Racing toward the city, I search for the taillights of my Honda, but can’t find them. When I enter the city I drive aimlessly around, but it’s pointless. They’re gone. Jo is gone. And there’s nothing I can do until I pay to get her back.
I head home. I never liked driving Jo’s car, and I like it even less now. The seats are low and I often hurt my back getting in and out of it. It’s not the kind of car you can use if you have kids-you’d break your back getting a child in and out of a car seat. I smile thinking about that, I smile thinking of the children we didn’t have, but used to talk about having. We never named them, we thought it weird to name somebody until you’d met them. I don’t know why I’m suddenly thinking about them, and even though they bring a smile to my face, I’m actually feeling sad for their loss. These kids will never exist. They died six months ago in the bar. No matter what happens, even if I get Jo back, she’ll never want to see me again.
I park up the driveway and leave the screwdriver in the car and walk around the gate and swing open my busted back door. I stare at the phone and even take two steps toward it, knowing I need to call the police and knowing just as well that I can’t. Cyris will kill Jo if I do. He may kill her anyway. The time to call the police is over and, anyway, it’s not like my experience with them is one I want to risk repeating.
I walk down the hallway. Last time I made this walk I was in cuffs and had a gun pointed at me. When was that? It feels like a few days ago, but it’s only been a matter of hours, maybe five or six of them. I look at my watch, but I can’t figure it out, and really it doesn’t matter. I stand in the bedroom doorway and stare at the cardboard box. I have to get rid of it. I can’t sleep in my house with the body part of a woman I failed to save. I don’t look inside it because Landry told me what was in there. Kathy deserves to be buried in one piece, but I can’t return the box to the crime scene. I can’t take it to the morgue. Can’t put a stamp on it and mail it in.
These thoughts disgust me, but they’re there, just logical progressions really, like a mechanic figuring out how to take a car apart, or an accountant carrying the one. Kathy is dead and for her to rest in peace her death needs to be avenged. That’s all. It doesn’t matter where her body ends up. I grab a garbage bag out of the laundry and put the box inside. I put my bloody shorts in there too. Then, turning the lights off, I stumble through the house and into the garage. I find a shovel.
My house is on the corner of a cul-de-sac. My backyard borders another house, but behind that are huge pastures. To get there I have to walk into the street and to a dirt driveway angled up between two homes. It’s nearly five o’clock in the morning, but I still pause to scan the neighborhood. No people. No lights. Nobody to care what’s happening to me. I head up the driveway. The wet ground sucks at my shoes.
I’ve been walking two minutes when I realize why I’m doing this. I need to bury this piece of Kathy, not just for her, but for me. It could help. It could make the ghosts go away.
The pasture is broken up into sections, different vegetables growing in each. Wire fences run between them as if the owners are worried the cabbages are going to mingle with the potatoes and create some hybrid vegetable nobody would like. Long dirt roads trail off into the distance. Dozens of irrigation pipes create a maze that leads to the nearby river. Iron sheds with spots of rust on them house farm equipment. The ruts in the dirt formed by tractors going back and forth are filled to the brim with water.
I decide not to bury the box anywhere in the pasture. The dirt is turned over all the time. Crops are planted then reaped. Tractors dragging large plows bite into the ground. One day it’s pulling up carrots. The next it’s decomposing flesh.
The dirt road I’m following keeps the pastures to my right. To my left the land is bordered by a long ditch with a small creek running through it. A dozen or so trees space out the distance. I walk for ten minutes, the rain no longer feeling cold against my skin. I’m numb inside, but not because of the weather. I pass more trees, and I wonder what could be buried beneath them. Just before the creek sweeps into the river, where the road turns right to move along the top end of the pasture, there’s a small bank. I climb down and stand a few feet from the creek. I figure this is as good a place as any.
I start digging. My cold fingers send slivers of pain up my arms, but I like the pain-I deserve it, and when I think of Jo and what may be happening to her, I dig faster. I try to concentrate as the hole starts to grow. I dig down two feet before taking a break, standing in the hole up to my knees, sweating and shivering. The rain is becoming heavier again. A shaft of lightning hums across the sky. It lights up the hole and the creek and the plastic bag beside me, and it lights up my body. I’m covered in dirt and I’m digging a grave. I must be insane. I’ve come into the night only an hour or two before dawn, carrying a body part and a tool with which to hide it.
I lean on the shovel and look into the creek as the following thunder chases the lightning. I suddenly realize that I’m not alone. I can sense her watching, but she says nothing as I slowly push back off my shovel and continue to dig. I last less than a minute before I sit down on the edge of the hole, close to tears.
“I’m sorry. I’m really, really sorry.”
“What are you doing, Charlie?” Kathy asks.
“I’ve no idea. Things have got out of hand. I’m even seeing ghosts.”
“Is that what I am?”
I shake the water from my hair and wipe a muddy palm back through it. “I don’t know. Are you?”
“Don’t bury me, Charlie. Go to the police.”
I stand up again and dig some more. All I’m doing is throwing mud to one side while more mud runs back in. “Is he going to hurt Jo?”
“I can’t know that.”
“Because you’re not real.” More lightning, more thunder, and it sounds like I have angered some vengeful god. As the sound rolls across the pasture the walls to my hole-and my sanity-start to cave in. I decide the hole is deep enough. I struggle out. Kathy takes a step back as I pick up the bag.
“Is this really the way to go?” she asks.
“You’re not really here,” I say, and she isn’t. She’s only in my decaying mind. Ghosts aren’t real, they don’t exist, and I don’t need Kathy to deny this. In this moment, in the Real World, I’m suddenly unsure of what is real. God, life, death, misery-does any of it matter? Of course it does. Sometimes it’s just difficult to see how.
Tears dissolve on my face. I wipe them away with muddy fingers. I take the box out of the plastic bag and ball the bag up into my pocket. I gently lower the box into the hole. I figure the cardboard, the breast, hell, even my shorts will decompose after a while.
“Why did you let us die?”
“You don’t believe that,” I say.
“What do you believe, Charlie?”
“I believe that bad things happen for no reason. I really tried to save you.”
“It’s hard to believe anything when you’re dead.”
I close my eyes and grab hold of the moment on Monday morning when I drove past the pasture and found Cyris’s van missing. I knew he had to be heading to a hospital or a morgue. Both would ask questions so maybe he would head straight home. I told myself this over and over, but I knew I was lying because I put my foot to the pedal. I was lucky because there were few cars on the roads. Yeah, Monday was all about luck. It must have been, because in the end I found the missing van. The only problem was where I found it. It was parked outside Luciana’s house.