The Shadow of Adeline: A Journey Between Love, Death, and Memories That Never Die

The girl in the graveyard is your dearest companion, and thus, you bear her homeward. The night lies between you like a bruise, a stain of crimson in the window of the passenger seat—a hue akin to fruit left to fester and decay. Her fingers, cold and lifeless, fumble with the seatbelt—one, then two.

The radio murmurs with static, and the body shifts uneasily in her seat. You gaze upon her visage: the familiar contour of her jaw, the nose slightly askew from where a baseball struck her at twelve, just a fraction off-center. Her skin, pallid and damp, resembles a rain-soaked shroud. The air is thick with the stench of musk and sulfur.

You yearn to avert your eyes, yet you cannot. She is beautiful, even in death. Your headlights carve jagged paths through the dirt road, casting a sickly yellow glow, like the jaundiced eye of some unseen watcher. Your hands are stiff from the cold, and your lips are parched and cracked. The girl beside you is dead, and you are bringing her home.

Four days past, you entered a hardware store and emerged with a shovel, sturdy and unyielding, fit to bear the weight of a life. Four days you toiled in your backyard, the earth yielding reluctantly to your efforts, the soil clinging to your nails like a second skin.

You dug until the ground split open like the maw of some ravenous beast, until you could sift through the loam with your eyes closed, with one hand bound. Four nights you lay awake, staring at the pockmarked ceiling, wondering what it might feel like to burn alive.

Now, the shovel lies heavy in the trunk; its dull thud is a constant reminder of your grim task. Your hands grip the steering wheel as though it were the throat of some wretched creature you sought to silence.

The body stirs. Dawn bleaches her skin to a ghastly salmon-gray. Her left eye slips from its socket, and she pushes it back with the heel of her hand. She smiles, her head lolling like a marionette’s.

“Forgive me, darling,” she murmurs, her voice strained and hollow. “I did not expect company. Surely, you understand.”

In the pale, sickly light of the waning moon, Adeline Marcus smiles up at you, her gums pale as the underbelly of a corpse.

——

Adeline Marcus perished on the thirty-first of October and was laid to rest a week hence the date upon her gravestone a mere month shy of her eighteenth birthday. In the court, the boys claimed it was an accident—they knew not she was within.

For better or worse, you believe them. The fingers that struck the match, the beer cans strewn like fallen stars upon the sidewalk—a jest gone awry, a cruel twist of fate. It need not have been deliberate. She need not have been home.

The coroner declared it suffocation, yet all you can envision is flame, a relentless hand striking again and again. Adeline crawled from the inferno on hands and knees; her Sunday dress singed to her thighs—the dress you knew so intimately. She was dead when she reached the pavement, her body a smoldering ruin.

The boys were sentenced to twenty-five years to life, and the Marcuses were left with a daughter cold and still, a ring of ash upon the ground like a chalk outline. You were left with guilt, gnawing at your soul like a ravenous beast, an ouroboros devouring itself—choking on its tail, swallowing its head, consuming itself endlessly, even as it consumes you.

For such things do not befall the righteous.

——

You watch the water spiral down the shower drain, carrying with it the vestiges of mortuary paint, iridescent insects, and the faint scent of jasmine. Strands of dirt stretch like sinew. The body’s head rests upon her knees, her vertebrae protruding like a row of molars. The electric light casts her in a ghastly green, her veins dark and gnarled beneath her brittle skin. She turns her face to the showerhead, picking at the powdery sediment beneath her nails. The shower floor is a mess of grit, and you think of a child sifting sand. You turn the heat until it scalds, scrubbing the mildew from the base of the shower door. You think if only you can cleanse it all, all will be well.

She turns her head, her eyes meeting yours through the fogged glass. “It is not so terrible,” she says. “I do not believe I felt a thing.”

Yet her lips are the color of spoiled plums, and her words ring hollow.

You fetch threadbare towels from the depths of the linen closet. You walk thrice around the block and return to find the corpse seated upon your sofa, as though she has naught better to do.

——

There are ants in your sugar bowl. You attempt to remove them, lifting their crystalline bodies upon the tines of a fork, yet they slip through the gaps, leaving behind a mess greater than before—a tea-brown sludge oozing from their crushed forms, the acrid stench of vinegar. There is a dead girl upon your sofa, yet let us focus upon the ants in the sugar bowl, the way they thread through the crystals like veins in a leaf, like the capillaries beneath your skin.

You brew tea nonetheless. You add too much milk and sit cross-legged before the body. She stares at you. You stare back. The two of you drink, and ribbons of milky tea pour from her trachea, the gaping wound in her chest, yet she does not cease until you do.

“You do not look at me,” she says. “Not truly.”

“I do,” you reply, your hands twisting in the shag carpet. “Do I not?”

“No,” she says. “You do not.”

You leave your teacup upon the floor, the saucer a yellow iris, and ascend the stairs. You take two cigarettes from the crumpled pack upon your father’s desk, then think better of it, crushing them beneath your heel until the tobacco vanishes into the tawny carpet. You change your bedsheets twice—eggshell white, no, gray with peonies. You brew another cup of tea. When you return, the body remains. You are looking at her. You are not looking at her.

“Do I disgust you?” she asks.

“No,” you say. She shakes her head, her dark hair clinging to her shoulders like reeds. “No more than I ever did.”

“You must rest,” you say.

“Darling,” she tilts her head, “rest is all I have ever known.”

——

The last time you saw Adeline Marcus alive, you were in the back of a stranger’s carriage, parked upon a stranger’s street, the taste of cheap tequila lingering upon your lips.

You were never ones for revelry, and thus the two of you appeared as children playing at dress-up. Blousy dresses with sleeves like a nun’s. Thrift-store necklaces tight about your throats. Shoplifted lipstick she hid beneath her mattress—more wax than pigment. Yet beneath the jaundiced glow of the streetlamps, with the distant thrum of music, you both appeared beautiful.

She sat sideways in the backseat, her legs curled beneath her, one hand upon your knee, the other pressed against the window, humming a tune you could not quite place. You were too close, yet it was night, and all others were drunk or indoors, and sometimes one must feel closer than is proper to lose oneself a little.

The song melted upon her lips, swallowed by spittle and spirits, and you said something akin to, “I must return home.”

And she said something akin to, “Have another drink.” And so you did. You let her pour the liquor into flimsy red cups and watched her swallow. She said, “You are so fair.”

And you said, “You must cease.”

And she said, “Let me say it. Just this once.”

And you wished to say, Cease looking at me thus.  And you wished to say, I desire to crawl inside you and dwell within the city of your mind.  And you wished to say, Let us be silent. Let us not ruin this with truth.

Instead, you pushed open the door and stumbled onto the vein-blue sidewalk.

“I am going home.”

——

The body lies upon your bed, her back to you, her hands clawing at the floral sheets, her chestnut hair spilling over her throat, past the ballpoint pen marks upon the bedposts, across the gray skin of her forehead.

You think upon the silken interior of a coffin. You think upon how she appeared when you drew her from the grave. The radiator hums, and the lace curtain billows in the open window. She rolls onto her side, her hands fitting together like pieces of a decaying puzzle.

“You still cannot look upon me,” she says, her words slow, sticky as gum. “Why am I here, Bette? What purpose do I serve?”

There are pink crescents upon your palms from where your nails have dug. She draws her knees to her chest, and a bone cracks. She draws her knees to her chest, and a molar falls from her lips.

“You can only love me when I am gone,” she says. “When there is naught left to love.”

You press your cheek to the cool sheets beside her, listening to the steady thrum of your heart and the way it echoes in your fingertips, utterly alone.

“Tell no one,” you say.

“Did you wish it to perish with me, Bette?” She shifts, her hair brushing your neck. “Were you glad it was silenced?”

“Tell no one,” you say again.

She sighs, lying back so you are face to face. Crooked nose, eye slipping from its socket, the gray-green decay creeping up her jaw. The stench of earth and rot and the hum of cicadas in the night.

“To whom would I tell?” She asks, brushing your hand. “I am not truly here.”

And suddenly, you can imagine it is your fists splitting beer cans like overripe fruit, your fingers striking the match. Yet you both know the house would still burn, and you both know you would leave alone.

You take her hand. You bury your face in the crook of her neck and beg forgiveness from a ghost.