Brooklyn Graves by Triss Stein Read Free Book Online Page A

after all this time, but I knew it was set off by Dima’s death. After a while, I stopped seeing the stones and the mausoleums and only thought about my Jeff dying in a park kind of like this, under the trees.
    I’d met him at my best friend’s Sweet Sixteen barbecue. To this day, he comes back to me with warm summer nights, the radio playing “Heaven is a Place on Earth,” and the smell of grilling hot dogs. We were deaf to all concerns from my Jewish parents and his Italian ones. We knew we belonged together.
    Brooklyn girls are nothing if not tough.
    After the accident, I remade my life and in the process I accidentally became a scholar. When I went back to school to become a high school teacher because I thought it offered a better future for us, my professors encouraged me, and I got some fellowships, and then I started a PhD program at City College. Now I go to museums and antique shows—for fun! And I read scholarly journals and even understand them. I have fallen into a life that my Jeff didn’t even know existed, a bigger life in some ways, and I am fine with it.
    Yet some days, I’d give it all up—everything I am now, everything I have—for just one summer night in the back seat of his battered Toyota, parked at Rockaway Beach with the sound of the surf rushing in and out.
    As I reached the hill I didn’t know if I was crying for myself or for what Natalya would have to live through. She would, though, just as I had. If Brooklyn girls are tough, Russian women have backbones of steel. Still, I would not tell her I still miss Jeff.
    One more bend in the path brought me to the crumbling building I could not get to see the other day. A tall metal fence, now rusty, and a small garden, now filled with overgrown evergreens and weeds surrounding it. The elaborately wrought gate was open, hanging on its hinges, and the caution signs were gone, so I went right up the front steps, walking carefully over the broken marble. I pushed on the massive bronze door, gently at first, and then harder, until it finally squealed and slowly opened just a crack. Just enough.
    I was assaulted by a damp, musty, moldy odor before my eyes had even adjusted enough to see anything. The light was dim, coming through a great rear window that had not been cleaned in, I guessed, decades. How strange to be in a chapel like this for the second time in a few days, when I had never even been near one before.
    There were two marble benches and a carved marble altar. Or was it, actually, the sarcophagus for the people who had built this memorial? There were some memorial tablets on the walls, but they were too dirty, and the light was too dim, for me to read them. Certainly they were in memory of the rich people who intended to establish their social position in death as well as in life.
    I turned to look at the great window. It was far too grimy to have the glorious effect it should have, but where the sun pierced through the dirt, brilliant rainbow fragments of color splashed across the dingy marble floor. I could see chips and scrapes around the frame, some ugly scratches in the dust on the glass, some bending of the leading.
    I looked up and up, as the window rose at least six feet above me. I could not make out what was depicted—I really would have to ask to see a reproduction—but it seemed complex and dramatic. Repeated patches in shades of blue suggested maybe a lake or river, or perhaps it was the sky.
    One side wall was plain white plaster now grimy and cracked. On the other, there were wooden boards covering an empty space. So that was it, all the problem from the other day. A window was broken? Or removed because it was unsafe? Could the metal frame have become weakened, or rusted? I had no idea, but I knew someone who might. I would call him later. I was curious now. Ahhh, maybe someone was hurt when it fell out.
    It was fascinating but also a little creepy. It was not the presence of death,