Elfrieda Leech took a breath. “When you leave, I’m going to wait three hours. Then I’m going to take the gun, put it in my mouth, nice and deep, and pull the trigger.”
“How many seconds in three hours?”
“10,800.”
“It was a pleasure knowing you, Elfrieda.”
“You too, David.”
The three intruders left then, leaving her bedroom door open. The dead bolt slid back in place at the front door. She had no idea how they had gotten a key.
Sitting on the edge of the bed, Elfrieda Leech remained perfectly still. In her mind, she began to tick away the seconds—10,800, 10,799, 10,798…the clock on her nightstand whirring along with her, the click of plastic on plastic as each minute fell away.
3
My shovel struck the top of my father’s wooden casket at a little past three in the morning, and by a quarter after, I had cleared away the entire surface. Although I had only been four when he died, I remembered the casket. The black wood had been polished to a bright shine, so much so I could see my distorted reflection in the finish from my seat next to Auntie Jo in the front row. Someone placed a rose on top, and I thought for sure Auntie Jo would knock the flower off since there wasn’t one on Momma’s casket, too. She didn’t, though.
That black shine was long gone, the bare wood showing through in spots, the metal of the hinges and latch rusted. The wood had begun to rot, and with a little pressure on the blade of the shovel, the screws pulled right out and the latch popped off.
Who put the flower there, Auntie Jo?
Some asshole.
If I stopped moving, I knew I wouldn’t go through with what I needed to do, so I didn’t allow myself to stop. I didn’t allow myself to think. Instead, I lowered myself into the small space I dug out to the left of the casket and jammed the edge of the shovel under the lip of the lid. Although the rain stopped, puddled water soaked through my shoes, and when I pressed down on the handle of the shovel, when I leveraged it with my weight, water squooshed between my toes and I wondered what it would be like to sink down into that mud, to disappear within the earth.
The top of the casket snapped open with an audiblepop!There was a rush of air both in and out of the casket, matched only by the deep breath I sucked into my lungs and forced back out.
I tossed the shovel out of the hole and wrapped my fingers around the lid of my father’s casket, prying it open against the weight of more than a decade.
I’m not sure when my eyes closed, but they did and they didn’t want to open again, but I forced them anyway. When they did, I found the courage to look down into the box.
My father was not inside.
I don’t think I expected him to be in the casket. At some point while digging, I began to tell myself he wouldn’t be in there, and as I repeated that mantra, it became easier to fill the shovel, easier to dig, to keep going. Seeing the empty casket, though, knowing for sure, that brought the tears and I collapsed in the hole, water and mud soaking my jeans. My hands gripped the side of the empty casket, my body quivering, and my mind so filled with thoughts I couldn’t make sense of any of them.
I buried my face in my filthy hands and cried, all the emotion of the past hours coming to a head.
When I finally brought myself to look back inside, I was certain he had never been in the casket. Unlike the wooden exterior, the satin lining of the casket appeared new, only slightly yellowed from its time below ground, preserved by the airtight seal. A pillow sat where his head would have rested, and that pillow didn’t have so much as a crease down the center.
In the center of the casket sat a cardboard box.
The box I had seen my father give Auntie Jo.
Inside the cardboard box, I found two books. A Penn State 1978 yearbook, and a paperback copy ofGreat Expectations.
Nothing else.
Not a damn thing else.
I wanted to scream. If not for the fear of discovery, I surely would have.
I’m not sure what I expected to find, but it certainly wasn’t this.
The anxiety, fear, and uncertainty of earlier quickly turned to anger and frustration.
There had to be something else. What the hell was I supposed to do with an old yearbook and another copy of that damn Dickens book? Why would someone go through all this trouble for something so mundane?
A note fell from the folds ofGreat Expectations:
