Paradise

SEVEN

A week passes before the police stop hording the Burnsby house every morning, and another week passes before the yellow tape warning not to trespass are completely removed, leaving the tudor house bare and exposed once more. But the house doesn't look the same, at least not to me. It still stands like a landmark of Paradise, big, pearly white and luminous, but it has no identity. There isn't a dog barking on the front lawn or whimpering for an escape in the back, the windows don't light up at night like a bright invitation to the dinner waiting inside, and there isn't an Escalade parked in the gravel driveway, Mrs. Burnsby unloading groceries from the trunk and heaving them inside all by herself.

The Burnsby house is hauntingly empty, the Orc long gone to live with a relative, and it simply sits, staring poignantly over 87th street until the day of the funeral, well, funerals to be exact because Mr. and Mrs. Burnsby were having separate farewells on the same exact day.

Except no one planned to say goodbye to Mrs. Burnsby. Just her husband, whose family demanded he have a ceremony in the very house the Burnsby's American Dream had been centered around. The very house in which Mrs. Burnsby wrote a letter informing everyone that the umbrella she used to shield herself from the rain had been ripped to shreds by mighty, grey winds. And she was suddenly soaking wet and shivering from the colds of the sky, her only wish to get warm. The very house in which Mrs. Burnsby grabbed her husband's shotgun and whisked them both away to wherever souls go once they leave Paradise.

If they leave.

The funeral location was announced the day before and I lied wide awake that night. Not because The Wolf's deafening, soul-curdling howls could be heard even from the den but because the thought of entering the Burnsby's perfect utopia of a home was terrifying. That night, I dreamed of walking through the tudor house just across the street and seeing Mrs. Burnsby's ghostly form in every corner, every hall, every window.

She didn't say anything in the dream. She just stood there with a haunting smirk on her face, the smirk she wore when she was tending to the Burnsby's lawn, listening in on the daily drama of 87th street with intrigue masked by innocent loitering.

She didn't have to say anything, however. Because her very presence mirrored exactly what was in the bullets that loaded The Wolf's gun, what was in the uncertainty that embodied my trembling trigger finger, what was stopping me directly in my tracks; the very thought of not dying.

Of not dying and drifting up to the clouds where something called Heaven lay, or Hell, or just somewhere that wasn't here. That wasn't Paradise.

She was a ghost and I don't want to be a ghost.

That would mean I'd be stuck here in Paradise, in the beautiful, teal house on 87th street, in The Wolf's den forever.

On the day of the funerals, there is a black carpet rolled out on the smooth, marble steps of the Burnsby's house like a luring enticement to death itself. It winds through the intricately decorated living room to the front of the fireplace where Mr. Burnsby's casket is placed.

Which is sealed shut.

The Wolf makes me wear a suit, one of the expensive ones from TJ Maxx that he'd neglected bills just to hang in his closet, only to be worn for First Sundays and the occasional dates. The suit is a dark grey and embellished with a lined pattern that resembles notebook paper and while everyone fawned over how fitting it was on The Wolf's modest build, the suit feels like heavy, slippery cream on me. It doesn't fit and I keep tripping over the trousers as we pass the arched doorway.

The Wolf is in no hurry to sit, canine teeth hidden behind a pearly white smile as he greets the same faces that speckled Paradise; Ms. Gordon who makes a show of sniffling and dabbing at her dry eyes with a handkerchief, Mr. Tanner who can only glare at me over the shoulder of The Wolf as he speaks, and a few of the choir members who all express glumly how they're disappointed the funeral doesn't require any singing.