because she saw the name on the statue, otherwise I would have had her stick with the new one. I’m just some guy who fell for her while she was here on vacation, trying to find some work after her parents died. There were so many loose ends. So many questions I tried to anticipate that strangers would ask her. I covered all the bases I could think of. Creating a person is hard. This girl wasn’t Laura and I didn’t want to make her a funhouse version, so instead I gave her someone new to be.
I was broken from this whole night. I felt empty and loose in my skin, like I was a different creature, just living in this fleshy costume. A new me. Just like a new her. I reached for my cell phone when Laura was out of sight and called Natalie to come pick me up. I could barely stand, let alone walk out of this place.
When Natalie asked me what happened I told her it didn’t work. She was right. Laura’s still dead.
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Previously published in Harvest Time, an Inwood Indiana Publication, available for purchase here: http://www.amazon.com/dp/1478101644
Cassandra Mortimer 