feel guilty,” she replied.
“For what?”
“For playing along. For letting him be crazy because I liked him better that way.”
We were quiet for a minute, staring down at the body, a decayed echo of my own form.
“We’d better get going,” I said, pulling the plastic back together to cover him as best I could. “We’ve got more work to do.”
I was going to just roll him in, but at the last second, it didn’t feel right. Like it was the wrong thing to do. So I had Amber grab the legs and I took the top, and we dropped him down in as gently as we could.
We started piling dirt on. Even Amber helped, kicking dirt down in, sometimes scooping it with one hand while she held the flashlight with the other. I shoveled like crazy. It’s like we both wanted to get it over with as fast as we could, especially at first when the dirt hit the plastic, making a weird sort of crackling sound. Then it was dirt on dirt and real quiet and not quite so bad. We finished by laying the sod, with its long grass, back in place. It wasn’t perfect, but it looked okay.
We stood back, side by side, me holding the shovel, her shining the flashlight on the slightly mounded ground. Our breath, heavy from the exertion, clouded in the cold. We were both dirty, but it was done.
Amber reached over and took my hand. All of a sudden she started to cry, a little bit at first, but pretty soon she was choking back sobs. It was over pretty quick.
“Sorry,” she said, sniffing.
“Don’t be.”
“It’s just that I grew to hate him so much, especially these last couple months,” she said, wiping her eyes. She kept looking at the ground.
“He used to hit me, you know,” she said. “Not much at first. More toward the end.”
I didn’t know what to say. I’d already figured as much, but to hear her say it was still strange. Maybe it was the way she said it, like it was a confession, an admission of sorts, even though she’d been on the receiving end. Maybe she was saying it for him, because he couldn’t.
“I thought at first that it would stop, that it was just a temporary thing, like when you come down with a cold for a few weeks and then it sort of disappears.” She shook her head. “I was so stupid, to let him treat me that way, to just sort of block it out like it was happening to somebody else. In the end it only made me feel worse. I felt like I was nothing.”
She hesitated. “That’s why I hated him so much,” she said at last. “Because he made me hate myself.”
“But it’s over now,” I said. “If it makes you feel any better, Chris hated himself too. For the same reason. I know,” I said. “I saw it in his eyes that night, right here in this clearing.”
We lingered for another minute. I didn’t want to leave yet. Not now, not after what she’d said, no matter how true it was. Chris was a messed-up kid, no doubt about it. But there was more. There’s always more.
“I didn’t know Chris when I killed him,” I said. “But I still felt bad. And now after being him, even for just a little while, I feel worse. He didn’t deserve it, Amber.”
“Maybe he didn’t,” she said. “But who’s to say why things happen the way they do?”
She leaned her head on my shoulder, and I put my arm around her. I felt so good all of a sudden. I shouldn’t have, but I did.
“We’d better say good-bye,” I said. She nodded.
“Tell me something about him,” I said. “Something good. Let’s say good-bye that way. There must be something.”
“There’s lots of things,” she said. “He was an asshole most of the time, but every once in a while, he’d let his guard down. There was this side to him, like a little kid.” She paused for a moment, thinking. “He had these sheets,” she said suddenly.
“Race cars,” I said.
She laughed. “I thought they were cute. I even picked on him once about them. He got pretty mad, but he never took them off,” she said. “What about you?”
I thought for a second. “He was good to his sister,” I said. “I think he really loved her.”
I turned to look down at Amber. Her eyes closed all of a sudden, but the tears came