The Raising (40 page)
“S
omething happened to him,” Perry said, “after the accident. I know Craig. He can be an asshole, but he’s one of the smartest people I’ve ever met. He remembers everything. He can tell you all the presidents in order, their terms of office. He won’t admit it, but he can. He’s not going to
forget
what happened on that night.”
Jeff Blackhawk’s car rattled around them disconcertingly, but Mira felt oddly comforted by the rattling, and the smell of it: the Krispy Kreme doughnuts and old French fries. When they’d left her apartment Jeff was watching
Sesame Street
with the twins, a show Clark insisted was the opiate of the masses. (“This shit’s supposed to turn parents into asexual zombies,” he’d said when Mira suggested that a minimal amount of PBS might help the boys with some language acquisition.) “Look!” Jeff was shouting at the television, pointing. “It’s
Elmo
!”
“Elmo!” the twins shouted back, as if it were a name they’d known all their lives and had only been waiting until this moment to call out.
Jeff wouldn’t even let Mira thank him—not for lending her his car, not for watching her children. “Just get some great material for your book,” he’d said, “and thank me in the acknowledgments. It’ll be my claim to fame.”
N
ow Perry Edwards was sitting beside her, directing her to the lanes she needed to be in to get to the exits they needed to take to get to Bad Axe to find the mortician who’d accepted the mangled remains of Nicole Werner, and who had slid them into the white coffin Perry had helped to carry down the aisle of the Bad Axe Trinity Lutheran Church on the day of her funeral.
Mira said, “Of course, there are head injuries that will cause selective amnesia—”
“But there were no head injuries,” Perry said. “They did a CT scan. They did ten CT scans.”
Mira stared out Jeff’s cracked windshield. It was a small crack on the left side, making its way across the glass slowly but perceptibly enough that she could gauge the progress it had made since the last time she’d been in the car. Two inches. In four weeks, at this rate, it would traverse the windshield.
She tried to think.
Mira had seen skulls.
Plenty of them. Skulls in Romania. Skulls in morgues. Skulls in long, chaotic piles and heaps in the Paris catacombs:
Walking through that underground full of bones, Mira had been amazed. So many dead. She’d let her hand drift over the hundreds and thousands of skulls, breathing in the smell she knew was theirs (must, dust) while the dank ceiling dripped ancient water onto her head, and she’d let it sink in how truly flimsy that helmet that protected everything was. That fragile container of dreams and memories and longings and desire. Of
everything
. One well-placed blow with a tree branch could shatter it all.
The impression had never left her. When she was seven months pregnant with the twins, she’d told Clark (who’d rolled his eyes), “I want them to wear helmets when they’re old enough to ride bikes. And they won’t ever be playing soccer.”
But, if there’d been no head injury?
There was nothing, Mira knew, that a CT scan couldn’t show. If there was no head injury, no brain damage, how was it that Craig Clements-Rabbitt remembered nothing of the accident that had killed Nicole?
“Well,” Mira finally said, “there are substances. Drugs. Injectables. There’s something called the ‘zombie drug.’ Scopolamine. At high doses it kills you, but at lower doses it induces amnesia. Prostitutes have been known to use it to drug and rob their customers. In some countries they claim it’s used to drug mothers and take their babies, traffic them to adoption agencies. They say it makes people so docile they’ll help you burglarize their own houses—and long after the drug is out of their systems, they still have no recollection of the events at all.”
Perry was running his hand over his head. Mira had noticed the buzz cut was growing out. It was as dark as she’d thought it would be.
“They used to give Scopolamine to women during childbirth,” she went on. “Probably your grandmother was given it—just woke up, and they told her she’d had a baby. It completely blocks the formation of memory. You can’t even hypnotize the person to help them remember what happened, the way you can with date rape drugs, because the memory is simply never recorded.
“They think it’s been used for voodoo for centuries in Haiti. It’s given to victims who are then buried alive and then dug up and told they’ve died and been exhumed as zombies—and they believe it. They’re willing to live the rest of their lives as slaves or prostitutes or servants because they’re convinced they died and were brought back to life.”
Perry had stopped rubbing his head. Now he was drumming his fingertips on his knee. The jeans he was wearing were creased so nicely Mira thought maybe he’d never worn them before. It was hard to imagine a boy his age ironing his own jeans, but if any boy would, Perry Edwards would be the boy. He said, “Before he left that night, in Lucas’s car, we had an argument. No,” he interrupted himself, “we had an actual fight. A fight that ended up with him with a bloody nose and us on the floor. He never said a word about it again, either like it never happened or, like after everything else that happened, it didn’t matter. I’ve never known if he just doesn’t remember. How do you know about this drug?”
The good students, they always questioned you in the end. They would accept your word for it only so far.
“Well,” Mira said. She went on to tell Perry how, while working on her master’s thesis, she’d traveled to Haiti with the help of a small summer grant that she and another graduate student had received together for a proposal they’d made to meet with a woman the Haitian newspapers had tried unsuccessfully to debunk as the “Zombie of Port au Prince.”
The woman’s family had claimed she’d been kidnapped by neighbors who tried to extort money from them, and that when they were unable to produce the money, the kidnappers strangled the young woman and left her dead body at the side of a road. Passersby put the body in the trunk of their car and drove it to the police station. When the trunk was opened, the young woman’s eyes were open, so she was returned to her family. But her family refused to take her back. When they saw her they said it was clear that she was missing her soul.
When word got out that this zombie was being moved from her hometown, where they’d have nothing to do with her, to an institution in Port au Prince, the institution employees resigned, and mayhem ensued among the other patients. By the time Mira and her fellow student learned about her and applied for the grant, the zombie was living in foster care—the fourth foster care she’d been placed in. It didn’t help matters that she herself had insisted that she was a zombie.
It seemed like such a promising research opportunity, and Mira’s advisors had been excited and supportive, but Mira and her research partner, Alexandra Durer, got only as far as the airport in Port au Prince, where they were refused entry into Haiti because riots had broken out. Americans had been killed. Armed rebels were said to have taken over the capital. Mira and Alex were boarded right back onto the plane they’d arrived on—and, after a lot of fruitless imploring and phone calls, they just gave up and got drunk on a bottle of duty-free rum they bought at the airport.
That winter, the Zombie of Port au Prince died of pneumonia.
Before they left for Haiti, Alex and Mira had done extensive research on the zombie drug, and their loose hypothesis had been that the woman had been drugged by her kidnappers, and that her ‘rescuers’ had mistaken her drugged state for death, and that the reaction to her return from the dead had been so influenced by the Haitian zombie culture that the victim herself, having no recollection of what had actually happened to her, had been willing to believe that she was a zombie.
“It’s not unheard of,” Mira said, “to find Scopolamine on college campuses—date rape, of course, but other uses, too. Hazing?” She shrugged. She’d never heard of this, but it seemed far from outside the realm of possibility. “Nicole might have known Greeks with access to the drug. Were she and Craig experimenters?”
Perry shook his head. “He smoked dope. A lot of dope. Probably other stuff, back in New Hampshire. I don’t know about her. I always thought she was against all that, but there were other things I thought about her that turned out to be wrong.”
He seemed disinclined to go on. He turned his face to the slushy scenery outside the passenger window, and put a hand against the dashboard, the heat vent. It couldn’t have been more than forty degrees in Jeff Blackhawk’s car, and Perry’s fingers were very white, the fingernails tinged with blue. Mira would have offered him the gloves she was wearing, but she was afraid that without them she’d be unable to drive.
“Zombie drugs,” Perry said after a long pause. He tucked his hands between his knees, paused again, and finally said, “All Craig can remember about the accident is what they told him, and what was in the reports: that Nicole was so badly injured and burned they could identify her only by the things she’d been wearing, and that he’d left the scene of the accident without bothering to try to help. That’s our exit.” He pointed to a green-and-white sign up ahead that read,
BAD AXE
.
S
helly’s answering machine was blinking so rapidly and chaotically that she didn’t bother to count the number of messages it must have recorded. She hit Play, and then she pulled a kitchen chair up next to the phone table, sat down, and began to unlace her boots.
“We know about you,” the first message said, followed by a beep. A young feminine voice. Not familiar, but not a total stranger’s, either. Shelly stopped unlacing the boot and put both feet next to each other on the floor.
“We know about you. You don’t know about us. We’re smarter than you think we are. You can’t trace these calls.”
An amused-sounding laugh, followed by a beep, and then:
“We’ve got a surprise for you. A
whole bunch
of surprises.”
Beep.
“Shelly? This is Rosemary. Are you okay there, honey? I felt so worried after our last talk. Things will get back to normal, I promise you, but how about, until things settle down, you come stay with us for a while? I told the kids I was inviting you, and they’re excited. Please?”
Beep.
“Surprise!”
But it was a different female voice this time. Lower. Sexier. Quieter.
Beep.
“Maybe you should have a look around your house. There’s a present for you. It’s in the bedroom. We know that’s where you like to get your presents.”
Shelly stood up.
Beep.
“That’s right. Go on. Go see for yourself.”
Beep.
“Hey, Shelly. Keep going.”
Josie
. Shelly couldn’t have proved it—too few words—but something about the cadence, the consonants pronounced at the very tip of the tongue against the teeth, seemed nauseatingly familiar.
Beep.
“Mee-
owwww
.” And then there was laughter, hysterical laughter, but Shelly was heading into the bedroom now, hurrying, that laughter pouring down on her like glassy rain.
Beep.
“Here kitty-kitty-kitty.”
Beep.
“You’re next, you bitch, if you don’t look out. I’d say it’s time you got out of town. And don’t think you can trace these calls, because the cops won’t be able to figure it out, and there’s no—”
But Shelly was screaming now, yanking on the rope that was strung from the light fixture over her bed and wrapped around her cat’s neck, pulling his limp body down, cradling him in her arms, screaming his stupid, silly name into his blank face with his black lolling tongue and his glass eyes staring intently at nothing at all.
M
r. Dientz remembered Perry from Cub Scouts. His own son was many years older than Perry, so they’d overlapped for only a year, but he gave Perry a hearty handshake and said, “Lord. What did your parents feed you, boy?”
Perry asked after Paul Dientz, who was in mortuary school in North Carolina, and then introduced Professor Polson. Mr. Dientz was obviously surprised, and not necessarily pleasantly so (a quick raising and lowering and raising of his very bushy gray eyebrows) to find that the professor was a woman. A young woman.
On the phone, he’d said, “Perry, since I know you, and since you say you’re doing this ‘research’ ”—the word had come out of his mouth like something from a foreign language—“I’m willing to indulge you and your professor, of course, and have I mentioned how impressed I am that you’re attending our state’s finest institution?”
Perry had assured him that he had.
“But it’s a part of my job I don’t relish. The reopening of old wounds, so to speak. Perry, it would amaze you to learn how many family members and friends in the weeks, months,
years
after a funeral—especially in the case of cremations and closed coffins—become convinced that there has been some case of mistaken identity. They think they’ve glimpsed a deceased brother or son or daughter on the street, or in a magazine, or they’ve gotten a hang-up call in the middle of the night—and, if they weren’t at the scene of the accident or the one to identify the body or if there were issues of identification, because many untimely deaths, Perry, let me be frank, leave behind corpses that do not resemble the living person—well, they can become fixated.
“Again, in the interest of ‘science,’ I am willing to meet with you and your professor and go over the record, but I must admit I can’t recall all the details, except of course the terrible tragedy of it, and, as I recall, the Werners did not take our recommendation to view the body. In the case of their lovely daughter, it would certainly have been horrific, but there’s really nothing better for a sense of finality, if you know what I mean, than to see the deceased with your own eyes.”
“W
ell, welcome,” Mr. Dientz said, sweeping his arm toward two plush red velvet armchairs across from his desk. “I’ve gone through my files, and as soon as you’re settled, I’d be happy to show you the reconstructive photographs.”
Perry had no idea what
reconstructive photographs
would be, but he did know, because Mr. Dientz had told him on the phone, that the funeral home kept a digital library of photos and information about their ‘clients.’ He would be showing them photographs of Nicole? Now? Perry looked toward the door, wondering if he could excuse himself for a moment, but Mr. Dientz wasted no time booting up his Mac, and turning the screen toward Perry and Professor Polson, so they could see.
“You may well ask yourself,” Mr. Dientz said, his voice shifting into the tone of a man on a radio commercial, clearly getting ready to say something he’d said a million times before but that still held meaning for him, “why it is we would spend the many hours we spend here at Dientz Funeral Parlor reconstructing the likenesses of decedents who have been disfigured by accidents or illness when, in fact, most funerals at Dientz Funeral Parlor are now closed-casket, and, in especially the most extreme cases, even family members will not be viewing the bodies
?
”
He looked at Perry and Professor Polson with rehearsed animation, as if gauging to what degree they had each been asking themselves this question.
“
Well
, I answer you with an anecdote from my earliest years as a mortician,” Mr. Dientz went on. “A young man had been killed in a motorcycle accident. I won’t go into the details, but like your friend Nicole, identification was difficult. Injuries, burns, even dismemberment. Everyone in the family insisted, as so many so often do, that they only wished to remember their loved one ‘as he had been.’ Of course, someone had identified him at the morgue, but it was a distant relative, and the identification was done mostly from clothing and a ring. The family insisted that they didn’t want any kind of reconstruction, no embalming. They didn’t even care what the deceased would be wearing in his coffin.
“Still, this was a very traditional family, and after ascertaining that they would not
object
to reconstruction and embalming, I went ahead with my usual practice of preparing a body for viewing—although, I will tell you, I did not charge the family for these services, or even inform them that I was going ahead with them.
“As I’d imagined might happen, at the funeral there was a great emotional outpouring. The mother was beside herself. The father had become almost violently inconsolable. One of the brothers threw himself against the casket weeping, and one of the sisters became hysterical, insisting it was impossible—insisting that her brother wasn’t in the casket, that this was a terrible dream or a mistake, and this got the whole family and even some of the young man’s motorcycle gang friends making similar outcries. A fight nearly broke out before the father pushed his other son away and flung open the coffin.
“Perry, Professor, let me tell you that if I’d had that coffin locked or sealed—or, if I
hadn’t
and that young man had been in there in the condition the county morgue had delivered him to me—well, this is the reason I always insist on reconstruction if I am going to have a body in a casket at Dientz Funeral Parlor.
“Because of the reconstruction, the family and the young man’s friends were able to gather around his casket and grieve properly. He was the young man they remembered. He was dressed in a decent suit. His hair was combed, and I’d remodeled what I could of his face based on the photograph they’d run in the newspaper.
“Nothing,
nothing
, makes a death as believable as being able to see, to
touch
, the loved one’s body. We are physical creatures, Perry, Professor.” He nodded at Professor Polson. “And although much has been done to ridicule and malign the ‘death industry’ in America, I can tell you from experience that there is tremendous comfort taken in being able to view a body, in repose, nicely dressed, tastefully remodeled, eyes closed, clearly at peace. And I make it my job to be able to offer that comfort to those who may not know, until the very last moments, that they will need it.”
“But Nicole’s family?” Professor Polson asked.
Mr. Dientz shook his head. “No,” he said. “Nicole’s family couldn’t bear it.” He shrugged, as if to say,
you win some, you lose some.
“Now,” he said. “The photos!”
Mr. Dientz whirled around in his chair with a flourish fit for the unveiling of the
Mona Lisa
. He waved his hand over his keyboard, took up his mouse, and then clicked a file in the center that read,
NWERNER
, and then
JPEG10
, and in less than half a second an image opened and filled the screen, and before Perry even realized that he had seen it, he was scrambling out of his velvet chair and across the room with a hand over his mouth, and then out of the office and into the men’s room near the entrance of the funeral home.