To: Matthew Corbin
From: Melody Bird
Subject: Gloves
I’ve got them.
I’ll be in the churchyard from 1 p.m.
Melody
The clock on the computer read 1:06. I needed to be quick. I’d just get the gloves and come straight home—easy. I paced around the office, shaking my hands by my sides. My heart was racing and I felt like I did before I fainted at the doctor’s office. I forced myself to stand still and take a few deep breaths. I shut my eyes, but it felt like the floor was moving so I opened them again. If I didn’t go now, then Melody would probably come here to see what was keeping me, and Mum would answer and see the box. After the episode in Dr. Rhodes’s office and Dad crying, she’d never forgive me. No, it was now or never. I took a final, deep breath and then ran downstairs.
As I sat on the bottom step and pulled on my white, barely worn sneakers Mum appeared from the kitchen with Penny. They both had mugs of tea in their hands.
“Oh hello, Matthew,” said Penny. “How nice to see you face-to-face for a change and not through a window.”
Mum laughed awkwardly but Penny just stared at me, her nose in the air.
“What are you doing, Matty?” said Mum. “Are you going somewhere?”
I stood up and used my elbow to open the front door.
“Yep,” I said, as casually as I could.
Mum and Penny looked at each other, stunned.
“Out? But he doesn’t go out, Sheila. Does he?” It was as if I wasn’t there.
“Well, I am now,” I said and I took a final deep breath and stepped out into the hot, humid air.
In the graveyard there was a large horse chestnut tree with a hexagonal bench surrounding its trunk. The bench was old, but the tree was ancient. I wondered if it had been mortified to find a bench being built around its base after all those years of being perfectly happy without one.
A girl in a blue dress was sitting on the bench in the shade of the tree. I hadn’t seen her in color before.
“Hi, Melody,” I said and I perched beside her on the very edge of the seat.
She didn’t say anything, but I noticed her slip a small white card into a pocket in the skirt of her dress. Next to her there was a white plastic bag, which I tried not to stare at.
“Some of these are amazing,” I said, looking at a gray stone cross with a weeping woman draped over it. Strangely I didn’t feel as threatened here as I had at the doctor’s or the therapist’s. You’d have thought being surrounded by graves would make me more anxious, but this part of the cemetery was so ancient … I imagined that any germs around here were long gone.
We sat in silence for a while and I watched a few crispy leaves scuttle along the path in front of us. The breeze blew in my face like a hot hair dryer.
“Thanks for getting the gloves.”
She nodded. The bag sat between us untouched, and I resisted the urge to grab it and put a pair on.
“I really do appreciate it. I know it was an odd thing to ask.” I laughed nervously and she raised her eyebrows. I was expecting her to start asking questions, but she didn’t.
“Come on, I’ll show you my favorite gravestone,” she said. “Now there’s an offer you can’t refuse!”
She jumped up off the bench and went to grab my hand, but I instinctively folded my arms against my chest. She looked hurt.
“I’ve—I’ve got this problem. A fear of germs. That’s why I needed the gloves. I’m sorry. It’s not you … There you go, you know my little secret now.”
Melody looked away for a moment and some of her hair fell in front of her face. She tucked it behind her ear before looking back at me. She smiled but still didn’t say anything. I think she was shocked that I was saying so much, and now that I’d started I couldn’t stop.
“And numbers. Well, one number actually. I get anxious if I hear or see the unlucky one. That fear isn’t as bad as the germs, but it’s still there and it’s been getting worse. If I see or hear the bad number I just need to count to seven in my head, which takes it to twenty so then it’s all fine again.”
I stopped as I realized I was rambling. Melody just stood there, wide-eyed. Then she spoke.
“It must have been hard for you to tell me all of this,” she said.
“Well, yeah. Kind of,” I said.
A big smile stretched across her face.
“No one ever tells me stuff like this. You know, private things about themselves.”
I shrugged.
“I thought you had a thing about fingernails,” she said.
“What?”
She nodded to the bag.
“I thought that’s why you wore gloves all the time. Because your fingernails creeped you out or something. I thought you couldn’t bear to look at them.”
We both looked down at my hands.
It was then I started to laugh. It began as a giggle, an almost silent chuckle to myself, and then it swept over me and I couldn’t control it. I clutched my stomach and I laughed until tears sprang in my eyes. At first she looked at me like I was mad, but then her shoulders began to shake and she laughed along with me. Every time we calmed down a bit I looked at her and we started again.
“Fingernails?” I said, trying to catch my breath.
“I didn’t know, did I?” she replied and we both collapsed into hysterics again. It felt good to laugh. Really, really, really good. We eventually quieted down and she wiped her eyes.
“So, how does it feel to be outside? Properly outside,” she said, smiling at me.
I caught my breath from the laughing and looked around. Over by the church I could just make out the tip of the bright white wing that belonged to Callum’s angel. As soon as I saw it, I realized that being here was a very, very bad idea indeed.
“Every single cell in my body is telling me to go home right this second and wash all these germs away.”
I held my hands up in front of me and turned them back and forth, seeing disease crawling all over them.
“There’s nothing on them, Matthew. It’s fine,” said Melody.
I shook my head.
“You’re wrong. They’re everywhere. I can’t stay here—it’s too dangerous. I’m sorry, I’ve got to go.”
I picked up the shopping bag using the cuff of my shirt and began to walk away, back toward the alley next to Old Nina’s house. Melody skipped around me and walked backward, in my way.
“You can go back and wash, of course you can! But first, just come and see something with me. Please? You can do all the washing you want when you get home, just delay it for a couple of minutes—it’s worth it, I promise.”
She stood in my way and held her arms wide, and I hesitated for a moment. That got her smiling.
“A couple of minutes, three at the most. That’s all it’s going to take, Matty, honestly. And if the germs really are going to get you, then three minutes isn’t going to make much difference, is it?” She laughed, but I didn’t join in this time.
“Come on, follow me!”
Her hair flowed behind her as she ran off toward the corner of the churchyard where the oldest gravestones were.
I stood in the bright sun and weighed my options. I could head home and feel the relief of washing, or I could delay going home for a few more minutes and see what this crazy girl wanted to show me. I thought of something Dr. Rhodes had said at our meeting. She said that I needed to confront my fears and trust in myself and that if I took a step off my continuous wheel of worrying and cleaning, I’d be all right. I reached into the bag and ripped the top off the box, and my anxiety eased a little when I put a pair of gloves on. I looked to the left where Melody had headed, took a deep breath, and followed.
This part of the graveyard was overgrown and the ground was uneven where the coffins had rotted away, leaving spongy soil ready to swallow someone up. Most of the stones were illegible, their surfaces mottled with lime-green lichen. I spotted Melody behind a cross that was leaning at an awkward angle.
“Oh good, you’re here!” she said and she glanced at my hands but didn’t say anything.
“I’ve just come to say thanks again for getting the gloves, but I’m going back now. I’m not feeling great and I think I’ve tried to do too much. I feel dizzy. I need some water, I think.”
As she stood with her hands on her hips the dappled sunlight danced around her, picking out flecks of auburn in her hair.
“But you’ve come this far! Honestly, it’s really worth it. Just come over, have a quick look, and then go. Okay?”
She crouched down next to a grave and pulled at some weeds. I just needed to walk five more paces, see what it was, then run home, sprint home. I could go straight upstairs and into the shower. It’d be fine. I could then clean my room, wait for the hot water to warm up again, then have another shower if I felt like it. I edged my way toward her and she turned to me, her face beaming. My feet twisted as the mounds of earth pressed against the thin soles of my shoes. I stood at the other side of the grave from her, my gloved hands tucked under my arms.
“Look,” she whispered. “Have you ever seen anything so beautiful?”
At one end of the grave stood a typical oblong headstone with some faded words, but in front of it and lying on a large, gray slab of stone lay an exquisitely carved mermaid. It was about half the size of Melody, and the detail was extraordinary.
“Isn’t it amazing?” said Melody and she brushed some soil and leaves off the mermaid’s tail. I knelt down for a closer look.
“Wow. Did someone carve this?”
“Yep, they certainly did …”
She gestured at the headstone.
“… in 1884.”
The mermaid was facedown, her shoulders slightly hunched with her forehead resting in the crook of her right arm. Her hair cascaded around her in stone waves that covered her naked back. The tail curved upward, the contours of its muscles supporting the large, uncurled fan at the end, slightly chipped on one side. As the sunlight flickered along her scales, the mermaid shimmered. It was as if she was still wet from the sea and was just here resting for a moment. I bent down to take a closer look and could almost imagine I saw her back rise and fall as she breathed. I tried to see the expression on her face, but it was hidden, never to be seen.
“Is she asleep?”
Melody pulled at a few more weeds.
“I don’t think so; I think she’s crying. She’s a mermaid in mourning.”
I studied her hair and for a fraction of a millisecond was tempted to touch a curl, but I didn’t.
“Why a mermaid? Who’s buried here?”
I didn’t want to get any closer, so I squinted at the headstone as Melody recited it by heart.
“Elizabeth Hannah Reeves. She died on the twenty-ninth of October in 1884, aged twenty-eight, but it doesn’t say anything else about her. I’ve tried looking in the church records to see if I can find out more, but I didn’t get anywhere. Maybe she went to sea once and thought she saw a mermaid but nobody believed her. Or maybe she just loved the idea of them. Who knows? But whoever she was, she’s left behind this beautiful grave.”
I watched her tugging at some ivy and thought maybe I’d been wrong about her all along. The constant talking I’d seen at the doctor’s was probably just nerves; this calmer, relaxed Melody was actually quite nice to be around. And she’d bought me gloves without asking questions. And she still seemed to like me even though she knew everything. Nearly everything. Maybe knowing what I’d done to Callum would change her mind though.
“I started coming over here after school before Dad moved out to avoid all the arguing. That’s when I found her.”
Standing up, she folded her arms.
“When I was having a bad day I thought about the mermaid, secretly sleeping here day in and day out. It took my mind off things.”
Reaching down, she brushed some more soil from the mermaid’s tail.
“It’s a sad grave though. On nearly all of the headstones here there’s more than one name—husbands, children, parents, they all seem to share a plot, especially the older ones. But Elizabeth Reeves is here all on her own. She only has the mermaid for company.”
I know how she feels. I thought about the Wallpaper Lion, and the thought of my clean, safe room sparked my anxiety again. The distraction of the mermaid faded as my chest tightened and my breathing got faster.
“Melody, I really need to go home now. The grave is great, thanks for showing me.”
I turned and carefully stepped through the tall grass back onto the footpath.
“I know you watch me from the window,” said Melody, catching up with me. “I know you were wondering what I get up to here. Do you think I’m weird?”
I shook my head.
“Good.”
We walked along a little way in silence, and then I saw her reach into her pocket and bring out the little white card. I stopped as she held it up for me to see. In one corner there was a pale, cream-colored lily with a dark green stem. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust from the dazzling sunlight, but the pale blue printed text eventually came into focus:
IN LOVING MEMORY.
Underneath in black ink was a handwritten note:
Forever in my heart. C.
It was a memorial card.
“Where did you get it?”
She put the card back in her pocket.
“Over by the church. It was on the grave of a man who lived to ninety-eight. How great is that? To live to such an old age.”
She was smiling but I wasn’t smiling back.
“I don’t understand. Why have you got it? Why have you got someone’s memorial card in your pocket?”
“I collect them.”
I stopped and faced her and her smile disappeared.
“You do what?”
She folded her arms. “I go around the graveyard and pick them up and put them in albums. I take them so that—”
“You collect them? What, like stickers? Like a kid’s sticker book?”
“No, it’s not like that at all. If I didn’t take them, then—”
“How many of these have you got? I mean, can you just take them? Off of people’s graves? These are people’s private thoughts—you shouldn’t be taking them, it’s theft!”
She looked horrified. “No, you don’t understand—”
“Don’t understand what? That you’re taking personal things that don’t belong to you?”
Melody wiped her face with her hand. The whites of her eyes glistened with tears.
“It’s not like you’re saying. I’m not stealing! They’d be thrown away if I didn’t take them. Why are you so angry?”
I was thinking about the card I’d written a few months ago on the anniversary of Callum’s death. It wasn’t a card exactly, just a scrap of paper. I’d scribbled a message to him telling him I was sorry. Saying I didn’t mean for him to die. I had gone to his grave before school, tucking the paper underneath the angel’s toe.
Melody stood hugging herself as a tear trickled down her cheek. I couldn’t tell her.
“I’m going home,” I said and I ran toward the alleyway, leaving her crying behind me. I needed to get away, from her and the graveyard. This whole thing had been just one big mistake. The gloves she’d bought didn’t feel right—they weren’t as thick as the ones Mum had gotten, so the germs were probably seeping through already.
When I passed the Rectory’s backyard Old Nina was standing on a stepladder trying to reach something that was stuck in her apple tree. Something made of white fabric was twisted in the branches; she was jabbing at it using a broom. Frowning as she bit her bottom lip, she was concentrating so hard she didn’t notice as I ran past, toward home.