After life, p.12
After Life, page 12
She slipped outside before I had a chance to change my mind. I turned my attention back to my little brother.
“That’s a cool drawing,” I said to Soren, and I sat down on the couch. He wrote his name in unsteady letters at the top: A backward S, a squashed O, an R three times the size of the other letters. Then he sat up on his haunches. In that moment, I wondered if I had somehow caused the hotel fiasco. It was undeniable that Soren kept his behavior in check prior to me prying into his stories, but now if felt like the shadow of Colton was everywhere.
I got up and crouched down beside my brother. He was so intent on his artwork, so determined.
“I love you,” I said to him.
Without missing a beat, he turned to me and said, “I love you, too, Sissy.”
I exhaled. And felt intense shame. I wasn’t some stranger to this kid, I was his sister. I needed to do anything that would help him, anything that would bring him peace. Even if that meant going blindly against my parent’s wishes—even if that meant drawing each moment of his past life to the surface. It wasn’t just me who was seeking validation, it was Soren.
“What was the picture of?” I asked Soren as he scribbled.
He looked up at me and then turned back down to his paper. “Nothing.”
“Did you see something you remembered?”
He shook his head.
“It’s okay.” I tousled his hair. “You don’t have to tell me.”
Standing up, I stretched my arms toward the ceiling. Soren watched me without a word. He handed me his finished drawing and I took it and examined it. It was nothing out of the ordinary; just a normal drawing from my little brother. But before he turned to walk away, Soren said, “I saw him in the picture. Waiting for me. Sometimes he just hides there. I wish he knew that I was Soren now. I think he’s confused.” And without allowing me a second to ask anything else, he stuck his fingers in his mouth and walked into his room, shutting his door behind him.
I wandered the hallways looking for Carlie. Her car was in the parking lot and she said she’d meet me, and I’d been looking for her with focused intensity. We had exactly ten minutes before morning classes started and I just wanted to give her a hug and tell her how amazing it felt to have her come to my rescue last night. But Carlie was not in any of our usual places and I was starting to give up. Even my texts went unanswered, and I grew frustrated by her silence.
When I rounded the corner to the foreign language hall, my vision was obscured by a gaggle of freshmen huddled together en masse between the lockers. They attempted to navigate the narrow hallway in a pack, shoulder to shoulder, some of them clutching each other’s elbows and waists like they were helping each other walk. I groaned, audibly, but that did nothing to alleviate the bottleneck. Then from around a tall brunette with an army fatigue backpack, I saw the door to Paria’s classroom open and Carlie slip out into the fray. As she was leaving, Paria’s stepped out and nudged Carlie, which drew my friend’s attention back toward her teacher. The freshmen lingered before the door and congregated by a locker. I sensed that Carlie wouldn’t be thrilled by my sudden appearance, so I hung back and used the girls as cover. From my vantage point, I saw Paria hold out her hand, Carlie look down and then grab something from Paria’s palm and slip her hand into her coat pocket. Then Paria placed a hand on Carlie’s shoulder and pulled her closer; she whispered and Carlie nodded, her lips pursed together. It was a long message and when Paria pulled back, Carlie appeared determined and intense. With her head down, she ducked out in front of the girls and moved down the hallway, too fast for me to catch up. Paria shut the door without looking around.
The group dispersed, and I was left exposed. I was fairly certain I had watched some furtive drug deal take place between a beloved teacher and stellar student. Although I already knew Carlie’s drug of choice, and if anything, the exchange would have been the other way around. Half-jogging, I bounced down the language hall and caught up to Carlie near the cafeteria.
“There you are,” I said when I reached her. “I’ve been looking all over for you.”
“Hey. I was studying in the library.” She searched my face.
“I thought I looked in there,” I replied and I didn’t break her gaze. “Huh. You must have been hiding.”
“Maybe we overlapped each other,” she replied and then dropped her eyes away.
Sometimes you have to take chances. Sometimes you have to call bullshit. When you make a decision to call a friend out on a lie, you are opening a door, and whatever rests behind it can be the start of an unraveling; even I understood that.
“What did Paria give you?”
She blinked, but her hesitation was brief. If she hadn’t been my best friend, my soulmate, then it may have never registered. But she knew me well enough to know not to play dumb. “Advil,” she said. “Monster headache.”
“I have one, too. Coffee headache or something. Maybe from our late night. Think she has more?”
Carlie cocked her head and squinted as if she was trying to view me through her eyelashes. She exhaled, caught, but unrelenting. “She’s not supposed to give drugs to kids. Dude…I had to beg. And she knows me.”
“Yeah, okay.” I waited, and then I pushed to see if she would break. “You two are close, then, right? But you’ve only talked about her a few times to me. I didn’t know she was your favorite teacher. Is she? Your favorite? I don’t know…I mean…you just don’t usually hang out with teachers before school. I didn’t know that was a thing.”
There was a pause.
“What are you doing?” Carlie asked.
The bell rang and people all around us began to scurry. The noise level increased and people flooded out of every corner and nook to begin their journeys to class. Students bobbed and rushed around us, diverted from their paths to avoid a collision, then reunited with their straight line a second later. The honest answer was that I didn’t know what I was doing.
“I think you’re keeping things from me,” I said in a small voice.
Carlie put her hands on her hips, and she began to move with the crowd. “You’re crazy,” she hissed. “Or you’re tired…but…stop, Mara. Just go to class.” With a spin, she was gone. My friend marched down the tile, her head held high, her back stiff and long—she knew I was watching her walk away. Her confidence never wavered.
Advil.
It could have been true.
My body felt heavy and tired. Long nights and practice would be my undoing. I was about to hustle to my first period class, when I felt a tug on my shirt. Sam. He stood next to me and he dangled his keys in my face, a smirk on his lips.
“Hey there,” he said. “You in the mood for a detour?”
“Detour?” I repeated. “No. Not this morning. If we skip class, it’s bad. Coach will make us run laps, potentially bench us.”
“It’s excused,” he said and he nodded toward the cafeteria doors, which led to the senior parking lot.
“Excused? How?” I didn’t budge. The last thing I needed was a truancy infraction.
Sam broke into a huge grin and adjusted his glasses. “My sister is an office aid. She gets to enter all the pre-excused absences.”
“Really?” I was incredulous.
“She doesn’t take advantage…she’s totally straight, all the time. Today is an exception. I might have called in some brotherly favors to get us excused for the day,” he told me and nudged me toward the door. I pushed back and tried to meld my shoes into the tile. Sam might have responded to an ambiguous text that required his presence at my house, but I didn’t know him. Not really. My weak and vulnerable call for help did not mean he got carte blanche access to me—cute as he was, skipping class was a risk.
“I can’t,” I said. I turned and took a step away. The hallways were dotted with a few errant kids, but the crowd had thinned. “I’ll get caught. I always get caught.”
“You won’t get caught.” Sam put his hands to his side. “You don’t even want to know what I have in mind?”
I did. Of course I did. Had we been flirting at my house? Did I send him strong signals of a deepening crush built upon my pure gratitude? If Sam had some romantic gesture planned, he needed to know me better—I was a rule-follower. And I only liked boys from a distance.
“I just can’t,” I said again.
“I’ve been thinking about your blue folder ever since I got home. And the police report. Everything. I can’t stop obsessing about this case…your brother. The whole thing.”
That froze me in my tracks. I almost laughed out loud. He had been thinking about the blue folder. Oh, the intricate lives we lead. If he said that he’d been thinking about me ever since he got home, I would have taken off running: I’d have never been more joyful to sit in history class. My crush would have evaporated like steam in the wind. But he hadn’t admitted to any romantic notions. No, no, quite the opposite: it was my ghost and the dead kids that interested him, piqued his curiosity. And so I stayed and turned back toward him.
“The whole thing?” I asked. I cocked my head, assessed him from an angle. Sam smiled.
“So, let me ask you again. You in the mood for a detour?”
We drove to Garsten. Back roads and side streets the whole way there with the sun beaming through the windows as it made its lazy crawl upward into the spring sky. It was a gorgeous day in every aspect—it tasted like summer and escape. I rolled down the window to Sam’s Land Rover and stuck my hand out into the air. Everything about Ivy Falls in the spring and summer is invigorating. When the sky is blue and the air is crisp and the flowers are blooming, I feel lucky to live in a place surrounded by such natural beauty: the richness of the mountains and the shiny lakes, all that green and blue. Oregonians are lucky in that regard.
After we got out of Ivy Falls proper, we navigated through unincorporated land freckled with a few houses here and there, but nothing substantial, and finally happened upon Garsten—beckoned forward with a paint-chipped sign. It was uncanny how the landscape changed after we ventured across the invisible boundary. A shiver passed through me as I watched the pine and aspen trees fly by the window. Everything about Garsten seemed darker, seeped in shadow.
Sam seemed to know right where to go. I didn’t question him as he took a right at the first four-way stop and took us up a steady hill lined with leaning birch trees. At the top of the hill was a gate, and it was wide open; a dirt-caked sign welcomed us to the Garsten Cemetery.
“Oh no,” I mumbled and I looked at Sam sidelong. “Are you serious?”
“I said I was intrigued.”
“I don’t know. It feels…wrong…like, what’s our right?” I said. We bumped along past a caretaker’s cottage and into a small parking lot with faded white lines. Sam parked and I waited to open the door; I could see my reflection in the window, my long nose, my full cheeks, my ponytail.
“It’s just an easy stop. Stop one. And we have just as much a right as anyone.” He slid out and slammed his door, and then he walked around to me and tugged the door open and motioned for me to follow. Reluctantly, I slid down and looked around. The cemetery was small. When my grandparents died, they were buried in the Willamette National Cemetery in Portland, a sprawling estate divided into zones like its own little city of the dead. We needed a map to find the burial services. But the Garsten cemetery was miniscule by comparison—visible in its entirety from the parking lot and cordoned off with a white picket fence in need of washing. It looked like those cemeteries attached to the side of churches in movies: small, old, sad.
Sam trudged forward and walked straight onto the grass. As he walked, he eyed every stone and read the names to himself, his lips moving as he processed if they were the graves we were looking for. A few of the headstones sported wilting flowers, and the grass had been recently cut, so it was clear the place wasn’t entirely destitute. Even in lonely Garsten, people buried in its obscure graveyard weren’t forgotten.
In a corner by the fence, Sam found what we had come to see. A dual headstone for two brothers. Their surname was printed in thick bold letters across the top. To the left Colton and to the right David. Birth dates. Death dates. The same date. In an oval underneath their names: pictures. School photos, smiling kids, just like I saw in my folder. I had to look to the ground for a second to gain composure. It was too hard to look at the heavy stone and then their small, smiling faces on that grave forever. I couldn’t disconnect Colton from Soren, no matter how hard I tried. When I was able to look up, I read the inscriptions for each: our memories of you will never fade.
“This is so sad,” I whispered to Sam, my voice catching.
He only nodded. Adjusted his glasses.
“Who could hurt children?” It was a rhetorical question; one that you ask knowing full well that no one could ever answer it. Luckily, Sam didn’t even try. A small wind kicked through and blew through my hair. The sun and the birds, the warmness of the day, it all seemed so diametrically opposed to the feeling of that place—a plot of land dedicated to bones and ash. Unlike some of the other graves, the boys did not have flowers. Although, someone had brought several toy cars and placed them at the base of the headstone. There was a weather-beaten stuffed bear, too, with matted fur and dirt-caked paws. Who knew how long it had been there, suffering through the Oregon rains, the heat, and snow?
I turned and scanned the lot. Next to the caretaker’s cottage there was a small bucket of cut tulips and daisies bound together in batches with string. The stems were wrapped in wet paper towels, still damp, so I assumed that the flowers were brought daily to the cemetery. Without consulting Sam, I tore off down the grass and went to the bucket. There was a sign affixed to the metal with tape that read: Flowers free, courtesy of the Garsten Yellow Scarf Brigade. So, I took two batches—white and yellow—and went back to the Sullivan children’s graves and placed the flowers next to the tiny toy cars.
It seemed wrong to arrive here, to gawk at these kids we didn’t know, and not leave some symbol of our sympathy. They had been someone’s sons, someone’s brothers. They had lives full of promises and opportunities cut short. I thought of Adam Sullivan, alive and sitting in that Oregon penitentiary, and I wondered if he thought about his kids every day. His confession played like a loop. And I wondered about Brick. There was no headstone here for the missing boy, and I realized then that Hannah Sullivan must have been waiting to see if her boy would come home.
His lack of a memorial was a sign of hope.
“Do you think they’re out there? Hurting?” I asked.
The wind carried my question away and Sam leaned closer. He looked confused. “What?”
“Do you think…that this place just holds their bodies?” I sounded ridiculous. What I really wanted to know: where are their souls? Could Colton have found a new home in Soren? Could David be trapped on earth? That is what I wanted to know. That is what I couldn’t ask.
“It doesn’t hold their bodies,” Sam said. He shrugged. We both heard a bird squawk from the distance and our heads popped up in unison and searched the hills.
“What?” I asked and I turned to him. “What do you mean?”
“Both boys were cremated. They buried their ashes. No bodies.”
“How do you know this?”
Sam shuffled his feet against the grass and shoved his hands into his pockets. Finally, he mumbled, “I just wanted to look into it…and maybe I got carried away, but there’s a ton of information out there on these kids. The world was fascinated with them.” Then he added, “For a time.”
“I couldn’t find anything,” I said and I felt defensive. How could Sam’s search yield so much more information than mine? What had he learned? Besides, the barren headstones seemed contrary to that statement: the world was fascinated for a time, but now they had neglected their memories.
I shifted my feet.
“A matted teddy-bear and a rusty toy car…” I thought of the Egyptians and their burials rich with remnants of their life on earth. “That’s all they get?”
“It’s been fifteen years, Mara,” Sam said as an explanation. “And we’re in some nothing town…you think people remember for that long?”
“Some people,” I replied.
“Family, friends and crazy people obsessed with murder. After fifteen years, that’s all you get.”
“What are we?” I asked honestly. I crossed my arms over my body and waited for Sam to tell me we weren’t freaks, weren’t crazy, weren’t ridiculous humans for standing there like we had some right to these kids and their story. Sam brought me here, so maybe he was the freak. But I was the one who showed him the folder as if he held some missing puzzle piece. Carlie was the one who made the folder. So, maybe it was me. Maybe it was her.
“Just like everyone else, I suppose,” Sam answered. A honeybee hovered around his ear and he batted it away. “Curiosity…curious if death is final…isn’t that why we’re here?”
“To find out if Soren is telling the truth?”
“Sure,” Sam answered.
He wasn’t here for that. He was here for me. He was here for the mystery. But he didn’t know or understand my own motivations—he couldn’t see how much I felt pulled between running and seeking. I would have never ended up in the Garsten cemetery on my own, and that I knew for a fact.
“Next stop?” Sam asked, and he started to walk away. I trotted to catch up, the sun on my back, and I felt lightheaded, so I slowed down.
“Where? The murder scene?” It was a joke. A careless joke said in haste, but not a real suggestion nonetheless. But Sam blanched at me as if I had just insulted his mother—his surprise and revulsion evident.
“No, are you out of your mind? I’m not that macabre,” he said. He took his keys out of his pocket and they jangled in his hand. “From what I can tell, Mrs. Sullivan sold that house super quick. Like, may not have even stepped foot back inside.”
“So where are we going, then?”
He opened my door for me and I climbed inside the car. Sam looked embarrassed as he hesitated to shut the door, his hand on the handle. “To see Hannah Sullivan,” he said. “She still lives in Garsten. Just down the road.”
