“Fun day?” Jenny Ping said.
“The funnest,” Mo said. He’d taken off his gloves and was rubbing his hands together, trying to get warm. Being this cold reminded him unpleasantly of what it had been like in Bogomil’s realm. Jenny had the heater turned all the way up, and still Mo was a lump of ice.
She reached over and squeezed his two cold hands in her small warm one. “Let’s get home and pig out on mac and cheese. You going to this thing at the Cliff Hangar?”
“Yeah,” Mo said. “Maybe. First I want to go up to the cemetery. Will you take me? I need to see where she’s buried.”
“Oh, Mo,” Jenny said. “I know we’re hardy New Englanders and we’re not supposed to care about cold, but frankly that’s bullshit, winter sucks, and so does snow. It’s like one degree out there.”
“I know,” Mo said. “But I need to do this anyway. Okay, Jenny? Please?”
“It really needs to be now?” she said.
“Yes,” Mo said. “It does.”
Mo didn’t spend a lot of time hanging out in cemeteries. That wasn’t his thing. But the old Lovesend cemetery up on the Cliffs was pretty, and once in a while he’d go and sit under the hemlock beside his mother’s grave. Wonder what she would have said about the problems he was having with some boy. Vincent. He really needed to stop hooking up with weird white boys. Find someone Black, boring, and fine.
The cemetery was a short bike ride from his grandmother’s house, twenty minutes if you walked. It was small, only a few acres, and on one end was a steep drop-off. Markers warned visitors away from the far end, the iron fence that now tilted oceanward. But the view was spectacular.
It was so cold today. He couldn’t get the idea out of his head how cold he had been when he was dead. How cold his grandmother must be now. His mother. Maybe it would warm them a little to have him near.
Jenny parked just inside the gates. “Do you want me to come with you?”
Mo shook his head. Took off his seatbelt. He began to open the door and then said, “I don’t have any flowers. I should have flowers.”
“We could get some,” Jenny said.
Mo thought about it. “No,” he said. “I want to just get this over with.”
Jenny said, “I’ll wait in the car.”
“No,” Mo said. “You go on home.”
“Mo,” she said, and before she could go on, he said, “I’ll walk. It’s okay. I just want to be alone for a little while.”
She reached over, squeezing Mo’s wrist as if to see whether or not he had grown warmer. “You have your phone. You promise you’ll call? If you want a ride?”
“I promise,” Mo said. He got out of the car. The wind, which was always stronger on the Cliffs, threw fine grains of snow into his eyes.
Wind had carved strange signs into the snow that lay over the cemetery grounds, scouring it away from the face of one tombstone, heaping it in a perfect dome upon another. Loaves of snow lay upon the flagstone paths, sat in sleek caps upon the tops of crosses. The grandiflora hydrangea standing at the top of the Gorch family plot was bare and starred with ice on the side that faced the Atlantic. Here was the small stone house where Cara Gorch was buried. When Mo had first seen it, he’d thought it was a real miniature house, with its stained glass windows, its wrought-iron gates, and two stern angels—one on each side—carved out of Nero Marquina marble, one holding a broken flute palm up as if asking you to take and repair it, the other sitting with its back against the mausoleum, wings folded protectively over the guitar it was cradling to its chest. Maryanne Gorch’s grave was hardly anything by comparison. A plain stone with her name on it and the dates of her birth and death. Under these: love is as strong as death.
“Well,” Mo said. “I guess you really are dead, then.” He touched her name, recognized the font, Freight. It had been her favorite for display text. Because he was very tired and he thought he should say something else and yet couldn’t think of anything, he sat down in the snow beside the grave. He was glad Jenny wasn’t there. Though it would have been nice if she had been there. He was so alone.
How long he sat he didn’t know. The snow continued and the last light drained from the sky. A gull landed on a nearby tombstone and watched him, its head tilted.
“Bowie,” Mo said. But the gull stayed a gull, and so Mo gathered up his will and said instead, “Avelot.”
The gull, grumbling, became a girl with a pink streak in her hair. She had on a ridiculous coat much too large and Bowie’s white scarf.
“Nice hair,” he said. “I met someone who wants to kill you.”
Avelot said, “Once I thought Thomas was kind. But kindness is soft. It wears away eventually. I wonder what Kristofer would be like now, had he not died. Had he been given the immortality Bogomil offered him.”
Mo said, “Thomas’s brother. What was he like?”
And suddenly Avelot was Bowie again, only with two blue eyes. Straw-colored hair. The face a little thinner and foxlike. The expression more confident than Avelot/Bowie had ever looked. Mischievous.
The person who was now wearing Kristofer’s face said, “Like this, or so I remember him. He loved to hear me sing. He loved his brother. I did not love him, but neither did I wish him harm. And yet I was the cause of his death and now I wear his body more easily than ever I wore my own.”
The boy who stood before Mo wavered, became a girl again, and then Bowie again, his expression now empty, a pink streak appearing and disappearing in his hair until Mo wanted to yell, Pick one and stick!
The boy said, “Avelot I never chose to be. Her life was hard. If Thomas does not kill me, still I would not choose to be Avelot again.”
Mo said, “You do you. But do it somewhere else. It’s late and I’m sad and I wasn’t looking for company.”
“I have a message for Thomas,” Bowie said. “I am sorry. I will be sorrier still if I am the cause of his death as I was his brother’s.”
“You want what now?” Mo said, incredulous. “You want to deputize me? To go say all that to the brother of the guy you killed? No thanks. I am not getting in the middle of that.”
“I think there are many things to live for,” Bowie said, “and after all this time he might choose something other than revenge.”
“And I can see how it might be in your best interest to say that to him,” Mo said. “But come on. True or not, it’s hard to give up on a plan when you’ve been carrying it around for such a long time. Even I know that, and I’m young and only a middling planner. You know Thomas better than me, so tell me, does he seem like a quitter to you?”
“This grave,” Bowie said, indicating Maryanne Gorch’s headstone. “Was she someone to you?”
“My only one,” Mo said. “My grandmother. She would have been fascinated by you. Your life, what you did, what happened to you. She would have carved a love story out of it somehow. That was her whole deal.”
Bowie said, “There was a graveyard in my city I liked to walk in. Those who visited their dead placed stones upon the graves.”
He held out his hand to Mo, and Mo saw there was a stone in it. He took it; it weighed hardly anything. When he looked more closely, he saw it was one of the porcelain stones from the store on Main Street.
“Where’d you get this?” Mo said. But Bowie was no longer there. A gull rose up, its wings beating snow into clouds of shining powder so Mo had to take a step back. That was one way to leave a party.
On his grandmother’s grave he placed the porcelain stone and the fortune cookie Thomas had given him, still in its wrapper.