Chapter 7 - What We Buried
The police didn't leave until four in the morning.
They took Sarah away in the back of an ambulance, not a squad car. Her lungs had given out right there on our lawn, a late-stage complication of the small-cell carcinoma that had been eating her from the inside out for eighteen months. Before the EMTs zipped the oxygen mask over her face, she had grabbed the sleeve of my cardigan with a grip like rusted pliers and muttered three words: *“Check the box.”*
The house smelled of burnt coffee and cheap industrial floor cleaner.
Elaine, my mother, was sitting at the kitchen island with her head in her hands, her silver hair disheveled, the empty mugs of decaf tea stacked around her like the ruins of a miniature city. Up upstairs, the children were finally asleep, knocked out by the sheer, terrifying exhaustion that only seven-year-olds can feel when the adult world around them collapses into chaos.
Adam was sitting on the radiator cover in the dark dining room, his elbows on his knees, his face turned toward the baseboards. He hadn't washed the dirt from his knuckles. He hadn't looked at me once since the ambulance doors had slammed shut.
I stood over the kitchen table. On the butcher block rested three things: the transport manifest, Sarah’s leather notebook, and the brass key to the safety deposit box Adam had kept hidden beneath the floorboards under our master bed for seven years.
"Mom," I said. My voice was dry, sandpaper over gravel.
Elaine looked up. Her eyes were red-rimmed, the skin beneath them sagging with guilt that went back far deeper than Wednesday afternoon.
"I didn't know about the money, Rachel," she whispered, her voice shaking. "I swear to you on your father's soul, I didn't know Adam took money. I only knew what he told me—that the baby died, that the grief was killing you, and that we were never, ever to speak her name because you couldn't survive another breakdown."
"You saw the photo album," I said, pointing at the living room where the blue velour book still lay on the coffee table. "You knew there were four bassinets."
"I was there when they were born!" she cried softly, mindful of the ceiling above us. "I saw them pull all four of them out of you! June was the smallest. She was so tiny, Rachel... her skin was translucent. You could see the heart beating against her ribs like a little trapped sparrow. When Adam told me she didn't make it to Day Twelve, why would I doubt him? What kind of monster lies about a baby dying?"
She looked toward the dark doorway of the dining room. Adam didn't flinch. He didn't even shift his weight. He was an empty suit of clothes sitting on a cold radiator.
"The kind of monster," I said, "who thinks he can buy his family's survival with his daughter's life."
"Rachel, please," Adam’s voice drifted out of the dark. It wasn't defensive anymore. It was completely gutted. "Call the sheriff. Tell them to bring the handcuffs back. I’ll plead guilty to whatever they want. Wire fraud, child abandonment, perjury. Just... don't look at me like that."
"Get the car keys," I said.
He lifted his head. "What?"
"Get the car keys, Adam. And get the heavy shovel from the shed."
My mother stood up so fast her barstool tipped over, crashing against the hardwood. "Rachel! No! You can't!"
"We bought a plot," I said, turning to her, my eyes wide and entirely dry. The tears were gone. They had evaporated somewhere between Sarah’s last ragged breath on the lawn and the moment I realized my daughter had spent seven birthdays fifteen miles from our kitchen table. "Plot 412 at Oakridge Cemetery. Section G. Under the weeping willow. I sat on that grass every Sunday for three years until the grass grew back over the scar. I brought white carnations. I read bedtime stories to a lump of turf."
I stepped toward the dining room doorway, looming over Adam until my shadow swallowed him whole.
"We are going to find out what is in that ground," I told him. "And if you don't pick up that shovel, I will tear that sod up with my fingernails until I hit the vault."
***
The fog at Oakridge Cemetery hung thick and low, smelling of damp peat, sulfur, and rotting leaves.
It was five-fifteen in the morning. The eastern sky was just beginning to turn the color of an old bruise—a sickly, yellow-violet haze that barely cut through the darkness between the ancient cypress trees.
Adam stood over the small, flat bronze marker.
*JUNE HOLLOWAY*
*AUGUST 3, 2017 – AUGUST 14, 2017*
*HELD FOR A MOMENT, LOVED FOR AN ETERNITY*
I had picked that epitaph from a catalog in the hospital business office while the IV morphine was still being flushed from my veins. The woman who sold it to me had given me a coupon for twenty percent off the bronze casting because we had three other infants in the intensive care unit.
*A volume discount,* I remembered thinking at the time, hysterical with grief in the wheelchair. *They gave me a discount on my baby's grave because I bought in bulk.*
Adam jammed the edge of the flat-head spade into the turf at the edge of the bronze marker.
The sound of the blade slicing through the roots of the Bermuda grass was shockingly loud in the silence of the dawn. *Crrk-chhk.*
He didn't speak. He dug with a manic, rhythmic fury, throwing the wet squares of sod behind him. His breath came in heavy, ragged plumes of gray steam. Sweat soaked through the shoulders of his gray work coat, mixing with the cemetery mist until his hair was plastered to his forehead.
I didn't help him. I stood at the edge of the rectangular hole, my arms wrapped around my middle, Sarah’s notebook clutched against my ribs like a breastplate.
Two feet down.
Three feet.
The spade struck something hollow and synthetic with a dull, sickening *thunk*.
Adam froze. His shoulders hitched. He dropped the shovel, sinking to his knees in the wet clay at the bottom of the trench. His hands, caked in black loam, reached down into the mud, feeling along the contours of what he had hit.
"It's not concrete," he whispered, his voice trembling so violently he could barely shape the vowels. "The vault... the director said he was putting the marble urn inside an airtight concrete vault."
He wiped the dirt away with his bare palms.
Underneath the layer of cemetery clay lay a standard blue plastic medical cooler—the kind used to transport organs, units of whole blood, and pathology specimens between surgical suites. Across the lid, faded by seven years of subterranean moisture but still legible, was the yellow biohazard emblem of St. Jude Memorial Hospital.
Securing the plastic latches of the cooler was a heavy zip-tie, thick as a finger, threaded through the locking rings.
"Cut it," I said.
Adam looked up at me from the hole, his eyes sunken, his mouth open in pure horror. "Rachel, don't make me. Please. If there's... if she's in there—"
"You said she was cremated, Adam!" I screamed down at him, the sound echoing through the headstones, startling a flock of crows from the high branches of the weeping willow. "You told me you carried her ashes in that white urn! What is in the cooler, Adam? Cut it!"
He reached into his pocket and pulled out his folding pocketknife. His hands were shaking so hard he nearly dropped it twice before the blade clicked into place.
He sawed through the heavy plastic zip-tie. The snap sounded like a gunshot.
With fingers that looked like they belonged to a corpse, Adam lifted the blue plastic lid.
A puff of cold, chemical air escaped—not the stench of decay, but the sharp, sterile bite of formaldehyde and dry silicone.
Inside the cooler, nestled in rotting bubble wrap, there was no urn. There were no ashes. There were no tiny, fragile bones.
There were four heavy glass intravenous bags, their labels yellowed and curled, filled with crystallized, discolored saline solution. Resting on top of the bags was a stainless-steel hospital weight—a two-kilogram calibration block used to test the accuracy of pediatric nursery scales.
And taped to the underside of the blue lid was a typed index card, sealed in an amber specimen bag.
Adam reached out and pulled the card free. He read it in the dim, sickly light of the rising sun. Then he dropped his head against the muddy side of the trench and let out a sound that didn't sound human. It was the howl of a dog that had been run down in the street.
I leaned over the edge of the pit and plucked the card from his limp fingers.
The typing was crisp, produced on an old hospital office typewriter:
*REMARKS: DISPOSITION COMPLETED.*
*SUBJECT #4 RE-ALLOCATED PER DONATION PROTOCOL ALPHA.*
*AUTHORIZATION: DR. ARTHUR KINCAID.*
*PAYEE: VANCE STERLING (CHAIRMAN, ST. JUDE FOUNDATION).*
*DELIVERY CONFIRMED: THE BLACKWOOD ESTATE, KESWICK.*
The baby we had wept over for two thousand five hundred and fifty-seven days was never in the ground.
May you like
We had buried eight pounds of water and steel to balance the scale.
***
