The Devil You Know
THE DEVIL YOU KNOW
Also by Jenn Farrell
Sugar Bush & Other Stories
The Devil
You Know
S
TORIES
Jenn Farrell
Anvil Press | Vancouver
Copyright © 2010 by Jenn Farrell
Anvil Press Publishers Inc.
P.O. Box 3008, Main Post Office
Vancouver, B.C. V6B 3X5 Canada
www.anvilpress.com
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, with the exception of brief passages in reviews. Any request for photocopying or other reprographic copying of any part of this book must be directed in writing to Access Copyright: The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency, One Yonge Street, Suite 800, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M5E 1E5.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Farrell, Jenn
The devil you know / Jenn Farrell.
Short stories.
ISBN 978-1-897535-06-6
I. Title.
PS8611.A774D48 2010Â Â Â Â Â C813'.6 Â Â Â Â Â C2010-904207-X
Printed and bound in Canada
Cover design by Mutasis Creative
Cover art by Katie Pretti
Author photo: Wendy D
Interior design by HeimatHouse
Represented in Canada by the Literary Press Group
Distributed by the University of Toronto Press
The publisher gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Canada Book Fund, and the Province of British Columbia through the B.C. Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.
for
Ailsa, Amy, Elise, Joan, and Wendy
CONTENTS
S
AM FOUND THE CAR KEYS ON THE HOOK BY THE FRONT DOOR
and drove her mother's rusty Accord straight to the hospital. She gave her name at the reception desk and waited for a social worker named Elise to take her down to the morgue. Elise walked with Sam to the elevator and unlocked their floor with a keycard. They went down, into the basement of the hospital, the part without gift shops or cafeterias. Elise pressed a buzzer on the wall; a young man poked his head out a doorway, nodded, went back inside, and then opened another door down the hall a few moments later. Sam walked into what looked like a small waiting room, painted pale yellow and fluorescently lit. There were soft chairs and a couch and a coffee table with a box of tissues and an open doorway to a green tiled room in the centre of which sat a stainless steel gurney with her dead mother on it. Sam dropped her purse on the coffee table and walked through the doorway.
Sam didn't immediately recognize the shape of the body under the white sheet. The cancer had stripped more than half her mother's bulk away, but her middle was bloated with the fluid they had been draining off every few days. Her shoulders and head were exposed and Sam noticed how small and bony she seemed. For the first time, Sam could see the resemblance between her mother and her grandmother.
The hair on her mother's head had thinned, and hadn't been cut or permed for some time. It hung back from her forehead, limp and white. Her facial hair had been neglected too, her chin hairs and moustache growing in.
“Oh, Mom,” Sam said. “You look terrible.” If she had come sooner, she could have at least cleaned her up a bit.
Her mother's sunken face did not radiate peace, or even rest. The last few days of her life must have been an ugly fight. Sam tried to touch her mother, mostly because she thought that's what people were supposed to do, but she couldn't bring her trembling hand into contact. She hovered over her ruined hair, her face, and noted the absence of warmth. One of her eyelids was not completely closed, and Sam peered into the sliver of visible eye. It seemed to look back at her, baleful. Judging.
“I'm sorry I wasn't here, okay?” she whispered. “I fucked up.”
Sam said other things too, things she was barely aware of saying aloud, but she could hear herself crying and the sound of the social worker crying behind her and the whirring of the cooling fans. She realized that this would be the last memory she had of the woman, that this body on a gurney would now be the picture she saw when she thought of her mother, and that there would be no new last memory to replace it.
A thin stream of greenish-black fluid began to run out of her mother's nose and towards the opening of her ear and Sam watched its progression, transfixed, horrified. The social worker appeared at her side and dabbed her dead mother's face with a tissue. Then she offered one to Sam, and they turned and left the room.
The cemetery office building was frigid compared to the shimmering midday asphalt of the parking lot. Sam lifted her hair and exposed her neck to the cold air blowing through a floor vent beside the reception desk. She was no longer used to the heat, the Southern Ontario humidity that was like breathing through a hot wet rag. Sam's shorts clung to the backs of her damp thighs and wrinkled in the front, and she wished she had worn a skirt.
The front desk was unoccupied, but a tiny man in a suit and tie appeared through a doorway and smiled at her. Sam was getting used to all the suits, a prerequisite for dealing with the dead, regardless of the heat. “You must be Samantha,” he said. His hand, when she shook it, was nearly as small as her own.
Petite
, Sam thought. Even the bones of his face looked delicate, almost elfin. He introduced himself as Michael, the Services Director. She liked how the title rang with professional anonymity; a label that wouldn't make people squirm, like
undertaker
might.
“Sam, please. Only my mother called me Samantha.”
As he led her into the office, she noticed that his salt-and-pepper hair was thick but wanted cutting, with that long shagginess in the back that she hated. Sometimes her clients wanted to leave that length, especially if they were thinning on top and believed that longer hair in the back made up for it. Sam was usually able to convince them otherwise. The advice of an attractive woman carried some weight in matters of hairstyle.
Michael's office was filled with shelves displaying urns, memorial plaques, and granite headstone samples. Sam examined a wooden display with a number of necklaces hanging from it and fingered a heart-shaped pendant as though she were in a shop. A small brass plaque explained that the “memory pendants” were meant to be filled with loved one's ashes. She let go of the heart and it rapped against the wood.
“So,” Michael said, sitting across the desk and interlocking his wee hands neatly, “I understand you're here today to discuss your mother's arrangements. I'm so sorry for your loss.”
There had been as many apologies as there had been suits. “These things happen,” she said, opening her palms to the ceiling. “But this, umâ¦arrangement has made it a bit easier.” Through a typical Williams family screw-up, a plot purchased by her grandfather in the '50s had gone unclaimed. Some great aunt had married a Jewish guy fifty years ago and left her eternal Presbyterian resting place vacant. It was Uncle Clifford who had tried to give Sam all the information right there in the arrivals area of the airport, before she'd even pulled her luggage off the carousel.
“Give me a fucking minute, wouldya?” she'd snapped, her fellow travellers' faces wide-eyed. Even the top of Clifford's old-man head had blushed. Sam tried to make polite conversation during the ride home, but the damage was done. He wouldn't even get out of the car when he dropped her off. One major family insult accomplished before she'd even seen her mother's body.
“âand since that facility is a member of our larger family of funeral services providers, the transfer of ownership is a relatively simple processâwith the necessary forms of course.” Michael presented Sam with a series of papers to be signed and initialled, which she did with a suitably heavy ballpoint pen.
“Let's move on,” said Michael, “to your mother's wishes. Did she leave you any instructions at all?”
“Well, my mother wanted to be cremated and then have her remains thrown into the trash. She was always a bit of a drama queen that way. But even though I'm going to totally ignore her and her stupid wishes, I'd like to keep things as simple as possible.”
Michael scarcely flinched, but Sam felt satisfied by her own testiness. It felt good to have her personality back for a minute, after all the polite whispering of the past few days. The obligatory visits to the airless sitting rooms of her few remaining relatives made her want to scream, but sitting home alone was even worse. An air-conditioned audience with Mr. Services Director was something of an improvement over both.
He flipped through a binder of plastic sheets, keeping up the sales patter as he went. There were many things to decide: the urn, interment in the ground or a crypt (which Michael called a memorial wall), matters of size, shape, colourâ¦Sam was baffled by the array of choices for the dead. Whatever she chose, it would most certainly not be in accordance with the note she had found in her mother's safety deposit box that morning.
“My Wishes”
My death is to be followed by cremation
If it's put in the paper, do it after the fact (
I mean later
)
(No service! Or memorial service NO PICTURES)
Ashes in a cardboard box only
Given to my daughter to be thrown in the garbage
WON'T COST MUCH AND NO TIME SPENT
You do not have the right to
judge
or change these wishes
NO FLOWERSâIN LIEU OFâCharitable donations to children's charities
of your choice. The children are the futureâhelp them!
Hooray the witch is dead!
Signed by, A Misfit
The note was not a surprise. Sam's mother had been working over that particular turf for years. She'd brought up one variation or another of those instructions so frequently, and with such bitterness, that Sam had always thought she'd have no trouble following them. She had often pictured herself walking out of some funeral home with her purse over her shoulder, a grande Starbucks cup in one hand, and a white cardboard box in the other.
Fuck you, you got your wish
, she would say, lobbing the box into the first garbage can she passed on the sidewalk. But now that she was actually dead, Sam was puzzled to discover that a lot of her mother's bullshit had died with her. Their fights that had gone on for years suddenly ended, even if Sam hadn't been finished fighting them yet.
In addition to not wanting to throw what was left of her mother into the trash, Sam discovered that she had no desire to hold a box of human ashes. She remembered how at the hospital she couldn't even touch her mother's body, that creepy cold shell that had nearly nothing to do with the person she had known. The idea of keeping the ashes, or wearing a pinch of them in a special pendant, was sickening.
She had called the newspaper and arranged for a small notice to appear in the Saturday obituaries after everything had been completed. There would be no funeral, no memorial service, but at least there would be a place to visit if anyone wanted. If the plot hadn't been an almost-freebie, things might have gone differently. Real estate costs were high, even underground. But this way, the body had travelled straight from the hospital to the funeral home, and then would go on to the crematorium and the cemetery, all without Sam having to touch anything more than pieces of paper.
Sam flipped through the selection of urns and chose a plain, white marble vessel shaped like a tall shoebox, not at all like what she thought of as an urn. One of their most economical options, it cost six hundred dollars. She imagined the box being sealed behind a wall, like a coffin in an Egyptian tomb, never to be seen again. “How do I know that you actually use this and don't just put the ashes in another box and keep this one to sell again?” she asked.