Chapter 16

I would just like the universe to acknowledge at this point that I didn't scream, or flail, or throw the jar, or scream "What the ever-loving FUCK!?!" or anything like that. I am a professional. I have uncovered teeth before, mostly in digs on the Black Sea, where it's not so fraught if you turn up human remains.

It's just that there's a big difference between teeth in situ at an archaeological dig and discovering a jar with somebody's molars buried in your own backyard.

A lot of molars. A lot. Probably close to a hundred of them. I set the jar down very carefully on the patio table, dropped into the chair, and stared at it, overcome with the creeping heebie-jeebies for about five full minutes.

Okay. Okay, I'm cool. There's a logical explanation. There's always a logical explanation. If there's a jar full of teeth here, it's because someone put it here. Probably Gran Mae.

A memory flashed across my brain, so clear that I couldn't believe I'd ever forgotten it. I must have been ten or eleven and one of my baby teeth had come out. I was staring at it in my hand, fascinated and a little disgusted.

"Be sure to put it under your pillow tonight, so the tooth fairy will come."

"I don't believe in the tooth fairy, Gran Mae."

"Oh, I suppose you're all grown up now," she said testily. "Fine. Give it to me." She held out her hand. When I didn't respond quickly enough, she snapped her fingers. "Come on. Give it here, Samantha."

"It's my tooth," I said, closing my fist over it.

"Don't be silly. You'll just lose it."

"I might not, though," I said. I don't know why I was so resistant, but it felt unfair of her to say it. Brad was always losing his retainer. He'd had to have the cafeteria staff fish it out of a trash can once. I wasn't anything like that. The thought of losing my homework or forgetting a permission slip made me want to curl into a ball of anxiety. It wasn't fair.

"Give it to me," she said again, and something about her voice made me look up at her face. She was angry. I couldn't figure out why. It was my tooth. It wasn't like I'd taken it from her.

I took a step back. From the doorway, Mom said, "It's her tooth, Mother. She can decide what to do with it."

"Don't be ridiculous, Edie," snapped Gran Mae over her shoulder. She reached out and grabbed my wrist, and for all that she was old and delicate-looking, her fingers felt like iron pincers. "Now give it to me."

"Hey! Ow!"

"Mother!"

Gran Mae ignored us both. She pried open my fist, plucked the little bloody ivory pebble out, then dropped my hand. "There!" she said, sounding satisfied. Then she laughed. "Now don't you all feel silly?" And she swept from the room.

I rubbed my wrist, feeling like I might cry, and Mom said, "Sam…" At the time I thought she was mad at me for not being nice to Gran Mae, but now, remembering the whole scene, I recognized that Mom was just as upset as I had been, but she didn't know what to say. She was a single mom and she was stuck and we were stuck with her. If Gran Mae threw us out, we had nowhere to go. We'd lost the house when Dad died. Mom was working two jobs and trying to get enough money to get us into an apartment, and meanwhile we were all at the mercy of Gran Mae's whims. Even the ones that she knew were wrong. Or in the case of the teeth, downright bizarre.

I stared at the jar on the table. Yes. All right. That was a logical explanation. Once Gran Mae had played tooth fairy, she had to do something with the teeth afterward. Maybe it felt wrong to flush them down the toilet or put them in the trash. Lots of cultures have taboos around disposing of body parts, many of them much stricter than the modern American suburbs. She might have put them in the jar and then felt like she needed to bury them.

Right. Okay. Perfectly logical explanation. Except for the fact that there were so damn many of them, and even if you added up me and Brad and my mother, that still wouldn't get you a jar half full of teeth!

I turned the jar, staring at the teeth, dozens of them, hundreds, molars and incisors and bicuspids, all strangely small, as human teeth are.

Some of them had been burned. There's a very specific look to burnt teeth. The enamel survives, but the pulp doesn't. The edges of the tooth start to split into little fissures. I could count at least ten that had been through a very hot fire before they ended up in this jar.

A logical, innocent explanation.

On a dig in college, on the Black Sea, I was working very carefully on a human skull. I had a toothbrush and a paintbrush and as I moved the dirt away, grain by grain, I kept finding more and more teeth. There seemed to be a second row of them in the skull, like a shark, filling the front of the face from just beneath the nasal cavity. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. I kept brushing and wondering what the hell they had done to this person—buried a skull inside a skull and mashed them together somehow? That didn't make any sense. (I did not think aliens. I didn't. I very deliberately did not think aliens. You start thinking aliens and then you start believing that ancient people couldn't have made great works without alien help and then you're that guy in the corner at academic conferences who nobody talks to, publishing increasingly racist articles about how the Nazca couldn't possibly have drawn those lines on their own.)

Finally I went and got my advisor and said, in so many words, "What the ever-loving fuck is going on here?"

Dr. Abbot, who was an endless delight, took one look at it and burst out laughing. "They're a kid who still has their baby teeth. The adult teeth all sit right above in the jaw. Looks freaky, doesn't it?"

"Oh Jesus." I exhaled. "I had no idea."

"Yup. Your skull looked like that once too." He grinned at me. "You were thinking aliens, weren't you?"

"I was not."

So there we were. Terribly freaky-looking thing, perfectly innocent explanation. Undoubtedly there was an equally innocent explanation for why there was a jar of hundreds of human teeth buried under my grandmother's roses, and I'd think of it soon.

Very soon.

Any minute now.

… fuck.

Honestly, there just aren't that many good reasons for the average homeowner to keep jars of human teeth lying around.

I debated whether or not to tell Mom. On the one hand, she was clearly having problems already, and it couldn't be good for her mental state to have her daughter wander in from the garden with a jar of teeth. On the other hand, I feel like you have a right to know if something like that turns up in your yard.

(I suppose there was a slim chance that Mom herself had put the teeth there, in the same way that there was a slim chance that I might be capable of unaided flight, but it did not seem likely.)

I sat in the chair, staring, until Mom came home. Then I shoved back from the table and went inside. "Mom? Hey, Mom… I think there's something you need to see…"

Fifteen minutes later, Mom and I were still sitting in the patio chairs and staring at the jar. Every few minutes, one of us would utter some variation on the phrase, "Well, shit." Mom's newfound prohibition against swearing had not held up to a jar of human teeth in the garden.

"Who could have put it there?" asked Mom. And then, not waiting for an answer, "It must have been there before the house was built."

I frowned. The lot had probably been scraped before then, and while it wasn't impossible, I had a feeling that a glass jar would have been crushed. Earthmoving equipment does damage to artifacts like you would not believe. "I guess that's possible? But I think it's probably more recent."

"How recent?"

I had a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. "Well… Gran Mae was the first owner of the house…" I remembered the fit she had thrown over my lost tooth. "And she got very weird about our baby teeth."

"No, she didn't," said Mom, almost automatically.

"Yes, she did. Don't you remember when…?"

I looked up. Mom was staring intently into my eyes, shaking her head just a fraction. Don't say it, that look said. Don't say it.

I stopped. I swallowed. After a long moment, Mom relaxed a little, probably because I'd stopped talking.

She acts like someone can hear us.

"Um," I said. Is someone listening? Does she think we're being recorded somehow? Which might be paranoia, but might not be. I thought of Gail saying, "Maybe she's acting completely rationally based on her experience." But what was her experience?

Mom pushed her chair back and stood up. "Well!" she said brightly. "I don't know about you, but I could use something to drink after that. Maybe a really fancy iced coffee. Or just ice cream. What do you say?"

"Uh… yeah, that sounds great." The false heartiness in her voice was no less alarming than anything else. I looked over my shoulder involuntarily, as if I might see someone spying.

Nothing there but the roses.

"There's a really good coffee shop in Pondsboro," I offered. "Or we could go into Siler City and get ice cream."

"Maybe there's a Baskin-Robbins," said Mom. "Are those still a thing?"

"I have no idea. Maybe." I picked up my keys. Mom's hands were shaking and there was a brittle light in her eyes that I didn't like at all. "How about I drive?"

We made it about two miles down the road before Mom burst into tears.

"Uh," I said. I am not good with other people having emotions at me. I don't even really like having them myself. "Um. Are you okay?"

"Just drive," said Mom, wiping her eyes.

"Okay."

Siler City was farther away. I took Chicken Bridge Road, which is long and meandering and turns a few times and doesn't have any scenery that requires comment.

"I'm sorry," said Mom, after we'd passed about five barns and a small herd of unimpressed cows.

"You don't have anything to be sorry for," I said. "Or at least, I don't think you do. Can you tell me what this is all about?"

Mom took a deep breath and let it out. "It's Gran Mae," she said, huddled up in the passenger seat. "She's not gone."