The night was soft and warm, like most spring nights in the South. There was still the undeniable snap of the last of winter’s chill, but the lightning bugs were already out and performing loops in the garden outside. The moon was so bright, it looked almost like a silvery daytime, and a group of kids played kickball in the street.
There wasn’t much to Mairmont. It was quiet, and the traffic was token, and the cicadas buzzed so loud you could barely think.
I don’t know why I said what I said next—maybe it was the buzzing of the insects, or the kids kicking a ball down the street, or the two glasses of rum and Coke, but I said, “Dad used to say these kinds of nights were best for a good moonwalk.”
Ben gave me a peculiar look. “Amoonwalk?”
“It’s a stroll—most of the time, through a graveyard. Dad says you can only take a moonwalk when there’s a good moon. No clouds, no rain. Don’t look at me like that—yes.Graveyard. My family runs a funeral home. My dad’s the director.” I stopped myself, and corrected, “Wasthe director.” I shifted uncomfortably on the rail and shook my head. “It doesn’t matter—”
“Do you want to go?” he asked suddenly.
“Go... where?”
“On this, erm,moonwalk. I have some questions about”—he motioned to himself—“and about you. I don’t quite understand, and I’d like to. And maybe you need to talk, too. Besides, a change of scenery might be nice.”
“Through a graveyard.”
“Iamdead. It seems apt.”
I bit my lip to keep the smile from my face. He had a point. But him asking was...unexpected. And I didn’t know what it was—probably the rum and Cokes—but it might’ve also been the way the silvery moonlight fell across his face, and the way his hair was a little floppy and his eyes were dark and deep and not at all cold or cruel, like I’d imagined in my head. As though he was actually looking at me, really looking, and wanted to know me and this weird life I lived. No lies, no walls of fiction—only this strange little secret no one knew.
And, anyway, Ididneed a change of scenery.
15
The Sorrows of Florence Day
ST. JOHN’S OFMairmont Cemetery was a tiny little patch of green grass surrounded by an old stone wall. There were tombstones that stuck out of the gentle hills like white teeth. Some had flowers bursting from them; others hadn’t been touched in decades. The cemetery was shadowed by oak trees that were large enough and thick enough that I was sure they’d been here long before any of the bodies below the lawn. And sitting in each one of them, perched so comfortably, were crows. A whole murder of them. Sitting in the budding branches and looking down at us with their beady little eyes, nestled in to watch us.
The wrought iron gates were closed and locked, but that had never stopped me before from creeping in. There was a crumbling wall about twenty feet down from the gate that I could get a foothold in and haul myself over.
“Oh, it’s closed,” Ben noted, reading the sign. “I didn’t realize cemeteries closed—where are you going?” He followed me over to the place in the wall where it was a bit crumbled.
I pointed at the wall. “I’m scaling that sucker.”
“Can’t we... I don’t know... ask permission or walk through a park instead or—”
“Park’s closed at night, too, and besides”—I took off my flats and tossed them over the wall—“I know the guy who owns it. We’ll be fine.” I decided not to add the part where I’d been permanently banned from the cemetery after dark after the previous owner called me in for trespassing one too many times. Seaburn wouldn’t care. Though it wasn’t Seaburn I was worried about.
“I’m suddenly second-guessing this,” he muttered.
“You’re dead—what could you possibly be afraid of?” I asked.
He gave me a level look. “That’s not the point.”
I rolled my eyes and put my feet into the old climbing holds that I’d chiseled out when I was teenager, and began to work my way up six feet to the top, where I looped my leg over and straddled it. “You coming or am I going for a walk alone?”
He shifted his weight from one foot to the other as he debated. Ran the numbers. Debated his options. His shoulders were stiff, his eyebrows furrowed, as if it were more thanjustbreaking into a cemetery that stopped him.
I swung my leg back over. “We don’t have to, you know,” I said, softer. “We can go to a park if you aren’t comfortable. Or—the Ridge?”
I couldn’tbelieveI just suggested that.
He shook his head. “No, it’s fine. It’s just... there aren’t others? In the graveyard? Others like me, I mean.”
“Ah, other people working through a post-living experience.”
He pointed at me. “That.”