Kenny rushes past me and hurtles into his drum kit, pushing the high hats over. They crash to the floor, and then he shoves the toms, the snares. He’s laying waste to his own instrument, the kit he calls Baby. I stop kicking and just stand back and watch.
“Why do you two have to ruin everything?” Kenny shouts, picking up the second microphone stand and throwing it across the room. He kicks the cymbals and Ripper and I leap out of the way. “There you go. It’s ruined. There’s nothing left for you to do.”
Kenny stops and looks up at us, his face red and his blond hair sweaty. We’re all breathing heavily. I struggle to collect myself, make sense of the way we seem to be coming apart no matter how hard we try to stay together.
But nothing hurts worse than the look on Ginny’s face as she surveys the damage. When she was alive, we would’vekilledfor a chance to record an album at a studio like Paramount, killed to have a hotly anticipated record. We’re making a mess of the thing the four of us and Bowie built, the thing we used to love most.
“You didn’t use to be like this,” Kenny says quietly. Somehow his gentler tone is worse. “I don’t know if it’s success or sadness making you two toxic.” He takes a step over the snare drums toward the exit. “But call me when you remove your heads from your asses.”
Chapter 37
Hannah
Monday, August 19, 2024
The Fairview Cemetery in Bonita Vista is the last place on earth I would choose to spend eternity. It’s a small cemetery, and not particularly pretty. It’s not idyllic the way cemeteries are in the movies. There are few trees to cast shade and the grass is always overgrown, the gravestone markers green with mildew, despite the infrequent California rain. It doesn’t overlook the ocean or the mountains; instead it’s located a couple miles west of the strip malls, with their signs flashing CASH4GOLD and VAPEHOUSE. The air here smells, very faintly, of manure.
It pains me that this is where Ginny ended up. Especially since we both worked so hard to leave Bonita Vista. I wanted better for her, but I wasn’t in my right mind when my parents chose Fairview, and by the time I got my wits together, they’d already put down a deposit. They insisted that since Ginny was their kid—they were still paying for her health insurance, for God’s sake—they got to make the decision.
If Dr. X were here, I’d tell her that this cemetery is yet another reason I can’t let Ginny go. There’s no way I can accept a reality in which my precious sister gets stuck here,in this forgotten suburban plot. Better to keep her with me, in whatever form I can.
Obviously, if I actually told Dr. X that I keep Ginny with me, the good doc would probably have me committed. So it was hard to protest when she assigned me the “therapy homework” of driving to Bonita Vista and visiting Ginny’s grave. She swore it would be cathartic.
Ginny’s grave marker still looks fresh and new, no mildew yet. She’s been put in a far corner of the cemetery, so at least she has some privacy, no one treading over her grave to get to someone else. There’s a limp bunch of sunflowers lying in front of the stone. My mom is good about bringing flowers, I’ll give her that. I think she comes every week. It’s a nice enough gesture that I’m trying to repress the thought that Ginny never liked sunflowers—she was a ranunculus girl. “The practical woman’s peony,” she called them.
“It’s true,” says Ginny, walking up behind her grave. “They look just like peonies at half the price. It’s what I would’ve chosen for my wedding.”
Her face glows with freckled beauty. “You would’ve made a perfect bride,” I say.
She sighs. “I wish I’d known I only had twenty-six years to fool around with guys. I would’ve hooked up so much more. Like you.”
“Slut-shaming even now,” I tsk. “You know feminism still applies when you’re dead?” What I really want to say is that I’d give her my wedding, my life and my years, if I could. But some things are too maudlin even for Ginny’s spirit.
“So,” she says. “You feeling the catharsis yet?”
I fold myself down on the grass in front of her grave and look around. There’s a bird singing in one of the trees, a sweet, trilling high note I couldn’t reach if I tried. It’s comforting to know there’s another creature here, and even in this suburban wasteland, there’s a music to the way the tree branches shiftin the breeze. A truck rumbles slowly down a distant road. It’s not the worst mix of melodies.
And yet there’s the relentless shining sun. I squint at it.
“I know what you’re about to say,” Ginny prompts. “And you need to get over it. It’s a weird hang-up.”
“It’s just disrespectful. Does it need to be sunny every day? California can’t give us a few months of storms in your honor?”
Ginny plops down on the grass facing me, with her legs crossed. “People literally move here for the eternal sunshine.”
I eye the grass at her feet. “I could dig you up and move you. We could go anywhere.”
She snorts. “You would go to one place only, and that’s prison.”
“Leonardo da Vinci used to dig up graves to study anatomy. Very respectable doctors in Scotland used to steal bodies to practice surgery.”
“Gross.”
“Remember when we learned Mary Shelley had sex with Percy for the first time on her mother’s grave?”
“I think you’re going to have to resign yourself to the fact that people used to get away with much more punk rock things in cemeteries.”
We gaze at each other. Her face is a mirror of my own, just a touch younger. Forever young.
