Funeral for a Friend

"*Hey man, this is Dusty's brother, can you call me when you get a minute?*"

The text message caused my phone to teeter onto the floor at just past two in the morning. Our small family reacted accordingly. My wife groaned amicably and rolled over in bed. Our big idiot German Shepherd snorted herself out of sleep and sashayed her way over to lick my face. I grabbed my glasses from the nightstand, picked up the phone from the floor, and stared at the screen.

The words sent a shiver down my spine.

Dustin and I had not talked in some years. That’s sort of how life works with old friends, I guess. The best of intentions lay paths that other obligations tear apart. Your twenties will do that to you. The point is - I cannot describe what it feels like to suddenly hear a dead man’s name in the middle of the night.

Two years earlier, our small town survived an especially nasty stint of black ice through late January and February. The roads looked awful. It didn’t snow much, but a few brief spurts of sleet across dark, cold pavement formed a terrible coating that cost us all dearly. Fender benders, accidents, and fatalities happened all over town. But no one came closer to home than Dustin.

My old best friend hit an especially bad patch that split the wheels and frame of his old Chevy pickup. The truck itself slammed into a tree and he flew through the windshield. We heard after the fact that death had come immediately. That’s one of those lies people tell you to be nice, by the way. A line fed to victims of tragedy in the hopes that the damage won’t get any worse. *They didn’t feel a thing. It happened right away. It was painless. They are at peace, now.* We tell ourselves these things because we have to. But every doctor and paramedic I’ve ever met insists that death looks a whole lot more ugly from their side. And they should know.

Dusty was twenty-four years old.

I rolled over and debated how to answer the text. Politeness won out, as it does. I knew his brother, Justin, well enough. He’s a good guy. I gave him a call. The line rang a couple times before a sleepy, nervous voice answered.

“*Hello?*”

“Hey, Justin, what’s up? Everything alright?”

The kid sounded on the verge of tears.

“*Not really. Sorry to call this late, man. I just… I didn't know who else to call.*”

My wife perked up at that. She’s a nurse by trade, and therefore much better in a crisis than her husband.

“What happened?” I asked carefully.

“*Can you come get my Mom?*” he sounded embarrassed. “*She’s at Dusty’s grave again.*”

That one hurt my chest.

See, we all grieve in different ways. Some of us turn inward and become little mopes curled on a couch all winter. Some of us drink too much. Some pray. Some fuck. Some throw themselves into work and money and strange little hobbies. Justin and Dustin’s mother chose the cemetery. Her boys grew up over on Lark Street, not too far from us. She’s a sweet lady, really, but the two years after Dusty’s death hit her hard. The kind of hard that gets your name spoken in hushed tones around town. She spent hours at the grave some days. Long enough to get picked up by the cops on more than one occasion.

“*She isn’t answering her phone,*” Justin continued. “*And Dad won’t wake up. He’s out cold on the couch. I can’t drive. I don’t know what to do.*”

I looked over at my wife. She nodded.

“Yeah, alright. Give me ten minutes.”

The cemetery sat at the edge of town on a low hill beneath a stand of old trees. My old sedan handled the backroads poorly in winter, but thankfully the weather had mellowed by then into one of those cold damp March nights where the fog hangs low over the fields. The graveyard gates stood open when I arrived. That struck me as odd. Nobody should have been there at that hour. I clicked on my high beams and followed the gravel lane toward the newer plots near the rear.

I found her almost immediately.

Mrs. Holloway sat in a folding chair in front of Dustin’s headstone with her hands folded in her lap like she had come to church. She wore a thick parka and no hat. Frost clung to her hair. The grave itself looked decorated for a holiday: flowers, pictures, a few candles in old glass holders, one of Dusty’s favorite baseball caps draped carefully across the stone. It all might have looked almost peaceful if not for the fact that she wasn’t alone.

A second chair sat beside her.

Someone occupied it.

At first I assumed it must have been Justin, or another relative. But the figure looked wrong. The body seemed too thin, too folded inward, and the head lolled at an angle no healthy neck should permit. My headlights only reached so far through the fog. I shut off the engine and rolled down the window.

“Mrs. Holloway?”

The woman turned slowly.

“Oh,” she said pleasantly. “*You came.*”

“Justin asked me to pick you up.”

She nodded as if that made perfect sense.

“*We’re just talking. You remember Dustin, don’t you?*”

Something in the second chair moved.

I felt the skin on my arms go cold. The figure did not stand. It merely shifted, one long limb sliding into the wash of the headlights. The hand at the end of it looked gray and waterlogged and entirely too large.

“Ma’am,” I said, and hated how weak my voice sounded. “You need to come with me.”

She smiled and patted the thing’s knee.

“*He came back to visit.*”

I got out of the car. I don’t know why. Instinct, maybe. Maybe I thought if I got closer the illusion would break and everything would make sense. But each step up that little path only made the situation worse. The thing in the chair wore a suit Dustin had been buried in. I recognized the cheap dark fabric and the silver tie from the funeral home. The body inside of it was too swollen in some places and too sunken in others. Mud clung to the cuffs. The face sat in the shadow of the cemetery oak overhead until the wind stirred the branches and the moonlight found it.

I wish it hadn’t.

His mouth hung open around broken-looking teeth. One eye had collapsed inward. The other stared at me with a pale and wet brightness that no corpse should ever possess. There was dirt under his fingernails. There was dirt in his hair. There was dirt across the front of his shirt, as if he had clawed his own way up through the earth to come sit with his mother.

“Jesus Christ,” I whispered.

Mrs. Holloway squeezed his hand.

“*Don’t be rude,*” she scolded. “*He made the trip all the way home.*”

Dustin smiled.

The expression split the skin at the corner of his mouth.

I stumbled back toward the car and nearly fell. The dog in me wanted to run. But Mrs. Holloway was still there. The poor woman looked genuinely happy for the first time in years. That hurt worse than the corpse.

“Ma’am, please. That isn’t your son.”

Her face hardened instantly.

“*You don’t know anything about my son.*”

The thing in the chair stood up.

I had forgotten how tall Dustin used to be. Death had made him seem taller somehow, stretched and wrong and all angles. One shoe was missing. The exposed foot looked mostly bone. He took a step toward me with the slow stiffness of a man who had been sleeping too long.

Then another.

I made it back to my car and slammed the door just as he reached the hood. The impact dented the metal. His fingers scraped across the windshield and left streaks of mud and something darker. Mrs. Holloway remained seated, calm as ever, while the thing that used to be my friend leaned over the glass and pressed his ruined face against it.

“*Missed you,*” he croaked.

I put the car in reverse so fast I nearly hit a headstone. The wheels spun in the wet gravel. Dustin slid off the hood and disappeared into the fog. Mrs. Holloway did not scream. She only watched me go with a look of bitter disappointment. I sped straight to the sheriff’s station and burst in looking like a lunatic. I’m sure I sounded like one too. They sent two deputies back out with me and a county medic just in case.

When we got there, the cemetery was empty.

The chairs remained. The flowers remained. The candles remained. Dustin’s headstone sat quiet in the moonlight with fresh dirt scattered around its base. But there was no body, and no mother. The grave itself looked disturbed. Not dug up entirely, not quite, but broken at the center as if something had forced a narrow passage up through the casket and the soil above it.

We found Mrs. Holloway an hour later standing barefoot in the road leading away from the cemetery. She had no memory of leaving. No memory of Dustin visiting. No memory of talking to me. The deputies chalked it up to shock and grief and the cold. They did not believe what I told them. Maybe they couldn’t.

Justin called the next day to thank me. His mother spent a week under observation after that. The family quietly moved her sister in to help out. Life, as it always does, dragged the whole event into the background. People whispered. Then people forgot.

I tried to forget too.

But every year around the anniversary of Dustin’s death, I hear from Justin. Sometimes it’s just a text. Sometimes it’s a call in the middle of the night. He never says much. He doesn’t have to.

He only asks the same question.

“*Can you come get my Mom?*”

And every time I drive out to that cemetery, there are two chairs waiting by the grave.