Chapter Text
From the day he’d started the job, Frank had been given one basic rule of thumb.
If they’re not causing trouble, leave the mourners alone.
Nobody liked to be bothered when they were having a personal moment over a grave. So while he was working under Andy, and when the old man retired, and when he’d started training up his own assistant, he’d held to one basic rule; If they weren’t making a mess, leave them alone.
But he was a curious soul, so he’d watched from a distance, out of the corner of his eye, as people came to Elmbridge Cemetery with bundles of flowers, with tears in their eyes, with letters written too late.
Stranger practices too- a few people who’d poured out a drink onto the grave, some who’d sat down and had a drink, and some who’d drink like they were trying to get buried themselves. That was one of the few cases where he’d come up and tell someone to go home.
Not everyone was sad. Some were angry. A couple of people would come and shout at the grave, for whatever reason. Frank had needed to stop some from trying to vandalise the headstones as well, or take a piss on them.
In one extraordinary case, a man had come along in dancing shoes and performed a jig. Frank hadn’t even tried to hide his gawking at the sight.
Still, the cemetery was big, and Frank probably couldn’t have pointed to any specific grave and recounted who had done what over it. Years of work had all blurred together, but for a few extraordinary anecdotes.
So it was really only because of the tree and the dogs that Frank noticed what was going on.
It was a brisk autumn day the first time he’d noticed a group of people standing under the old yew tree just off to the centre of the cemetery. Nothing strange about that, plenty of people didn’t want to stop by alone.
However, Frank had made sure the sign at the front gates was very clear- No Dogs. If the damn things weren’t chasing squirrels and knocking the flowers all over the place, they were crapping on the grass. And that group had three dogs with them. Three! Couldn’t they read?
Frank had made his way over to give them a telling-off with that balance of sympathetic and annoyed he’d developed over the years- or at least, he’d got halfway before he’d seen the other group who’d just reached the grave under the yew tree. By the looks of things, they didn’t know the first group.
Well, Frank had turned around and fussed over the grass for a few minutes, to give them time to argue or catch up or whatever before chivvying them away; But once he looked up again, all of them were walking back to the gates, dogs at heel.
He’d discretely checked the grave for droppings, and found none, luckily. Just a bunch of flowers, fairly typical. Less typical was the cheap necklace draped on top, and the little metal canister by the stone.
Frank had shrugged and put it from his mind, and that would have been the end of it.
A few days later, there was another visitor standing under the old yew tree, and this one was more noticeable. Elmbridge was a decent-sized town, taking some of the spill from Chicago, but it wasn’t too diverse, and a six foot tall Asian man was notable. Especially one who, when he scratched at his arm, revealed the dragon tattoos under his coat.
The man had stood by the grave for a long while, long enough that Frank had worked his way down the row towards him, before he’d given a shallow bow to the grave and walked off.
Unusual.
There were more unusual people after that. A tired woman with tattooed arms had sat in front for a while. Frank hadn’t seen her do anything, but when he’d gone past the grave the next time, flowers were sprouting from the grass. Big ones, a kind he’d never seen before. The grass didn’t look dug up either.
A blonde woman in green had nodded to the headstone, and then left with odd speed for her slow pace. Very long strides, maybe.
A youngish man had sat in front for at least an hour before he’d put a toy chicken by the headstone, paying no mind to the birds that flocked to the yew tree’s branches. They’d all flown off after he’d left, at the same time.
A few others, more normal looking, in ones and twos. There was a man and a woman who stood out because of the contrast- the woman had dark hair going grey and sensible clothing, nothing unusual; but the man looked fat even from a distance, with ill-fitting clothes and a bizarre hairstyle that looked like a half-hearted attempt at a mohawk. They’d talked together for a long time, then left business cards on the grave- a therapist and a PR consultant, apparently.
Every strange visitor and odd gift had only piqued Frank’s curiosity further. Not even the one mobster buried in the north side had received this kind of unique attention. Some of the visitors had come back twice- the blonde woman from the first group moreso.
Three weeks after the group with the dogs, Frank huffed to himself as he walked the rows, pulling weeds and cleaning off bird shit, before he’d noticed that the grave under the yew tree had another visitor.
Andy’s words rang in his mind, the rule of privacy. Leave the mourners alone. So Frank kept walking the rows, trimming the grass, watering the flowers at the border, sweeping up leaves.
Two hours later, the visitor was still there.
Frank sipped at his thermos, mulled it over some, sipped again, then put the thermos down and muttered, “Hell with it.”
The man didn’t look up as he approached. Frank just stopped a few feet away, saying nothing. After a moment he turned to look at the headstone as well.
The bunches of flowers were still fairly fresh, though dropping petals. The live flowers were growing like mad, inches high with wide yellow petals. For all his amateur botany knowledge, Frank still couldn’t place them.
The toy chicken was waterlogged from last night’s rain, but the plastic necklace was still there, and the little canister. A few other things- a little paper cube, gone soggy; a scrap of fine cloth; a rubber spider.
The two of them stood there, saying nothing at all.
At last, the visitor sighed- and when someone like that sighed, you felt it. He was a big man, not just tall but broad, like somebody who’d played college football and stayed in shape after that. The sensible boots and the thick jacket only added to the image.
Frank cleared his throat. “You alright?”
The man looked his way. “Sorry?”
“You’ve been here about-” Frank made a show of checking his watch, “-two hours now.”
“That long?” The visitor shook his head. “Got lost in thought.”
There was another long silence. Frank chewed his lip.
He could just walk away, leave the man to whatever thoughts were bouncing around in his head. That’d be the decent thing to do.
Still, that little flame of curiosity burned in his soul.
“Family?”
The visitor snorted. “No. No, she was…”
Frank gave him a side-eyed look. The look on the man’s face was hard to place- a little sad, a little confused, a little angry.
“Look, if you want to be left alone-” Frank began.
The man shook his head. “No, it’s fine. I should probably be moving on.” He didn’t shift an inch.
Frank glanced down at the headstone.
Taylor Anne Franklin nee Hebert
June 12th 1995- November 2nd 2035
Always, she strove.
It struck Frank as a bit minimalist- nothing about her family or her job or her pets like some people had. The full stop was odd too. Punctuation on a headstone wasn’t something you saw a lot. It was too… particular.
“Friend’s not the right word either,” the man said at last. “We could have been friends, I think. We bonded over a lot of stuff, grew up in the same town.”
He sighed. “But I asked her to push me forward. So she pushed me, about as hard as she pushed herself.” He laughed grimly. “Say what you like about her, but she never asked anyone to do something she wasn’t willing to do herself.”
Frank felt the edges of a thought growing in his mind. There were a lot of edges. Sharp, pointy ones.
“And it worked. I was what I needed to be. Tough, hardened. But I could never just… turn off my feelings like she did. She didn’t make any friends, she never focused on anything but the job. I don’t know if she was capable of being anything else at that point.
“And we needed that, we needed someone to be that kind of focused. But God, it made her hard to deal with.”
“Mm.” Frank nodded.
“I lost family,” the man said. His hand curled into a fist even as his voice stayed level. “And she didn’t say a damn thing about it. There wasn’t time.
“I mean, there really wasn’t. Nobody else said anything. I didn’t say. But I wish she had.”
“That’s hard,” Frank said weakly.
He’d read a bit of philosophy- it helped a bit when things started getting maudlin. Plato’s Allegory of the Cave was something that appealed to him- that the world people experienced was simple shadows compared to the complexity of actual reality.
The story the man was telling now was giving Frank an impression of the shape of the real thing, and it seemed like it had a lot of jagged edges.
“I met her kids,” the man said suddenly. Another laugh. “Kids! I couldn’t picture her unwinding enough to go on a date, let alone have kids! They look just like her. Especially the girls.
“And the younger one, her middle name’s Aster. Like my sister. When she said that, I almost passed out.”
“Seems sweet,” Frank said cautiously.
“Ha,” the man said humourlessly.
The conversation stalled there, and Frank looked down at the grave again. Thinking.
After a second he looked up at the man again. He was maybe forty, but with the look of a man who’d aged like teak, only getting harder as time went by. There were a couple of faint scars across his face, old scars only visible because his face was rather pale. Not getting a lot of sun.
Frank felt something click in his mind. He wasn’t looking at shadows on a cave wall any more. He was turning around, seeing the real object out of the corner of his eye.
“Must have been pretty bad,” he said slowly.
The man glanced at him. Frank gestured at the dates on the headstone. “I mean, it’s been two years.”
The man shook his head. “I only just heard.”
“Ah.” It was crazy to think. There were plenty of other reasons for people to drift apart and not talk to each other. But Frank remembered all the hullabaloo several months back, about the portals between other worlds opening up, enough for people to pass through.
The sun was starting to go down, and the wind was developing an extra bite to it. Frank hunched into his jacket a bit more. The visitor didn’t seem to notice.
He could have just come out and asked the big question lurking in his mind, but Frank’s nerve failed him. Instead, he asked “Are you angry?”
The man blew air through his lips. “A bit,” he admitted. “After everything she did, it bothers me to think she put it all behind her.”
“Right. Although,” Frank ventured, “that’s not to say it was easy for her.”
“True.” The man paused, then added “Knowing that she moved on… Part of me is glad she did. Glad she let herself have a life.”
“Mm. Nobody ever feels just one thing about another person.”
The man snorted. “Complicated relationships are pretty common for me.”
There was another long pause.
Frank really wanted to ask. A little flame of curiosity burned in his chest. But the stony conviction to let people grieve in relative peace surrounded it, kept it from spreading.
“Well,” he said at last, “If there’s one thing I’ve learned from working here, sometimes you need to be alone to work through your feelings. And sometimes you need to be with others,” he added. “You said you met her kids? Maybe that’ll help.”
The man shrugged uncertainly. “Maybe? I guess they’d like to see their ‘Uncle Theo’ again,” he said with a trace of irony.
Frank nodded. “Anyway, I’ll leave you alone.”
“No, it’s fine.” The man- Theo- straightened up and shook himself. “I should get going anyway. Can’t stay here all night.” He glanced down at the grave again. “Got to move on.”
He turned and set off without a backward glance, breath pluming in the cold air.
Frank watched him leave, then turned to look at the grave. Theo didn’t seem to have left anything behind like other visitors had. Nothing physical, at least. But maybe he’d got some sorrow off his chest.
Frank gave the grave a nod, and turned away. It was always the rule to leave the mourners alone.
But it was probably best to leave the dead alone too. They’d already been through enough.