Grave Sight

Silly girl. But looking at her, as she mopped at her face and then brushed her hair, I realized that she was only seven years younger than I. Mary Nell's life had been no picnic, of course, but probably it had been better than mine. By the time I was Mary Nell's age, even aside from the lightning strike, my life had changed forever. I had watched adults I knew and loved, as they threw their futures away. Then I had lost my sister Cameron; literally, lost her.

"Don't look at me like that," Mary Nell said, her voice quavering. "Do you even know where you are? God, stop it!"

I blinked. I hadn't realized I'd been staring.

"Sorry," I said automatically. "Your mother says you had a tonsillectomy this past year?"

"You are so weird. So fucking weird," she said, daring to say the bad word in front of me, daring me to admonish her.

I didn't give her any reaction. "Answer me," I said, after a pause.

"Yes, I did," she said, sullenly.

"You were in the hospital here?"

"In the next town, Mount Parnassus. Our little hospital closed two years ago."

"Dell was in the same hospital when he had to have stitches?" I was dredging up Sybil's conversation from when we'd seen her house. It was hard going. I wasn't sure what I was probing for; maybe I'd know it when I heard it. "He had a broken leg, or was that someone else?"

"That was the boy who was driving the car. Dell had stitches in his head. At first the emergency doctor thought he might have other problems, and he was unconscious for a little while, but they just kept him overnight."

"And your dad was in the hospital, too." I was trying to make something out of nothing.

"Yes, he had pneumonia." Mary Nell's face grew sad. "He had a bad heart, and the pneumonia just weakened him. I told him he'd get better, but the day before he died, he said, "Nelly, I'm just not the man I was before I caught that bug."

"He called you Nelly?"

"Yeah, or Nell. He liked me and my brother being Nell and Dell." The teenager's little face collapsed as I watched her. "I don't have a brother or a father. Probably nobody'll call me that again in my whole life."

"Sure someone will," I said, trying to figure out what had rung a bell in my head. "You're a pretty girl, Mary Nell, and you have a lot of spirit. Someone will come along who'll call you anything you want him to."

She brightened, happy to hear this even from someone she thought she despised. What she actually felt toward me was probably something closer to envy.

"You think so?"

"Yes, I think so."

"Harper," she said, and I realized she'd never spoken my name before, "what's going to happen to Tolliver?"

"Like I said, I called our lawyer. He gave me the name of an Arkansas attorney. She'll be here tomorrow. She's coming from Little Rock. She's going to appear at Tolliver's arraignment. I know she'll get him out."

"You fixed that up yourself?"

I nodded. "Sure."

"I couldn't do that," she said, subdued. "I wouldn't know how to begin."

I didn't want to sound like Ozark Gra

"I liked Miss Helen," Mary Nell said, surprising me yet again.

"You told me that before," I said mildly. "I did, too. How well did you know her?"

"Well, she worked for us for a while. That's how Dell got to know Teenie. I mean, he knew who she was from school, because we all know each other, right? But he probably never would have spent time with her if Miss Helen hadn't worked at our house. That's how he got to know what she was really like. Then Miss Helen got to drinking so much she didn't get to work on time, and Mom had to let her go, and hired Mrs. Happ to help. But Dell and Teenie were sneaking off to see each other by then."

I'd heard pretty much the same thing from Hollis.

"Then Mr. Jay, Jay Hopkins, he beat Miss Helen up, and I heard my mom and Uncle Paul arguing about whether we should get Miss Helen back to work in the house. Uncle Paul said Miss Helen was sober and deserved a second chance, and Mom said after what she knew now, she wouldn't have Helen back in the house for love nor money. Especially love, she said."

"What do you think she meant by that?" I asked. With Mary Nell around, you wouldn't need a tape recorder.

"I have no idea," the girl answered. "I never did understand. I think my mom thought Miss Helen took something from her. But they wouldn't tell me." Familiar bitterness tinged her voice: the teenager vs. the adult world.

"Mary Nell, could you drop me back by my car?"

She sounded a little hurt when she told me she could.

I'd been too abrupt; but I had to think, and I knew Mary Nell would keep on talking as long as I was available to be her audience.

Once I was by myself, I felt both visible and vulnerable. I drove to my motel by the most direct route and shut myself in the damn room with the damn green bedspread. I had no messages. I couldn't decide if that was a good thing or a bad thing. My leg was tingling, as it sometimes did, and I peeled off my jeans and rubbed the skin, with its fine tracery of purple spiderwebs. Cameron had called me Spiderwoman for a while, before we'd figured out that the branching lines weren't going away. My stepfather had been fond of ordering me to show the leg to his friends.

Hollis never mentioned it. Maybe he didn't understand it was lightning-related. Maybe he thought it was a birthmark of some kind and didn't want to hurt my feelings.

I lay down on the bed. SO MO DA NO, I thought. It might almost be the chorus to a Caribbean song. Okay. Reverse it. ON AD OM OS. NO DA MO SO. Dams, moon, soon, mad, mono, moans, nomad. Damon, doom, moods. Amos. Samoa? Nope, only one A. Why one A? Every other phrase ended with O.

Okay, what if the second letter was some... condition? What if the first letters stood for names? S could be for Sybil, D for Dell, N for... oh, Mary Nell had said her dad had called her Nelly. That could be N. But then, who was M? No one's name started with M, that I could recall. D could be for Dick Teague, if not Dell.

For the first time, I wished that I could ask questions of the dead. I could only take what they gave me. They gave me a picture of their deaths. They gave me what they'd been feeling at the moment. But they never told me why, or who, just how.

A bullet in my back... an infection in my lungs... my heart stuttered and quit pumping... I was just too old and worn out... the car hit so hard... the fall was from too high... I picked up the razor blade... I couldn't breathe, couldn't breathe, my inhaler was too far away... the meat lodged in my throat... the virus traveled through me and laid waste to my body... the knife traveled through my liver, then my stomach, then...

The dead all had stories, but they never explained or condemned. I'd heard, on odd little message boards that I visited, that some others like me—people who'd been French-kissed by electricity—could see the dead, could even communicate with them. No one else had confessed to having my truncated sort of relationship with those in their graves. There were lightning-struck people who could see the future, who now walked with a limp, who were blind in one eye. One woman had said no one in her family would help her right after she'd been hit because they were convinced she was charged with electricity. On a more private board, a board with far fewer members, a man in Colorado Springs posted that he was accompanied everywhere he went by his dead brother, who'd been killed by the same lightning bolt. No one else could see the brother, of course; his family had even had him committed for a time.

I stayed in my room all night. I ordered a delivery pizza. Hollis called to tell me he was working that night, all night, and to remind me to call him if I needed anything. I got one heavy-breathing anonymous call, a call I figured came from one of the teenage boys who'd confronted me. Paul Edwards called to tell me he was sorry about my brother's "situation," and he offered to help me in any way he could.