Full Force

In the end, I let him have the hill.

I want to be honest about that. I had said what I thought. I had stood in my mother's office with the cassette hissing behind me and told a detective sergeant with thirty years on the force that he was walking into a stage built for him. I'd been polite. I'd been clear. And Frank Dunleavy had listened to me with his hat in his hands and his eyes on the floor, and when I was done he had said, gently, "I hear you, Ms. Ostrander," in the voice of a man who has already decided.

Then I had looked at my daughter, and she had looked at me, and neither of us had said another word. Because I was a copyeditor and she was thirteen, and he was the one with the radios.

Perhaps he's right, I thought. Perhaps there's nothing in the world as safe as a hundred armed men.

It was a lovely thought. I held it all the way to Greywood.

…

By half past six the cemetery had been closed like a fist.

I watched it from the passenger seat of Dunleavy's car as we climbed the long road up from the river, and I couldn't take it in. It came at me in pieces. A dark sedan with its lights off, parked on a verge beneath a plane tree, two men in it, not talking. Another at the bend. Another in the mouth of a service lane, nose out. I counted eleven cars in the first half mile, all unmarked, all a plain nothing-color, with the mud-colored anonymity of vehicles that wish to be noticed by no one and are noticed by everyone. A van at the east gate with a satellite dish folded on its roof like a sleeping bird. A police horse trailer. Two dog handlers in dark coats, standing at the edge of the light with German shepherds on short leads. A man in a long gray overcoat with the small stiff walk of a plainclothes sniper, carrying a case the shape of a violin.

"Eyes on the slope," said Dunleavy, into the radio, in a flat dry voice. "Eyes on the pines. Nobody goes up that hill without being logged."

"Copy," said a dozen voices.

I looked out at the dark. I could see the pines rising on the ridge, black and enormous against a sky the color of a bruise, and I thought, with a sort of dull surprise, that every one of them had a man behind it.

"Isn't that a bit much?" I said.

"It's what it takes."

"Frank, you can see them from the road."

"That's the idea."

"I mean that he can."

Dunleavy didn't answer. He changed down for the grade. Beside me, in the rear, I heard June draw a breath, and let it out, and say nothing at all.

…

The west gate of Greywood Cemetery is an arch of black iron with a stone lintel and the single word REST spelled out in brass letters that have gone to verdigris. It opens on a gravel road that winds upward between ranks of monuments. A little lodge stands beside it, a squat brick hut for the caretaker. The window was dark. A hand-lettered card in the glass said BACK IN 10 MIN. I'd seen that card on every visit since I was fourteen. I don't believe the caretaker had ever come back.

They dropped me at the gate.

I stood on the gravel with a bunch of white chrysanthemums in my arm and my breath smoking and my heart beating in my ears. They were from a gas station on Lorain, three dollars, in a cone of green paper. I had chosen them because they were what my mother always brought. White ones, for the spring and the fall. She said white was the color of people who have nothing to say.

Behind my left ear, nestled in the fold, was a bead of plastic.

"Maren."

It was Dunleavy. The voice came from inside my skull, quite close, steady and low, as it had in the bank. "You're live. We have you on the gate cam and the slope cam. Take the route your mother took. Walk it as she would. If you remember a place she paused, pause. If you remember a turn she made, make it. Don't hurry."

"I won't."

"We've got you."

I started up the path.

…

It was a path I had walked a hundred times.

Not this one. Not at night. But the shape of it came back to me as my feet found it, as if my body had been waiting. The gravel crunched. The road bent left under a stand of black walnut. There was a stone angel with her wing chipped, and a family vault with an iron door and a wreath of dead roses, and a long straight avenue of cedars that led away to the right, toward the east slope and the newer stones. My father was there. My father was always there, in the polished ranks of the 1990s. And I turned my back on the avenue.

I turned left.

I did it the way my mother had. I let my feet remember. She had never gone to the cedars first; she had gone round by the west, along a narrow path under the dripping wall of a hemlock hedge, past a bench that nobody used. She had stopped at the bench every time. She had sat for a minute, with her bag on her lap, looking at nothing. She had said my feet. She had said there's more shade. I sat down on the bench now, in the cold dark, and put my flowers on my knee.

"Nothing yet," Dunleavy said in my ear. "Go on."

I went on.

The path climbed. It narrowed. The monuments grew older, plainer, more worn, and then tilted, and then did not look like monuments at all, but like teeth, a crooked mouth of gray stones, leaning out of the grass at every angle. This was the old section. Nobody had touched it in fifty years. Moss had eaten the names. Ivy hung from the headstones in heavy ropes. Here and there a stone had fallen outright and lay on its face in the weeds, a flat gray slab, a kind of door to nowhere. The air smelled of rot and wet earth and, faintly, of snow.

It was quiet. It was so quiet that I could hear the individual grains of gravel shift under my heel.

And then the pines began.

…

They stood above me in two long rows, enormous, black, centuries old, their trunks as thick as cars and their crowns lost in the dark. They had been planted when the cemetery was laid out, I think, in a double colonnade, for shade, and over the decades they had grown together overhead and met, so that the path ran under a vaulted roof of needles. It was darker there. It was colder. A wind had risen from somewhere on the hill, and it moved through the branches with a sound I have never forgotten.

It was not a roar. It was a whisper.

It came and went, high up, in long, soft, shushing waves, like a congregation murmuring the response to a prayer. It rose and fell and rose again. If I held my breath I almost thought I could make out words. Maren, it said, or marrow, or only more. I pulled my coat around me and walked faster. I told myself it was the wind. I told myself it was the needles. I told myself that I was a rational woman who read for a living, and that a cemetery was only a field with some rocks.

"Maren." Dunleavy, in my ear. "Slow down. You're out of sync."

"Sorry."

"What's the pace?"

"My mother's. I was trying—"

"Ease it. Stop at the stone. The old angel, on your right. Where she used to stop."

I stopped.

I stood in front of a tall gray angel with a broken nose, her wings folded, her hands crossed over a book. Her face was turned to the earth. The name beneath her had worn away. I stood before her in the dark with my flowers, as my mother had stood a hundred times, and I looked at her and felt nothing, and heard in the pines that slow soft rushing talk.

"Anything?"

"No," I said.

…

I should explain what I was doing, because it sounds absurd.

I was acting. For an hour, in the dark, in a field of the dead, I was playing a woman at a graveside. It was the stupidest and the bravest thing I have ever done, and I did it badly. I stood with my head bowed. I put out a hand and touched a stone, and drew it back. I looked up at the pines, then down at my shoes. Over my left shoulder, somewhere in the dark, a hundred and ten men watched a woman with a bunch of chrysanthemums pretend to remember where her mother liked to walk.

Look at me, I thought. Here I am. This is what you came for.

And in my ear, through the plastic bead, I could hear the world.

I could hear everything. That was what struck me. I had expected silence, a thread of voice now and then, a click. Instead there was a river of it, a constant clean clear chatter, a dozen voices bright and distinct as if each were speaking into my ear alone. Unit seven, east fence, all quiet. Unit nine, I've got movement on the ridge, no, a deer. Camera two, you're drifting left. Dog team four, hold position. Sniper three, confirm you have the angle on the third pine. Copy, third pine. Every detail. Every position. Every command, repeated twice, clear as a bell, in the dry flat trained voices of men who have done this before.

It was like listening to a man tell a story in a language I did not know, about a house I could see all the rooms of.

It's so clear, I thought.

It's so clear that anyone could hear it.

I did not know where the thought came from. It rose in me quite suddenly and sat there, small and cold, in the middle of my chest. Anyone. A man with a receiver, with a scanner, with a bit of wire. A man who had had the plan before we made it.

I looked up at the pines.

…

The old section lies at the deepest part of Greywood. You go through the pines and then down, into a hollow, a kind of bowl in the hillside where the ground falls away, and the stones are older, and the paths are not paths but sheep-tracks between the graves. It is a place where the wind does not come. I stood at the top of the bowl and looked down into it, and the whole dark hollow was blue with moonlight, and the headstones rose out of it like the backs of a school of fish.

A bell began to toll.

It was a long way off, from a church in the city, a single deep note. It tolled eight times. Eight. I counted. And I thought: it's eight o'clock, and nothing has happened. Nothing at all.

An hour had gone by. An hour of gravel and pines and bowed head. I had walked the whole of my mother's circuit, from the bench to the angel to the hollow, and nothing had moved. Nobody had come. No shot, no shout, no sudden figure out of the trees. The chatter in my ear had slackened. The voices were bored now. Nothing on four. Nothing on six. Nothing, nothing, nothing. A man laughed. Someone asked if there was coffee.

"Maren." Dunleavy's voice was softer. "Are you cold?"

"A little."

"Come back to the gate. We'll regroup."

"All right."

I turned. I started back up the path. My knees ached. My hands were stiff on the cone of paper, and the flowers were bruised and dripping. I thought of my father's grave on the east slope, the polished black granite, the carved lilies. I thought of my daughter, in a van somewhere behind the wall, with a screen in front of her, watching me walk.

It's nothing, I thought. It was a trick. A fishing line. They baited the hill to see who'd come, and nobody did, and so we've lost an hour. I was almost relieved.

And in my ear, very small and clear, a voice said, "Mom."

It was June.

She was whispering. I knew at once that she was not supposed to be on the channel. It was the hushed, quick, urgent whisper of a girl speaking behind her hand, and under the words I could hear the creak of a van seat and the faint mechanical hum of a monitor.

"Mom, don't stop walking. Don't turn around. Keep going like you're cold."

I kept walking. My heart began to pound.

"What is it?"

"It's Officer Pruitt." A breath. "The new one. Next to me. He's been asking me questions all night. About Grandma's road. What shape it was, and how long, and whether she ever stopped. He's very nice. He keeps giving me gum."

"June—"

"He's looking at the screen."

"So is everyone."

"No." Her voice was a thread. "Everyone else is looking at you, Mom. At the people on the screen. At the road. At the trees. They look around. They blink." A pause, a hair's breadth, so quiet I could hear the swallow in her throat. "He's looking at one square. Just the one. The one that's the gate. And he hasn't blinked."

I stopped dead on the path.

"He hasn't blinked once," whispered my daughter, "in six minutes."