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The rain falls slow and big. Fat drops colliding with the coffin and echoing like the patter of Jesse’s palms on his beloved bongo drums. My sister Callie even starts humming a little bit before catching herself and swallowing her sad little song. Jesse and Steven are quiet for once. They’re our neighbors from up the street and they never knew anyone who died. The four of us huddle together under the wide black umbrella we found lying a few yards from the grave site. Someone must’ve left it behind this morning. We’d been allowed to go to the funeral, but it didn’t seem real then. Too much talking about God in loud voices echoing off the dark walls of the crowded church. Too many people crying and hugging and pretending they really knew Joey. Like a big, sad play in a theater stinking of incense.
With all the commotion at home afterwards, we had no problem sneaking out to climb the hill back up to the grave site. We just had to see it again, by ourselves. Now we stand there shivering, while twisted streams crawl from under our tennis shoes into the small pit holding what’s left of my brother Joey. The pit’s so small. Too small. Funeral pits shouldn’t be so small. But Joey’s only three, and his body doesn’t take up much space.
“Do you think he sees us?” asks Jesse. Steven cuffs him on the back of the head and says sharply, “Of course not, stupid. He’s DEAD!” Jesse glances quickly over at me and Callie before looking down at the ground.
Callie starts to cry a little bit, and I think I might cry too. But I don’t want to look like a sissy in front of Steven. He’s two grades ahead of the rest of us in school, and he’s always telling us how boys don’t cry. Besides that, I’m not really sure that being dead is such a sad thing. Lots of cool people are dead, like Kurt Cobain and Johnny Cash and Elvis. And it seems like they’re still with us, sometimes more than ever. Maybe it’s like that with Joey. I mean, I know he’s there, in the ground. But I can still feel him. I can still hear him, singing his little baby songs and laughing when I put him up on my shoulders. I don’t think he’s a ghost or anything corny like that, it’s just that I can still sense him.
“It’s wet. Let’s get outta here,” grunts Steven, and starts down the hill. Jesse scampers after him, but me and Callie stay put. Something holds us there to that spot. I know Callie feels it, because she’s staring at this spot on the coffin, the same spot I’m looking at. A little red spot near where Joey’s head might be.
“Callie?” My voice sounds scared, and I’m glad Steven and Jesse took off.
“Shhhhhh,” she whispers. She doesn’t look away from the spot.
I start to tell her not to shush me, but then she whispers again.
“Shhhh, Joey, it’s okay. We’re here now.”
She’s leaning closer and closer to the coffin and looking like she might fall into the grave. She turns to look up at me, her face white and serious and her stringy wet hair stuck to her cheeks. “He’s crying,” she says.
“What? Callie have you gone crazy? What are you….” But before I can finish, I hear it too. It’s Joey alright, crying the way he did when Mama tried to make him take a nap and he knew me and Callie were still playing outside. Crying to be let out of his crib. Only this time it wasn’t a crib he was in. I look over at Callie, and she looks at me, and we know we have to help Joey. But how do you help a dead boy? What can you do when he’s locked up inside a box? We sit looking helplessly at one another while Joey continues to sob, and then I suddenly see a flicker of light in Callie’s eyes. “Stay here!” she commands, “And tell Joey I’ll be right back!” Then she runs down the hill towards home, leaving me alone with Joey.
I lean down close and I can smell the wet earth and I can hear the crying. If this was a movie on TV I would definitely be freaking out, but for some reason I feel so calm and normal. I just start telling my baby brother his favorite story, about the great green room with the moon and the red balloon. Soon it gets quiet, and I know he’s listening. I focus on the red spot and I just keep telling that same story, as much as I can remember, and maybe it’s my eyes but that red spot seems to get bigger and bigger. Soon it doesn’t seem to be a spot at all but a face, and then a body, and then there’s Joey as alive as I’ve ever seen him, just standing there on his tiny coffin sucking his thumb and waiting.
Just then Callie comes rushing up. She doesn’t bat an eye when she sees Joey standing there on his coffin.
“Here baby,” she says, reaching out to him. “Here it is.”
She hands him his bear. Our bear. The bear me and Callie gave him when he turned two. The bear he slept with every nap and every night since he got it. Me and Callie had saved our allowances for a whole month to buy that bear for our baby brother, and it was like he somehow knew how special it was. Anyhow, when Callie holds it out to him, Joey hugs it close and smiles the biggest smile we ever saw, even brighter than the sun. Then he starts sucking his thumb again, and lays himself right back down there in his new bed, for his eternal rest.
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