How I’ve Been Dying {Chapter Four}
This is the fourth chapter of my novel about a small town with a big, twisted soul publishing on Medium and my Substack newsletter. Wherever you read it, you can support me on Patreon to help bring this story to life.
Catch up on the story {Prologue, Chapter One, Chapter Two, Chapter Three}
Thanks for being here.
Fulton, for all the care he put into his work, never had his garden in order in time for the summer and scrambled every year to salvage what plants still struggled for life, culling the countless more that withered against the changing seasons.
The oncoming summer had a habit of catching all of Heron’s Call by surprise, leaving the whole town paralyzed in its tracks with wary, vacant eyes. Quenon’s seasonal residents always showed up exactly on time, but a week too early by their groundskeepers’ schedules. The procession of April rainstorms always dissipated before predicted, stranding the townsfolk in a rapidly-arriving summer heat wave.
Last year, the summer’s swift entrance had claimed close to everything Fulton was growing, so now he trudged down the stretch of road with enough consecutive storefronts to count as a Main Street, determined to avoid a similar collapse.
At the end of the street, just before it turned sharply and wound south toward the beach, a tiny storefront was set off from the others by an alley smothered with mud and natural debris. Bright, green paint peeled off the brick building in droves, littering the gravel parking lot so thoroughly it looked to Fulton like grass dancing with the wind. As usual, Theo’s pick-up was the store’s sole companion, and he doubted that he’d find anyone else in there besides the gruff ranger, hawking the same old tools. Theo’s Tools didn’t get much more business than that which Fulton and some of the local groundskeepers brought, but it seemed to be enough for her to keep the building open. Clearly, though, it was nearing the limit of its usefulness.
It’s like the marsh is spreading out and eating it, Fulton thought as he passed the mud-covered alley.
The last serious rainstorm had come through a few weeks ago, and yet this year’s marsh still refused to loosen its grip around the town and retreat back to Old Heron. Even here at the edge of Main Street the grass oozed under pressure, damp as the morning after rain. It was unnatural, although no one seemed motivated to mention or address it. There was no blame there; unnatural came and went in this town.
Everything left them alone if given enough time, though the medical supplies scattered around the open bed of Theo’s truck reminded him that there was more than mud leeching its way into the town.
It was just a cave. Isa said it herself, nothing in there.
It had been just a cave, the same cave it had been every year. That last storm had been unexpected, so the ground must’ve become oversaturated. As per usual, Heron’s Call’s infrastructure had failed to deliver.
The bell above the door to Theo’s Tools tolled when Fulton carefully pushed it open, remembering the last time he’d used a normal amount of force and taken the fragile thing off its hinges.
“You really gotta get a new doorbell,” he remarked, shutting it with an equally deft touch. “Honestly, did your order get mixed up with a church? I feel like I should only come here on Sundays.”
Theo’s head popped up from behind the counter, wearing the same stern look with a smile at the edges that she always reserved for him.
“You coming here only once a week?” she retorted, standing to wipe down her perpetually dusty uniform. “You’re gonna make me a very happy woman, Sheen.”
In all the years he’d known her, Fulton could not recall one instance when Theo had used anyone’s real name. At least he had the honors of her using his middle name; she referred to most by whatever they seemed insecure about.
“Has anyone ever explained middle names to you, Theo?” Fulton asked, approaching the counter. “I feel like you might struggle with the concept.”
Theo made to whack him with a spade but relented. Practically growing up in the back of her store, pestering her endlessly about gardening and the local wildlife, had earned Fulton the right to tell a few jokes a day at her expense.
“Are you here to practice stand-up or do you want to buy something?” Theo asked, waving the spade in his face. “My guess is you finally remembered about summer — just a week too late this time — and you want my help so you don’t lose damn near your whole garden again.”
“Come on, it was closer to half, really,” Fulton lied. “But yeah, I’m trying to avoid a repeat either way. So, you win; please tell me what to do.”
As usual, she had read him right away. But there was a piece missing, although he wouldn’t expect her to guess it. They’d always dug just deep enough into each other’s lives to know they were friends; whatever he’d felt on that beach, how it kept him up at night, how he needed to be here… that was a few levels further.
It was just a cave. Millie always got in her head around this time of year; it would only take one rough night. Either way Isa looked, and any fucking ghoul or whatever in there probably shit its pants and left town — I know I would.
Isa had broken his nose when they met, close to ten years ago now. She’d just moved to the area and was experiencing public school for the first time, and he was spiraling with all the grace of an eight-year-old coping with his parents’ harrowing divorce and dad’s ensuing disappearance. Given those circumstances, it was only natural that he’d target her and she’d lay him out. Their friendship developed immediately after that, and every day she found new ways to remind him.
I don’t know what I’d do without her, though, Fulton thought as he followed Theo to the back room, half-listening to the advice he’d come here for. I hope she knows that.
Too often, he didn’t think she did. With every year that brought them closer to graduation, her fire dwindled. That was when everything would catch up with her: shipped off somewhere private, pressured into marriage, dead on arrival. They could joke about it all they wanted, but the truth was eating her alive.
“Sheen!” Theo’s voice rattled his brain back in pace with reality. Dazed, he found himself leaning over the worktable in Theo’s back room, apparently learning about different kinds of shade cloths. “Have you heard anything I’ve been saying?”
“Well…” he stammered.
“Goddammit, Sheen!” she started angrily. It faded with a breath. Another breath and her eyes came back concerned; the same look she’d give him when he was a kid frustrated with a dying plant. “If you got something on your mind, just tell me. I’ll teach you how to save your garden, but you gotta get whatever’s on your chest off before we can keep going.”
“Things are just… strange right now,” he began cautiously, testing the surface to check if it’d hold. “Millie’s not herself, and Isa… well, she just really picks up on stuff like that with Millie. I know you have no idea who I’m talking about — honestly, it’s just high school stuff.”
“Don’t tell me not to care about your problems when I just asked to hear them,” Theo said. “What’s going on with this friend — Millard, or whatever her name is?”
Sweat shone all over Fulton’s hands, so much he almost slipped getting into the cheap, metal chair propped up in the corner. Fatigue had set in everywhere, sudden and intense.
“I don’t know what’s going on with her,” he said, wiping his forehead. “It started earlier this week; she just seemed off and wanted me and Isa to check out this cave with her. The one in Dean’s Quarter. She told us she’d had a nightmare about that cave and thought that going there might help her get over it. But we went and nothing changed.”
She’d tried to go in after Isa. The marks where she’d scratched him still bled at night.
“I swear she’s gotten worse,” he continued. “Just distant, pre-occupied. Sometimes I’ll be with her and it’s like she’s not there. I can’t describe it. She’s just not there, Theo.”
When he’d gone with her to help out at one of her dad’s Quenon houses, the whole day had passed in silence. More than silence, loneliness. There were two bodies in the house, moving around, bumping into each other, yet he had become acutely aware of a pervasive, singular loneliness dulling his senses. Two bodies, one person.
Theo considered his words, filling the silence with her usual grunts and grumbles.
“Sheen,” she said, choosing each word with careful intention. “When I was teaching you how to garden, your grandma told me it was a good thing for everyone that you pick up the practice. She said to me, ‘our family needs a gardener.’ Gardeners are caretakers of fragile, fickle things, Sheen. The things we nurture live or die for their own reasons, and we make do with that. Do you believe in making do?”
He didn’t answer. A blood-stained memory shuffled around the back of his mind’s eye, clouding his vision red.
“Well, I hope you find a way,” Theo said, beginning to sound equally distracted. “I know where you’ve been, surrounded by little flowers, like the kind you used to bring me right before they died. And I told you then what you wouldn’t accept for years; the flowers had been lucky to be cared for the way you did, but the soil was all wrong. The climate was all wrong. Those beautiful, frail things never stood a chance.”
Isa tucked a pillow underneath her elbow, stemming the ache that had set in from holding her phone up for almost an hour straight. It was a temporary fix, as she’d have to switch positions soon anyway to compensate for the difficulty her body was having just being comfortable right now. She reached up and popped her window open, letting in the cool summer breeze that drifted around her house every night; it wouldn’t be long until she had to close it, though, when her room got too cold or the bugs started streaming in.
All that shifting around, opening and closing, and Millie hadn’t said a word. The only sounds coming through Isa’s phone for the past five minutes had been breathing and static.
I swear if she’s fallen asleep on me I will walk over there and wake her ass up, Isa thought.
Millie wasn’t asleep, though; her breathing told Isa that much. They had set aside over an hour of time just to talk, and she’d barely said anything.
“Millie,” Isa said, in an attempt to finally break the silence. “If you want to hang up, we can talk tomorrow. You know I won’t be offended.”
Anything would be better than this.
“I’m sorry,” Millie said after a few more moments of silence. “I thought I — no, I’m just distracted. We can hang up, I’m –”
“Millie, wait,” Isa almost shouted, her heart stuck halfway up her throat. “I’m not gonna hang up. Please talk to me. It’s been two days since the beach and we’ve barely seen each other.”
That day at the beach she’d told her that it was just a cave, the same one they used to scream their names into so they could hear the echo bounce them back. Isa had been conscious she was lying, but now time was blurring the shadows and hushing the voices, gradually convincing her it was all a trick of the light — the same darkness you’d find inside any cave. She could believe it, and she was prepared to; if Millie would only believe with her, it would all make sense again.
“I can’t…” Millie said, pain leaking out of her voice like a pipe about to burst. “I’ve been waking up every morning terrified. My dad’s sending me to Quenon every day and Lewis stole all my fucking weed and nothing feels real anymore. I can’t breathe, Isa.”
Isa’s soul was being pulled out of her body through her ear, twisted around the vibrations of Millie’s quivering voice. Words scrambled to force themselves out and into the silence, but there was nothing she could say that wasn’t the truth…and that would never see the light of day.
“I saw my mom,” Millie whispered.
Isa closed the window, shutting out a sudden, bitter chill.
“What do you mean?” she whispered back.
“I saw her. Not in a dream, outside my house,” Millie explained with a defensive harshness. “She was in the tall grass watching my dad work on a car. And he looked in that direction but he didn’t do anything. He didn’t even look surprised. It was like I could see her and he couldn’t.”
Her voice trailed off, like she was catching herself on the edge of a cliff, spinning her arms in a desperate attempt to regain her balance.
“God, Isa, I don’t know why but I was so fucking scared of her.” Millie found her voice and sent them both tumbling into the abyss. “I think I’m going insane.”
“No you’re not,” Isa said, before she’d had any time to think. “You’re not going insane, Millie. And you’re not dealing with this alone. I’ll be at your house tomorrow — whether you invite me or not — and we’ll figure this out.”
Millie hesitated. Not convinced yet, but she could get there. They would put this all together.
“Okay,” she agreed. “So, it’s you and me?”
“You and me,” Isa said as a saccharine warmth spread out from her stomach, gliding over her bones like honey.
Dinner with Isa’s family was always a sordid affair, smothered by layers of etiquette and a daily accumulation of guilt, but tonight’s meal she found especially suffocating. They were eating with the Ashers, a monthly occasion filled with stilted conversation and veiled mentions of their neighbor’s heritage.
Poor Mr. Asher had grown up Jewish, with a family he barely saw anymore; his wife had demanded that he join the Catholic church and tear apart those old bonds. It seemed ironic, then, that Catherine took after him far more than her mother. She admitted to knowing almost nothing about her father’s heritage, and habitually ironed away the rest.
What thoughts passed behind Mr. Asher’s tense eyes? Enduring Isa’s parents’ insistent fawning over his conversion, his pre-ordained rejection of his entire culture for a life of spiraling indignities. Isa always wanted to ask if he ever regretted any of it. It wasn’t just about heritage or religion, not really, it was about loss. She wanted to ask whether or not it had been worth it. Losing his family. Suffering the judgement and hatred. Sitting at dinner with people who’d wash the silverware twice tonight, just to be safe.
Is it worth it for love, for your own family?
Those thoughts were weighing more heavily on her than usual this night as they finished saying grace and began to eat. Millie’s voice still lurked, sweetened with that trusting affection Isa found so calming, but drifting always toward a patient darkness. Toward the women dancing in the cave.
There was nothing in the cave, Isa reminded herself. Lewis is moving out soon, we’re getting closer to graduation, Millie’s getting overwhelmed and all the grief is coming back up. She just needs help. She just needs me –
That struck Isa with a buried memory. Sitting with Millie after the funeral, holding her as she sobbed, brushing onyx hair away from her eyes, kissing her slowly, with a caution that melted against her touch. Millie had needed her then. They’d left that kiss on the beach and never returned to it. But if she needed her again…
“What do you think, Isadora?” her dad’s voice cut through the mental noise, suddenly stranding her in the middle of a conversation.
“S-sorry, Daddy,” she stammered, reaching hurriedly for her manners. “I’m afraid I missed that last part.”
“It’s okay, honey,” he replied with a smile that said they’d talk about this later. “We were discussing the mayor’s boy; news is the hospital cleared him to come home. We wanted to know what you think the mayor should do with that old ranger who got him hurt?”
“I say she should be fired — lose her store, too,” Mr. Asher put in. “She lets the poor kid get lost in a part of town we should’ve torn down ages ago, calls 911 way too late, and doesn’t even have the decency to wait for the mayor at the hospital. It’s only right.”
Across the table, Catherine had her eyes firmly on her plate. Isa was well aware of Lucas Webber’s unfaithfulness, and recognized Catherine’s practiced poise for the pain it was masking.
“It wasn’t right what she did,” Isa started, carefully. “But it would be quite Christlike of Mayor Webber to show her grace. I’m sure they can find a solution that allows her to atone for this without losing her place here.”
She caught Catherine’s eyes, passing along a silent “Are you okay?”
“A noble sentiment, Isadora,” her dad responded without much thought. “But it’s God’s place to give grace, not ours. I say he should throw the book at that dirty hag.”
Strolling through the small collection of streets that defined their corner of Heron’s Call had become tradition for Isa and Catherine, both needing the company and the conversation after those awful monthly dinners. Their walks seemed to get longer with each month. By Isa’s judgement they’d been out for close to an hour already, just meandering around the same isolated suburban streets. After so much time it had become monotonous, although they’d only tried to leave their neighborhood once, finding the one road leading out unlit and terrifying in both directions.
“I can’t believe my dad said all that about Theo,” Catherine complained as they passed the miniature park at the center of the neighborhood for the sixth time that night. “She basically taught him how to take care of a house. And now he wants her run out of fucking town! For what?”
Catherine turned into the park without a word, hands shaking as she adjusted her hair. There’d been a fire within her since they left the house, burning furiously beneath her quivering upper lip.
“You don’t think she’s responsible for what happened to Luke?” Isa inquired, keeping away from the heat.
“Yeah, right,” Catherine scoffed. “Luke never needed anyone to help him fuck something up.”
In the moment those words left her mouth, Catherine was energy all over, wringing hands passing again and again over the bun she’d pulled so tightly atop her head, her mouth shaping and unshaping words that she may never have the power to say again. The heat between them would turn Isa to ash, but she thought it might be worth it, if only to keep this burning girl alive.
When Isa reached out, Catherine met her with such a need her legs gave way and she fell, limp and weeping, into Isa’s shoulder.
“It’s all right,” Isa whispered. “It’s just us here. You can cry, okay?”
Moving gently together, Isa lowered Catherine onto the bench overlooking the pond they’d used to play in when she first moved here. Catherine had been the first neighborhood kid to approach her. She’d invited her to run around the pond that first day and they’d gone in so deep Isa had lost herself underneath the grey water for a few heart-stopping moments. Dad had screamed that night and forced her to wash all her scum-ridden clothes by hand, but the girls had sat on the grass banks together eating clementines and he could never take that away.
The tears were still pooling against her shoulder, although Catherine’s sobbing had gone silent. Isa gathered Catherine’s hands in hers, peeling open the fingers like an orange skin to meet her palms with hers. They waited like that until the moon slipped above the rooftops and threw soft, silver light down onto the pond.
How intimately the night-sky knew this pond, how it doted on its slight ripples, murmuring currents, caressing each with starlight. It was only for a minute that the whole park froze, awash with beauty, and when it had passed the pond became a pond again, left only with the memory of that light and that touch and that moon which arrived every night for this breath of heaven.
“What would you do if you were me?” Catherine asked.
“You know he’ll just keep hurting you,” Isa said.
For two years Catherine had given her heart to Luke and he’d treated it like an over-excited child, mishandling it and begging each time for another chance, so sure that he could control himself this time. He wouldn’t let it all slip through his trembling fingers this time.
“Of course I know that,” Catherine responded — not cold, but tired. “He-he hurts me every chance he gets. He says it’s because he’s afraid, and sometimes I believe him, I really do.”
“Catherine –”
“No, Isa.” She stopped her, squeezing her hand. “I know if I go back to him, he’ll hurt me again. But, fuck, what if I don’t go back to him? What if I break up with him and lock myself in my room and the only person in there is me?”
Isa’s hand fell powerless into her lap as Catherine left the bench, fidgeting with her bun again.
“We should go back, okay?” she said hastily, catching her breath with each word. “Our dads are probably gonna lose it, we’ve been out so late.”
“Catherine, we still need to talk about this,” Isa pleaded.
“We’re going back!” Catherine snapped, her face flushing with red. “I can’t be out here anymore. I can’t be talking about this with you, or this pond, or this whole, awful town!”
“Wait!” Isa scrambled after Catherine. Her feet fell haphazardly in front of her, desperate to close the distance between them, to reach out to her again and find the sweetness of those clementines eaten ages ago on the grassy shore. There had to be some left, always one more in the bag. One more and it always tasted the sweetest.
But she caught her own feet in her rush and went face-first into the dirt. By the time she had come up, Catherine was gone. The park was so dark without the moon, and there would be nothing sweet for her tonight; just cleaning the grime from her clothes and thinking of this bitter moment.
