The static broke for a second and I thought I heard Elton John, but then he was gone again. I reached the top of the hill and made a sharp left, careful to stay on the stone pathway and not walk over the graves on either side.
I paused when I reached the mausoleums, all positioned in two neat rows with a stone pathway down the center.
Pittsburgh had a lot of cemeteries. This particular one, All Saints Hollow, was one of the largest.
The mausoleums.
I didn’t much like the mausoleums.
When we drove by a cemetery, Auntie Jo said you’re always supposed to hold your breath the to keep the spirits of the dead from finding you. I’m not sure why this rule didn’t apply when you were actually in the cemetery, but if it applied anywhere, it would be at the mausoleums. The air was still here. I pictured the dead peeking out from the cracks in the stone, bony hands ready to reach out and snatch unsuspecting little boys, pulling us inside those squat structures, never to be seen again.
I drew in a deep breath, pulled the radio to my chest, and ran down the center of the mausoleums, nearly tripping when Steve Perry started to blare from the speaker.
I reached the far end of mausoleum row and blew out the air, the speaker again going back to static. I had no idea why the radio worked in the middle of those buildings, and I didn’t really care. I could find another spot. I wasn’t going back in there.
Looking out over two hundred and seventy acres of rolling hills, I could no longer see Auntie Jo or the red maple.
The cemetery came to an end at a thick tree line. A black metal bench sat beneath the trees, a willow sweeping over the top, a canopy of thin leaves and moss weighted in shadows. Upon that bench sat a girl. About a hundred feet from the girl, a woman in a long white coat stood beside a white SUV on one of the cemetery’s access roads, her hands in her pockets.
It wasn’t hot out, but it wasn’t cold, either, too warm for such a coat. This didn’t seem to bother her. She had it buttoned to her neck. As I came over the hill, the woman turned toward me, her eyes black, hawklike. Her hair, as white as her coat, fluttered in the light wind. She became rigid at the sight of me, her shoulders squaring off. Her hands balled into fists and disappeared beneath the folds of her coat. She held there a moment, eyes upon me, cautious and strange, then returned her gaze to the girl on the bench.
The girl wore a white ruffled blouse, also buttoned up, tucked neatly into a black skirt falling just past her knees. Her long brown hair, alive with waves and curls, dropped over her shoulders and down her back. One side partially covered her face, the other pinned back behind her ear. Her dark eyes were lost between the pages of a paperback book held in her lap with gloved hands.
I’m not sure how long I stood there.
I’m not sure why I stood there.
But I did, I stood there watching her, watching her turn the pages with a gentle determination, her lips slightly parted, mouthing the words silently to an enthralled audience of one.
“Jessie’s Girl” blurted out from my radio and the girl’s head jerked up, her eyes on me, one hand carefully marking her place in the book.
I fumbled with the radio’s knobs and turned it down.
I didn’t remember walking up to the bench, but somehow I had. I stood right beside it.
The girl’s brow furrowed, and she tilted her head curiously. “My, you are an ugly little boy.”
I wasn’t sure what to say to that, so I said nothing at all. I knew I wasn’t ugly. Auntie Jo said I was lucky that I took after Momma in the looks department rather than being cursed to look like Daddy. Although, I had a picture of Daddy, the only one I managed to hide from Auntie Jo. He looked like a movie star standing next to his rusty Ford, the same one he had been driving when—
“Your clothes are ratty, too.” She had an odd accent, sounding something like James Bond but not quite.
A squeal came from the radio’s speaker, drowning out Rick Springfield and all else. I switched it off, retracted the antenna, and found myself climbing onto the bench, sitting on the opposite end from her. Again, I didn’t know why. My mind screamed for me to run away. This was a girl, after all. I had no business with girls, especially one like this, all prissy and proper and smelling of flowers. But I didn’t run. I climbed right up on that bench and sat beside her, ignoring the strange flutter in my stomach.
I nodded up at the woman standing at the SUV. “Is that your momma?”
“No, not my mother.”
“They why is she watching you?”
“That’s what she does.”
“It’s kinda creepy.”
The girl smiled at this, then forced it back as if she didn’t want me to see her smile, as if it were something she didn’t give away so freely. “What kind of boy wanders around a cemetery all alone? Where are your parents?”
“Dead.”
“Really? Who killed them?”
Not what killed them or how did they die, but who killed them. As if death by another’s hand was the most logical of things.
“What are you reading?” I asked, wanting to change the subject. I didn’t want to talk about Momma and Daddy, not now. There had been enough of that today.
She held up the book so I could see the cover—Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. The paperback’s spine was nearly white with creases, opened and closed so many times the color was gone, faded and cracked away. The cover wasn’t much better. The book looked a thousand years old, some lost thing rescued from the bottom of a box in someone’s basement.
“Is that the one with the boy and the raft?”
“Hmm. Ugly and uneducated, I see.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“You’re thinking about The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. That book isn’t even written by Dickens. Twain wrote it. Twain is a hack. Twain isn’t even his real name. He was just a boat captain who managed to scribble out a few thoughts when he wasn’t gambling and drinking.”
I hadn’t read anything by Twain or Dickens. My reading shelf consisted of half the titles from the Hardy Boys collection and a few dozen comics. I didn’t know anyone who read Twain or Dickens, not even my parents or Auntie Jo. “What is Great Expectations about?”
The woman at the SUV had managed to draw closer. I hadn’t seen her move, but she was only about ten feet from us now, watching from the corner of her eye, no doubt listening to every word.
The girl looked down at the book in her gloved hands. “It’s about everything that really matters.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You wouldn’t.”
“Can I see it?” I reached for the book and she shied away, moving toward her side of the bench. The woman edged closer, then stopped as the girl looked up at her.
The girl placed the book on the bench and slid it over to me with the tips of her fingers. This seemed to calm the older woman.
I picked up the book and read the description on the back.
“My name is Stella,” the girl said. “I was named for the girl in that book, only her name is Estella.”
I handed the book back to her. I half expected her to make me slide it back on the bench, but she didn’t. She snatched it from the air and placed it back in her lap. “When a girl tells you her name, it’s only polite to reciprocate.”