Here Lies Olive, page 24
I freeze in the doorway, balling my hands into tight fists. Sour sweat pools in my armpits, and I shake so hard that my teeth clatter together. I can’t go in there. I can’t look at Davis lying in that bed and know that behind his closed eyes, there is only darkness.
I can’t look into his face and know that he’s slipping into the Nothing.
I look at my parents and try to say something, but my throat works soundlessly and all I can do is stare.
Dad takes my hand. “You’ll regret it if you don’t.”
“I know it hurts to see him like this,” Mom says. “But if he dies—” Her voice hitches, and she takes my hand. “This might be your only chance to say goodbye. To get closure.”
The C-word. Somehow I knew she was going to say it. I still don’t know what it means—it’s not like I ever questioned if Mrs. H was really dead. I was there when she died. I saw the light go out in her eyes. How much more closure do I need?
“This is how you honor Davis and what he meant to you,” Mom says. The steady beeping of the medical equipment almost drowns out her soft voice. “By facing your pain instead of trying to escape it.”
The well of sorrow inside me hasn’t gone dry yet, and her words bring new tears to my eyes. If only I had listened to her when Mrs. H died—if only I had given in to my grief instead of seeking out a ghost. None of this would have happened, and Davis would be safe and whole.
My skin crawls when I imagine him becoming like Jay: a shade, only a shell of what he once was. I can’t bear to think of Davis trapped like that. And now it occurs to me that if he dies and I can’t mourn his death and accept that he’s gone, I’ll be trapping him here as another kind of ghost. The kind that haunts me for the rest of my life.
I don’t want that to be how I remember Davis. I don’t want to turn him into a ghost. I take a deep breath, and Mom’s hand falls out of mine as I step into the room.
What do you say to the only person who ever really knew you? I can’t think of any words that make sense. Nothing will be able to capture the storm in my heart. Anguish, grief, sorrow, guilt, love, and gratitude shift and swirl, bleeding together like the aurora in northern skies. One color fades and another takes its place, until the sky is a mottled blend of colors. And like the aurora, I know that everything I’m feeling now will always be there, sometimes hidden, sometimes blocked out, but ready to rise to the surface whenever the circumstances are right. When I pass a stranger who walks with the same loping grace as Davis, or when I catch a whiff of smoke from a candle that’s just been blown out. That’s when my own personal aurora will resurface and I’ll feel this storm just as strongly as I do now.
A month ago, I would have done anything I could to snuff this out, to bury these feelings until they could never rise again. But now I just close my eyes and let them wash over me, and I’m glad to know that I’ll feel these things again. There’s pain there, but there’s also joy and love.
Finally I open my mouth and speak from the heart.
“I loved you when we were kids, and I love you now,” I say to Davis. “I think I always will. You’re my brother. You’re the best thing that ever happened to me. You never gave up on me, and you taught me not to give up, either. No matter what happens, for the rest of my life, I’ll carry you right here.” I lay my hand over my heart, feeling it beating, feeling it living.
After half an hour, Davis’s parents take my place at his side. I squeeze his hand one more time and promise to be back tomorrow, and the next day, and the next, and every day until he’s home. Poppy brushes his hair out of his eyes, and Mr. Wills leans down to kiss his forehead. I can see the outline of Davis’s atlas tucked in his back pocket.
Now I understand why Jay’s mother made a mourning brooch of his hair and wore it close to her heart. The atlas makes Mr. Wills feel closer to Davis. If Davis died without telling his dad about his dreams, it would have been so easy for the atlas to become like the ledger: a symbol of all the pain in Davis’s life tethering him to our world as a shade when he was meant to move on. But I don’t think that would happen now, even if Davis does slip away. Instead, I think the atlas would become for Davis’s parents what Mrs. H’s locket was for me. The most tangible, honest thing left of the person they loved.
For the first time in what feels like a lifetime, my eyes are dry and I don’t feel one hundred percent miserable. In fact, I feel good. Hopeful. Like things are going to be okay.
I still have the ledger hidden under my mattress. I wonder if Maren wants it back, or if she would be totally opposed to me burning it. It still gives me the creeps to think of William Seymour bent over the book, noting every person who passed through the doors of Seymour House like they were nothing more than a bolt of fabric or a sack of potatoes. Jay’s story is just one of the secrets that book holds, and it suddenly seems unfair that the rest of them will stay buried.
Logistically, it makes sense to leave the bodies in place and create a memorial on the Seymour grounds. There are hundreds of bodies in the woods and the only record is a century-old ledger handwritten by a man who had a motive to hide the truth. If they try to exhume the bodies and rebury them somewhere else, someone’s bones are sure to slip through the cracks. And that’s the premise of at least a dozen horror movies that I can think of off the top of my head.
But knowing those bones will stay in the ground, wrapped in their rotting canvas shrouds, feels wrong. They’ll never have their name engraved in stone to mark their final resting place; their loved ones will never have a place to gather and speak memories of them into the wind. Their lives will stay forgotten, and that feels like consigning them to the Nothing altogether.
So as much as my skin crawls every time I have to touch that damn book, I fish it out from its hiding place when I get home from the hospital, and open up my laptop and start typing.
I don’t have some grand plan; no visions of a monument that can make up for what happened to them. I’m just typing their names and their dates, one after another, like a string of code that might conjure their memory into reality. If Maren were here, she would probably already have a dozen ideas how to honor the dead. Maybe when I’m done, I’ll send her this list and let her decide what to do. I don’t know. All I do know is, with every stroke of the keys, each person whose life was recorded in this book feels more real to me.
It doesn’t take long before there are red hot pincers jabbing at my temples and a crick in my neck from bending over. Not to mention that I think the scent of leather is ruined for me forever.
One year at the Festival of Death, there was a traveling exhibit about anthropodermic bibliopegy: books bound in human skin. That’s a real thing, and the most famous one is a memoir written by a Boston highwayman who died in the 1800s (of consumption, coincidentally) and requested that the book be bound in skin from his own back. The exhibit had the Boston memoir and some other examples, along with displays on their history and the mythology and ethos surrounding them. Curiosity got the better of us, and Davis and I spent the whole afternoon poring over the displays. It was like those shows about popping pimples. I was horrified, but I couldn’t get enough.
Anyway, an hour bent over the ledger in my bedroom with the worn cover creaking under my fingers makes me think about those books bound in human skin. And the more names I type out, the more convinced I am that the ledger is bound in human skin, too.
I’ve typed five single-spaced pages and my fingers are cramping up when there’s a knock at my door. I jump, startled out of the world of names spinning through my mind. I slam the ledger closed and shove it under a stack of unfinished homework as Mom and Dad come into the room.
“Lo–Olive?” Dad says. “Let’s go grab a bite to eat. Anywhere you want.”
I have to stop myself from looking at the corner of the ledger poking out from under my homework. I can’t leave this room until I finish. “No thanks,” I say, shrugging.
“You have to eat,” Mom says. “Poppy’s is closed, but there’s got to be somewhere else in town with good cheese fries.”
“It’s not that I don’t want to eat,” I say. “I’m just not in the mood to go out and be surrounded by people and have to listen to them talk about Davis.” My nose wrinkles. “School is bad enough.”
Dad nods. “I understand. And seeing Davis today at the hospital must have been exhausting, too.”
“Exhausting in a good way,” I say. “But it was a lot, and now I just want to stay home. You guys should go. You could bring me something to eat.”
Mom and Dad glance at each other. “I don’t know,” Mom says, biting her lip. “I don’t want to leave you here by yourself.” She reaches out to cup my cheek.
“I’ll be fine,” I repeat, shifting in my chair to block my computer screen. “Really. It might be nice to have some time alone.”
“Come on, Beth,” Dad says. “She’s right. We’ve been hovering too much. She’ll be fine for an hour.”
“I really will,” I promise.
Mom looks unsure, but she finally lets Dad lead her out of the room. I wait until I hear the car pull out of the driveway before pulling the ledger out from under the stack of paper and flipping it open.
I’m trying to find the page where I left off when I come across a name that I recognize.
Cold fingers fit themselves between the knobs in my spine. I lean over the book, sure that I misread the entry, sure that when I look again it will say something entirely different.
But the words written in spidery, fading handwriting don’t change, no matter how long I stare at them.
Wilhelmina (no surname given) born August 1, 1899, in Frankfurt, Germany; household maid
—and her babe, Vanessa, born July 31, 1915, at Seymour House
Left of her own accord September 10, 1915
This doesn’t make any sense. It must be a coincidence, or some sort of cruel, twisted joke that Jay left for Maren to uncover. Everyone listed in this book is dead, and has been for a hundred years.
The rest of the page gives the details of Wilhelmina’s employment. It looks like as she was a paid employee, William Seymour did not track the expenses related to her lodging as strictly as he did the other inhabitants of Seymour House. Baby Vanessa, however, was another story. There’s a long column after her name: diapers, bottles, powder, and dresses. Each one is marked through with a heavy black line.
I flip through the rest of the book, looking for other columns that have been marked out, other debts that were settled, but find none. As with Jay’s entry, the numbers only increase. William Seymour showed no pity, forgave no debts, except for one.
Vanessa, the infant daughter of his household maid.
“Why did he let them go?” I murmur, reading the line at the bottom of the page again: Left of her own accord. But there can be only one answer.
Vanessa’s voice, rich with secrets, telling Maren and me her mother’s story: My mother, Willa, had the most tragic love affair.
The shadow show of Edward Seymour as he buried Jay alive: Help me, Mina, you dirty little gold-digger.
Other snippets of Vanessa’s conversations over the past few weeks race through my mind. My father was the heir to a wealthy family, and my mother worked in the house as a maid . . . I would take revenge on anyone who ever wronged me . . . He never acknowledged me . . . and most sinister of all: Here’s to new friends and old grudges.
Shivers sweep over my body. It’s so clear now. Vanessa was not only the daughter of Wilhelmina—she was also the daughter of Edward Seymour, William’s son. And when Wilhelmina revealed her child’s true paternity, rather than welcome them into the family, William canceled their debt and threw them out with nothing.
I feel like I’m falling, tumbling to my death, as I remember more and more hints of who Vanessa really is: her fascination with Seymour House, the way she always refers to it as the asylum instead of by name, just like Jay. It even answers the question of why she befriended me in the first place: Maren and I were together the first time she met us. She was using me to get to Maren.
Maren.
Her name sends a shock wave of alarm through my chest. I got her involved in all this. I led her right to Vanessa.
I scramble across the room to grab my phone from my bedside table. Swiping at the screen to unlock it, I pull up Maren’s number, suddenly desperate to hear her voice and tell her the truth about who—what—Vanessa really is.
She deserves more than a warning. She deserves an apology, both for getting her involved in this nightmare and then for leaving her on her own when the wolves descended. Later I’ll apologize until I’m blue in the face, but first I have to make sure she knows how dangerous Vanessa is. I have to warn her not to be alone with her.
Sixteen unread texts.
I skim through them, my heart like a crumbling lump of granite when I think about Maren mentioning that I hadn’t texted her back, the way her face fell, the way her voice was small in a way that Maren’s voice never is.
Maren: I can’t sleep. Are you up?
Maren: How are you? If you want to talk, I’m here
Maren: Are you going to school tomorrow? I can give you a ride if you want
Maren: Are you there?
Maren: Can we talk
Maren: I’m worried about you
Maren: Everyone thinks i had something to do with it but i wasn’t even there. Did Vanessa say something?
Maren: I know you blame me too. I’m sorry. Please answer me
Maren: I know you don’t want to hear from me anymore but I thought of something
Maren: you destroyed the shade that was my great-
grandfather when you took the ledger from him. If Jay is a shade now, the only way to destroy him the same way is to take whatever it is that tethers him
Maren: Vanessa thinks its his bones
Maren: his obsession with how he died and his unmarked grave
Maren: that’s what tethers him to this world
Maren: If we don’t move the bones, no one will and Jay will stay in the woods forever. What happened to Davis will happen again, only next time someone might die
Maren: Vanessa and I are going to destroy him for good. It’s the only way I can make up for everything I’ve done.
Maren: I wish things had gone differently between us
My chest gets tighter and tighter as I read the messages. By the end I feel like I’m trapped in one of the slot canyons we visited in Utah a few years ago. I can feel my ribs closing in, compressing my heart, squeezing it in an iron grip that feels like Vanessa’s hand. My mouth sags open and I gasp for breath. Spots of black crowd my vision, the Nothing creeping in and threatening to overwhelm me.
What have I done?
I don’t know how long I struggle to breathe, how long it takes for the Nothing to disperse from my vision, but even in the darkness, everything becomes clear.
This has been Vanessa’s plan all along.
She’s spent years, decades, looking for her chance to take her final revenge on the family that rejected her. As the last blood descendant of Vanessa’s father, Maren has been her target all along. Vanessa never intended to help Jay move on. She’s been waiting for the shadow to take him, waiting to place Maren in his path so that Maren is the next victim of the Scary Road Stalker. Only this time, Vanessa will make sure that Jay cuts deeper and Maren’s blood flows faster.
I’m not sure what she is—a ghost like Jay, or something more dangerous—but there’s no doubt in my mind that her thirst for revenge trapped her here just as surely as Jay’s fixation on his grave trapped him.
Just as surely as I’m trapping myself.
It hits me all at once, a punch to the gut that sucks away my breath. I can see what I’m becoming: a kind of shade. Not one formed from what haunted me in life, but one I’ve created out of pain and fear and loneliness. Just a shade of myself, of the person I should be. The Nothing isn’t coming for me—I’ve been running directly toward it this whole time.
After I died, I thought the best way to protect myself from ending up alone was to push away my feelings. Tell myself that none of this matters. Lock myself away from the people I cared about.
But that’s flawed thinking, because by avoiding relationships to protect myself from being alone, I am fucking alone. I’m alone and I’m scared and I think I’m turning into something bitter and corrupt.
I have to slay my demons. I have to face my fears and let someone in, before it’s too late. I might have waited too long with Davis. Two years—two wasted years that I could have spent with his friendship. My heart clenches as I remember being grateful that we had found each other again, that we had the rest of our lives to rebuild our friendship. And now the rest of his life may be so short. It stings when I think we could have had more time.
I can’t make the same mistake with Maren. It’s scary and I’ll be vulnerable. Telling Maren how I feel about her—it could all go wrong and leave me with Nothing.
Or it could give me everything.
The vise around my chest loosens at the thought. Maybe I’m not too late. Maybe—
I dial Maren’s number from memory, but the call goes straight to voice mail. Her phone is off.
The last text was sent only half an hour ago. I must have been so preoccupied with my fevered typing that I didn’t notice the phone buzzing across the room. Half an hour is nothing. Sometimes it takes me half an hour just to find my shoes.
But Maren’s not the type to drag her feet when she decides to do something. If she said she and Vanessa were going back to Jay’s grave, then she’s already there.
I shove my feet into a pair of Doc Martens and half fall down the stairs. The house is still and silent. I jerk open the curtains at the kitchen door. The trees in the yard stand out bare and spindly against the fading light of purple dusk.
The driveway is empty.
