Chapter 48
“Did you know people used to install bells inside coffins?”
Allie chewed on her turkey sandwich. “You’re making that up.”
“Really. It was a thing.”
Of course their first date would be at a cemetery. But the coin must be obeyed. That was the first and only rule of the penny date,
Ethan had explained, and even though it was mid-February and a crisp thirty degrees, Allie was finding it an oddly pleasant
day for a picnic in a graveyard. The sky was hard blue, the foliage all skeletal sticks. She’d lost track of how many times
they’d walked the same looping concrete path, their laughing breaths fogging in the air, each time passing that same headstone
with a conspicuous rust-eaten gizmo.
She picked away dead leaves. “Why install a bell?”
“As someone who’s already died once before, I figured you’d be an expert,” Ethan said. “They were called safety coffins. That was ages ago, when my field was a total shit show and we cured everything with cocaine and leeches. People used to
worry they’d be pronounced dead prematurely by some idiot doctor. Imagine waking up from a coma and realizing you’d been buried
alive. The bell was to alert passersby that there was a living person trapped down there inside a coffin, pulling that little
string for dear life.”
“The origin of the phrase saved by the bell?”
He laughed. “Maybe.”
Something about walking in circles over hundreds of dead people prompted reflection (and Jack and Coke in the thermos didn’t hurt).
Allie had driven past this cemetery countless times on her way to the airport but never actually set foot in it.
She’d never paid so much attention to the engravings on headstones or noticed how many husbands and wives chose to be buried together.
It was oddly romantic. Reassuring, even.
Her own experience with dying in Mexico had been so jarring and lonely that she’d never imagined having company when you go.
She’d always traveled alone. Maybe she didn’t have to.
Being a public figure is strangely isolating. Strangers may recognize your face, but the connection is strictly one way. You
exist in other people’s minds as a caricature of yourself, and she sometimes felt like she’d sold part of her soul the day
she stopped being Alma. It sounded like the name of a 1950s housewife, but it was still hers, wasn’t it? She hadn’t planned
to be famous or to even monetize her hobby. After high school she’d only wanted to quietly wander the world like Carmen Sandiego,
seeing what was over the next hill and the next, but she was also a storyteller, and an English teacher once told her that
being a storyteller is a sort of pathological emptiness—when you feel something, you’re not satisfied until you’ve made other
people feel it, too. You can’t just experience it yourself. You have to share it.
Passing through the saddest part of the cemetery, the children’s section, Ethan had softened. “My kids had better outlive
me.”
“You don’t have kids.” She was still learning about him. “. . . Right?”
“I mean someday.”
“You want them?”
“You don’t?”
Allie winced, like he’d grazed a nerve. “I’d be a shitty mom.”
“I disagree.”
“You just met me.”
“I know enough.” He stepped over a frozen puddle. “Actually, I knew you’d be a good mother the moment I first saw you.”
She grabbed his thermos and took a mighty swig. “Bull. Shit.”
They’d met last month on a multi-grotto caving trip outside Tucson.
“Before the cave,” he said. “That first morning.”
The groups had camped in and around an old retrofitted bus. A nifty idea, but in practice the thing stank like armpits and
stale rubber. Allie had been the first to rise and claim the outdoor shower. She’d been shampooing her hair when she felt
something tickle the top of her foot. Blinking away water, she’d looked down to see knuckled legs crawling over her bare skin—a
hairy yellow scorpion, four inches from pincers to stinger.
“It was an Arizona Desert scorpion, right?”
She looked at him. “How do you know that?”
“I wasn’t spying on you,” Ethan clarified, his hands up. “I was asleep inside the bus, and your voice woke me up.”
“My voice?”
“You were talking to it.” He smiled. “You were trapped inside a little phone booth–sized shower with it, and you were naked, defenseless—”
“How do you know I was naked?”
“I’m assuming.”
“Creep.”
“My point is, anyone else would’ve screamed bloody murder or tried to smash it. But you talked to it. You told it not to be
afraid. You explained that you weren’t going to hurt it, that you were just catching it under a glass so you could safely
move it out of the shower. You were so .
. . polite to the venomous arachnid. And I just listened there in my sleeping bag, until I saw you scamper out of the shower with your hair wet, wrapped in a towel with a scorpion in a cup.
And I remember thinking, Whoever she is, I want to know her.
” Ethan sighed, as if he’d already said too much. “You’d be an amazing mother.”
Her stomach fluttered.
For a long moment, Allie and this man she barely knew walked without speaking. His words repeated in her mind, an unexpected
sentence she could neither ingest nor ignore, so she turned it over and over. You’d be an amazing mother.
As they walked—how many times now had they paced this same loop through the same headstones?—she felt like she was rising,
like she could float away. The sensation was deep inside her stomach, both euphoric and terrifying, and she almost tugged
Ethan’s wrist and kissed him for the first time. Instead, she laughed. “You’re full of shit.”
“I meant it.”
“No, your coffin bell myth.” She grinned, circling him. “A bell would never save you. If you woke up buried alive, you’d suffocate
long before anyone came by. Compare a human’s lung capacity with the size of a coffin—that’s a hundred breaths, right? You’d
last an hour.”
“A little longer.” Ethan flashed a know-it-all smile. “Exhaled breath still has oxygen, just less of it every time. The same
air can be breathed more than once.”
Allie froze.
The same air can be . . .
. . . breathed more than once.
Underwater, she opened her eyes.
She knew the final breath she’d taken from her water bottle moments ago, the air that had raced past her face as tickling bubbles in the dark, had collected somewhere overhead.
She craned her neck, tilted her chin up, and pressed her mouth against cold rock.
With her lips she found these precious bubbles, trapped in the tunnel’s highest crease.
Just traces of oxygen left.
Enough.
She sucked this final breath through her teeth. Then with a few more seconds, a few more heartbeats, Allie tensed her body
and braced all her weight against her ankle, against those inches of fragile bone and tendon. This time, she thought about
what her boyfriend told her in that cemetery fourteen months ago.
You’d be an amazing mother.
You’d be an amazing mother.
You’d be an amazing—