Gravedigger's Cottage Read online

  Party. Ah, no, I don’t think so.

  “Of course we’re going to the party,” Walter said as he tramped behind me through the dunes. Dad, back at The Diggers, had sent us out on a mission to collect authentic decorative sea stuff for his new vision of the home. Probably instead of actually fixing and upgrading and rehabbing stuff he was going to spread around seashells and driftwood all over the place. Which was a finer idea altogether, in my opinion, and much more in line with Dad’s notion of home-improvement work.

  “Of course we are not,” I said. I stopped and bent to pick up a pinkish something out of the sand. The body of a crab that had been eaten by a seagull sometime before I was born. I dropped it and moved on.

  “You have to start listening, Sylvia. You never listen, you know that? You never listen, and you never think about other sides except yours.”

  “Because the other sides are wrong. And…what was the other thing?”

  “You never listen.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “No, you don’t. You decide and you command and you insist, but you don’t listen. Dad says you’re not my sister, you’re my insister.”

  I got indignant. Then irritated. Then a little proud.

  “I don’t think he’d say that.”

  “Not when you could hear him. He’s afraid of you like everybody else is.”

  Nobody is afraid of me—that is just ridiculous. He was really making me boil by saying so. Well, maybe not boil, but pretty warm. That is, smile. I took a quick dogleg down out of the dunes to make a run for the water, completely sure he would stay right at my heels.

  “Hey,” he shouted, right at my heels.

  But the surf, as we got nearer, was working to smother all lesser sounds.

  The first two waves, when we got as close as we dared, down over the gritty dry sand to the gritty packed wet stuff, pounded down when they broke like a team, bam-bam. It was that serious, emphatic type of surf day where the waves come in madly and then stop short. Followed immediately by the suck back to almost pure silence while the sea and we catch our breath for the next.

  It was in these silent breaks Walter tried to fit his case.

  “No joking, Sylvia, I think we should go to the party.”

  “Okay,” I said, “why?” See, I could be reasonable and listen.

  He started to speak, and the waves came, like my bodyguards.

  Bam-swoosh-bam.

  He tried again.

  “It’s a thing they do here, every summer, before school starts. Bonfire night. All the kids go. Nobody misses it. It’s a tradition.”

  Now the waves came in, switching sides, to give Walter’s words the impact. But not enough.

  “That doesn’t mean we have to go,” I said coolly, picking up a piece of half-decent driftwood that was shaped almost like Nova Scotia. I knew my dad would love that.

  “Yes, it does,” Walter said, a bold statement made so boldly it didn’t matter that a whopper wave tried to stifle it. “Listen,” he said, speeding up to seize the space of wave silence as well as my own. “I don’t want to be a freak, okay? If everybody goes to this thing and we are invited to this thing and we have a chance to get to know people and things…” He was shouting now, defying the waves, defying them impressively, I had to admit. “What’s the harm? If we don’t go, that’s a bad start. We can be a lot of things, but geek sticks, you know, weanie sticks, creep sticks…I don’t want to be any of those. We already have a hole to dig out of anyway, with the Gravedigger’s Cottage situation making us look like hermit ghouls, so I don’t think we should make it any harder for ourselves.”

  He was overstating things, as he does. We were fine. There was nothing wrong with the way we did things, and if Walter was suddenly seeing things in a different light—a dim, unenlightening light—then that was his problem. It was important that I not encourage him, especially on such a silly issue.

  I walked on, and picked up the most wonderful dead starfish that had washed up on the sand. It was a beauty, stiff but still orangish, and as big as my hand. Immediately, I brought it right up to my face and breathed it deep.

  I don’t know if it is a guilty pleasure or not, but I do know it is a pleasure. I have always held a deep, passionate affection for the smell of old starfish, even rotting starfish. I do not know what it is about them, but they have always called to me, like a siren song—or a siren scent, I suppose—from the sea. And as I stood there with the starfish, smelling it, feeling the oddly rough clingy pebbly texture of its back and its uncountable sucky finger things, I closed my eyes and smelled the smell, felt the beginning mist coming down from the sky and the rising spray coming up from the surf, washing lightly over my face. A seagull flew close by and let out a little scream, and I could not imagine much of a better moment all over. I could not.

  I opened my eyes again, and cast my gaze well on down the beach. It was an amazing beach, known locally as the Beach at the End of the World because you couldn’t actually see the finish of it in either direction due to the curving-away rocky edges of the land, the frequency and intensity of the mists, and, well, the huge endlessness of it. We heard all this from the real estate agent when she was busy not telling us about weeping walls and Gravediggers. Couldn’t blame her, I suppose.

  I looked, I smelled, I felt it on my face, in my mouth and eyes. You could pretty well deal with anything else if you had all this. And it sure would help things if we could bring as much of this perfect outdoors as possible into our indoors.

  My dad was going to love my starfish. He had a net, like a small fisherman’s net, that he was keeping in the garage, and he liked to attach some of these sea-based things to it, like a sort of organic tapestry he was creating. I knew my starfish was going to wind up entwined there, and I hoped it would all wind up on some wall in the house, any wall in the house.

  “Hey,” Walter said in my ear.

  I had my eyes closed again. I kept them that way. “Hey what?”

  “Hey, it’s starting to rain.”

  “That’s not rain, it’s mist.”

  “Still. Don’t you think we should get going?”

  I gave him a blind shrug. I liked the feels, the smells, the sounds of right here right now. Where does it say a person has to go in out of the rain? What is so wrong with rain?

  “You should do what I’m doing, Walter. Then you’d enjoy it more.”

  He didn’t say anything for a bit. Then he did.

  “Are we all right, Sylvia?” he asked, altogether too seriously.

  I opened my eyes. And there was his face.

  It made me very sad, the way I was seeing it now. His round, round face with the round, round eyes, always seeming somehow to become even more perfectly circular when he got at all forlorn. The moisture in the air taking his longish caramel-colored hair and smoothing it down to frame all around that face. His heart-shaped little mouth, pursing and poking out just before he spoke.

  “Don’t you want to have friends, Sylvia?” he asked.

  What kind of a question was that? Of course I wanted friends. I was very friendly. I loved having friends, and friends loved having me back. At the old place, at the old school, there was an actual waiting list to become my friend, because I just couldn’t deal with the volume all at once.

  I just didn’t always feel exactly up to it. The effort of it. That was all. That would pass. Probably, sometime. Being friends and having friends would not always be so hard as it seemed now. Probably.

  “You’re my friend,” I said.

  He pinched and squinched his face all up, like he was exasperated with me. He could be a real little old man sometimes.

  “Yes,” he said, “I am.”

  “Good. Then that’s settled. Let’s go home and I’ll make you and Dad and me hot chocolate.”

  He started walking ahead of me. He picked up a decent-sized piece of blue sea glass. He showed it to me. It wasn’t completely worn the way the best sea glass should be—the edges were still kind
of shiny and dangerous—but it was a beautiful cobalt blue and close enough for what you can find of sea glass anymore since people got all good and conservationist and insufficiently conscious of sea glass.

  “I’m going to the bonfire,” he said to me firmly, and turned to walk on.

  Must have been the new house, the new situation, making Walter McLuckie bolder and more adventurous than ever before. Maybe living in the Gravedigger’s Cottage was making him feel like he had some kind of new powers.

  Because this was a tall statement. For one thing, this bonfire—well after dark, without any adults present—was not even possibly the kind of thing Dad would say okay to. And that would mean doing it on the sly.

  Walter McLuckie was never a sly guy.

  And it would also mean doing it without me, because I wasn’t doing it.

  “Well, I’m not,” I said.

  “Fine,” he said.

  Not fine. Not fine at all.

  Tank

  TANK WAS THE I-dare-you-to-kill-this indestructible pet gift I got from Dad.

  It was a dare that should never have been made.

  He was a sturdy tortoise, no doubt about that. He was stepped on a good many times, old Tank was, but he’d just suck himself up and wait for the danger to pass, then be on his way again. He ate greens—dark lettuce, spinach, broccoli, asparagus, snow peas, green beans. If they were a little bit wilted, he was okay with that. He had a particular fondness for green peppers which, if I chopped them up really small for him, he would eat with the gusto of a starved dog.

  He ran for green peppers. He would smell them from his little nap area, which was a long pine box that once had a bottle of wine in it, and he would just bolt like a thoroughbred toward his bowl.

  I may be exaggerating. I may, in the glow of hindsight, in the afterglow of Tank’s afterlife, be making his achievements more notable than they actually may have been.

  But he was great. He didn’t gallop, maybe, but he really did charge after his green peppers. He was like a perfect child. Ate exactly the best things without a peep. Couldn’t even make a peep if he wanted to, although he wasn’t silent. I used to take him up and put him on me while I slumped extra far back on the couch in front of the TV. He would climb up my sweater, working so hard, his determined pointed beak pushing on up the mountain of me, then through the tangle of my hair, then around my neck as he searched for a better place to be. Then I would scoop him up, hold him to my ear, and listen to him.

  The tiniest little breaths. Huh-huh-huh, he would go, right in my ear. Only audible if I had his head basically placed right inside my ear. Huh-huh-huh, Tank huffed. I never failed to giggle. I wanted to squeeze him so much, but we never could quite work that out, the proper squeeze.

  Huh-huh-huh. Made the whole ocean sound in a conch shell seem like the honking of city traffic by comparison.

  So he was quiet, and he was polite, he was no trouble and great company. He could go ages and ages without eating, he never drank except for what he could get from his veggies, and he never even tipped over and stranded himself on his back except when Walter did it just to watch. Even when that happened, I was the only one to get mad. Tank just kept on with his steady walking motion with his feet up in the air, as if he were still getting somewhere, until I turned him over and gave Walter a clap on one ear and an earful in the other ear that I can promise you hurt a lot worse. Yet Tank paid no mind, went on, on his way without ever trying to bite anybody, which would have been his right.

  He was Tank, as we had hoped, but he was not indestructible. He seemed like nothing could bother him, nothing could ever get at him, but you find whenever you think that, you were wrong. You find that you had overlooked something. You find that you never really knew the whole story from the inside, and maybe you never can.

  Because at some point something bothered Tank. He stopped eating. His food bowl sat there, and the vegetables went from crispy to soft, from soft to shrunk, from shrunk to decomposed. We cleaned the old stuff out and put in new crispy stuff that then also decomposed.

  We let him roam around much of the time, like we did, but he got harder and harder to find. He would stay in closets, under furniture, behind the refrigerator. So many times I pulled Tank out of someplace and found him totally covered in dust bunnies, looking like some kind of very adorable mutant hybrid turtle kitten that got caught in the dryer.

  But he wouldn’t eat. We tried everything. Warming him up. Cooling him down. Keeping him in his box more, letting him roam more. Bathing him. Walking him. He didn’t even take the occasional nip of a blade of grass, which he loved to do on his walks through the yard.

  He wouldn’t eat. And we couldn’t force him. Some creatures you can force-feed. Ever try and force a piece of lettuce into the mouth of somebody who can suck his whole head into his body?

  All I could do was watch. He shriveled. You couldn’t see him losing fat, because everything about Tank went on inside, in his shell, his house, his protection. Where nobody could see, where nobody could get to him. His protection and his fault, the same thing.

  But his legs shriveled, his head looked smaller. He would be lost for days at a time, and when I found him he would have one less toenail, one less toe, one less foot. Months he lived without a bite. And other than the decaying away, you could swear that he was fine with everything. He wasn’t bothered. You would swear it.

  The last time I found him, I knew it was the last time. I picked him up and dusted him off and held him to my ear. He stretched his neck, put his head in my ear.

  Huh-huh-huh, he said, like always.

  This time I didn’t giggle. This time, for the first time, I decided he was trying to talk to me. He was trying to tell me things.

  He had always been trying to tell me things, I decided, but I couldn’t hear his little voice. Like in Horton Hears a Who.

  I would have figured it out. We would have worked it out. I would have heard him. I would have understood him.

  We just ran out of time.

  Everybody’s Walls

  I NEVER, EVER LIKED the nighttime, even at the best of times.

  No kind of a night owl, me. Morning owl, which wouldn’t be right, I suppose. Morning sparrow? Morning dove?

  I would like to be a morning cardinal, if I had my choice and if it didn’t sound a little weird. They are the most beautiful birds, the brightest, most livid vivid birds, always visible, always there, always special. Never seen one alone, though, I don’t think. Strictly in pairs.

  Anyway, it’s not about the birds—it’s about everything else. I am suspicious about the nighttime, about the shadowiness of what and who is up and out there. Suspicious of what prefers not to be seen, which couldn’t be a good sign—not wanting to be seen. There is just so much more hope in mornings, in the breaking light rather than the retreating kind.

  I lay there in my bed, in the dark, when the August dark finally decided to arrive. I lay there listening. Smelling, breathing in the scents of the house and the sea, the scent of the darkness itself, which of course has its own odor. And listening, listening.

  Stupid idea, stupid thing anyway. Bonfire night. No adults. Who needed it? It was dark, it was night. Bed was the place to be. You should always be in the place to be when it is time to be there. No place like bed.

  The house whistled. Darned if Dad didn’t turn out to be right about that. The house whistled when the wind blew.

  Smash. Whoa. That was a tidal wave, practically, to sound like that all the way up here. That was a wave and a half.

  He wouldn’t go. He was too sensible for that, no matter how hard he wanted to seem otherwise. Walter had a good head on his shoulders despite it all. He was bluffing, to see what I would do; and now that it was clear I would do nothing, he would do the same. That’s my boy, Walter.

  Oh, no. I heard a muffled thump-thumping, like feet on the carpeting, and a rustling. In the hall right between my bedroom and Walter’s. He was doing it. He was sneaking out. How could he? Thi
s was not like us. Not like me, not like him. This was not a McLuckie thing to do. Right—that was the point, he would say, not to do the McLuckie thing. Well, I didn’t care for his point.

  I got to my feet, scurried across the room in my nightdress, and threw the door open.

  “Hi. Sorry. Did I wake you?” Dad said.

  He was there in his summer pajamas, the ones that look like a short-sleeve button-down dress shirt and matching short pants with a hedgehog pattern stamped all over. He wore everything we ever gave him for Father’s Day. Even gag gifts.

  “No, Dad,” I said. “I was awake.”

  “Oh, good,” he said. “Do you smell it? It just won’t go away. I think it’s getting stronger, and just now it was distracting me so much I couldn’t get to sleep.”

  Dad was like me, not liking the night much. He turned in when we did nearly every night. As he stood there in his shorty pj’s, hunched over in sniffing posture under the mellow, bare forty-watt bulb dangling in the hallway, it made perfect sense he should be turning in as early as Walter and me. Or earlier.

  “I’m not sure I do smell it, Dad.” I gave an obvious sniff to the air. I shrugged.

  “Sure you do. We talked about it this afternoon. You must be just getting used to it. Which might not be a bad thing, since obviously it won’t be waking you up at night. But as the head of the house responsible for such things, I can’t ignore that some strong, powerful scent is penetrating all corners of our home without trying to get to the source of it. You remember the smell.”

  I did now. And it was true—the house had a unique kind of an odor—but I figured all houses had theirs. This one was a sort of smoky damp, like wet charcoal, and it really only seemed to compete with all the other local smells when it rained hard—which it was not now doing. But the fact that Dad could smell it at all was noteworthy. And the fact that he seemed able to smell it even before I was able to smell it, that was altogether peculiar.

  “Right. I do remember now,” I said. “Wet charcoal.”

  “Right,” he said, relieved, smiling at me. “Barbecue sauce. Very sweet, and vinegar, tomato, and molasses.”