The smell from the coffin was surprising. Not a smell of death. It was sweet and sour, an ancient primordial scent: earth, mud, leaves, and underneath that a faint chemical smell. And something else as well, something I wanted to understand. A smell that reminded me of a lost time, and I breathed in the air from the tiny coffin, trying to spark that memory, trying to send myself backward in time. But it was elusive, not a smell of death, but also not meant for the living.

“Baby B,” I said, wondering. “He’s so much smaller than I thought.”

“Also more, you know, intact,” Tuck said, reaching out for me, touching my soaked hair.

“Yes, that’s really surprising,” I said.

“What do we do now?” Tuck said.

“Put him back,” I said. “What else can we do?”

But I didn’t want to close the lid. He was ugly, his skin gray and desiccated. There was nothing cute about him. But still, here was his body, here were his small hands, here were his cheeks, his forehead.

“Little brother,” I said.

I closed the lid, and, trembling now, we shoveled the dirt onto him again.

Chapter 24

24

Cole was waiting for me at home. He would be forever waiting for me. In every house, in every room, at every table, in every chair. We came in through the kitchen, and stood there, soaking wet, our faces and arms streaked with dirt.

“Where were you?” Cole said, looking scared. Was this the first time I’d ever seen him scared? I couldn’t remember. But I liked it. I hadn’t thought about what I’d tell him. But I didn’t need to think up anything, because Tuck answered for me.

“We were digging in the graveyard,” Tuck said cheerfully, and Cole’s fear seemed to deepen, break the composure of his face.

“Say what you will,” Tuck said, “grave robbing is hard work.”

“I have to wash off,” I said.

We took turns in the shower. Cole stood in the doorway of his room, watching us as we passed in the hallway, furious.

“You really thought he wasn’t dead?” Cole said. “You thought it was all a dream you could wake up from. It’s not a dream. He’s dead, Lydia. She killed him.”

“What does that mean?”

But Cole disappeared into our ghost room and wouldn’t come out again. Of course, that was the new question I had been asking myself. Had she killed him? I hated Cole for saying that, because we hate the things that give voice to our fears. We hate them and we’re grateful to them—sometimes against our wills.