The Light of the World, page 3
It was cooler here. The cemetery was old; the graves were marked with dates that went back more than one hundred years. Eva bent down and brushed dirt off a grave marked “Monroe.” Her fingers dug at the moss that had grown into the R.
A bobwhite called in the distance. The mournful cry filled the cemetery. It echoed like a gunshot, and in that moment even the cicadas fell silent. The hair on the back of Eva’s neck prickled as a stiff breeze whipped through the lush greenery around her. The bit of moss in her hand fell to the ground. The bobwhite called again.
“Why here?” Eva murmured. She straightened and fell into step beside Charlie and Ainsley. She glanced over and offered an unsympathetic smile as Ainsley’s heels sank into the soft lawn.
The spot that her grandmother had picked out was under a tree and far to the back of the small cemetery. It stood in shadow, but the light hit it in such a way that there was one place that was bathed in light. Eva could see Mary’s grave marker, flat and silent, illuminated as if under stage lighting. A pool of sunlight amidst the shade.
In her pocket was a Loonie from a trip Eva had taken to Montreal and Quebec City in middle school. Her grandmother had been far too old to chaperone, but she’d sent along all her coins from her own trip to Canada many years before, as well as a note that told Eva not to talk to any strange Canadian men or women. She insisted that they were after nothing but her virtue. Eva had been all of fourteen at the time and had found the note hilarious. She still had it, tucked into a journal she’d kept during high school. It promised a smile—always.
As the pastor said his final words and they said their goodbyes, Eva stood in that pool of light and turned the Loonie over and over in her hand. The Queen’s face on one side, the loon on the other. A dollar, a ticket into the world of the dead.
As they left, Eva flipped the coin expertly into the small hole where the urn that held all that was left of her grandmother had been placed. It clattered against the blown glass before falling silent amidst the flowers and dirt.
She walked away, her head held high. She couldn’t look at her aunt and uncle, or her stupid, insensitive cousin and his date. Her eyes stung as she looked out over the cemetery, and the bright green of the vegetation twisted into a blur of tears tinged with summer.
Chapter 2
Slow Drive
Unshaven and bleary-eyed, Eva’s father clutched a cup of coffee to his chest. He stared blankly forward as if lost in thought, his fingers curling on Eva’s mother’s knee. “You know,” he said, “sometimes I feel like I never really knew my mom.”
Traffic was a snarl at this hour, and the hour-long drive back into New York was already stretching well into its second hour. Eva stared down at her own cup of gas station coffee and picked at the fraying hole in the knee of her jeans. It was cooler this morning; rain had rolled in overnight and with it had come a more comfortable temperature. It was sure to still be hot in the city, but Eva thought that anything would be better than the heat of yesterday.
“Why do you say that?” Eva asked. Her mother was glaring at the line of brake lights and stopped cars that filled the road ahead. Her expression was stormy in the rearview mirror, but she hadn’t objected to the conversation. Usually traffic like this called for absolute silence. Eva’s mom couldn’t concentrate otherwise. “She was your mom, after all.”
This was a regular conversation in Eva’s family. Eva didn’t anticipate that her dad’s response was going to be any different than before. There were questions about her grandmother and her grandmother’s life that no one could answer. She was a strange and enigmatic woman at the best of times, and grouchy and bitingly sarcastic for the rest. There was a sadness that she carried with her like a great albatross around her neck. She never answered Eva’s questions about her past even though she had grown up during the Roaring Twenties and had survived the Great Depression and the Second World War.
“I don’t really remember them,” her grandmother confessed. It wasn’t too long after they brought Eva back from the hospital. She was sitting next to her grandmother in her rickety old bed, hands cupped around a mug so large that it must originally have been intended for beer. Her grandmother had been sick for a week over what Eva had almost done. Eva was sleeping on the couch in her grandmother’s living room to make sure that her condition didn’t get any worse. “It’s almost like there is this terrible cloud that had descended over my memories and turned them all to ash,” her grandmother told her. “I remember the major events—the Crash, FDR, Hitler invading Poland, Pearl Harbor—but I could not tell you what I was doing during that time.”
“Why?” Eva asked. She curled forward and leaned against her grandmother’s thin body then, burrowing deeper under the blanket against the chill that had settled over the apartment. “Was your life really that boring?” She hated that she couldn’t hide her skepticism. It was obvious to Eva’s entire family that their matriarch had a great deal more than just a passing memory of such events. She chose not to recall them, or to deny her presence during them, and even as a young child, Eva had been determined to know why.
Her grandmother huffed, folded her arms across her frail, aged chest and looked insulted. “It was hardly boring, darling. It’s just that sometimes you forget things. Especially at my age.” She looked away from Eva then, out the window where rain pounded against the glass. Her expression darkened. “Sometimes you want to forget the things you remember.”
Eva had never mentioned that conversation to anyone, and she wasn’t about to mention it now. It didn’t have any bearing on the current conversation. She and her grandmother had been far closer than her grandmother had been to Eva’s father or her nephews. There was a shared history between them and a shared understanding of the cast of demons that danced mercilessly in the shadows of Eva’s dreams. Her grandmother had them too, Eva was sure of it. The knowing looks and comforting smiles made that very clear to her when she woke up sobbing in the middle of the night to find her grandmother sitting beside her bed.
She held her tongue, not wanting to voice her thoughts. Eva hated keeping secrets. She’d grown good at it over the course of her life, but she hated the deception and the little lies that had to be told to keep the secrets safe. Her grandmother’s secrets were kept by the dead now. The only way to discover the truth was for them to be shared beyond the grave.
Her father’s shoulders rose to his ears in an elaborate shrug. Eva turned away and rested her chin on the palm of her hand. Was keeping that conversation to herself really the right thing to do? Would it help him heal and move on? Was it worth it to betray the confidence she’d kept? She hated omitting details, which was no better than lying outright.
Is this the sort of lie you want to tell?
Outside the window, a long line of concrete noise shields were covered in creeping ivy. The effect was beautiful, a great hulking monument to modernization and the long fingers of suburban sprawl. A small, sad smile crept across Eva’s lips. Even the walls had secrets, covered in the lush, reclaiming force of Mother Nature.
“I don’t know,” her father said. His voice was so quiet that Eva could barely hear it over the rumble of the car. Her father was not a quiet man by nature. He was quick with a joke and always laughed easily. Now his voice sounded lost amid the road noise and the steady sound of Eva’s breathing. “She was just so… I don’t know, unhappy all the time. Sometimes she’d spend days staring off into space, and she’d talk about the light of the world as though it meant something to anyone other than her.”
Eva chewed on her lip for a moment before she sipped her cold coffee tentatively. It tasted bitter as she swallowed, and she frowned deeply at the taste. She hadn’t put in enough sugar. Gross. “Maybe she was just depressed,” she suggested.
It was a simple explanation to a situation steeped in stigma. Eva had grown up with the illness and had embraced it as a part of herself long ago. For many people older than her twenty-two years, however, it was a source of deep shame and something never to be discussed publicly. Eva’s father almost never spoke of his own struggles with depression, and her mother never made much of an effort to understand. She just nodded, asked Eva if her medication was still working, and went about her day pretending it didn’t exist.
Until Eva lost control one day, and they had all been forced to confront the real cost of ignoring such an illness. That day they called her a coward and demanded to know why she hadn’t asked for help. Eva thought the reason was obvious, especially in their reaction to what she’d done. They’d demanded to know how she could be so selfish, not once bothering to ask why she felt her world was slowly spiraling out of control.
Eva shook herself free from memories of her failure. The car was moving again, slowly, but it was moving. They would be back in the city soon.
Her mother laughed. It was a short, derisive bark. “Oh, she certainly was depressed. No one could possibly be that negative without some depression coming into the equation.”
Eva bit her lip so hard it bled in an effort to stop an angry retort.
“Let’s not speak ill of the dead, Claire,” Eva’s father said quickly. He probably sensed disaster. This was an old argument they’d had many times. Eva didn’t know if she and her parents would ever see eye to eye on the subject of coping with mental illness. Her parents believed that any depression her grandmother struggled with stemmed from her grandfather’s death. It could not be that simple. Eva had always sensed that her grandmother regarded her husband as nothing more than an inconvenient necessity of life. The sadness her grandmother struggled with was there long before Eva’s father was born. Of that, at least, Eva was certain.
Silence filled the car again. Eva sat back and drank more of her disgusting coffee. She was starting to feel carsick. The conversation wasn’t helping. This was the sort of argument that Eva hated. There was no point in guessing. Her grandmother was dead, and they’d never know.
“I think there’s something more to it than simple depression.”
Eva’s stomach turned. Her mother, of course, would not leave well enough alone. Eva wished she would let it go. There was no point in continuing to talk about this. They couldn’t find out anything more because the subject of the discussion was dead and burned and buried in the ground.
No one interjected, so Eva’s mother continued to speak. Her voice was sharp and biting over the sound of the road outside. “Come on, Dan, do you think that she married your dad for any reason other than convenience? We both know that they hated each other’s guts.”
Eva’s father sucked in a harsh breath. Turning to stare out the window, Eva gritted her teeth. She would not rise to the bait. She would not. She could not. She did not want to have this argument.
“Once we get back to her place, we’re going to find something to explain why she was such a miserable pill of a woman. Mark my words we will.” It wasn’t a secret that Eva’s mother didn’t care for her mother-in-law. They were constantly at odds during Eva’s childhood, and doubly so after that day, when Eva became the object of a contest of wills.
On today of all days. We don’t need this right now.
Despite the harsh way her mother had said it, the comment had made her think. There was something more to the story. Eva was sure of it. She braced herself for a fight between her parents, not sure if one was to come.
The silence stretched on.
She tossed every little tidbit her grandmother had ever told her around in her head as they inched their way back to Brooklyn and her grandmother’s apartment. There were so many little comments that had to have meaning, such as not liking blondes when Eva showed her a picture of a fair-haired boy she liked. Or, after Eva’s first breakup with her high school girlfriend, when Mary warned her not to invest too much time in loving women because they were fickle.
Eva wondered if this was her grandmother trying to tell her something about herself, but as soon as she finished one rant about loving women, she would start in on the men. There seemed to be no end to the comments. There had to be something else beyond the obvious answer that her grandmother was simply difficult to get along with.
Eva leaned forward and set her coffee into the cup holder. She brushed her father’s arm with her fingers before she slumped back into her seat and he turned to smile at her. His eyes were crinkled and kind and his shock of graying hair caught the light and haloed him. Evidently, he was happy that she hadn’t started the fight her mother so obviously wanted.
It was getting easier not to take the bait. Eva’s mind was preoccupied with what her mother had not said. Something that she could not quite recall was shifting just below the surface. Her mind felt slow and weak as she fumbled through her thoughts. The straws she grasped at didn’t fit her mental image of her grandmother. They were lies, a veneer on a crumbling foundation.
All her life, Eva could not shake the feeling that her grandmother wasn’t always there, and that she was caught up in a bad memory of which she could never be free. Her father had grown up never truly understanding his mother, and had watched his own daughter grow closer to her than he had ever been. Eva owed it to her father to try to find some explanation for her grandmother’s depression. All Eva wanted was for there to be another reason, something encouraging that would give her some hope for her own future.
She shook her head. It wasn’t right for her to think that there should be another explanation. She was evidence enough that sometimes people simply couldn’t help themselves. It was just a lurking, unpleasant feeling that Eva could never shake. Her grandmother saw something, once upon a time, and it had completely changed her. Eva wasn’t sure if it was a great lost love or some horrible trauma. Her grandmother had lived through nearly two decades of unpleasantness before she’d gotten married after World War II.
“I was an old maid then,” she told Eva. “No one wanted to marry a girl who was on the wrong side of thirty. Your Grandpa offered me an agreeable match.”
“You say agreeable like you didn’t love him, Gran.” Eva was eleven, sullen and stubborn. Always determined to get the last word. “I thought you had to love someone to get married to them.”
Her grandmother threw back her head and laughed. “That’s true, Eva darling, but not everyone makes good choices.” Her expression, and Eva remembered it clearly to this day, went dark then. Her face became unreadable and caught on a miserable grimace of a smile. “Not everyone has a choice in the end,” she said. “Your Grandpa would have loved you, sweetie. You’re a lot like him.”
“I want to be more like you, Gran!” Eva stuck her lip out petulantly. “Your life is so much cooler than Grandpa’s.”
“You say that now, Eva…” Her grandmother shook her head. “Soon you’ll find out I’m just a tired old husk of a woman whose world was ripped out from under her nose when she was scarcely old enough to realize it.”
Eva had spent what felt like half her life trying to understand the great mystery that was Mary Kessler. The cryptic recollections and one-off comments only deepened Eva’s confusion. Now that her grandmother was gone, Eva wondered if there was something left lying about in her grandmother’s apartment that might hold the key to this mystery.
Her mind preoccupied, Eva leaned against the window and watched the slow-moving traffic. She soon dozed off as the gentle lull of the car moving through stop-and-go traffic made her eyelids heavy and sleep come easily.
The hole was deep, so deep that she could not climb out of it. Eva’s fingers scrambled against the slime-covered walls of her prison, but could find nothing to grab onto. Everything smelled like decay, the constant and steady drip of water long forgotten and left to fester. Moss grew in brilliant patches of violent, electric green. It surrounded her, making the walls seem as though they were closing in around her. Fear gripped her like a vice.
She ran down a narrow passageway. Blue-green sludge got in her hair. Eva swiped at where it fell cold and wet against her forehead. She raised a shaking hand to touch the dampness and her fingers came away streaked black. She stepped into a large, dark room with high walls. Light played across them, dancing in beautiful, indescribable patterns. It was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. A myriad of glowing geometric shapes swam like tropical fish against a stark black background.
Except that when she looked closer, the background was also moving. It was a living thing. Gooseflesh rose on the back of Eva’s arms and a shiver ran through her body.
A girl was in the room with her. A girl she felt she knew.
“Who are you?” Her voice was lost in the darkness. “Who are you?”
The girl turned and her face was a blank mask of skin stretched over bone. A hollow rattled where her mouth should be, sucking in a long, slow breath.
Chapter 3
Buried, Not Forgotten
Eva awoke with a gasp. Her entire body shuddered as she surged forward, her fingers reaching for something that wasn’t there. Her head pounded and her vision was still blurry with sleep. Sitting back, she rubbed at her eyes and blinked to see her father looking at her from the passenger’s seat.
“Musta been some dream,” he said wryly.
“It was… something,” Eva replied. The disquiet feeling would not leave her. She reached for her coffee, only to find that it was cold. She drank it anyway, wanting to pull herself closer to wakefulness. The black pit and the dancing colors would not leave her mind. The memory of the girl’s rattling breath made the hair on the back of her neck spike upwards. The car was hot, but the skin on Eva’s arms was covered in goosebumps.
Blinking sleepily in the hazy mid-morning sunlight, Eva let out a yawn. New York stretched up above her in all directions. She exhaled and tilted her head back to gaze at the buildings, feeling far more relaxed than she had in the wide-open spaces of Eastern Long Island. There were people everywhere, and faint patches of blue sky could be seen above the buildings as they made their way through her grandmother’s old neighborhood. A grin tugged at Eva’s lips. She was home.
