As they walked through the cemetery, tucked together, she heard words as she used to when she came here as a child, snippets of speech as murky as gutter water draining through a clog of leaves. "The wintermen are gleaning," said one, and another intoned "butterfly," and "hungry." "Stove burning," said a flat voice, and then suddenly, a familiar voice hissed, "-- knife, Sunshine --"
Kizzy's eyes went wide and she looked around and over her shoulder, inadvertently nuzzling Jack Husk's hand with her chin. Despite that smooth jolt of a touch, she had the wherewithal to realize she'd left her grandmother's knife in her jeans pocket. All the years of wanting it and she'd left it behind! She wanted to ask her grandmother what she was doing here. She should be far away by now, navigating labyrinths, fending off shadows, lapping water from stalactite tips with her ghostly tongue, and answering riddles to win passage through gates made of bones. She should be singing beasts to sleep with lullabies and bribing otherworldly coyotes to smuggle her deeper into her new world. She shouldn't be here, among these fainthearted cemetery ghosts! This eternal loitering wasn't for Kizzy's folk, least of all her grandmother, her strong, untemptable grandmother. Kizzy wanted to ask her -- but she was warm against Jack Husk's side and didn't want to step away from him to whisper her question to the dead.
"Did you hear something?" Jack Husk asked suddenly.
"What?" Kizzy asked, startled and strangely guilty, as if he'd caught her hoarding the whispers of the ghosts to herself.
"I don't know. Sounded like a twig snapping. I wonder if anyone else is here."
But there didn't seem to be anyone else in the cemetery, or even any sign of recent visitors. It was a lonesome place, and Kizzy wasn't surprised the ghosts came to her messy yard to while away their days among the cats and chickens.
Jack Husk's fingers began idly stroking Kizzy's shoulder as they walked between the rows of graves. It happened slowly, imperceptibly, but she realized he was pulling her little by little closer to him, the stroking deepening into rubbing, so his whole hand was cupped over her shoulder, his thumb making little circles. She could smell boy spice beneath the thrift-store aroma of his jacket, and the rubbing and the smell began to work to soften her -- like butter before you add sugar, in the first step of making something sweet. It was her first experience of how bodies could meld together, how breath could slip naturally into rhythm. It was hypnotic. Heady.
And she wanted more.
"They have teeth," whispered a ghost. Kizzy ignored it.
"They have nectar," said another, very faint and filled with longing. Kizzy felt a small chill, but ignored that too.
"Hungry?" Jack Husk asked, as they pivoted to walk another cemetery row.
Kizzy shrugged. She had little interest in eating just now. But spreading out the checked blanket someplace quiet and sitting down, leaning back on her elbows beside Jack Husk, that did interest her. She couldn't stop glancing at his lips, and she kept pressing her own together, hyperaware of them. She remembered babysitting an infant cousin on the day he'd discovered his tongue; he'd kept wagging it and touching it, making a whole repertoire of new sounds and trying to stick it out far enough to see it, obsessed by the discovery of this new appendage. Kizzy felt like that about her lips today, like she was just now finding out what they were for, but she hoped she was more discreet than her baby cousin had been.
"Let's go over there," Jack Husk said, nodding his head toward a distant corner of the cemetery where there looked to be a sort of overgrown garden. They made their way slowly, Kizzy scarcely noticing the graves they passed, so wrapped up was she in this newness of strolling like lovers, slow and fused. But at the end of the row of graves, she did notice something.
She walked on past it; it took a moment to register, but a few steps later her head swung around and she looked again, recognition tingling in her.
The frowsy green of the unkempt cemetery lawn was disturbed by a patch of brown, stark as a wound. It seemed to describe a radius around one particular grave, and Kizzy squinted to see what the tombstone said. She couldn't read it, and Jack Husk was tugging her gently in the other direction. She surprised herself by reaching for his velvet lapel and tugging him back. "Over here," she said. "I want to see something."
"What?" he asked, coming easily along with her.
"This." She stopped before it. A grave where nothing grew, not even grass. She read the name on the headstone. Amy Ingersoll. "I knew her," Kizzy said, surprised.
"You did?" asked Jack Husk.
Kizzy nodded. "I was a freshman. I think she was a junior, but I barely saw her because she got taken out of school. She was sick. She ..." Kizzy's voice trailed off. She had almost said, She starved herself to death. But seeing this dead brown grave, other words came to her mind. She wasted away.
"Sad," said Jack Husk. "She was your age when she died."
"Yeah," said Kizzy, thinking of the picture of gaunt Amy Ingersoll she'd seen in the paper, her eyes seeming huge and haunted in her pinched face. There had been a special assembly in school about eating disorders. A doctor had talked about anorexia and bulimia. After, Kizzy and Evie had pinched the generous skin of their h*ps and joked crassly that they could use a little anorexia themselves, and Cactus had said they could start by switching to Diet Coke.
"I wonder why the grass is all dead here," Kizzy said, wanting there to be some other explanation than the one buzzing in her thoughts. Surely in this dull town the wild things her family believed in were just stories. Such things happened far from here, on cobblestones, and in the haunted dooryards of ancient churches.
"Damned" said a ghost right in Kizzy's ear. She shivered.
Jack Husk felt it and let go of her shoulder to shrug off his velvet jacket. "You're cold," he said. "Here." He draped it over her shoulders and drew her back against him. Her brow rested against his jaw briefly, skin against skin. "Come on," he urged.
She went with him to the little garden in the corner, and Jack Husk laid out his checked blanket behind some stone urns overflowing with ivy and scant alyssum blossoms left over from summer. They settled down and he opened his picnic basket and produced from it a loaf of golden bread and a round cheese with an artisan's stamp in its thick rind. Things like that, cheeses signed like artworks, were unknown in Kizzy's house, where they had either salty lumpish cheese her mother made or an army-feeding slab of impossibly orange stuff from the superstore.