Meg Cabot - Darkest Hour

"Your mom's fine," Andy said. "Everyone's fine."

The pinprick started getting a little wider. I could see my mom's face now, peering at me worriedly from the deck, with Dopey behind her, wearing his usual sneer.

"Then what - " I saw the men in the bottom of the hole lift up a stretcher. On the stretcher was a black body bag like the kind you always see on TV. "Who is that?" I wanted to know.

"Well, we're not sure," my stepfather said. "But whoever he is, he's been there a very long time, so chances are, he isn't anyone we know."

Dopey's face loomed large in my line of vision.

"It's a skeleton," he informed me with a good deal of relish. He appeared to have gotten over the fact that only that morning he'd had a mouth full of beetles, and was back to his normal insufferable self. "It was totally awesome, Suze, you should have been here. My shovel went right through his skull. It cracked like it was an egg or something."

Well, that was enough for me. My tunnel vision came right back, but not soon enough to miss something that tumbled from the stretcher as it went past me. My gaze locked on it and followed it as it fluttered to the ground, landing very near my feet. It was only a deeply stained and extremely threadbare piece of material, no bigger than my hand. A rag, it looked like, though you could see that at one time it had had lace around its edges. Little bits of lace still clung to it like burrs, especially around the corner where, very faintly, you could read three embroidered initials:

MDS.

Maria de Silva. It was the handkerchief Jesse had used last night to dry my tears. Only it was the real handkerchief, frayed and brown with age.

And it had fallen out of the jumble of decaying material holding Jesse's bones together.

I turned around and threw up Friday's bacon cheeseburger and potato skins all over the side of the house.

Needless to say, no one except my mother was very sympathetic about this. Dopey declared it the most disgusting thing he had ever seen. Apparently he'd forgotten what he'd had in his mouth less then twelve hours before. Andy simply went and got the hose, and Sleepy, equally unimpressed, said he had to get going or he'd be late delivering 'za.

My mother insisted on putting me to bed, even though having her in my room just then was about the last thing I wanted. I mean, I had just seen them removing Jesse's body from my backyard. I would have liked to have discussed this disturbing sight with him, but how could I do that with my mother there?

I figured if I just let her fuss over me for half an hour, she'd go. But she stayed much longer than that, making me take a shower and change out of my uniform and into a silky pair of lounging pajamas she'd bought me for Valentine's Day (pathetically, it was the only Valentine I received). Then she insisted on combing my hair out, like she used to when I was a little kid.

She wanted to talk, too, of course. She had plenty to say on the subject of the skeleton Andy and Dopey had found, insisting it was only "some poor man" who had gotten killed in a shoot-out back in the days when our home was a boarding-house for mercenaries and gunslingers and the odd rancher's son. She said the police would insist on treating it as a homicide until the coroner had determined how long the body had been there, but since, she went on, the fellow still had his spurs on (spurs!) she assumed they would come to the same conclusion she had: that this guy had been dead for a lot longer than any of us had been alive.

She tried to make me feel better. But how could she? She didn't have any idea why I was so upset. I mean, I'm not Jack. I had never blabbed to her about my secret talent. My mom didn't know that I knew whose skeleton that was. She didn't know that just twelve hours ago he had been sitting on my daybed, laughing at Bridges of Madison County . And that a few hours before that, he had kissed me - albeit on the top of my head, but still.

I mean, come on. You'd be upset, too.

Finally, finally she left. I heaved a sigh of relief, thinking I could relax, you know?

But no. Oh, no. Because my mother didn't retreat with the intention of leaving me alone. I found that out the hard way a couple of minutes later when the phone rang, and Andy hollered up the stairs that it was for me. I really did not feel like talking to anyone, but what could I do? Andy had already said I was home. So I picked up, and whose cheerful little voice do I hear on the other end?

That's right.

Doc's.

"Suze, how are you doing?" my youngest stepbrother wanted to know. Although clearly he already knew. How I was doing, I mean. Obviously, my mother had called him at camp - who gets calls from their stepmother at camp , I ask you? - and told him to call me. Because of course she knows. She knows he's the only one of my stepbrothers I can stand, and I'm sure she thought I might tell him whatever it was that was bothering me, and then she could pump him for information later.

My mother isn't an award-winning television news journalist for nothing, you know.

"Suze?" Doc sounded concerned. "Your mom told me about . . . what happened. Do you want me to come home?"

I flopped back down on my pillows. "Home? No, I don't want you to come home. Why would I want you to come home?"

"Well," Doc said. He lowered his voice as if he suspected someone was listening in. "Because of Jesse."

Out of all the people I live with, Doc was the only one who had the slightest idea that We Are Not Alone. Doc believed ... and he had good reason to. Once when I'd been in a real jam, Jesse had gone to him. Scared out of his wits, Doc had nevertheless come through for me.

And now he was offering to do so again.

Only what could he do? Nothing. Worse than nothing, he could actually get hurt. I mean, look at what had happened to Dopey that morning. Did I want to see Doc with a faceful of bugs? No way.

"No," I said, quickly. "No, Doc - I mean, David. That isn't necessary. You stay where you are. Things are fine here. Really."

Doc sounded disappointed. "Suze, things are not fine. Do you want to talk about it, at least?"

Oh, yeah. I want to discuss my love life - or lack thereof - with my twelve-year-old stepbrother.

"Not really," I said.

"Look, Suze," Doc said. "I know it had to be upsetting. I mean, seeing his skeleton like that. But you've got to remember that our bodies are simply the vessel - and a very crude one, at that - in which our souls are carried while we're alive on earth. Jesse's body . . . well, it doesn't have anything to do with him anymore."

Easy for him to say, I thought miserably. He'd never gotten a look at Jesse's abs.

Not that, if he had, they would have interested Doc much, of course.

"Really," Doc went on, "if you think about it, that's probably not the only body Jesse's going to have. According to the Hindus, we shed our outer shells - our bodies - several times. In fact, we keep doing so, depending on our karma, until we finally get it right, thus achieving liberation from the cycle of rebirth."

"Oh?" I stared at the canopy over my bed. I really could not believe I was having this conversation. And with a twelve-year-old. "Do we?"

"Sure. Most of us, anyway. I mean, unless we get it right the first time. But that hardly ever happens. See, what's going on with Jesse is that his karma is all messed up, and he got bumped off the path to nirvana. He just needs to find his way back into the body he's supposed to get after, you know, his last one, and then he'll be fine."

"David," I said. "Are you sure you're at computer camp? Because it sounds to me like maybe Mom and Andy dropped you off at yoga camp by mistake."

"Suze," Doc said with a sigh. "Look. All I'm saying is, that skeleton you saw, it wasn't Jesse, all right? It has nothing to do with him anymore. So don't let it upset you. Okay?"