“The Unquiet Grave”

June in the floodplain was long. Mud like heavy shag carpet and raindrops the size of pearl onions made it hard to enjoy any sort of early summer prosperity. It was the kind of weather that made paint peel and hair stick to the back of your neck. The kind of weather that eroded all kinds of things. Maggie had been at Josie Moore’s old house since noon.

“It was this beautiful apparition of paradise. Glittering gemstones and pieces of sun cascaded down in strands like wind chimes or bluebells or dangly earrings. A breeze blew them around in slow, circular patterns, causing them to clink together. And the air was hot. But it wasn’t soupy, and it didn’t burn, it was simply brilliant and righteous. Like a perpetual first day of summer. And she was there. Josie.” Rosalie Moore shook her head as she spoke. Her eyes were glassy, and her gaze was stuck to a piece of cellophane about to be blown off the kitchen counter by the table fan. She had once been a big woman, but over the last year she had gotten thin, wearing her loose skin like a winter coat.

“You know it makes me sick sometimes. To tell you things like that.”

Maggie looked up from her blue jeans. “Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“Like it makes you sick to your stomach?”

Rosalie shook her head again and pushed a laugh through her teeth. “I guess I never want to sound insincere. Like I’m trying to perform for you. Like I-”

She paused to watch the cellophane silently meet kitchen tile. 

“Like I want your pity. I don’t know.” Rosalie leaned her head over the curve of the couch arm. “You don’t have to keep coming here.” 

Maggie shrugged, getting up from the sofa to grab the piece of cellophane and ball it in her fist. “Well, I enjoy it. Hearing you talk about your dreams. About her.”

She wasn’t lying. Maggie had been visiting every Sunday afternoon for a year now. She would bring some kind of fruit or baked good just for it to go untouched and spoiled in the pantry. She’d always stay for an hour or two, even when she could tell Rosalie wanted her to leave. She could be self-punishing like that. Or maybe it was a sort of radical conviction. Maybe it was because she believed if she stayed for long enough, if she stayed very still, she would see something she wasn’t supposed to. Something that belonged to a different version of the home. A bygone Christmas dinner or birthday party. Something that belonged to Josie.

“Levi saw you yesterday.”

Maggie ran her finger against the grouted lines of the kitchen counter instead of making eye contact. “Yeah? He didn’t say hello.”

“In the churchyard.”

“Yeah.”

“Says he sees you there a lot.”

Maggie let out a slow breath. “Yeah.”

The truth was that Maggie had been visiting that grave almost every day for a year now. She visited even on days like yesterday when the graveyard attached to the Moores’ church was flooded with groundwater. Tufts of Texas buffalo grass poking through dips of puddles. Gravestones and markers appearing as stone behemoths in seas of umber. 

Josie’s stone was easy to spot because the slate had yet to be sullied by the elements and Rosalie had it shaped like an angel. A dogwood tree grew next to it, slowly losing its pink and white blossoms this time of year.

Maggie never really spoke or even cried during her visits, just knelt in muddy earth and stacked stones atop the angel’s wings, fixed in their flight.

“You know,” Rosalie paused to release a cough that came from her chest. She never said anything about it, but Maggie suspected that she had some kind of sickness. She never did seem to get up off of that couch, and one time a home care nurse was at the screen door just as she was leaving. “You don’t have to keep going there to prove you cared for her. To prove you’re a good friend.”

“I don’t.”

Rosalie gave Maggie a once-over, picking out her words. “It’s just, it’s almost to the point of being sort of strange, Margaret. I don’t want people to get the wrong idea about you. Josie, neither.”

Maggie didn’t look up from the tile, tracing the checkered pattern. She didn’t respond.

“I guess what I’m saying is I don’t want you to go about making yourself unhappy,” said Rosalie even though that wasn’t what she was saying at all. “Excessive grief disturbs the dead. Anyone ever taught you that?”

Maggie pushed off the kitchen counter and finally looked up, meeting the gaze of those grey-blue eyes. 

She thought back to a year ago, to the first time she had ever gone over to the Moore home. Rosalie didn’t quite know what to make of the strange woman showing up on her doorstep with a pink, tear-streaked face and a runny coconut cake, sputtering something about her and Josie being old friends from the children’s choir.

She let her in, though. Even if she grumbled or let the silences sit between them for too long, she always did open that screen door and talk to Maggie, even if only to tell her that she’d look prettier if she grew her hair out long. 

Maggie could tell that she needed it just as much as she did. The conversation. The indulgence in lament and memory. The arrangement was built on a polite foundation of things best left unsaid.

“May I use your restroom?”

Rosalie nodded. “Upstairs.”

Maggie’s boots were loud against the bloated wood of the Moores’ staircase. Humidity did strange things to an old house.

She was sure that Rosalie could hear each step, even the ones that took her to Josie’s childhood bedroom rather than that pink-tiled bathroom at the end of the hall. If she had heard, she didn’t stop her.

The room was just as Maggie imagined it, a picture pieced together from fragments of Josie’s old stories. It was as if she already knew the floral wallpaper that peeled and bubbled in its corners, or the shelf of trophies and ribbons for swimming races and choral competitions and good behavior in school. Everything was meticulously in order. Wicker shelves stuffed with books and photo albums, not unlike the set-up Josie had arranged at theirs. A box of winter clothes was pushed to the back of the closet, perpetually put away for spring. Maggie wondered if this was Rosalie’s doing, or if Josie had once left it this way, unintentionally everlasting.

But it all felt wrong. Because when Maggie had opened that door, speckled in stickers and old school pictures, a part of her had expected Josie, or some bygone version of her, to be there, waiting. 

Maybe it was because the ceiling fan was on. An old, weary machine, crooked in its orbit. 

It emitted this awful, rhythmic rattle. Tek, tek, tek, tek, tek, tek, tek, tek.

Maggie stepped her boots onto shag carpet and eased Josie’s door shut, careful to avoid creaking. She felt like an intruder. This really wasn’t like her at all, to impose. She was usually the kind of person who was good at keeping her head down and minding her own business. But maybe it was the weather or the look in Rosalie’s eyes earlier or the cruelty of another season continuing on without Josie to talk with and walk and love with that gave her the nerve to demand a piece of her memory on a June day like this. 

She sank into that wire-framed bed, right below a pretty ivory cross. The bed creaked, and she was sure that Rosalie could hear that too. Still, she didn’t stir. 

On the nightstand was an old photo of Josie, maybe fifteen, next to a big mastiff dog. Her hair was long, and her smile showed gums. She had a sunburn. It must have been the summertime. Maggie curled up on top of a quilt dappled with galloping horses, her knees to her chest, and just stared at the photo for a long while.

“God, I miss you,” Maggie said, before she even realized she was speaking. “I wish-” 

She thought of Rosalie. Her fragile acceptance that Maggie and Josie were old school friends who met in children’s choir. But what kind of school friends live together for three years? What old choir buddy visits your mother each week? Or your grave for twelve months and a day?

“I wish I could have met her with you. I really wish you could have introduced us.” She was crying now, hot tears dripping down her cheek and onto the pillowcase. “Maybe in a different world, where we’re different, where things are different, me and your mom could have really liked each other. Known each other. Now we’re just two sad, lonely women who don’t really know what to make of one another.”

She turned onto her back and looked up at that ceiling fan, unrelenting in its rotation. Its light was white bright. Its blades churned so fast they formed a trembling, sacred circle. 

Maggie could have sworn then that the creaking had gotten louder. Almost chant-like. She propped herself up on her elbows to get closer to the fan.

Teka ter, teka ter, teka ter, teka ter.

Yes. It must be. It was louder now still. A strange kind of heartbeat, irregular and rhythmic and whirling. It didn’t sound mechanical anymore, but symphonic. And familiar.

“Josie?” 

It took a sort of surrender for Maggie to say it. To call out Josie’s name. 

Maggie was a stoic woman. Not completely unlike Rosalie. The kind of woman who didn’t give way to fantasies or fervor.  

But what she heard was beyond noise. It was felt in the teeth and in the spine. 

Tell her, tell her, tell her, tell her. 

It was deafening.

“Josie, I love you.”

It stopped after that. 

Not that warped old ceiling fan. It rattled on, blowing a slow relief of air. But that utterance, that familiarity, went away, leaving Maggie kneeling on the quilt, crying. 

And out of the corner of her eye she could see Rosalie was there too, her shoulder to the doorway and her face full of a sad look of understanding.