Is that all? she wondered. Is there anything else to say? I have a feeling there is, the same feeling of something left out I've had ever since I came to this place. You try so hard to be honest with yourself and you wind up by making lies a little less pleasant to the taste.
"We can go now," the woman said.
You're forgetting the rose you kicked, Laura told her. Put it back the way it was. It just has to be straightened out a little. I'd do it myself and save you the trouble, but I can't. Would you, please? Thank you.
As if she had heard, the woman knelt gracefully and put the rose back into line with the other flowers. Her long fingers had a slight tint of lemon to them, but her nails were the same shade as the roses. A little darker, perhaps; roses after rain.
Thank you Sandra, Laura said. Good-by. She wondered where Michael was.
"How much time do we have?" the woman asked. She and the man began to walk away from Michael's grave.
"The trial's down for August eighth," the man answered. "Gives us almost a month."
"That's not much time." The soft voice sounded a little worried.
"Time enough. If there's anything for me to find, I'll have it in a month. If I can't turn up anything—" He shrugged heavily. "We can always appeal."
The woman stopped with her hand on the man's arm. "I didn't kill Michael. I won't suffer for something I didn't do."
The man's high chuckle was like sand rattling into a tin pail. He started walking again, and the woman followed him. "Why not? Why should you be different from the rest of us?"
"That isn't funny, damn you," the woman said.
They passed out of Laura's sight, although she could still hear their voices. The man's answer was amused and easy. "That's called gallows humor, lady. It'll get funnier as time passes." From that point on, the voices became blurred, partly because Laura was not listening very hard.
I suppose I could follow them, she thought. I was going to visit my own grave, after all, not Michael's. The trouble is, I don't really want to follow them. I don't want to see them. What do I want with the living? I'm not going to depend on them. If I do that I'll never forget life, never get to sleep. And I've got to stop letting myself be distracted. If I can't be alive, I want to be dead. Dead, as in dead. I don't like this in-between state. It's too much like life and not enough like it. I have to stop looking at live things and being interested in them. Even the scurrying of an ant is treachery, even a dandelion is deceitful and seductive. And that reminds me, I wish I could blow on one of those fat white dandelions. If you make a wish and blow all the fluff off in one breath, the wish comes true. I know. I was never able to do it all in one breath, and my wishes never came true.
The dead have nothing to do with dandelions, and the dead don't make wishes. I'll go to my own grave and lie down again.
Then she heard whistling, and she turned to see Michael coming down the road she had walked. The whistling of a ghost is like no other sound in a fistful of universes, because it is woven of all the whistles the ghost has ever heard, and so it usually includes train moans, lunch whistles, fire alarms, and the affronted-virgin screaming of tea kettles. To all of these components Michael had added an extra memory: the agonized yowl of a car stopping very suddenly in a very short space. It all made for a tuneless and unmelodic sort of sound, but ghosts have no interest in melody. The production of sound is all that interests them. Michael seemed quite pleased with his whistling.
"Hello, Michael," Laura said when he seemed about to pass by without seeing her.
Michael stopped and looked up. "Hello, Laura. Listen, and I'll whistle your name."
He whistled a brief passage of notes that made Laura think of a kite caught in a hurricane. It stopped suddenly, and she said, "Is that all?"
"You ought to have a longer name," Michael said. "Longer and harsher. That's the best I can do with Laura Durand." He sat down in the middle of the road and beckoned her to join him. "I've been doing this all morning—whistling up names for things. Like leitmotivs. You name it and I'll whistle it. Go on."
"Dandelions," Laura said promptly.
"Dandelions. Right." Michael whistled a few bars of a crashing march tune. "Dandelions."
"Not to me. It sounded like dinner music at an American Legion picnic."
"That's the way I see dandelions," Michael said firmly. "I'm an impressionist. If you want program music, get yourself one of those hundred-and-fifty-violin orchestras. Whistling is a very personal kind of music."
"All right," Laura said. "I leave you your integrity. Do Mr. Rebeck."
"I haven't got him yet. I've been trying on and off, but it never comes out. I'm still new at this, remember. Try something else."
For a moment Laura considered saying, "Sandra. What kind of Sandra-music do you have?" She gave up the idea only because she was afraid he might actually have a melody for the name.
At that moment Michael noticed the bright flowers on his grave. "Hey," he said. "Somebody dropped something." He got up and went over to look closely at the roses.
"I'll be damned," he said. "I've got a secret admirer."
"Your wife left them," Laura said. "She was here a few minutes ago."
Michael was silent, his back to her. She could see through to the small marble headstone shining in the sun.
"Very fresh, too," he said after a moment. "And expensive. Eight or ten dollars a dozen. I always wondered why one kind of rose should be worth more than another."
"She just left a minute or so before you came," Laura said doggedly. I'm getting mean again, she thought, and in a way it's worse than with the boy.
"I heard you," Michael said. "What do you want me to do about it?"
"I don't know. She's your wife."
"Nope. Not any more. Death us parted. We are annulled. There's a really terrifying word for you. Annulled."
"You could follow her, I suppose," Laura said. "She was walking very slowly."
"I don't want to, God damn it!" She felt oddly satisfied that she had made him shout. "I don't want to see her. I have nothing to say to her, and if I had she couldn't hear me. She was my wife and she murdered me, and my feelings are understandably hurt about the whole thing. Stop talking about her. I don't want to hear anything about her. Stop talking about her or go away. One or the other."
He had stepped on the roses in his anger. They lay unharmed under his feet, dark red, their outer petals already beginning to curl in the heat of the morning. They had not yet begun to change color. That would come later.
"I'm sorry," she said, and she was, though she did not quite know for what. "I'm very sorry, Michael."
"Forget it," Michael said.
"I get like this once in a while. I don't know why. I never used to when I was alive."
"It's all right," Michael said. "Don't talk about it. Look, are you doing anything right now?" In the same breath he said, "That is conceivably the most stupid thing I ever said, in life or in death."
"No," Laura said. She did not laugh. "I'm not doing anything special. I was just walking around."
"Come with me, then, if you feel like walking. I was heading down to the gate to look at people."