If You Lived Here (3 page)

I close my eyes, willing
this
call to be the good one. I spin my finger in the air like fireworks. “We’ve been hoping to hear from you!” I bubble.

“Yes,” Carolyn Burns says, and that single word marks the shift in tone from cheerful efficiency to something more sober and sympathetic. And so I know. “Shelley, I’m sorry. I have some very bad news.”

No, I think. “I have to have Sonya here by her birthday,” I announce,

not merely to Carolyn Burns, but also to myself, to God, to baby Sonya, over there in Europe. My voice sounds absolute, but in my heart I know that things can only go wrong in this business.

“I’m so sorry. The birth mother decided that she wanted to have a Slovakian family adopt her child.”

“She can’t do that.”

“She still has some legal rights, apparently.”

I lean against the wall, then let myself slide down until I’m squatting, hugging my knees. “I was just about to travel,” I whisper. I press the nail of my thumb into the tip of my index finger, trying to concentrate on that pain instead of this one.

“I’m sorry,” she says.

“Is there any hope?” I ask.

“Well, another child is available. A little boy from Vietnam.” “I’m talking about Sonya. My daughter. Is there any hope?” She doesn’t answer immediately.

“Tell me.”

“There’s one possibility. The birth mother has agreed to meet with you. She’s willing to let you try to convince her that you’re the best family for her child. You’d have to leave as early as tomorrow, though, because she plans to decide in the next few days. I should warn you: You don’t have much of a chance.”

I have spent so many months imagining my trip to Slovakia: the journey from Wilmington to New York and Prague and then, finally, Bratislava. I imagined the anxious hours on the plane, just waiting to meet my daughter, and then the journey home, juggling bags and bottles and a little girl. I never imagined traveling all the way over there and then coming home without her.

“I need to talk to Martin,” I tell her. “There’s so much going on right now. We expected to have a week’s notice before we traveled. We have to arrange for extra staff.”

“If it’s any help, your husband doesn’t need to come. But talk to him. If you decide to try it, call me within a few hours. I can make the arrangements for you to leave tomorrow. You could meet with her on Sunday.”

“So, I’m supposed to beg her?”

“It’s a little more rational than that. But, yes. Essentially.”

By the time I get to the office, the little body of Oscar Rivenbark has already arrived, making it an awkward time to speak with my husband about flying to Bratislava tomorrow. Rita observes me carefully as I walk through the front door. Maybe she can tell that I’ve been crying. Maybe she can tell that I’m panicked. Maybe she’s just wondering why I stayed home to cook and arrive now, two hours later, empty-handed. Sometimes you can’t speak, though. Sometimes you can’t explain to anybody that you burned the dish you were perfecting, that you’ve thrown it in the garbage, that your heart is nearly broken.

“Where’s the slow cooker?” she asks, eyeing me over the top of her bifocals.

I don’t stop. Somehow I manage to announce, “We’re ordering pizza.”

I find Martin and Bennet in the preparation room, getting ready to do service on the little boy. Because the death was accidental, the coroner has autopsied the back of the head and the chest, checking for signs of a stroke or heart attack that might have caused the initial fall. These days, Bennet does most of our embalming, but, because juvenile cases are both technically and emotionally challenging, he needs one of us to help.

“Did you hear anything from the coroner?” I ask. I am aware that I will have to hurry if I have any chance of going to Bratislava, but there’s something so sad about this little body on the table that it’s hard to figure out how my own problems fit in here.

Bennet squats in front of the one of the cabinets. “They won’t have a report until tomorrow,” he says. I admire his steadiness. It amazes me sometimes, when I watch him work, that the kid is only twenty-seven. He looks pretty much like he did when he was sixteen—soft, slightly pudgy, John Denver in his “Rocky Mountain High” days. Around the office, he’s sometimes silly, but he turns solemn and professional when he works. We recognized his talents years ago, when he was still in high school and, out of curiosity, he started taking late-night service calls with Martin’s boys.

Even at sixteen, he had a polite attentiveness that calmed the bereaved. Emergency crews often commended his maturity and good sense. Abe and Theo did the job adequately, of course, but they weren’t enthusiastic and they couldn’t handle the hours. We all felt lucky when Bennet went into the business. Martin and I hope he’ll take over when we retire.

Bennet swivels toward Martin, looking up. “I’m going through the cavity fluid, but I’m not sure what we need. Do you think the weight is less than forty?”

We glance at the preparation table, trying to judge. The way the body looks at this moment confirms my support for open caskets: It takes a great leap of the imagination to connect this small gray form with the bright pink flash of energy that must have so recently animated it. The contrast between the two can make you believe in the soul. It can make you believe in transcendence.

Martin stands closest to the body. He says, “Yes, but get eight ounces anyway. We’ll do some direct injections.”

I walk over to him, just to be close. He looks worn down and flustered. “How you doing?” I ask. It’s a ridiculous question, of course. A boy lies dead on this table. In my mind, a little girl, our daughter, is drifting away. But I have to try to make things normal.

“I’m okay,” Martin says. He sounds very far away. Almost idly, he picks up one of the little hands and begins to massage away the splotches of blood that have pooled beneath the skin. “I measured the length of the body. If the family wants it, we can use the three-foot casket we have in stock.”

Martin seems determined to continue, but is disorganized, aimless. His hands look awkward as he tries to make firm circles on the sallow skin. I look at my watch. I don’t have to meet the Rivenbarks for several hours. I say, “Hey, let me finish this up with Bennet. Can you go upstairs and see what’s wrong with Excel on my computer?”

“You can’t figure it out?” he asks, but he looks relieved. I say, “Please.”

Martin washes his hands and takes off his coveralls while I put mine on and pull a hairband around my hair. I walk over to the preparation

table and untangle a couple of stray twigs from the little boy’s curls. As Martin turns to go upstairs, I say, “I’ll do a shampoo, too.”

Bennet and I work to music. He’s always the DJ and he has eclectic tastes. For a while, we listen to the soundtrack from
All That Jazz,
then switch to Joy Division, and then, because we’ve all become fanatics for Hawaiian music, he puts on a little Don Ho. I swab and set the features of the little boy’s face, aspirate the abdominal cavity to remove gasses and the contents of the stomach. I make an incision in the neck and push my finger inside, searching for the carotid artery, then pull it out a few inches to connect it to the tube that will inject the embalming fluid. When I’m ready, I turn on the pump. Sometimes, if a person suffered through months or years of illness, the introduction of embalming fluid will transform a scrawny body into what, in slightly different circumstances, would seem to be a picture of health. On Oscar Rivenbark’s body, which was healthy and young, the effect is more subtle, like the inhalation of breath. The tinted fluid brings color to the pallid skin. Slowly, the boy begins to look, well, if not more alive, then more presentable to those who will force themselves to look at him. Bennet and I have to pause for a moment, just to watch.

Before I became a mortician, I worried, as a lot of people would, about my ability to handle the more disturbing aspects of this profession. But, like people who work in medicine, you get used to the gore very quickly and you focus on the more intellectual, and even spiritual, aspects of what you’re doing. When I prepare a body for burial, I gather hints about the life that person lived. Experience does not always reveal itself in a literal way, of course. Many people endure heartbreak, for example, but I have never actually seen a broken heart. I have never seen a pulled leg, a bent mind, a twisted tongue. I have seen the results of suffering, however. A body’s size hints at excess and deprivation. Skin can reveal the myriad ways in which people drag themselves to ruin. Scars give clues of pain, not only physical but emotional as well. Sometimes, I discover the vestiges of happiness, too: the grooves a wedding ring will make on a finger after decades of wear, toenails painted in zany colors, bunions that developed, perhaps, from many years spent dancing. I know very few of the people I bury, but I detect their secrets. I see the odd tan lines, the hidden tattoos,

the scars in illogical places. I am the last human being who will ever wash this face or run a damp cloth across these ankles. To the extent that I have a relationship with God, it’s in my capacity as a funeral director.

Eventually, of course, Martin wanders back in. He stands at the foot of the preparation table looking unsure about what to do next. “What’s wrong with my Excel?” I ask.

“I just had to restart the computer,” he says. His eyes rest on the body of the little boy. His voice sounds vague and distracted.

Bennet and I stand on either side of the preparation table, scrubbing grime from the little fingers. If you didn’t know better, you might think we’re manicurists at some kind of pricey spa. Martin doesn’t move and, after a moment, Bennet looks at me, his face full of concern, then says awkwardly, “Shelley tried out that new shampoo. I think she’s right. It’s better.” He runs his fingers through the still wet hair, as if to prove his point.

But Martin has frozen. I would do anything, I think, to make him happier. And so I decide, without any vacillating, really, that I will not abandon him and leave tomorrow for Bratislava. “Honey,” I whisper. “Go take a break or something.” When he looks up at me, his face is hopeless. I think, Don’t weep.

After all the evening’s visitors have gone home, after we eat our pizza and wash it down with beer, I wander out to the bench behind the building where the drivers come to smoke. From this spot, tucked between the storage rooms and the back of the garage, I gaze up at a narrow slice of sky. Each experience of sadness has its own particular sharpness, but the pain I feel right now comes from too many different sources, making it blunt and indistinct.

Martin steps outside and sits down beside me on the bench. Back in his street clothes, he looks more composed and steady, like someone you could count on. He sets his hand on my knee. Everyone else has gone home. We have nothing to do but go to bed so that tomorrow we can come back and do more of the same.

The Hughes memorial, despite the crowds, has gone off without a hitch. The Simmons viewing had a moment of tension when the deceased’s

two daughters got into a spat over the dress they’d chosen for the burial. As for Tara and Mark Rivenbark, they somehow managed to complete all the arrangements for tomorrow’s burial of their son. They could barely speak. His eyes were wild; her eyes were dead. That’s one advantage of this business. When you’re really down, you remind yourself that your own problems are not so awful, really.

“I wish I smoked,” I say. I lean over and pick butts off the ground, then toss them into the sand-filled flowerpot I leave out here as an ashtray for the drivers.

I have let my hair down. Martin’s fingers begin to weave through my curls. “That would solve everything,” he tells me.

For a while we just sit there. He leans against the building and I lean into his arm. It’s hard to find comfort in his presence just now, but I try. After a few minutes, he says, “You’re holding me together these days. I’m sorry.”

I take his hand. I am scared to see him cry, so I make my voice sound light and reassuring. “It’s too hard sometimes.”

He says, “When I was a kid, one of my dad’s friends killed himself. He’d been diagnosed with terminal cancer and I guess he didn’t want to go through it. Right before the Duke-Carolina game he shot himself. Did I ever tell you about it?”

“No.” Martin has so many stories of death, but he’s not a raconteur. “In his suicide note, he wrote that he’d like his family to schedule the

memorial for three o’clock on Saturday, which was right when the game started.”

“Do you think he knew that?”

“Of course. He and my dad were Tar Heel buddies. They drove up to games together every season. So he was testing everybody: Would they go to his service or watch the game?”

I’m not sure what Martin’s getting at. “That’s crazy,” I say.

“My dad thought it was funny. He took it as a final little poke, one buddy pulling a prank on the others. So they went to the service, but they took a radio with them. Every now and then, the minister would pause so one of the mourners could announce the score.”

“Your dad had a weird sense of humor.”

“He just had a way of accepting everything, without absorbing it too deeply.” He sounds irritable now, as if he’s looking for a path out of his own morass and I’m not being helpful.

“We all have to find our own way to deal with things,” I say. I could remind him that his father used to drink a fifth of bourbon when he came home every night.

Martin says, “I’ll be better tomorrow.”

This kind of talk makes me impatient. I accept that he can’t handle the Rivenbark case alone, but I don’t want to hear him lie about it. I sit up, then turn to look at him. “We lost the baby,” I say. I can hear that my voice sounds accusatory, and I’m sorry, but he needs to know the extent of the day’s disasters.

“What do you mean?” My announcement seems to jolt him. I start to cry.

It doesn’t take long to explain what happened, because I leave out the crux of it, the fact that I might have gone and begged, but didn’t. “I never really believed we’d get her,” I say, which I didn’t realize until right this minute.