Eight Years Ago
EVERYONE WENT TO THE FUNERALS RESULTING from a fourth-year event. It was a way to pay respect and to count your blessings that it wasn’t you or yours being put into a pine box.
LuAnn Stimple left twelve victims between the ages of nine and seventeen to be buried. For four days in a row, we went from one funeral service to another, mouthing the same meaningless words, throwing down handfuls of dirt to cover one dead body before moving on to the next.
Daddy loved these funeral-filled weeks. Any large gathering of people put a spring in his step, never mind the reason they’d come together. He’d work the crowds with one arm around Mom’s waist and the other free to shake hands, slap backs, and every so often reach over to pat your head or mine while he turned his eyes heavenward and intoned in a solemn voice, “The silver lining here is that we’re reminded to cherish our loved ones and hold them closer.”
I hated it, but got through it with you at my side.
Except that week you refused to go.
I thought Daddy would be furious and drag you down to join us, but if he noticed there was one less head to pat, he never said a word about it.
The nine-year-old’s funeral was last. There were always more tears at the final funeral, as if people had been saving them and now needed to use them up before it was all over.
I skipped the feast they always had after the final burial. Daddy would be mad, I knew. He always made a big speech, talking obliquely about the sacrifices these brave young people had made for the greater good of Gardnerville. As if their deaths were noble. Or a choice. I didn’t know how anyone could listen to it and not hate him, but more than once I’d been told that his words were a great comfort.
I trudged home, my whole body heavy with four days of grief. As I walked, I began to feel angry with you for making me go through this alone. Yes, you had almost been one of LuAnn’s victims yourself, but that seemed a better reason than any to attend the funerals of those with less luck. By the time I burst into the house and stampeded up the steps toward your room, I was steaming.
I threw your door open, and froze.
Every square inch of your room was covered in crumpled and torn paper. And you . . . you sat in the middle of the madness, muttering to yourself and stripping pages from a book one sheet at a time, and then tossing them this way and that, adding them to the various piles. You were so absorbed in your task, you didn’t hear me come in.
“Piper?” I called softly, my throat already aching with unshed tears.
Startled, you looked up. “Oh good, you’re here. Come help me.” You held a book out to me. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland read the gold lettering along the spine. Taking it, I flipped through the book. It looked like you had already stripped half the pages from it.
“Hurry,” you said, flapping a hand at me. “We need to take them apart before we can put them back together.”
I sank down to the floor, papers crinkling beneath me. “Piper, are you okay?”
I wanted you to laugh and say it was all a joke.
You didn’t. Instead you snatched Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland back from me. “These are my books, my stories. I can change them if I want to.”
“Okay,” I answered, gently taking the book back. I opened it and tore a page out. “I’ll help.”
We ripped the pages, not just from Alice, but also Peter Pan and the entire Chronicles of Narnia. As we began to put the books back together, heavily edited and with entirely new endings, the pattern became clear. Characters in these books made the same terrible mistake that Dorothy did in The Wizard of Oz. They left a magical and sometimes dangerous place for the relative safety and comfort of home.
You called the characters idiots and cowards. You pounded the book covers and said these books equated ordinary with good and extraordinary with evil.
I nodded and agreed, but all the time I couldn’t help finding the new stories unsatisfactory in a slightly different way. In our Gardnerville story, we were born into the magical and dangerous place, and that left us with a new problem and no easy solution that I could see.
Maybe it was all those funerals, but our predicament seemed much worse than anything that Alice faced. How could we ever have a happy ending, Piper, when the mysterious and deadly land is where we’ve grown up, and there is never any hope of finding a safe place to call home?