The man at the altar cleared his throat and began to speak. He was black, and I assumed he must be the Reverend Wyland that Ellen had spoken of. His voice was low and it filled the church like hot fudge poured over ice cream, melting into every nook and cranny of the place. He opened the service with Psalm 23 and I thought once again that if a more reassuring ten sentences existed, I’d never heard them.
He spoke for only a few minutes. What is there to say, really, about someone who was buried three years ago? There was no mention of Nicky’s secret life as Reed Tolliver, or of the circus. It was as though the last three years hadn’t existed, and I wondered if that was a conscious choice on the part of the Bellingtons, or a suggestion from Reverend Wyland.
Fifteen minutes after we’d sat down, John Lennon’s “Imagine” started up and we all stood, followed the coffin as it was carried out on the shoulders of six men, and filed out of the church and made our way to the gravesite.
The cemetery was a sprawling mass of rolling hills and low-hanging trees, offering plenty of shady places to sit and contemplate life in the land of the dead. I found a deserted bench and sat, resting as I watched the mourners make their way to the grave. The Bellingtons hadn’t procured a second site after all; they’d simply dug up Nicky’s original grave and removed the empty coffin, to make room for the full one.
I inhaled deeply. The smell of grass recently cut hung in the air, heavy as a blanket, and in the distance, in some unseen part of the cemetery, a lawn mower roared to life. Above me, the sky was clear save for one cloud, elongated like a stretched-out athletic sock, gray on the bottom, white on the top. On the ground, by my shoe, a small snail slid across the dirt, leaving a trail of slime in its wake. Its shell was the size of a quarter and I watched as its tiny antennae quivered in the air. The snail was a specimen millions of years in the making, its sole protection a thin casing no thicker than my fingernail.
A miracle, in and of itself, and I watched it make its way slowly toward the shade of the bench, each millimeter a triumph of perseverance.
“Want some company?” a voice chirped behind me. I turned around and nodded at the young woman.
“Sure.”
Tessa sat next to me, rearranging her long crimson skirt so it hung straight. She wore a short-sleeved cardigan open over a black top, and a thick gold chain that hung down and came to rest just past her breasts.
Out of the corner of my eye, I studied her. I saw no traces of the angry woman who’d been at the police station, or of the hyper-friendly woman who’d visited me at home, or even of the active acrobat I’d watched yesterday.
Instead, she seemed small and sad and lonely. She played with the pendant on the chain, a gold coin that flashed in the sunlight as she twisted it with her right hand.
I was starting to think maybe she had multiple personalities, and then I remembered being in my early twenties, and the angst, and the awful feeling of not knowing your place in the world, and I decided she was probably absolutely normal.
She’d also just attended her boyfriend’s funeral. There was no acknowledgment of Tessa from the reverend or the Bellingtons, and I wondered if they even knew Nicky had spent the last few months of his life with a pretty and talented young woman who loved him.
“That’s lovely, your necklace,” I offered.
She lifted it and looked at it, then let it drop back to her chest.
“I suppose. My parents gave it to me on my sixteenth birthday. They gave it to me, and I gave them court documents to sign to emancipate me.”
“Was it really that bad?”
She shrugged. “What’s bad? We had food to eat, and clothes on our back, and no one hit me. They put every spare nickel they could into my gym training, and then my bar training. I was their princess. But I knew I was only going to go so far on their dime, in little old Keylock, Idaho.
“Once they signed off on the papers, I couldn’t get out of that trailer fast enough. Without their financial support, I was free to get all sorts of training fees waived, and scholarships, too. And then Papa Joe came along, and well, you know the rest,” she continued. “Now I do everything I can to make sure I’ll never live in poverty again. Hence, all the classes I’m taking, the finance and accounting stuff. I feel like if I can understand how money works, how it really works in the real world, I’ll be that much more ahead of the game.”
I nodded and looked back at the gravesite.
I saw Terence and Ellen Bellington take up places next to the raised coffin. They stood on either side of Annika; all three dressed in black. In front of them, Frank Bellington sat in his wheelchair. Across from the Bellingtons, Darren Chase took a place next to Paul Winters, the founder of the Forward Foundation, the group that had been camping together when Nicky had gone over Bride’s Veil.
The men hugged, and then Darren patted Paul on the back.
I hadn’t realized they were friends.
Whenever I saw Paul Winters I thought of that actor, the one that played George Costanza on Seinfeld, whose real name I could never recall. Paul was short, rotund, and wore wire-rimmed glasses. He was balding on the top of his head-round as a cue ball and rapidly getting sunburnt-but wore the rest of his dark hair in a tidy ponytail that reached his collar.
I watched as Paul leaned toward Darren and spoke into his ear. Darren murmured something in response and then clapped Paul on the back again. The older man had eschewed a suit; instead, he wore dark slacks and a gray short-sleeved dress shirt with a red bolo tie. When he lifted his hand to push his slipping glasses back up the bridge of his nose, his massive watch caught the sunlight and reflected it like a solar panel. The thing was the size of a cell phone and I’d have bet serious money it was fully loaded with every accoutrement you could hope to get into a watch.
I didn’t know much about Paul.
He made a bucket of cash in the dot-com boom and was lucky enough to pull out before Silicon Valley went bust. He tooled around South America for a few years, starting up but never completing schools for orphans, and somehow found his way to Cedar Valley. He’d been here less than a year before opening the Forward Foundation.
Tessa interrupted my thoughts. “Gemma, what do you hope for, most of all, in the whole world?”
She’d resumed playing with her pendant, and her fingers slid the pendant up and down the gold chain, back and forth. I started to answer and then stopped, really considering her question.
What did I hope for, most of all, in the whole world?
“Well, I think hope is a funny thing. It’s not quite want, is it? And it’s not quite desire, either. I guess what I wish for, really, is probably the same as most people. I want my life to count for something good.”
Tessa watched the crowd at the gravesite. “I get terrible insomnia sometimes. I lie in bed and all these thoughts spin around in my head, so fast, and I can’t sleep. I lie there and think and think and think. I just want to be somewhere I can stop thinking. Stop worrying about my routine, my future, having to move back to Keylock, living with my parents in their two-bedroom trailer, failing.”
How do you tell a twenty-two-year-old that the worries only get worse?
You don’t, unless you are the cruelest kind of person.
“Tessa, you seem to have a good head on your shoulders. I think you’ll do fine,” I said. “But, there’s something I want to ask you, and I have a feeling you’re not going to like it. But I’d like the truth, here, right now, just the two of us, woman to woman, okay?”
She looked up at me.
“I heard that Lisey moved out of the cabin. What’s going on with you two? I hear one thing from you, and something else from her,” I said.
I paused and then added, “To be honest, I’m not quite sure who to believe.”
Tessa’s face flushed and she stood up. “What did she say about me? Did she tell you I was a liar? That I’m psycho? She is such a bitch.”