“You sure you don’t want company?” Abby slides her sunglasses—purple, heart-shaped—down her nose to look at me. “I’ve always thought I’d make an excellent grave robber.”
“I’m not robbing a grave,” I say. “I’m making one.”
“Offer rescinded. Sounds dirty.”
When I climb out of the car, a chorus of birds starts competing to be heard. A rabbit darts out from beneath the carriage of the old rusted Dodge and scampers off behind the tumbledown brick cottage for which the street was named. I stand for a second inhaling the smell of pine and earth, the way the shadows shift as the wind turns the leaves in the sun.
August is the saddest month: nothing so perfect can possibly last forever.
For the past few weeks, Abby’s been spending most of her time with Wade. Whenever I see her, she either brings him along or just spends the whole time quoting him. For a while, I thought she must have a crush on him, but when I teased her about it, she looked almost pained.
“No,” she said. “Not him.” But she wouldn’t say anything more.
So fine. Abby has a secret crush and a new best friend, and every time she forgets to invite me to hang out it feels like I’m trying to digest a pointe shoe. But that’s okay. People grow up and grow apart and get new friends.
Normal people do, anyway. I can’t even hold on to my old ones.
From the trunk I get a shovel—one of the few useful things we’ve managed to salvage so far from the endless flow of garbage bleeding out of our house—Georgia C. Wells’s The Way into Lovelorn, and all the pages of Return to Lovelorn, crammed into a single shoebox, and start for the woods.
“What do they call this?” Abby shouts after me. “Behavioral therapy?”
I turn around and manage a smile. “Closure,” I say.
I take the creek easily in one bound, zigzagging up the dry bank with the shovel jogging on my shoulder. Only a few feet into the woods, my phone dings a text—Abby, last chance for company—and then, a second later, a picture message from my mom. At first I don’t understand what I’m looking at and have to stop, squinting over my screen, to make out the splotch of curdled green color in the screen.
Can you believe I found my carpet? she has written, and then I realize that they must be tackling her bedroom, by far the worst room in the house.
Proud of you, I write back, and return my phone to my back pocket.
Ever since Dad found out about Mom and her condition, we’ve had an army of therapists and professional organizers storm the house, helping my mom deal with more than five years of accumulated disaster. I always thought her hoarding started after Summer died, after Dad left, but it turns out I was wrong. For months before they separated, Dad said, he would come home to find she’d stolen rolls of toilet paper from public bathrooms or stuffed his bedside table drawers with used matchsticks and restaurant flyers. It was part of the reason they began fighting so much: she told him that she held on to stuff because she was unhappy and their marriage left her feeling empty.
So. It’s not my fault. It was never my fault.
Now Mom goes to see a psychiatrist at North Presbyterian Hospital on Thursdays and we have family sessions every other week, too, with a Dr. Leblanc, who looks exactly like the lion from The Wizard of Oz. Mom has been calling me and texting me more than ever since I started staying at my dad’s, as if in the absence of all her stuff it’s me she has to hold on to most tightly.
But she’s making progress. We all are. That’s why the shovel: I figure if she can put the past to rest, so can I.
I head straight for the long field, through buzzy clouds of gnats that disperse like smoke in front of me. Something tugs at me, a residual fear, a sense of being watched—Lovelorn—but I ignore it. Dr. Leblanc says that hoarding happens when the brain mixes up signals, confuses trash for treasure, makes things meaningful that don’t have any meaning at all. Maybe it’s the same for the bad memories we carry, for associations overlaid onto a place or a book or an old story.
In the field the grasses are nearly waist high and riotous, fighting back as I start pushing toward the place where Summer was killed, scything with my shovel. I’m surprised to see that her memorial is still tended. Around the cross, someone has trimmed the grass and must be refreshing the flowers: a bouquet of purple carnations, Summer’s favorite, lies next to it. I feel uneasy without knowing why—then I realize it’s the circle of trimmed grass, which is almost perfectly proportioned to the circle of stones Summer had set up for the sacrifice that day.
That day. Sometimes I think I can still smell that poor cat, like sick and sweat and gasoline, can still feel its heartbeat slow and sluggish under my fingers. I don’t know why we never told the cops the truth about the cat. It would have been so easy to say: Summer did it. Maybe because the truth was too terrible. Maybe because I still blamed myself for running, for not doing anything more to help.
That’s the whole point of stories: they stand in for the things too horrible to name.
I start digging. Since the storm there hasn’t been an inch of rain, and the dirt is dry-packed, dusty. After only a few minutes I’m sweating. But I manage a hole just large enough to fit the shoebox, and bury it, tamping down the dirt with my foot, releasing a thin mist of red dust. I feel as if I should say a word or a prayer, but I can’t think of one. The makeshift grave looks bare and sorry, like an exposed eyeball in the middle of the grass, and I reach for the bouquet, thinking it might serve as a headstone. Goodbye, Lovelorn. Goodbye, Summer.
When I move the bouquet, a small handwritten note slips from it: a psalm. Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil. The wind passes over my arm like a phantom finger, lifts the hairs on my neck.
It’s the psalm that was attached to the last arrangement, too. Could it be from the same person? Purple carnations were Summer’s favorite flowers. Whoever placed them here must have known her—must have known her well.
I stand up, and the ground seesaws a little. The bad feeling is back, not a minor note but a full-on chorus, coupled now with the sense that I’m missing or forgetting something.
Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death . . .
Through the valley of the Shadow . . .
The Shadow.
Even though I haven’t moved, I feel breathless. Someone was wearing a carnation at Summer’s memorial—I noticed it then but didn’t make the connection I should have. Who was it?
I close my eyes, trying to call up my memories of that day, but all I see is the crack of Jake’s fist against Owen’s face, and Brynn shouting, the way the crowd started flowing down toward us like a multicolored tide. People pressing us from all sides, whispers building, and then through the crowd, our savior, one hand outstretched, eyes huge behind her glasses—
A twig cracks in the woods behind me. A footstep.
I spin around, swallowing a scream.
Ms. Gray doesn’t look surprised to see me. She just looks tired. “Hello,” she says.