Absolute Brightness (20 page)

“Is my dad in the running?” I asked him. “As a suspect, I mean.”

Chuck grabbed the hefty knobs of his knees tight, gave them a hard squeeze, and then looked around the room. He was either making sure no one was listening to our conversation or he was hoping to get a second opinion about how to proceed.

“We're not ruling anything out,” he finally replied. “We need more information. But I had a talk with him yesterday, and it seems unlikely.”

Deirdre came down the stairs and made apologies, told us Mom was resting, and asked if Chuck needed anything.

“Well, actually,” Chuck said, “there is something.”

Then he lifted the water glass and took another dainty sip. A fly was buzzing around the living room; it was a mad thing, colliding with lampshades, ponging off the window screens, and desperate for an exit.

Chuck put the glass down, took a deep breath, and said, “We're going to need someone to come down and identify the body.”

Since Deirdre didn't know the full story, I was afraid she might volunteer without understanding exactly what was involved. Mom couldn't do it—not until she had moved beyond the “No” stage, and I figured that wouldn't be happening any time soon.

“When?” I asked.

As soon as I opened my mouth, I realized that I had signed up for the job without meaning to.

“Tomorrow morning. About ten o'clock. I'll give you the address.”

Then Deirdre, who was still standing in the middle of the room, asked, “Are you sure, Pheebs?”

I was not sure. I was not sure of anything. And wasn't she the older sibling? Wasn't she supposed to take care of these difficult, dreadful things when they came up? Wasn't it her job to protect me? But the world was spinning way too fast, and I was scared that any minute gravity would stop working and we would all be flung off the face of the planet into an outer space of danger and uncertainty. Somehow the simple movement of my head bobbing up and down kept us all in place. It was the least I could do.

Chuck wrote down the address of the morgue on a piece of paper that he had torn from his blue binder. And as he did, he said, “It'll have to be your mother who identifies the body. Or your father. Someone over eighteen.” He then left the information on the coffee table, as if handing it to me would have been too much of a dare. Deirdre and I walked him to the door. He turned and looked at both of us, as if he wanted to say one last thing.

“What?” I asked.

“Nothing,” he said wearily. And then, focusing his big baby blues on me, he added, “Be good, okay?”

“Sure.”

Later, when I was lying in my bed, I could almost feel the piece of paper still sitting on the coffee table; it was vibrating down there, throbbing, keeping me awake. Minutes went by. Hours. But at some point I must have fallen asleep, because I had a dream.

In the dream I was sitting up to see Leonard standing at the foot of my bed. He was soaking wet, his face and clothes dripping lake water onto the yellow carpet in my room. I worried that the water would stain the carpet even though it's old and worn and faded around the edges. Leonard was smiling at me as if there were nothing in the world worth getting upset about. I opened my mouth to speak, but before I could say a word, he reached out and offered me his closed fist. Then slowly, very slowly, he opened his hand to reveal the gold Yves Saint Laurent money clip.

“Thank you,” he said.

When I woke up (this time for real), it was morning and my eyes were wet with tears. I had been crying in my sleep, and Leonard was still dead.

By nine o'clock Mom had pulled herself together just enough to get herself down to the county morgue at the appointed time. She said I could come along for the ride, but really I could tell she needed me there more than she was willing to express. Without her makeup or breakfast or her trusty smile, she looked like a temporary version of herself, a stand-in sent to do the job.

We sat in a large wide corridor with high ceilings. The floors were highly polished and there wasn't a single picture on the wall, no plants, no people, and no sign of life. The place smelled of antiseptic and formaldehyde. The stillness bothered me, because every sound was amplified and seemed more important than it actually was—a door opening, a cough, a pen hitting the hard floor. These noises were proof that even in a place where life had stopped for some, life was going on for the rest of us.

There were swinging double doors, and just beyond them, I knew, bodies were laid out in cool compartments, oblivious of the ongoingness of everything. And perhaps out of respect for those bodies, we the living tried to keep the ongoingness to a minimum.

Chuck arrived right on time, and the minute I saw him, I realized what a sorry sight Mom and I were, the two of us sitting there on the bench, leaning against the wall, dressed in whatever, no makeup, waiting. Chuck tried to prepare Mom for what she was about to see. As he spoke, I focused on his mouth, his teeth, his big tongue, and wondered if he liked his dentist, if he flossed regularly, and if he had a girlfriend.

“Is it all right if Phoebe comes in, too?” Mom asked as she slipped her hand into mine. She was shaking.

Chuck looked me straight in the eyes and then gave a quick glance down the empty corridor.

“Sure,” he said. “Come on.”

We followed him through the swinging doors. Immediately I was aware of a deep hum in the room. I tried to pretend that the high-pitched buzz was the baseline of some angelic chorus keeping a vigil over the corpses as they began the long, unsteady journey away from their corporeal selves, but it didn't work because I knew it was really the sound of the refrigerated units that lined the wall.

We were introduced to a guy wearing wire-rimmed glasses and a knee-length lab coat. His job couldn't be less fun, I thought to myself. I mean, opening and closing drawers with cadavers in them, arranging bodies for viewing and dealing with the undisguised grief and horror of family members is nobody's idea of how to spend a summer day. And though for the life of me I couldn't tell you the guy's name, I found myself wondering about his home life and what his wife thinks about when he kisses her. I noticed that the guy's hands were delicate and waxy looking, like fake fruit; he used both of them to grab hold of the bright chrome handle on one of the refrigerated drawers and give it a good, solid yank.

I had never seen a dead body before. Nana Hertle had been cremated, so when we went out in Mr. Federman's boat to dump her into the high sea on a stunningly hot day in the middle of October, she had already been reduced to a box of ashes. We poured her remains over the side of the boat, and though some of the dust of her blew back onto our life jackets, most of her disappeared into the ocean without a sound. My dad said a few words, and that was that. Other people I've known about who died were famous, so their bodies live on in celluloid form, untouched by decay or rot or the effects of having spent a month at the bottom of a lake. Leonard's death was something entirely new for me.

His whole body was covered with a white sheet made of a very coarse material, like linen or sailcloth; I forced myself to look at the lump of him under the sheet, lying on a shining, cold slab of chrome. He came out headfirst. I told myself to pay attention, pay attention, pay attention, because really, when would you ever have this kind of experience again? But the moment I saw that shocking bit of flesh sticking out of the bottom of the cloth, too swollen and bluish to be the big toe of the Leonard I remembered, I felt all interest drain from me. The toenail seemed like just an old piece of plastic that had been stuck on like an afterthought with Elmer's Glue. Then the hum in the room got louder and seemed to be coming from inside my head. I heard the high notes of other angels coming in as if on cue. And then there was nothing.

They say that fainting is the body's response to a sudden lack of blood flowing to the brain. The central nervous system is designed in such a way that in moments of extreme distress, the brain has a plan; it knows just how and when to knock you out and send you down for the count. Then, whether the cause is physical or psychological, the idea is to get your head down closer to the ground, where the blood can once again begin to circulate in your brain. It's an ingenious safety mechanism.

But when it happens to you and your body is sprawled out on the cold tile floor, time stops and the movie of your life is, for a moment, interrupted. You are gone. When your eyes finally flutter open and you grope your way toward consciousness, the picture has been changed completely. You are horizontally arranged at shoe level, staring up at the concerned faces that are hovering above you. And there is a gap of time you can't account for.

“What happened?” I asked.

“You fainted,” said Chuck. His eyes were as big as teacup saucers, and he was offering me water from a paper cup that was shaped like a little upside-down dunce cap. “Here. Drink this.”

Chuck and the guy in the lab coat got me onto my feet. They helped me out through the double doors and then into the hallway, where they propped me up on the bench. Mom kept saying, “I knew this wasn't a good idea.”

Once everyone was convinced that I was fine, considering that I'd just fainted and fallen on my face, they all went back inside to finish what they'd come to do.

As I sat there in the chilled and narrow corridor of the county morgue waiting for my mother, I tried not to think about the horror of Leonard's toe. I forced myself to focus instead on the details of last night's dream, the image of Leonard standing wet and happy at the foot of my bed, thanking me for finding his clip. I tried to reconstruct the living Leonard to counteract the image of that toe—him ridiculously dancing like Britney Spears in front of a full-length mirror; him standing beside the before-and-after photo booth and waiting for his first victim; him with his toenails glued and glittered and leaving tracks across the living-room carpet; him tearstained and mortified when we had to wake him from a nightmare; him walking like wrecked royalty down the corridors of our high school while everyone made fun. And as I played these memories over in my mind, I suddenly realized how difficult it must have been for Leonard, and how much he had had to overcome in order to appear that happy. Despite his circumstances, he'd always put on a good face and rarely let on that he was struggling. He was so determined to make the best of everything, to fit in, to triumph over his tragedy.

I sat there on my bench, breathing in the antiseptic air, aware of the ongoingness of the world and thinking of everything that Leonard would miss. And then, because I couldn't stand it another minute, I crowded my mind with memories of the living Leonard and flooded them in a light so absolutely bright, tragedy didn't stand a chance.

 

fourteen

LEONARD WOULD HAVE
wanted flowers, a few tears, and of course plenty of style. Afterward he would have expected a party, music, a light lunch, and perhaps cocktails. But he would have been the first to remind us to keep the service brief and to the point. Everybody, he would have told us, has things to do and places to be. It was, after all, a Saturday. In the end, we chose the basic cremation package from Fallucci's Funeral Home; they picked up Leonard's body from the morgue, reduced him to ashes and bits of bone and teeth, and then handed over his remains in an attractive bronze urn, which they had named “The Standard.” All for $550.

The Urn of Leonard was then transported by car to Monmouth Memorial Park, a modern overly designed cemetery where the gently dipping, rising hills extend into a kind of infinity, making it look like someone's idea of suburban heaven. The word “cemetery” is rarely used when referring to Monmouth Memorial Park. For as long as I can remember, people have called it the “Park,” as if it served some recreational purpose.

The first thing you notice when you come into the Park is that there are no headstones; only thousands of discreet bronze markers embedded into a square mile of earth like little metal doormats. Occasionally the grass is interrupted by a potted geranium or a memorial wreath—stuff left behind by families who make a habit of checking in with their dead members and decorating their places of eternal rest.

Almost every one of my mother's customers showed up at the funeral. And more astonishing was the fact that they were all wearing that one smart black dress that Leonard had insisted they add to their wardrobes.

“You have to, have to,
have to
…,” Leonard told each one of them. “You
have to
own a black dress. At least one. It's de rigueur. Y'know, for when you get invited to cocktail parties and the like.”

That these women had lived in Neptune, New Jersey, almost their entire lives; that they had husbands who were either retired or dead; that they lived on fixed incomes and had last been invited to a cocktail party when Ford was president—none of this discouraged Leonard in the least. The women had tried explaining to him that a black dress just wasn't as essential as, say, groceries, and maybe Leonard didn't exactly understand their lifestyle.

“Nobody invites me nowheres,” Mrs. Geleski pointed out to him, as she counted out her singles to pay for her perm at the reception desk.

Leonard closed his eyes, shook his head, and held up his hand as if to stop the flow of yet another unwanted thought. “Mrs. G, let me tell you something. This has nothing to do with lifestyle. This has to do with the fact that if you
had
a smart black cocktail dress, people would start inviting you places.”

Eventually they gave in to his suggestion. But who knew that they would all end up at his gravesite, parading their black dresses in his honor. In some sense it was a real fashion coup. Leonard had done more for the women of Neptune than the combined talents of Calvin Klein and Donna Karan. The only sadness was that Leonard himself wasn't around to enjoy his success. His was one of the classiest funerals Neptune had seen since 1989, when basketball's world free-throw champion, Bunny Levitt, was buried, and Bunny's funeral wasn't nearly so well attended as Leonard's.