The ’79 Lincoln Continental shone blue as moonstone at high noon. It was her papa’s ‘til he died of black lung, then Suzanne’s, but I drove. A deadly heat wave had moved past the Appalachian region. Still, summer raged on. Kathryn puffed cigarettes out the window with bare feet on the dashboard as we trespassed, her wind tousled dark hair threaded with silver. The sky was cloudless and pale, the once bustling Locust Avenue quiet. Remnants of sidewalk crumbled and buckled beneath expanding roots. A rusted stop sign loomed over the desolate intersection. Three steps ascended to nothingness where her childhood home once stood, the lot empty of all but ghosts of dandelions. She jumped out as I cut the motor.
We weren’t expressly forbidden to do it or granted permission. Don’t ask, don’t tell. Human cremains are rough and stark white pebbles, nothing like ash. Suzy’s were in biodegradable cardboard. We covered them with proprietary neutralizing agent, soil, and wood chips according to directions. We planted a birch seedling, dampening it with bottled spring water. Aptly called a living urn, buried among lush greens and woodsy scents, weeds and blooms and shrubbery competing in the wild overgrowth, it breathed. Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary rose like a mirage on the hillside, its cerulean domes startling against the watercolor sky and bare expanse.
When we were back on the road, I asked. I had to. “Why’d she do it?”
“She was lonely,” Kathryn answered.
“But everyone loved her.”
“She couldn’t stand to be with her thoughts. Don’t you feel that way sometimes?”
“Always,” I said.
Summer of ‘82 we were an entity: my charismatic neighbor, Suzanne, and her sister Kathryn; Suzanne’s boyfriend, Rodney; my best friend Jay, who was Rodney’s brother; and me. Kathryn was a natural beauty—eyes amber-green like sun-dappled moss, skin the gold ochre of sand, hair deep sepia like freshly dug earth. Rodney drove us seventeen miles to watch Poltergeist and Kathryn squeezed my hand in the dark cinema. That July I turned sixteen and drove us past soybean fields at dusk, music blaring. I hated school separating us, but that September, we went to the Bloomsburg Fair. Kathryn offered me her paper cone of blue fairy floss on the Ferris Wheel. I pinched a piece off and ate it. Spun sugar bejeweled with my spit clung to my fingers. She grabbed my hand and sucked the sweetness, grinning.
Misfortune struck my town four years before my birth. A fire originating from trash incinerated at the local landfill seeped into a coal seam, igniting a subterranean honeycomb of anthracite. Scientists estimated it could burn for centuries. They put boxes in our homes that ticked, measuring carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide. When levels soared too high, the boxes shrieked, but what could we do? We opened a window.
Then there were those boreholes—twice as many as people—black smoke with an eerie purple-blue sheen rising in fifteen-foot plumes. Devil’s cigarettes. My sophomore year a twelve-year-old fell into the spontaneous sinkhole behind his grandmama’s house. A subsidence. He miraculously survived without brain damage or scalding, grabbing onto roots and then his cousin’s hand. Blue flames of methane flickered from the abyss.
We were lucky. Not in the zone where vegetables burnt to a crisp in backyard gardens, and folks needed no water heaters for warm baths, feeling faint, suffering migraines, their asthma aggravated by the noxious brew of gasses and their small children developing upper respiratory problems, eyes watery and skin pale.
We pressed our luck that Halloween. We snuck into the woods and drank moonshine pilfered from my granddaddy’s stash. Kathryn wore black plush cat ears, her gold-green eyes lined and wing-tipped in kohl. We played hide-and-seek in land rife with potential subsidences, dumb drunk and feeling immortal in our youth. Kathryn and I hid behind an overturned dogwood, backs against rough bark. She kissed me passionately beneath the indigo sky, then laughed.
“I’m not,” she said, shaking her head. “I’m sorry.”
Weeks later, in the hallway at school with her best friend Meg, her eyelids were the iridescent periwinkle of a butterfly’s wing. Her freshly shorn hair was in a shoulder length shag with bangs like her idol Joan Jett’s, emphasizing her perfect cheekbones.
“I like your hair,” I said.
“Did you hear something?” she asked Meg, glaring.
Suzanne’s was a one-story brick home in Harrisburg with moss roses. I parked the Lincoln out front. Kathryn looked at me then. “Julia? Thanks for coming.”
“Of course.”
“When’s your flight?” she asked.
“Tomorrow morning. You gonna be okay—” She climbed into my lap. “Kat.”
“Shh,” she said. “I’m not afraid anymore.” She kissed me.
Before the fire, we were bound by generations of trust, living in clusters of clapboard row houses. After the fire, friends stopped speaking. Husbands and wives separated when one wanted to stay and the other wanted to take the children somewhere safe. Some wanted the government to extinguish the fire somehow, or money to move. Others didn’t believe there was a fire, talking of conspiracy to get us out, millions worth of coal rumored to be under our properties. Everyone agreed the government abandoned us. They couldn’t put the fire out, so they put the people out. Basements were backfilled, all traces of us eradicated. There would be no rise from the ashes.
Hurricane Irene hit in late August a week after I had flown back to Guam where the Navy had me stationed. Next came Tropical Storm Lee. In September Obama declared an emergency in Pennsylvania—Harrisburg evacuated—then formally repealed ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.’ More than 14,500 military members were thrown out since 1993, the year the government condemned houses and evicted families in my town. I did not say goodbye to Kathryn, partially because I had such an early flight, but also, I wanted her last memory of us to be from that night. It doesn’t hurt, not anymore—though I can conjure those blues.