“Do you have the mirror?”

“I told you last night, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Who’s the fairest of them all?”

“Mattie.”

“Mattie. Not Christine.”

The silver-plated mirror was heavy in her jacket pocket, covered by the brown bag.

She looked back at Christine’s grave. The ravens were hopping along the ground, searching the grass for insects and worms. Nasty birds. But at least they were moving away from her baby.

A truck pulling a small flat-bed trailer stopped at the gate. On the trailer sat a stand-behind lawn mower and several gas-powered Weed Eaters. A man got out of the truck and pushed the gate wide. He waved to Renee.

“He sees you,” Renee said.

“He thinks you’re talking to yourself.”

“Wish me, then,” came the voice. “Wish me the money.”

“Why can’t you face me?” She glanced back at the groundskeeper, who was ignoring her, busy checking the fuel levels in his machines.

 A shuffle of leaves came from within the thick stand of vegetation, the sound moving away from Renee and closer to the vine-clotted wall. Renee stooped and surveyed the ground beneath the lower branches. A worn path appeared to run just inside the perimeter of the wall. Cigarette butts and two crushed and dirty beer cans lay in the weeds. She took a deep breath, wondering if she could force herself to crawl through the narrow opening, where bugs and spider webs and dirt and thorns awaited.

The groundskeeper started his lawnmower and the gargle of the four-stroke engine drowned out whatever words the hidden stranger might have said. The three ravens lifted into the air, and with a crisp flapping of wings they soared over the thicket and settled on the roof of the strip mall. A stagnant puddle of water stretched across the wrinkled tar roof. On the water’s surface, the sky was reflected, the thin silver clouds floating, the sun suspended, two seemingly endless worlds meeting in the face of a mirror.

She pulled the mirror out of her pocket, looked into it, and saw Mattie. Her racing heart fluttered, skipped a beat then thundered on toward its eventual finish line.

“Who’s the fairest of them all?” Jacob shouted.

Her hand clenched around the mirror handle. She forced herself to look at the reflection again. Nothing but her wild, glittering eyes, hair as crazy as that of a rubber Halloween mask’s, mouth creased with anxiety. She touched her hair, tried to smooth it straight, then gave up and slipped the mirror back into her pocket.

“Wish me,” she yelled into the thicket. The lawnmower was coming close on its first lap around the cemetery, the blade trimming to putting-green closeness. The mower would soon be rolling over Christine, disturbing her sleep. She would awaken crying. She would need a blankie and a snuggle, “Hush Little Baby,” her mother’s breast.

Renee stepped back a few yards and the man on the lawnmower rode past her, lifting one gloved hand and nodding, the machine throwing clippings into the thicket. He was wearing headphones, his boots and jean cuffs stained green. The smell of cut grass filled Renee’s nostrils, irking her allergies. The mower roared onward and soon the man disappeared behind the mausoleum and the far side of the hill. In the relative quiet, Renee called into the thicket again. “Wish me, Jacob.”

“Wish me the fire didn’t happen.”

At her feet, a greasy earthworm stretched itself toward the shade, carrying off bits of the buried dead. Renee shut her eyes and pulled the brown paper bag from her pocket. “I brought the money.”

The lawn mower buzzed over the hill, following the inside curve of the far wall. The groundskeeper was hunched over the handles, oblivious to everything but whatever amplified audio source was bombarding his ears.

“Throw it to me,” Jacob said.

Renee peered into the tangled growth, trying to spot movement. She twisted the bag into a denser package and hurled it with all her strength. It landed against a hemlock, caught in the branches for a second, then vanished into the shadows. Renee knew this was her best chance, but her knees were weak, and she felt like a skeleton shivering on an October wire.

She was afraid to see her husband, afraid of what he’d become.

“Is this all?” he said.

“All that’s left.”

“I need more.”

“Jacob, you don’t have to—”

“I’m not fucking Jacob, all right?”

“Please, honey.”

“Wish me.”

“Let me get you some help. This has been hard on both of us. Dr. Rheinsfeldt—”

“Wish me, goddamn it.”

Tears stung Renee’s eyes. Grief caused one kind of crying, anger brought on another. Hopelessness brought a third kind, a clear, sulfuric emission that was more akin to bleeding than weeping.

“Wish you what?” she whispered over the distant hum of the mower.

“Wish me a million dollars so we can live happily ever after.”

“Jacob, please.”

She brought the mirror from her pocket, afraid to look into its surface. The mirror lied. Mattie and Christine had both been the fairest. Tied for first, the most beautiful princesses in all the kingdom. They should both be reflected in that mirror, and they deserved to have lived happily ever after.

“Jacob,” she called. “Come by the apartment. I’ll give you the rest.”

The lawn mower had completed its circuit and was making a return path toward Renee. She could think of no reason to continue standing there. Jacob wouldn’t come out. He was hiding because he was ashamed. He had lost face in more ways than one.

The fire, the new pink skin of his cheeks and forehead, his raw nose, the eyelashes that were singed short and stunted. Jacob had died in that fire as surely as Mattie had. She needed to bring his new incarnation back from the ashes, a reluctant phoenix. That was her only remaining purpose, her last chance at redemption.

In the end, it always came down to the selfish need to mortgage your own sorry soul.

“Wish me, Jacob,” she shouted, voice cracking.

The lawn mower came closer, roaring like a swarm of man-eating bees, its exhaust hanging blue and pungent in the air. The groundskeeper eyed her, slowed the mower as it approached, shouted “Are you okay?”

She nodded. Grief. Playing a role to fit the surroundings.

We all wear masks, all the time, happily every after. Wish me not to be in my daughter’s graveyard.

The man adjusted his headphones, hit the throttle, and accelerated across the grass. Exhaust rose, bitter and gray. The mower lurched toward the mausoleum, weaving between the oldest rows of markers. The smoke settled, thick as a battlefield’s.

The smoke. Gray now. Surrounding her. Gushing from the thicket.

The woods were on fire.

“Jacob!”

The first bright flames leapt from the evergreen branches, leaf litter crackling, the wind lifting the smoke and pushing it across the earthen beds of the dead. Renee thought she heard a final “Wish me,” or it may have been the roaring echo of an earlier fire, one whose embers glowed deep and red and ceaseless inside her heart.

 

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Carlita had taken Joshua’s virginity at the age of fourteen, the same age at which Jacob had discovered the brutal numbness of alcohol.

On the backside of a hill on the southern corner of the Warren Wells property, a row of cramped mobile homes housed the Mexicans who worked the Christmas tree farms, spraying pesticides and planting seedlings to replace the spruces and Fraser firs that had been harvested in previous years. Many of the workers had temporary agricultural visas, enduring thirty-hour bus rides each season to earn American dollars. Illegal aliens were cheaper and never complained about working conditions, so the papers were often passed to different hands if a worker said “No mas” and caught an early bus back to Guadalajara.

“Who the hell can tell a Jose from a Joaquin?” Warren Wells used to say in his unassailable logic. “They’re all brown beaners to me.”