Jennifer Longo - Six Feet Over It

I nod.

“Dario,” Wade plows on, “this is my youngest, Leigh!” He gathers me in a smothering one-armed embrace. “And today is my baby’s birthday! Lucky fifteen today, how do you like that? Brand-new coworker, not a bad birthday present!”

So much for talking slowly.

“¡Quinceañera!” Dario says to my blank expression; then abruptly joyful, he clasps both my hands in his before turning to run back up the hill. “Wait for me!” he calls. “Wait!”

Wade is practically bursting with the awesomeness of it all; he can barely contain himself.

“What do you think?” he says, grinning like a fool. “He’s from Mexico !”

“Yeah, I got that,” I hiss. “You don’t have to shout it.”

“He saved every penny he had,” he says near my ear, fast, “worked his whole life on a farm… or landscaping, I don’t remember which, but this kid is industrious and smart, knows what the hell he wants, gave all his money to one of those jerkwads, what is it, a coyote? Who of course took it all and bailed halfway to the border when the feds caught up. San Diego border patrol swarmed them, for real, he said, helicopters and everything! So there’s ten guys stuffed in the back of the coyote’s van and they all scatter, this is the middle of the damn night, and he hides in some rusted-out car in a ditch, right under the hood! Jeez Louise.”

“I thought you said he doesn’t speak English.”

“No, I said he had some words.”

“He told you all this?”

“Yes!”

“Okay, that’s not ‘some words,’ that’s… all the words.”

He rolls his eyes. “ Any way, so he crawls through a bunch of drainage ditches and barbed wire for, like, ten hours till he crosses into San Diego and he scrapes a few bucks together somehow or other, I didn’t ask, and he buys a bus ticket and twelve hours later he’s in Sacramento. Can you believe that?”

“No. When was this?”

“I don’t know, like a year ago? It’s true! He’s been staying on people’s sofas, friends of friends of cousins…”

“ Cousins? Really?”

“What?”

“Like all Mexican people are related?”

He tosses his hands, and his voice jacks right back up to full volume. “I’m just telling you what he said, he told me this!”

“All right.”

“He did!”

“Okay.”

This Dario person answered Wade’s ad in the PennySaver classifieds the first day it ran: Yard Work. Xlnt Pay. (Cash, of course, under the table) Bnfts.

Yard work. Jesus.

I’m just relieved my “interpreting skills” may not be needed after all. I’m perfectly happy letting Howard the coroner keep translating for Spanish-speaking clients over the phone for me, which he’s only had to do twice anyway and both times for At Needs who seemed content to just sign on all the X s, write a check, and call it a day, no chitchat necessary.

Dario comes jogging briskly back over the crest of Poppy Hill, his left arm raised over his head, hand clenched in what looks like triumph.

“Happy birthday!” He offers me his open palm, a tiny clay skeleton balanced there.

A little dead woman, top-heavy in a hat dripping sparkling flowers, bony smile, empty black eyes. I feel the heat and color drain from my face.

“You have the best day!” he says. “The Day of the Angels!” My blank silence confuses him. “ Días de los Muertos —the Day of the Dead! Your birthday, the Day of the Dead!” He moves the skeleton closer to my face. “ La Catrina —she is you, this is you, Our Lady, the patron saint of death!”

I accept the skeleton, hold it in a loose fist.

I have the unsettling sensation of seeing this scene outside myself—it’s a movie, my entire life revealing itself at once in all its predestined glory in real time, in this moment.

Patron saint.

Of course.

Creepy death/birth? Check. Living in a graveyard? Check. Kai and Emily and oh sure, born on the Day of the Dead? The Day of the Flipping Dead? Check. Check! Check!

And that makes… everything. Every single moment I’ve been alive is directly related to and for the sole purpose of celebrating, defining, facilitating death.

All around me people get sick, they drop like flies, and I remain untouched.

Proximity to me is poison.

Patron saint. Of death.

I belong in a graveyard. I’ll never get out of here.

“Thank you,” I barely whisper. “Excuse me.”

And then I walk.

Away from Wade’s calling to me to get the hell back here, where the shinola do you think you’re going? I walk and walk and think. First about how Wade’s reports of Dario’s English are about as ignorant as his insistence on Dario’s having “just gotten here”; a year isn’t “just,” and obviously the guy speaks pretty good English, easily better than Wade himself, who tends to split infinitives, mix metaphors, and double his negatives like nobody’s business.

And second, I think about how Dario has given me so much more than a stupid skeleton; thanks to him I can stop being baffled about the seemingly random losses and sadness and deathiness I leave in my wake.

Not random at all.

Patron saint.

Fantastic.

I toss the skeleton into the wicker wastebasket in my closet, crawl back into my unmade bed, and lie awake in my clothes for a long, long time until Wade bangs on the door and demands to know “What the Bo Jangles is wrong with you? Get out here!”

“Get lost,” I hear Kai tell him, and he grumbles off. She unlocks the door with a bobby pin and barges in against my weary protests.

“Birthday lunch, let’s go!” She jumps on my mattress.

I pull the covers up over my face.

“And oh, PS,” she whispers, lying beside me. “Did you meet him?”

I nod.

“I like him! He seems very… like he knows what he’s doing. Dad better cool it so he’ll stay.”

I close my eyes.

“All right, so get up. Mama Dicarlo is waiting!”

“Can’t.” I duck back beneath the blankets. “I don’t feel good.”

She pulls the covers away, presses her slender wrist to my forehead.

“You feel fine.”

“I don’t feel hot, I feel awful. ”

“Just power through.”

I shake my head. “I don’t want it.”

“What, lunch? So we’ll stay home, that’s all right—cake for dinner! Presents!”

The house smells like chocolate. I shake my head.

“Leigh!”

“I don’t want it. Just let me sleep.”

“You don’t want what ?”

“Anything. Any of it. A birthday.”

She squints at me, searching the horizon for the ship of what I actually mean.

“You don’t want your birthday ?”

I curl like a shrimp.

“Why?” And right on cue, her lovely almond-shaped bright blue eyes brim with tears.

Even before the leukemia unintentionally depleted Wade and Meredith’s entire supply of patience and empathy for anyone but themselves and her, Kai has always been a big crier. They may roll their eyes at my “theatrics,” but “sensitive” Kai can cry whenever, wherever, about whatever, however much she wants to. Which is pretty much all the time about everything.

Go to her for sympathy and you’ll wind up comforting her proxy grief instead.

“It’s all right,” I say dutifully, rubbing her arm as she weeps.

“What about presents?”

“Maybe later, okay? Please?”

She finds a package of tissue in the clutter on my floor. Blows her nose.

“But why ?”

“Just don’t feel well. Okay? Okay?”