Nassau Knolls Cemetery, a large burial ground in Port Washington, New York, is where Apollo Kagwa goes to learn who is buried in his son Brian Kagwa’s grave. The cemetery’s scale, the practical details of its modern graves, and its exposed position beside local emergency services shape the scene of Apollo’s nighttime arrival and exhumation. What begins as a place he must reach becomes the setting for an act that brings grief out of the abstract and into the dirt, concrete, and small white casket beneath it.

Setting and Approach

The cemetery’s front entrance faces Port Washington Boulevard, but its extensive grounds are surrounded by a residential neighborhood. The Port Washington police department stands literally beside the cemetery, and the fire department is across the street. These details make Apollo’s approach strikingly exposed: although he is heading toward a grave after dark, he pays no attention to the nearby authorities or homes as he focuses on the force needed to break through the wrought-iron gates.

Apollo reaches the area after escaping North Brother Island, nearly drowning, and abandoning his creek boat at Barretto Point Park. Exhausted and disoriented, he makes his way to the East 149th Street station, only to discover that his wallet and MetroCard were lost in the water. After hopping the turnstile, he rides downtown while calculating how fast a vehicle would need to travel to smash through the cemetery gates. The thought of the grave has become a practical problem to solve, even as his physical state is close to collapse.

He gets home in the early morning, strips off his wet clothes, and passes out. When he wakes in the evening, he forces himself to eat and reserves a Zipcar. The available Honda Odyssey, Suave—the same vehicle he had driven when he and Brian found a first edition in Riverdale—feels to Apollo like fate. He drives through Queens and out to Plainview, estimating that a 4,400-pound vehicle traveling at fifty miles per hour could tear apart the iron gates. Finding that he cannot drive straight at them from Port Washington Boulevard, he turns onto Revere Road, turns around in a pharmacy parking lot, and heads back toward the cemetery. At eleven o’clock on Thursday night, he crosses Port Washington Boulevard at thirty-five miles per hour, approaching the entrance in near silence.

Locating Brian’s Grave

Inside the cemetery, the extent of the grounds makes finding a single grave a challenge: Apollo and Patrice Green could have wandered for half a day without coming across it. Patrice has quickly researched how modern burials are constructed. A modern grave is typically four feet deep rather than the traditional six, because sturdier caskets and concrete grave liners help prevent the sinkholes associated with the collapse of older graves. The liner functions as a protective outer casing around the casket, a second shell that Apollo will have to break through.

A map on the cemetery’s website supplies the needed route. Patrice looks up Brian Kagwa’s burial plot, and the pair use the community mausoleum as a landmark. The building is white and resembles a banquet hall; Brian’s grave lies behind it, with a road on the far side. The grave itself has a marker rather than a tombstone. It is in the twelfth row, ninth marker in. When Apollo sees Brian’s name, the carefully researched directions give way to recognition: the marker identifies the place, but it cannot prepare him for what lies underneath.

The Exhumation

The cemetery’s ordinary features become tools and obstacles in the nighttime search. Patrice carries a flat-blade shovel, crowbar, and ax; Apollo takes a heavy mattock from the maintenance building. Its four-foot wooden handle supports a two-headed metal head, with a pointed pick at one end and a horizontal adze at the other. Apollo also carries the iPad. The practical equipment and Patrice’s quick research make the work possible, but neither turns it into a routine task: they are opening the grave of Apollo’s child.

The mattock first catches in the concrete liner. Apollo strikes again, and the liner cracks. Four blows reduce the sectional concrete casing to dust, revealing a child’s white casket. Its decorative hardware—handle-rod brackets, caps, and stamped-metal corners—is finished in antique nickel. Apollo cannot bring himself to chop through the lid. Instead, he searches for the seam between its top and base, slips in the pick end of the mattock, and wrenches the locking system apart. The lid catches halfway; he drops the tool and hauls it the rest of the way open with both hands.

Dawn reaches the upper part of the grave while the bottom remains dark. For the first time in four months, Apollo sees Brian. The mortician has done what he could, but the child’s face still bears burn marks, and the skull shows through at the top. Brian’s small body is wrapped in a light-blue blanket, now covered with dirt and stones that fell during the opening of the casket. Apollo has broken into the grave to confront what was hidden there, but the damage caused by the exhumation is itself immediately visible: the child once sealed away clean is now soiled.

Narrative Significance

Nassau Knolls Cemetery makes Apollo’s journey to the grave both a physical crossing and an encounter with the material facts of loss. The drive, the calculations about the gates, the cemetery website’s PDF, the rows of markers, the concrete liner, and the casket all narrow the distance between his uncertainty and the body itself. The modern grave’s four-foot depth and protective casing are not incidental background; they determine the work required to reach Brian, while the cemetery’s scale delays that encounter until Apollo and Patrice find the right marker.

The scene also places private grief in a setting that is neither remote nor sealed off from ordinary life. Residential streets, a pharmacy parking lot, the police department next door, and the fire department across the road surround Apollo’s approach. Yet his attention stays fixed on the grave and on the question of who is buried there. Once he reaches Brian, the marker’s name becomes the child’s body: damaged by fire, wrapped in blue, and exposed to the dirt of the opened grave. The cemetery is therefore not merely the destination of Apollo’s drive but the place where his need to know becomes an irreversible act of physical contact with his loss.