Restless

5 - Company of the Dead Girl

The next day at the office, Debra had to manage three walk-ins while Mr. Crimshaw oversaw the reconstruction of the south hill. The Hispanic workers had loaded all the caskets onto the back of a flatbed truck and covered them with a green tarp. She assumed none of them realized one of the coffins was empty. She doubted the casket weighed much more with Andrea in it. She couldn't be more than seventy pounds. 

The first two walk-ins weren’t difficult. They had all lost a relative, but the relatives had been older and their time was at hand so there were no surprises. The most difficult was the last couple who came in with a need to bury their toddler. She hadn't waited around to hear the reason for the child's death. She excused herself and walked across the memorial park, fighting back tears, to where Mr. Crimshaw stood talking to the contractor.

"I can't handle this one," she said. She continued on foot to her house. "I'm sorry, but I don't think I can do this today."

"Are you quitting?" he called after her.

She shook her head, but she thought she might look for jobs that night in the newspaper.

As she walked across the memorial park, Debra felt that darkness calling. The call had grown stronger. After a long evening of crying and reliving old pains, the darkness now had a hold on her that she couldn’t push away. It was now ever-present in her mind, like a vulture circling in the sky above her. When she reached her house she had the urge to just drive out of town, go somewhere new, and start over. Debra would have just jumped in her car and driven away at that moment, but when she had left the office she left behind her purse. With her wallet and car keys inside her only choice was to walk back and get them or try to keep her promise to Andrea and help her get to prom. That seemed to be the only thing that mattered now. If she couldn’t do anything about her own life, she would at least help Andrea get hers back.

She kept an extra key to the house on the top of the porch light, so she stretched up with her feet extended to the tip of her toes and reached over the dead moths until she found it. As she walked in the front door, the clean, almost vanilla scent of fresh paint permeated the air. She wondered if it wouldn't be better to just ignore Andrea, go straight to the shower, and then directly to bed. 

As tempting as the shower seemed, she decided that the company of the dead girl was better than the loneliness. She walked the stairs to Andrea’s room. For the past few days Debra had been trying her hardest to communicate with Andrea. She could tell the girl was as frustrated by this distance as she was, but now she began to understand why.

Andrea might have forgotten how to speak English and she might have forgotten how to write, but she hadn't forgotten how to paint. 

Andrea had kept the auburn color on the wall, but softened it to lighter shade of yellow near the top and shadowed it to brown near the base. On the wall to the south, the one with no windows, she had painted a hillside covered in sky scrapers. It didn't look like any city Debra had ever seen in the United States, but it did look like the pictures of cities in China that went on for miles and miles and were inhabited by millions of people. It was New York City times ten but upon closer inspection, as the details clarified, Debra could see that these weren't sky scrapers at all but giant coffins. Coffins filled from top to bottom with smaller coffins. A giant city of the dead. 

From these coffins, red leaves blew into the wind, but Debra wasn't sure if they were leaves from a tree or the skin of the coffins’ many occupants. They swirled across the wall that faced out to the memorial park and around the window to come to rest on the foot of the other windowless wall.

On this wall, a girl sat atop a dappled horse, facing away from the city and gazing into a setting sun. She would have looked completely alive except that the hand that held the reigns was a skeleton's hand. But her blond hair caught up bits of the leaves or skin and it seemed that the wind was pushing her toward the sun.