Summer of the Gypsy Moths (6 page)

G
eorge dropped us off and went to start the lawn. The first thing I did was waft a fresh coating of Febreze over Louise, spraying extra long, since I didn't think the manufacturers were considering decomposing bodies when they came up with the instructions. I pulled the door shut, hard.

Angel was in the kitchen, staring into the open refrigerator. She took a sleeve of American cheese out and peeled off a couple of slices, then passed it to me. “We missed breakfast. And lunch.”

I ate a piece, peering into the fridge next to Angel, and
started calculating. “She shopped on Wednesdays. She cut her coupons in the morning, then headed out before the specials ran out. That means we should have three more days of food.”

“More,” Angel figured. “Since she's not going to be eating her share.”

“It's still not much. There's not much here. Oh, wait. Her hurricane cupboard.”

Angel gave me a blank look.

“She used to say that anyone who lived on Cape Cod and didn't stock up in case of a hurricane was a fool. Sometimes she went down there when she needed a can of something. It's in the cellar, that's all I know.”

I found it: Next to the laundry, a cupboard with two shelves full of stuff: a tiny canned ham, a giant jar of peanut butter, crackers, maybe half a dozen cans each of tuna fish, beans, and tomatoes, and a five-pound tub of Crisco. There were candles and matches and batteries, too.

I ran back up, bringing the peanut butter. You can eat peanut butter for three meals a day. “We're not going to starve for a while,” I said. “Plus, there's her garden.”

Angel made a gagging face—she never ate anything green.

“Scurvy is a real thing, you know. It's not just sailors who get it.”

Angel rolled her shoulders. She pulled one of her never-ending supply of Dum Dums from her shorts pocket and stuck it in her mouth. She opened the freezer and poked at a red-and-white box.

“Not the coffee cake,” I said. “She keeps it there in case.”

“In case what? In case she dies and we're hungry?”

“No, in case someone stops by unexpectedly. Didn't you ever listen to her?”

“I tried not to,” Angel said. “Blah, blah, blah.” She pulled the coffee cake out.

“No,” I said, surprised at how strongly I felt. “We are not touching that. It was important to her. She liked to feel prepared.”

“She's dead,” Angel said, and ripped open the end of the box. “She probably wasn't too prepared about that.”

I reached for the box, but Angel yanked it back.

“Don't do it, Angel. I mean it.”

Angel eyed me then, trying to decide how far to fight. I set my jaw and folded my arms to let her know.

Angel looked down at the box. “The expiration date is January, anyway,” she said. “
Four years ago
January. She didn't get many unexpected visitors, I guess.” She tossed the box into the trash.

I picked it out and put it back into the freezer, my lips
pressed tight. Then I went back to studying the refrigerator. “There's a pound of hamburger in here. She always made chili on Sunday afternoons. I guess we should make chili.”

Angel snorted a laugh around the Dum Dum.

“What's so funny?”

“You're going to just
make chili
,” Angel said. “The kind you could actually eat.”

“Of course,” I said. “And you're going to help.”

I was wrong about that part. I handed Angel a couple of onions and told her to cut them up, and when she handed the cutting board back, the onions were in halves. With the skins on.

“You've never cooked before, Angel?”

Angel's chin shot up and her eyes narrowed.

“Never mind. You can watch.”

Angel picked a
Soap Opera Digest
out of the mail basket, hopped onto the counter, and began to read. But I noticed she kept stealing suspicious glances at my hands, as if I were dealing cards and she wanted to catch me cheating. I chopped onions and peppers and slid them into a big cast-iron frying pan with some oil. As I worked, I gave out helpful cooking tips I'd learned from my grandmother, but I made it sound as if I was just talking to myself. “If you keep onions in the refrigerator, they won't make you cry.”
Angel kept her head buried in the magazine, but I thought she nodded a little at that.

“Not too much garlic,” I went on, mincing a couple of cloves and adding them to the pan. “It can take over. Rubbing your fingers on stainless steel will get the garlic smell out—weird, I know, but it works. I read it in…never mind. Brown the hamburger after that.” Then I stirred in the tomatoes and beans. “Two big cans each,” I said, in case Angel didn't see it. “That's it.”

Angel slid off the counter and took two spoons from the silverware drawer.

“No, it has to cook now,” I explained. “For a couple of hours.”

Angel looked as if she was trying to figure out if I was kidding. Before I could explain the importance of simmering, there was a knock at the screen door. We jumped.

George again. We hadn't noticed the mower kick off. He was holding a shovel. “You're all set,” he said, setting it by the steps. “You two helped me out so much yesterday, I figured the least I could do was come back and dig those holes for you.”

Treb trotted up the steps then. He began to whine and nose the door. George shook his finger at him. “You're not going in, boy. That's the price you pay for rolling in seaweed. By the way, I piled it beside those holes for you girls.
Just fork it over the mounds when you're done working in your fertilizer.”

Treb scratched harder at the door. I shot a quick glance down the hall and shuddered. George ordered him down, and Treb obeyed, but you could tell it nearly killed him. He stared through the screen with his head cocked as if he couldn't believe what he was smelling. Now and then he broke his gaze to look up at George as if to say, Don't you want to
roll
in that? He gave a final scrabble at the door and then lay down with his head on his paws and looked up at us, whimpering at the injustice.

Angel came up behind me. “Well, thanks, George,” she said brightly. “Good-bye!”

But George didn't take the hint. He brushed the grass clippings off his pants and then opened the screen door with a
“Stay!”
warning to Treb and stepped inside. He lowered his head and pointed a finger at me. “You,” he said.

“Me?”

“Eight mousetraps, all sprung. Not a mouse in a one of 'em. You know anything about that?”

I raised my hands in surrender, relieved. Angel stared between George and me.

“I figured,” George said with a smile. “Soft heart for the underdog, runs in the family. Okay, I give up—your underdogs can have the cottages this year.” He sniffed.
“Smells good.” He crossed to the stove and nodded over the bubbling pot. “Louise makes some fine chili. She must be feeling better if she got up and cooked.”

Angel and I stared at each other.

“Gotta be tough on crutches. Guess it wiped her out. Must be why I couldn't raise her.”

Now we stared at George.

“I saw her through the window as I was coming in. I waved, but then I could see she was conked out. Dead to the world.”

Angel found her voice first. It was shaky, though. “She is. Dead to the world. Exactly. So…” She gave a meaningful look at the door.

“I brought my screwdriver,” George said, completely ignoring Angel's meaningful look. “I've been promising to fix that towel rack in the bathroom for weeks. Once the boat goes back in tomorrow, I won't have the time, so I'll just do it while I'm here. I'll be quiet—”

My voice came back then. Loud. “No!”

It was George's turn to stare.

“Stella is just remembering the big school project we have to do,” Angel said. “It's due tomorrow. Stella can't work if there's someone in the house.” If lying were a sport, this girl would have a neckful of gold medals. Angel grabbed the door again and swept her hand as if George
were already walking through. “So, bye, thanks.”

George finally gave up. “Well, then,” he said. “You're all set for Saturday. You have Louise call me if she needs anything.”

“Thanks again!” Angel said, shutting the door on him.

We went over to the window and watched him get into his truck with Treb and drive off. “That guy is trouble,” Angel said.

“He's really nice.”

“Oh, he's nice, all right,” Angel agreed. “But he's
in love
with her.”

“With who? Louise?”

Angel nodded as if she'd never been surer of anything in her life. “Oh, yeah. He has all the signs. All these projects he does for her? Mowing her lawn? The towel bar? Please. Any excuse to hang around here. He's drawn to her like a moth to a flame. I can't believe I didn't figure it out before.”

“What should we do?”

“We'll have to put out the flame. Duh.”

“She's dead, Angel. That pretty much puts out the flame. I mean what are we going to do about him coming around? He told me he'll come every weekend to mow and take the renters' garbage. How long before he gets suspicious about not seeing her?”

Angel thought for a minute. “I know,” she said at last.
“We'll give her a boyfriend.”

The image of Louise's lolling off her recliner flashed in front of me. “That might be kind of hard at this stage,” I said.

“No,” Angel said. “That'll be easy. But first we'd better get her buried.”

G
eorge had dug three big holes in a row for us. Angel and I got to work shoveling out the earth between them. Twenty minutes later, we stood panting over a trench that was maybe two feet deep. We climbed down into it and set to work again. The ground became sandier, but loaded with rocks. After half an hour of solid digging, stopping only to wipe sweat and swat gnats, I thought the pit looked enough like a grave.

“Another foot deeper,” Angel insisted. “I'm telling you, that goat…”

More digging. The mound beside us grew. Finally, just
as the sun began to fall toward the tree line, Angel dropped her shovel. “Let's go get that pumpkin.”

We climbed out of the pit and went in.

“Well,” Angel said. She didn't take a step into the den, though.

“Well,” I said. I grabbed the Febreze and gave Louise another good spraying, but I didn't go in either. I stood next to Angel, trying to judge how heavy my great-aunt might be. She wasn't tall, but whenever she heaved herself out of a chair, you could tell there was a lot of effort involved.

Angel made two fists and pumped her arms, like a wrestler. She dropped them and sighed.

“Right,” I said. We stood there some more.

“This is ridiculous,” Angel said. She marched into the room and went behind Louise's recliner and gave it a shove. “Well, I can move her,” she said. “But I can't look at her.” She pulled the throw from the back of the couch and flung it over Louise.

It made all the difference, not having to look at what had happened to Louise. I joined Angel behind the recliner, and together we pushed it to the doorway. We steered Louise down the hall and into the kitchen—it was surprisingly easy, and I thought, Well, there's a nice benefit to keeping your floors waxed. I kept this to myself, of course.

And then there we were at the back door. Which the recliner was too wide for.

“I've got an idea,” Angel said.

She left, and I stayed with Louise. Even though she was under the throw and couldn't have seen anything, and even though she was dead, for heaven's sake, I was glad that her last view on earth was of the golden light of sunset pouring over those blueberry bushes she was so proud of. I liked it that there was a pot of chili simmering beside her in her own neat kitchen. “This is what you want, too, isn't it? You didn't want us to call the police and be taken away, right?” I was surprised to find that it didn't feel weird to talk to a dead person. I only wished she could answer.

I gave the chili a stir, then turned the flame down even lower. “Probably not as good as yours,” I admitted.

I heard the scrape of furniture being moved, and then Angel was back, dragging the braided rug from the den. “Her magic carpet,” she explained. We tugged the chair back enough to unroll the rug out on the step.

Angel and I looked at each other. She bent to Louise's feet and gestured that I should get her arms. We turned our heads and tried not to breathe.

“One…two…
three
,” she counted.

And we heaved.

For a minute, it looked like we'd overshot and Louise
would go tumbling over the steps. But she rocked back onto her side, and Angel and I let out our breaths. We stepped over her and each grabbed an edge of rug and tugged her off the landing. “Sorry,” I whispered at each bump.

The path through the middle of the garden was fairly smooth, but it wasn't designed to drag a body down. It took both of us straining together to make any progress at all, and within minutes we were dripping with sweat and gasping for breath. The mosquitoes came out and decided this was just how they liked their dinner.

After what seemed like an hour of dragging, we reached the trench. “One, two,
three
,” Angel called again. We took one edge of the rug and lifted. Louise wobbled at the lip for a minute, as if she were having second thoughts about all this, but then with an extra push we sent her rolling softly into the pit, her jewelry making tiny jangles as it slid in with her. We dropped the rug in, and it fell over her with a hushed thud.

I turned to the heaps of fresh earth behind me, and my arms went numb.

Not Angel. She filled a shovel with dirt and tossed it into the grave without looking. And then another and another.

I touched Angel's arm. “Hold on.” I went inside and looked around Louise's room for something that I could bury with her. I settled on the picture of her with my
grandmother, the one with the tarnished frame. I went back out and knelt beside the grave and dropped it in.

“What's that for?” Angel asked.

“I don't know,” I admitted. “Company, I guess.”

After that, I could cover her up. It was hard work. We shoveled and raked, but that hole didn't seem to get any fuller for the longest time. At least when true evening fell, the mosquitoes gave up, but by then we were covered with bites under the sweat and dirt.

At last the grave was filled. We piled the rest of the dirt up into three smooth mounds over where George had dug the holes. Angel raked the seaweed around the mounds. Then she brushed her hands together as if she was finished. “Let's go eat some chili,” she said.

“We can't just go in, Angel. We have to say something.”

Angel turned back to the grave with her hands on her hips. “Jeez, I hope she's deep enough,” she said. “Otherwise, every dog in Barnstable County…”

“Not like that! Something to lay her to rest.”

“Why do we have to say anything? We're not really burying her, not that way. This is temporary, Stella.”

“Temporary?”

“When your mom gets here, we'll have to explain things. And then people will come, and…do whatever. Right?”

I realized I hadn't wanted to think about that part, but
I nodded. “I guess.” But it didn't feel right. “No. She and my grandmother only had one brother, and he was killed in Vietnam. There's no one else to do this. We have to say something.”

“Fine,” said Angel. She nodded over the fresh dirt. “Rest in peace. I hope you…you know…rest in peace.”

“Not
to
her, Angel! You say something
about
her. Something good you remember about the person. Don't you know anything about funerals?”

Too late I realized what my mean, cramped-hearted self had said. Angel knew a lot about funerals.

Angel glared at me, fury gathering up like a volcano. “Who put you in charge of everything?” she spat. “I didn't know her. I don't have any good memories of her. She didn't care about me, and I didn't care about her. She's yours—you say something!” She stormed off down the path and disappeared into the house with a door slam.

Suddenly, it was so quiet there in the darkening garden, with just a few chirping crickets and the soft rustle of oak leaves beside me. The yellow light spilling from the house seemed to beckon me inside, but the thought of comfort made me feel guilty.

I turned back to the dark mounds of earth. The grave; it was a grave now. I shuddered at how real that word made things. Under this dirt was the body of my great-aunt. A
real person who had been alive just two days ago. She'd had no idea this was coming; she was just planning on a regular day doing regular things. She had punched the microwave extra hard in front of me Friday morning but then thought about things and dredged up a good memory of my mother and promised to teach me how to make a pie. She had packed us lunches and sent us off to school and stirred cream into her coffee and thought, Good, now I've got an hour with the
Today
show before I have to start my chores, and then had never made it back into her kitchen to put that cream away.

She had been a real person, and now she was really dead. What made that seem the saddest was that Angel had been right—we had never really known her. I had no good memories to share either.

I thought back to my grandmother's service, to how many people had stood up and told stories about her and said how much she had meant to them.

“I'm sorry I didn't try harder to find any connections between us,” I whispered into the quiet. “I'm sorry about everything, about you dying—I hope that didn't hurt. I didn't know about your heart. I wish you'd told me. I'm sorry I didn't carry all those bags for you—maybe if I had…Well, I'm sorry about you having to be out here like this. But at least it's in your garden, near your blueberries.”

I looked over at them then: dozens of bushes that even in the dark were ripening up their berries for Louise's blue-ribbon pies. And then I knew just what to say.

I faced the bushes as though they were a crowd of mourners. “When I first got here, I looked out at this backyard from my bedroom window, and I didn't think much of it. The ground was brown and scruffy, and all that grew for a lawn were a few patches of tough grass that were brown and scruffy, too. It looked to me as if the world's biggest mangy dog had laid himself out back to catch a little sun, with more bald patches than fur. You wouldn't see a yard like this in
House and Garden
magazine, that's all I'm saying.”

I glanced up at the house, hoping that Angel would hear me and change her mind and come out. She didn't, so after a minute, I went on.

“But Louise was always out here doing something, and when she was inside, she was reading gardening magazines. Friday she told me about her blueberry bushes, and how proud she was of them. Of you. She kept pictures of her pies on her refrigerator, did you know that? I figure someone who cared that much about growing things was a good person.” Then I said “Amen,” because even though my mother never let me set foot in a church, I knew that much.

I started to head in. But something about those blueberry
bushes, huddled together in the darkness, made me pause.

I was nine when my grandmother died, old enough to read the obituary in the newspaper.
She leaves behind a daughter, Margot, and a beloved granddaughter, Stella.
I'd stared at our names in print and felt exposed, as though our left-behindness was a shame on public view. At the funeral, I imagined everyone was seeing us that way. Her left-behinds.

These blueberry bushes. They were Louise's left-behinds. Without her, they were probably going to become a wild tangle; then after a while they'd stop growing. They'd wilt, and shrivel up, and die.

I knew how it felt when the one person tending you disappeared.

“Louise asked me to help her take care of you. She's gone, so I guess it's all up to me now. You are my
destino
, or whatever Angel said the word was. My destiny,” I promised out loud. “You can count on me.”

 

Inside, I found Angel hunched over a mug full of chili. I ran water and squirted dish soap over my hands. “Um…Angel?”

Angel raised a warning palm to me without looking up.

“Rewind, okay? I'm sorry. That was a dumb thing I said.”

“The phone's on the counter. Call someone who cares.”

I dried my hands and sat down across from her.

She got up and slammed her mug down next to the stove. “We just have to survive the summer without getting caught,” she said, her words thrown over her shoulder. “This isn't an episode of
Friends
. Got it?” She slapped some more chili into the mug, letting it spatter over the counter, then left the room with it.

I looked over at the phone. I did want to call someone who cared. But I didn't know who that could be. I put the chili in the refrigerator without eating any, because my stomach hurt.

 

People's sleeping sounds are like fingerprints.

Louise had been easy to keep track of. Her snoring was loud and steady, except for when she snorted herself awake every now and then. My grandmother had been a steady snorer, too, but it was a soft, easy whuffling. My mother—who was the reason I learned to listen in the first place—didn't make any breathing sounds at all, but she whimpered all night, as if in her dreams someone was always being a little mean to her.

Angel didn't snore or whimper, but every once in a while I'd hear a small, quick rustling of the sheets. I somehow knew she was scissoring her feet around, like a dog
with a dream. I'd sit up in my bed, straining to hear it over Louise's snoring, and then when I did, I'd lie back again thinking, That girl's here, but she wants to run.

The night we buried Louise, I woke up around midnight as usual and lay still, listening for Angel's rustle. What I heard instead was rain. It took a minute to remember what had happened earlier in the night. I lay in my bed for as long as I could, trying not to imagine the rain washing away the dirt we'd shoveled over Louise. That was crazy, that couldn't happen. But then I gave up and went over to the window.

A full moon lit the backyard silver, so bright the trees threw clear shadows on the ground. But I still
heard
rain—not a soft, gentle rain, but a sharp pattering that made me shiver. I lifted the screen and stuck my hand out to be sure: It was not raining. I listened harder; now the sound was more like chewing—the sound a million angry bees might make if they had sharp teeth. I looked over to the garden, to the fresh, dark mounds of dirt over Louise.

I ran back to my bed and crushed a pillow to each ear.