When Tommy Lemolo was fourteen she broke her left leg playing school softball. It was a gruesome injury involving both her tibia and fibula.
“Never break a bone before? Looks like you have a special talent for it,” a vaguely cute Xray tech joked with her at the hospital as he wheeled her in for pictures. A healthy shot of morphine had placed Tommy in a state of serenity; it made people funnier and cuter than they might have been judged previously. It thickened her senses, therefore she did not register the look of deep concern on the tech’s face nor his change in attitude after he had viewed the first images.
A lot more pictures and concerned faces followed. Eventually Tommy learned the awful truth: Osteosarcoma. Bone cancer.
It cost Tommy her left leg at the knee and endless hours of chemotherapy. But she gained the “cure”– that is if “in remission” (a phrase Tommy found a bit non-committal) can be taken as a cure. For six years her checkups have returned clean, and she figured that once she passed the ten year mark she would be gold.
Still, you never know.
Tommy, however, learned that you could go through life as though it was an endless game of Russian roulette or just get on with it. One of the nurses who had lost a leg in a motorcycle accident said “Look at it this way kid, you will go through life stubbing only half as many toes.” Tommy figured that she wasn’t the first amputee to hear that from the same nurse. But it was a positive thing. Regardless, uplifting sentiments, bumper sticker slogans and spitting in the devil’s eye perkiness only get you so far. It renders down to living in fear, fretting over every bump and pain, just waiting, or getting on with it.
Tommy was all about getting on with it. She had stayed the night at Irene’s, as was her habit when the PDQ came out (although she only drank half a can–oddly fresh or otherwise, the stuff really was piss). She rose quietly a bit after six, and got ready for a run. Ever since her brush with death, Tommy was never tired upon waking. Even on slightly under four hours’ sleep she was ready to go. She loved to run in the early morning. The world was hers and she had room to think. She experienced the mornings and did not hide from it behind earbuds the way so many others did.
It was going to be a beautiful day. The air was cool and clean–there wasn’t a sluggish summer breeze carrying the high stink of garbage or the charnel stench of small deaths in the high grass. Tommy noticed that the cemetery’s main gate was already open, which was a happy surprise. Being inside New Town in the morning was like being under water, amongst the shadows of the yews and maples. Moreover, the circular path that was about a quarter mile in length went down then back up the face of the graveyard. It attracted many runners and dog walkers.
Tommy entered the cemetery and chose to run right. If she had gone left she would not have seen the corpse of Holly More propped up at the foot of the great maple because he was on the other side of it.
She ran and avoided the areas where the spray of the automatic sprinkler system overshot the grass and landed on the pathway. There were people who bitched about that sort of thing, but the getting on with it mindset does not linger on such inane matters. And as she hit her stride, Tommy’s mind flitted from subject to subject like a hummingbird.
“Weird Ellie coming out… ‘dreamt of a man and lady in the graveyard’… Dow Lady–why haven’t I ever seen her? Everyone else has…bastards Ha! Goddam snobby ghost–ha! Maybe a joke…naw…hey, who’s the fucker frying bacon while I’m being all healthy like–bastard–Ha!”
This line of thought stopped soon after Tommy had made the turn and was halfway up the hill. She saw some guy lying against the big maple tree. At first she went on “Yellow Alert.” Often homeless people would catch a bit of sleep inside the cemetery. Another thing Tommy had gained from her illness was compassion, but you could only have so much compassion when you are a young woman clad in running shorts and a tee shirt (fake leg withstanding) and there is no one else around.
At first she slowed down and waved. No reply. Upon drawing closer she saw he was out for the count. His body lay limp and his head was bowed. Closer still and she saw flies landing and departing from him.
“Hello?” she said, her trepidation set aside. Something told her he was dead. Still, young women in shorts and tees explore situations even after “something” gives them inside information. Then she saw the needle, the tubing, the dried trickle of dried blood, which (Tommy assumed) had attracted the flies. She knelt on her one real knee about five feet away from the man, and without taking her eyes off of him she extracted her phone from a compartment she had devised in her prosthetic (all kinds of shit in there–wallet, gum, smokes for healthy living, etc).
Tommy opened her phone and called 911. And although she had looked away from him for maybe half a second, when she looked back there was a ghost beside him. This was when time stopped for roughly seven seconds (only time can be stopped for an amount of itself; the eternal paradox). The wispy glimmer of a woman was obviously a ghost because people are not see through and are not like to hover above the ground as this individual did. Stunned, Tommy gazed at the ghost. The ghost finally laughed and said, albeit from what sounded like a very long distance, “You will remember everything.” Time resumed and when the operator said “911, what is your emergency?” the ghost vanished.
******
Emma, who, like Holly and the mind she referred to as Keeper, was centered in the great tree. She watched Tommy leave the house and enter the gate which Keeper had unlocked with a quick blue bolt of electricity a few minutes after sunrise. Apparently, Keeper had over-estimated the voltage necessary to unlock it–therefore that was one lock that would never work again–it leapt off the gate and lay in the grass, fused into a molten mess. Emma always found it amusing whenever the all powerful Keeper goofed. Stuff like that had happened before–once with even greater energy. Emma remembered a dead pine felled during a fierce storm in 1962. (She also got hit with a bolt of lightning that day and Dow Lady sightings were higher than ever for weeks). It appeared that it would crush the small Caretaker’s Cottage, and two City employees who had taken refuge there. Emma believed that Keeper’s intent was to nudge the thing out of harm’s way. Keeper was very spare with “her” resources and Emma understood that Keeper did not seek human attention. But instead of pushing the pine to one side with an electric “shove,” Keeper blew it into toothpicks. The concussion knocked out many windows, but the city employees were saved.
And although Holly was “there” as a tree spirit for lack of a better term, his mind had been sucked into a Legend–his energy ebbed at a low pulse and she figured that it would remain that way until sunset. Emma had always wondered how that went. “Do I vanish, or am I still in the tree?” For over seventy years, she had “kept the Legends” for Keeper, and today was the first time she hadn’t been sent into the life of one of the persons buried at New Town since her arrival in 1943.
It was a pleasant development, seeing the sun again with her own mind. Whenever Keeper culled electricity from storms and the air itself, She (meaning Keeper, again for a lack of a proper term) stored it, assumedly in the tree, which really was not a tree in the common sense. Emma had learned how to tap the power after she had been inadvertently hit by lightning in 1966 (something that Keeper had not arranged). She found that with a little practice she could “thinktoward” her shape and project it wherever she wanted to in the cemetery. Emma found it amusing to do this when Tommy appeared at the foot of the tree.
But there was also a necessity involved. Emma and Holly had twenty one days to make contact with Tommy and Irene (whom Emma had watched grow up, as she had “known” Elsbeth Allison nearly all her life as well). By the twenty-first of the month, a certain task must be accomplished. Emma had never directly communicated with Keeper, she was on the need to know basis, but she knew the outline of the situation if not yet the specifics.
Fortunately, Emma was very intelligent and despite being dead she could still learn new things. Every night when she returned from a Legend, the number that began as 25963 and reduced to zero in her mind as she died, went up by one. At sunset, after her final “dip” into a Legend, the number twenty-two entered her mind, and twenty-one did the same. Long long before, within her first week of odd conscription, Emma had figured that 25963 was how many days she had lived–from 20 May 1872 to 21 June 1943. She inferred that it must also be the number of days of her service.
What happened after that, she had no idea. But she had an idea and if it could happen it would be wonderful.
******
The aftermath of Holly More’s (supposedly) lonely death was well attended. Three police cars, two aid vehicles (featuring two nearly identical semi-cute EMT’s both with the same, haircuts Navy tattoos on their forearms. and (for no known reason) and a firetruck, all arrived soon after Tommy placed the call. She took advantage of the interval and went inside to fetch her sweat pants.
After six different cops (one of whom was a friend of her dad’s) had asked Tommy essentially the same questions, she figured that she had been “cleared” from the suspects’ list–as though there were any other except for what was in the needle.
Irene had been in a state of semi-consciousness when Tommy darted into her room and told her there was a “deadguyinthecemeteryandaghostohmygod.” Tommy was in and out of the room in sweats within two seconds, three tops. Irene was much coffee and at least two cigarettes away from making sense of what Tommy had told her.
Slowly, Irene rose and peeked through the blinds on her bedroom window and saw a procession of emergency vehicles pull up to the main gate of the cemetery. Although a bit sluggish without adequate levels of the substances she was addicted to in her system, Irene figured what Tommy told her probably had something to do with it.
“What happened?” she asked Tommy, meeting her at the gate about twenty-five minutes later. Gram was still sleeping. Irene almost brought the baby monitor speaker, but she recalled its sudden death. Besides, it was out of range anyway. She toted a comically large gas station coffee cup instead. She offered some to Tommy, who accepted.
“I was running and found a dead guy against the tree–had a needle in his arm,” Tommy said. “I also saw the Dow Lady.”
“That’s a bit of a news overload for a Tuesday morning,” Irene said, lighting the day’s second cigarette. “Um, dead guy and the Dow Lady?”
“I really saw her–and I just found this.”
Tommy pulled up her left pant leg and opened the compartment in her prosthetic. She made sure no one was looking then showed Irene a lump of metal that somewhat resembled a padlock, and stashed it back inside.
“Whazzat?”
“The gate was unlocked. Figured it was still open from yesterday–too early otherwise.”
“That the lock?”
“Duude, I do wish you’d wake up quicker.”
“Awake enough to know about withholding evidence.”
“You watch too much CSI.”
“How come you hiding it then?”
“The Dow Lady,” Tommy said, as though it explained everything.
The driver of a white van lightly beeped his horn because the girls were in his way.
“Sorry,” Tommy said, quickly dropping the leg of her sweatpants to cover the lock.
“That’s the coroner,” Irene said. “Same guy who picked up Mrs. Lonney a couple years back.”
“Who?”
“You remember her–she lived over in that little brown house…Mars bars on Halloween…had the weird little dog named Barfy.”
Irene remembered that there had been some talk about bring Barfy on board after Mrs. Lonney’s death (which happened at least two days before she was discovered). Fortunately, one of her sons took him in. There were few animals that Irene didn’t love on sight, and Barfy was one of them. He was a small Heinz 57 of some sort, and a mean little bastard at that, always nipping, always making noise.
“Her? That was hella long ago,” Tommy said. “Sixth grade.”
Emma listened to the girls (in her mind they would always be the girls, as was Elsbeth). Even though she was several hundred feet away, she could “thinktoward” any conversation or person in the cemetery; it was the same as being there.
And although she could see the area surrounding New Town, she had no power to reach beyond what was obviously an artificial habitat. Irene was being an irritant because she kept stepping in then out of the cemetery. But she was able to infer from Tommy’s replies that the conversation, save for the lock and the sighting of herself, was fairly inane.
“Are these guys done with you?” Irene said. “I probably should make sure Gram’s still alive.” She said nothing about the dead man, but she knew he would bound into her mind later, as most sad things did when she was alone. It was getting to be a hard world in which dead people were found lying about almost monthly, in a town of under forty-thousand. Harder still was acknowledging she was building a standard complacency to such news; although overdosing was old news, doing it in the graveyard was something new.
Irene’s little morbid jokes helped her survive, but they also carried a pang that disconcerted below the level of mention. It was something that had to refill, like a cistern, before it elicited any comment.
“Think so,” Tommy said.
As they crossed the street and out of Emma’s reach, Tommy’s left leg began to hum.
“Your phone’s making weird noises.”
“No,” Tommy said, “it’s in my front pocket–goddam what is it?” She bounded up the stairs to the porch swing, sat and opened the compartment. The lock was buzzing, like a June beetle.
“Don’t touch it,” Irene said.
“Like hell, I won’t–fucker’s in my leg,” Tommy said. She reached for it, hesitantly, and when she touched it the noise ceased. “Wow, it’s warm,” she said, holding the lock up to show Irene, who touched it.
“Ow, fucker–” Irene said because she had been hit with a bolt of static electricity. “How come it didn’t zap you, ya lucky bastard?”
“Because she’s still dead in some places,” something said in Irene’s mind.
And for the second time in one morning, time, again, was stopped for an interval of its own self. This “time” it paused for seventeen seconds. Keeper had run up a time debt during her activities and it was necessary to pay the interest, like that on a credit card, now and again–though really just now–an endless now of sorts.
For Irene, upon the shock everything was still. Tommy was still holding the lock, frozen in place. A large Monarch butterfly was suspended in the air and was a pair of goldfinches just off the porch in a similar holding pattern. And there was no sound at all, like it must be in outer space.
“What’s this?”
“You heard me,” the same voice replied. It was a man’s voice, unfamiliar,
“Who the fuck is ‘me’?” Irene raised her voice, she did not like this at all, especially the utter silence.
“Don’t be frightened. Soon, you will remember everything.”
And with that, the mostly under-appreciated sounds of the world flooded back and Tommy laughed, “You are such a baby.”
End Chapter Four
