The clouds rode high and swift in the sky, covering and uncovering the sun, casting the sloping green cemetery in shadow and light. Life was like that, Alison thought, the world one day a dark and dreary place, the next day bright and full of promise. But death she couldn’t think about right now. It all seemed so black and hopeless.
Neil was dead.
They stood by the grave, dressed in mourning, atop a low hill that looked through tall trees to an orchard and a wide watermelon field beyond. It was a pretty place, she supposed, if you had to be buried. Neil’s mother was present, as were Tony and a minister, but pitifully few others had come to pay their last respects. Brenda and Joan had both bowed out, pleading too much emotional distress. Alison did not doubt the validity of their excuses. She was beyond wondering and worrying.
The minister read a psalm about the shadow of the valley of death and having no fear, and Alison felt that for Neil it was a proper reading, for his life, more than anyone’s she had ever met, had been truly righteous. At the close of the prayers, they each stepped forward and laid a rose atop the casket. The casket was not an expensive one—Neil’s mother hadn’t much money—nor was it very big. But it was enough. The Caretaker had not left much, anyway.
“Thank you for coming,” Mrs. Hurly told her as they hugged at the end of the service. “My son often talked about you.”
The lady’s quiet strength, her calm acceptance of the tragedy, both strengthened and confused Alison. She stopped crying. “I thought about him a lot,” she said truthfully. “I’m going to miss him.”
Tony came next, at the end of the line. The last two days, Alison had not seen him shed a tear, nor had he at any time failed to say the right words. He did not ask for sympathy and he continued to stand tall. Yet he had become a robot. His spark was gone. Perhaps it would be gone for a long time. “If there is anything you need help with at the house,” he said, embracing the tiny, gray-haired lady whose eyes were as green and warm as Neil’s had been, “let me know.”
That had been a minor slip, though an understandable one. There wasn’t a Hurly house anymore.
Mrs. Hurly nodded kindly. “Please walk me to the car. I would like to speak with you and your girlfriend.”
Alison would have preferred not to have been invited. Though on the inside she had felt drawn to Neil, she had not really been a close friend. If his mother was going to bring up sensitive, sentimental memories, Tony alone would be the right one to share them with. But she could not very well say no to the lady, and she trailed a pace behind as Tony escorted Mrs. Hurly, arm in arm, to an aging white Nova.
“I don’t know how best to put this,” Neil’s mother said as they reached the narrow road that wound through the cemetery, the sun temporarily out, warm on their faces, the overlong grass rippling in green waves in the shifting breeze. “When I received the call at my brother’s place in Arkansas that our home had burned to the ground and that Neil had been caught asleep in bed and had perished in the flames, I refused to accept it. I thought the officer had the wrong address and that it was the family next door or the one across the street. God forgive me for praying that this was so.”
As Mrs. Hurly paused to find the right words, Alison was forcibly drawn back to two days ago. The phone call had come in the early morning instead of the middle of the night, and it had been Brenda, not Tony, who had brought the news of the fire. Brenda had rattled off the facts with what had seemed mechanical precision but which in reality had been emotionless shock. Neil’s home was a smoldering ruin. So far, the firemen going through the debris had found only one body, the charred and scattered pieces of a skeleton of an individual approximately five-and-a-half feet tall who had worn an emerald ring on his left hand. All the evidence was not in, but the fire marshal was inclined to rule out arson. There were no signs that combustibles such as gasoline or kerosene had been involved. The blaze appeared to have started in the kitchen, probably triggered by faulty wiring. And it must have spread quickly to have caught the resting occupant—as the expert had called Neil—totally unaware. It was the gentleman’s opinion, Brenda said, that Neil had probably not even awakened.
Listening to the account, Alison had felt a corner of her being cracking, the tight place where she had hemmed in the panic that had been growing since the Caretaker’s first letter. Released, the fear had rushed through her like an icy wave, leaving her shivering but strangely unafraid. She had probably felt that now, with this murder, things could get no worse.
Remember, you have been told.
Each passing day inevitably decreased Fran’s and Kipp’s chances of being alive. Three scorched skeletons in the rubble would not have surprised her.
Yet the game rolled forward. Joan had received a letter and her task had been in the paper this morning.
J.Z. Spread Rumor You Are Gay.
Joan had been prepared to model naked in the mall, slap the principal in the face, and burn down the whole city. This demand, however, she simply could not meet. She was sleeping with a police-trained German shepherd, her bedroom windows covered with shutters that had been nailed shut. Her law-enforcement father didn’t even know his daughter was in danger.
Alison was not looking forward to her own turn.
“All parents react that way to accidents involving their children,” Tony said. “Don’t blame yourself.”
Mrs. Hurly patted his supporting arm. “It was still wrong of me, especially given the circumstances. After I had a chance to be by myself, to put the accident in perspective, I saw that it was a blessing in disguise.”
God’s will, fate, destiny . . . Alison could see it coming. Nevertheless, she nodded in understanding. Metaphysical rationalizations were a comfort this poor woman deserved, and she was not going to argue with her personal philosophy at a time like this. A minute later, however, she realized she had totally misjudged the lady.
“I’m afraid I can’t see it that way,” Tony said.
“Because Neil never told you the truth,” Mrs. Hurly said, glancing in the direction of the lonely coffin lying beside the pile of brown earth that had seconds ago lost its green plastic cover to the wind. A brief shudder shook her. Around the curve of the bluff, a worker waited impatiently in his tractor. He was probably supposed to be out of sight, but the message was still clear: They were in a hurry to get the body in the ground. Mrs. Hurly continued, “He didn’t want your sympathy, he didn’t want you treating him any differently in the time he had left. Remember once when you were at the house, Tony, and the two of you were going to see a movie? Neil was broke and I was behind on the bills that month. You offered to take him, but he wouldn’t even accept a couple of dollars from you. You remember how proud he was in that way. I think that’s one of the reasons he kept his illness a secret and made up those stories about having diabetes and cartilage damage. He couldn’t totally hide what was happening inside his body, but he thought he could camouflage it with lesser complaints. I went along with his wishes, but it was hard, harder than I can say with words, especially toward the end when he was in so much pain he could hardly walk.”
“What are you saying?” Tony whispered.
“Neil had cancer. It started in his leg. Those weeks when he was out of school, that’s when he was receiving chemotherapy. That’s why he lost so much weight. The doctors tried, but it just spread everywhere. The last X rays they took showed tumors in his brain.” She bowed her head. “You see how I could be grateful for this accident. At least he doesn’t hurt anymore.”
She broke down then and Alison wept with her, filled with shame for all the times she had been with Neil, watching him deteriorate before her very eyes and not once stopping to ask him or herself if he was OK.
“But I could have helped him,” Tony said, choking on the revelation. “He should have told me.” He clenched his fists and yelled, “Neil!!”
The cry echoed over the cemetery and through the orchard. Of course, there came no answer. The fury left Tony’s face as quickly as it had come. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Hurly,” he said softly.
“Most of all,” she said, dabbing at her eyes, regaining her composure, “Neil didn’t want to have you sitting around worrying about him. He was a brave kid.” She handed Alison a handkerchief and Alison took it gratefully, blowing her nose. His suffering in silence filled her with as much awe as sorrow. When she had a cold, she called all of her friends and cried on their shoulders. Neil had taught her a lesson about nobility that she would never forget.
Tony offered to drive Mrs. Hurly to the home of the friends she was staying with, but she refused, reassuring them that she would be all right. They watched her drive away in silence. With a wedding you could always throw rice, but there seemed to be no good way to end a funeral.
Tony walked her toward his car, which was a respectable distance—he had parked on the far side of the cemetery by the chapel and had ridden to the gravesite in the hearse. By unspoken consent, they did not hold hands or talk until they were out of sight of the casket.
“It’s funny the way your mind plays tricks on you,” he said finally. “Just for a moment there I was thinking how sad this day is and how I would have to call Neil when I got home to tell him about it. That’s what I’ve always done these last four years.” He shrugged. “Now I don’t know what I’ll do.”
She wanted to tell him that she would listen. But she was afraid how poor a substitute she might be. “I wish I had called him a few times,” she said instead. “Just to chat, you know. I always meant to.”
A scrawny rabbit, looking anxious to get to the neighboring farm fields, cut across their path. “He would have liked that a lot. He liked you a lot, more than you know, I think.” He stopped her and reached into his coat pocket. “That’s what I was trying to tell you that night in the car in front of your house. You were his . . . love.”
“Me?” Neil had found a shallow phony like her attractive? “I never even suspected.” The information hit her as hard as the fact of his cancer.
“But he asked you out.”
“Yeah, just to the movies. I didn’t think anything of it. I . . . I . . . ” Her tears—she should have run out of them yesterday—bubbled up again. She sought the handkerchief Mrs. Hurly had given her. “I turned him down. Damn.”
Tony hugged her gently. “He didn’t hold it against you. The last time we were alone together, he asked me to do two things for him should the Caretaker get to him. One of them was to give you this.”
He placed a warped lump of blackened metal in her hand. It took her a moment to realize it was Neil’s emerald ring. The heat had distorted the gold band but the stone had not shattered. “Did he have this on when . . . ”
“He was wearing it, yes. He was going to give it to me to keep for you but he said he wanted to get it cleaned first.” Tony added softly, “It made the identification easier.”
“But I can’t take this.”
“If I’d had more time, I would have had it cleaned up. I think a jeweler could reset the stone.”
“No. I don’t care that it’s no longer beautiful. I just don’t deserve it.”
Tony smiled, and she knew before he spoke that it was from a sweet memory. “He used to see you as a goddess. To him, you had everything: beauty, poise, good humor, love. He loved you, and although he was never really able to express it to you, I like to think it made him happy just being in the same world as you. For that, you deserve the ring.”
“Was he . . . jealous of us?”
“Not Neil.”
The question had been unworthy. She held the ring tightly. “I’m honored to know he saw me that way. I’ll keep it safe.”
They resumed their walk toward the chapel. For the last several minutes, the sun had been hidden behind the clouds and it appeared that a storm truly was on its way. Here they’d been cooking for the last few weeks and now when summer was about to officially begin, they were going to get rained on. Graduation was just around the corner. There would be a few empty seats at the ceremony.
“What else did he want you to do for him?” she asked.
He shook his head. “It’s a long story.”
“Were you able to do it?”
“No, I’m afraid not.”
“Did you check with Mrs. Hurly to be sure it was OK that I keep the ring?”
“Yes, and it was fine. Please don’t feel guilty about it.”
“I was just afraid that she would feel uncomfortable losing a family heirloom.”
“I don’t think Neil’s mother even knew he’d had it.”
“Oh, for some reason I assumed it had been in the family.”
Tony stopped.
“What is it?” she asked.
He shrugged. “Nothing important.”