Read Online Grave by Joan Frances Turner - Free Book Online Page A

own daughter, if she’d confided all this in me? No words in any language are as cloying, self-serving, as selfishly solicitous as I know just what you mean .
    Lisa shifted where she sat, tugging on another strand of hair. It was a miracle she hadn’t pulled herself bald. “Look, Amy, everything that’s happened since—”
    “It’s got nothing to do with that.” She didn’t sound angry, or frustrated that Lisa didn’t know just what she meant ; in fact, there was almost a buoyancy to her words now, the ballast of confession tossed overboard. “It’s from a long time before—you can’t tell my mom. Okay? She’d just start in again about how it’s all her fault and if she’d just stayed—well, it was okay before, you know, I mean years ago, because it really was only her and me and we almost never talked to anyone else. I didn’t even really know enough other people to feel different. I didn’t have any friends. I didn’t know how you talk to people, how to get friends. Then I learned how to pretend at it, use their language, but—”
    “Lots of people have trouble making friends,” Lisa said. “It doesn’t make them freaks.”
    Silence again, like Amy was thinking that one over. Or just being polite. “But it does make them friendless,” she said. “Okay, see, I can see how all of you look at Nick, I’m not blind, but I spent all that time running away from him and now it’s like he’s the only real friend I ever—”
    I’d taken a step closer, then closer again to hear them better and I startled some large possum-like thing that went scuttling off in a crackling volley of dry twigs. And there I was, nothing between them and me but a half-dead lilac bush. They both turned swiftly and Amy’s face shut up fast and tight with suspicion, like in the old days whenever Mike’s sister tried kissing her hello; it shoved me farther away than the strongest set of hands. Lisa looked from Amy to me, then back again, waiting virtuously for her cue.
    “I got worried about you,” I said, my voice hardening as I turned to Lisa. “When Naomi came back all by herself.”
    Lisa gave me this tight little nod, her eyes searing me with a clean defiant heat of don’t even ask , and suddenly all I could think about was what Naomi said, about how Lisa’d had to shit. Had she dug a hole and buried it, like you were supposed to do camping, or was it lying somewhere away from here for the flies to find, or had this whole privileged conversation happened right in the same spot, Lisa’s shit sitting right at their feet? I couldn’t smell anything, but then Lisa’s shit didn’t stink anyway, now did it. My skin prickled harder and my heart was beating in a bad way, sharp and drum-tight, and as Amy got to her feet, I pivoted and turned away—
    A possum. The thing that gave me away was a possum, I’d guessed right. Now it lay curled up not five feet away from me, dead. Playing possum. It had to be from how I’d startled it. But I’d seen so many dead things back at the lab and I just knew, I knew looking at it; it’d died quietly right beside me, and I hadn’t sensed a thing. It lay cradled in the mud and leaves and a damp gray netting of dead branches—so many, like someone had been gathering tinder and then dropped armfuls without ever building the fire. Something touched my arm as I stared at it and I jumped, then saw Amy standing beside me, her apprehension turning to fear.
    “Mom,” she said, “look.” She pointed back into the trees, the path we’d all followed. Lisa was coming up too, gazing where Amy’s arm led. “Before, when we came down here, it was...”
    Green. It had been all sorts of colors not half an hour before, green with spring and brown with mud and purple-pink-white with blossoms, with only a few dead branches here and there—and now the soil was covered in them. The whole ground was a nest of gray twigs, dropping steadily from overhead, and the new, soft spring leaves had turned