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“Lydia?” Bristal says cautiously, her voice eerie in the dark. “You okay?”
“Yeah . . . I just landed—” I fall silent, realizing. “Could you maybe get the light?”
Bristal moves without talking and I see the light swing back around toward me a moment later, as I’m coming to my knees. I grab a branch and haul myself upright, the light blinding me for a moment.
“Sorry,” Bristal says, moving the beam away from my face and toward my feet, where water has gathered. It whirls in dirty pools where my hands had been, dead leaves spinning on the surface.
“Do you think?” I ask, and Bristal hands me the light.
“Only one way to find out,” she says. Bristal digs, and I hold the light.
She moves the water first, letting it pool inside the shallow basin of the shovel, then tossing it aside, occasionally splattering my legs. But even though I’ve fallen twice, she’s soon way filthier than me, sinking deeper into the muck as she digs. The rain has let up, but it still flows through the ground, backfilling almost as fast as she can empty the ever-widening hole. Bristal is working methodically, the pile of mud beside the hole growing. She eventually strips off her jacket, sweating despite the chill, and steam rises off her skin visibly as I hold the light on her as she works. The shovel makes a sucking noise every time she pulls mud from the ground, and her breathing becomes labored before long.
“Want me to take a turn?” I ask.
“Nah,” she says, driving her foot onto the top of the shovel and tossing out a hefty wad of wet soil. “Shoveling isn’t as easy as it looks. You actually have to know what—”
There’s a splitting noise, and Bristal’s hands go still, her eyes wide in the brightness of the flashlight.
“Bring that over here,” she says, her voice flat. I come closer to the hole she’s standing in, the beam trailing down the muddy handle of her shovel to the rusted head—and a curl of dark, human hair erupting from the ground at the end of it.
“Oh fuck,” Bristal says, collapsing at the knees, and sitting down hard at the edge of the grave. “I think . . . I think I split her skull.”
“It’s okay,” I say grimly, leaning over the edge. I wiggle the shovel and delicately pull it free, then step gingerly down on either side of the patch of dark hair.
“Hold this.” I hand the light over to Bristal, who takes it with shaking hands.
“I felt it,” she says, her voice tremulous. “I felt the bone. When it hit the shovel it just . . . it cracked.”
“It’s okay,” I say again, pulling a pen out of my pocket. “Just hold the light still.”
I lift the curl of hair by the end of my pen and follow it down to the ground, pushing mud out of the way with my other hand.
“Lydia, I don’t know if you should—”
But I’m not listening. I drop the pen and push both hands into the muck, clearing a path down past the driven trough of Bristal’s shovel blade, moving handfuls of dirt aside until I see a bright flash of bone. I pull back, and Bristal leans forward, shining the light over my shoulder.
Under the spray of hair is a bright white spinal cord, the cervical vertebrae running like a ladder down into what’s left of a pinstriped shirt, with little blue roses.
“It’s okay,” Bristal says, echoing my words. But they’re not for me, and they’re not for her.
“It’s okay,” she says. “We found you.”
“Oh my God,” I say, my hand covering my mouth as the sobs start to come, panic hitching my lungs upward, then down, a vibration taking over my whole body as shock settles in.
“Shit,” Bristal says, digging in her pockets. “My phone must’ve fallen out when I was digging. Lydia, you need to call nine-one-one. Tell them—Lydia!”
But her impatience is cut off as her eyes follow mine to the road, where the single beam of a flashlight shines down on us.
“Girls?” a man’s voice calls. “What are you doing?”
Forty-One
I shade my eyes against the light, and he moves it, the beam bouncing off the grave at my feet.
“What are you doing?” he asks again, and without the rush of fear in my ears I recognize his voice.
“Dad?” I ask, relief bubbling over as I climb from the grave. “Dad!” I stumble upward.
