Chapter Four
“So how’d your therapy session with Mr. Shorts go? You know, before you took an involuntary nap on his floor.” Dad was clumsily juggling a coffee and doughnut in one hand, a set of overflowing file folders in the other. He looked like a clown in a business-suit.
“It was fine,” I said dismissively, lowering my face towards the bowl of cereal. I hurried, the morning rays and looming threat of conversation beckoning me outside.
“Drowning in your breakfast won’t help you,” my dad teased, piling his work stuff onto the table and sitting across from me. He kicked my shin beneath the table and smiled. “I talked to Shorts, Mar.”
“You kicked me.”
“I was getting your attention in a nonverbal fashion.”
“You‘re the world‘s most immature lawyer,” I stated, failing to press back a smile.
He raised his hands as if at gunpoint. “Just in California. Maybe.”
I rolled my eyes, my smile breaking further to let an involuntary laugh slip. Dad seemed to be the one remaining person who still managed to evoke a little humor. One day I’d thank him for keeping me in-tune to my happy human emotions. So maybe I wasn’t skipping around in a poodle-dress singing “What a Wonderful World,” but life was bearable. The sky was blue, the birds still sang, and the sad-story theatrics truly didn’t apply all too often to my life…subtract the fatalities and moments of missing Mom.
I drank my orange juice in victory of swerving the initial subject of yesterday‘s therapy session, then put my dishes in the sink. “I’m going for a walk, ‘kay?”
“Okay,” Dad said. With my hidden relief, I grabbed my shoulder bag and headed across towards the door. My luck ran out as my hand touched the doorknob. His words stopped me in the nick of time: “But we are talking later.”
Crud. “Have it your way.”
“And Marra?”
“Yep.”
“If you’re going to the cemetery I want you bringing Keefer along. The Grim‘s still running around over there.”
I sighed. “Right.”
“And Marra?”
How long would this last? “Yeah, Dad?”
“Next time, please hang out in the mall or the park, or something…you know, like a normal teenager.”
“When have I ever been normal Dad?” I asked, turning back to see his expression offered no answer. Still, I knew what he meant. It was honestly unfair for his wife to leave him physically and his daughter to abandon him in spirit. Without another word, I turned back to the world outside.
I closed the door behind me. Out here, the world was blazing in the Cali rays. I left the shriveling yard behind me, turning back only for a second to look at the mockery of a garden that grew in the plots around our yard. All cacti, as my dad couldn‘t grow as much as a healthy amoeba if he so desired. All things considered, it was a miracle that Keefer and I had lasted this long.
The ugly mutt head-butted my knee, the way he always seemed to greet people. He was a brown brindle mess of shaggy fur and flashing amber eyes. A Blue Heeler-mix, the owner had called him when we bought him as a puppy. My guess was more mutt than Heeler, probably more hyena than Heeler too.
“You’re coming,” I assured him. “I would never ignore that gorgeous face.”
Tongue lolling sideways out of his mouth, he only reinforced my sarcasm.
We walked down the road, and I pulled my hair up into a messy ponytail to keep it off of my neck. It glinted to the redder side of its auburn spectrum as summer transformed it, more like Mom‘s. Winter and it would become almost as black as Dad’s.
To be honest, I was a little scared of the Grim no matter how grudging I acted about the safety precautions that Dad usually had me take. The whole neighborhood was a little spooked. He was a big wiry gray wolfhound that skulked through the cemetery. I didn’t get why nobody called Animal Control, but it was as if the dog was tabooed in that sense. Who would ever try caging the Grim?
Besides that, he hadn’t actually done anything. It was more fearing in the fact that a big scraggly dog wandered a cemetery all day. The idea was eerie. In nature, he seemed drifty and ghostlike, and sometimes when I spent mornings there I swore he came and melted with the morning mist.
As weird as it was, coming here made me realize that I missed being home. I missed Pollard Hill. I’d visited Mom’s grave almost every day. We were now a few hundred miles from our Arizona origins, and I wanted to sit there by that grave and watch the clouds meander through the undying atmosphere. I still went to the cemetery here, even though I didn’t know anybody buried in it. I’ll admit, Dad was right, it’s a little weird. Weirder than Mr. Shorts being a psychiatrist, maybe even weirder than a ghostly dog named Grim.
Either way, I went to the graveyard more often than my dad liked. Today I grabbed a crayon and pressed out the faded carvings of some of the older headstones. Pressing the faded words onto paper, I felt like I was the liberator of these forgotten people whose mourners were now long since dead too.
I fell asleep in the grass after a few minutes of heroic liberation, with Keefer as my tail-wagging pillow. When I woke up, I was more or less plastered with sweat, even though my guess was that I’d been sleeping for an hour or less. Keefer had been loyally unmoving.
But then I sat up, and so did he, his brindle hairs instantly went on-end. I traced my canine’s gaze as he pulled back his jaw into a shuddering growl.
Standing sagely before us was a big gray dog with wiry fur that flew outward from his lean skeletal frame, and beside the Grim was a tall, pale boy at about seventeen. His eyes were a deep mottled autumnal brown, like oak leaves lit by shattered glints of golden sparks from a bonfire. In all honesty, they were a little wrong, almost unnatural. “Who are you?” he asked, with a curious crooked half-smile wavering on his face.
There was a strange but unexplainable tone in his voice that made it unique. Then a shiver ran down my back. I thought about the second voice of my most recent dream, of a boy who’d whispered Keeper.
And the dumbest thing came out of my mouth. Why did it just come out of my mouth? I asked: “Are you dead?”
And the boy, petting the Grim, just smiled.
Then a raven, squalling, whizzed above my head. We both turned, to see that dozens had flocked together. As black birds gathered in tribunal fashion, a counsel perched upon headstones, the boy and I seemed to both share the same belief. His face turned even paler.
On one headstone, a streak of wet red liquid slid down the tomb’s face.
. 
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