My mother died suddenly. Although I know that she understood the profound depth of my feeling for her, I wish that I had been able to express it to her adequately on that last day of her life.
Sometimes, out in the night, on the dark beach, when the sky is clear and the vault of stars makes me feel simultaneously mortal and invincible, when the wind is still and even the sea is hushed as it breaks upon the shore, I tell my mother what she meant to me. But I don’t know that she hears.
Now my father—still with me, if only tenuously—did not hear me when I said, “You gave me life.” And I was afraid that he would take his leave before I could tell him all the things that I’d been given no last chance to tell my mother.
His hand remained cool and limp. I held it anyway, as if to anchor him to this world until I could say good-bye properly.
At the edges of the venetian blinds, the window frames and casings smoldered from orange to fiery red as the sun met the sea.
There is only one circumstance under which I will ever view a sunset directly. If I should develop cancer of the eyes, then before I succumb to it or go blind, I will one late afternoon go down to the sea and stand facing those distant Asian empires where I will never walk. On the brink of dusk, I’ll remove my sunglasses and watch the dying of the light.
I’ll have to squint. Bright light pains my eyes. Its effect is so total and swift that I can virtually feel the developing burn.
As the blood-red light at the periphery of the blinds deepened to purple, my father’s hand tightened on mine.
I looked down, saw that his eyes were open, and tried to tell him all that was in my heart.
“I know,” he whispered.
When I was unable to stop saying what didn’t need to be said, Dad found an unexpected reserve of strength and squeezed my hand so hard that I halted in my speech.
Into my shaky silence, he said, “Remember…”
I could barely hear him. I leaned over the bed railing to put my left ear close to his lips.
Faintly, yet projecting a resolve that resonated with anger and defiance, he gave me his final words of guidance: “Fear nothing, Chris. Fear nothing.”
Then he was gone. The luminous tracery of the electrocardiogram skipped, skipped again, and went flatline.
The only moving lights were the candle flames, dancing on the black wicks.
I could not immediately let go of his slack hand. I kissed his forehead, his rough cheek.
No light any longer leaked past the edges of the blinds. The world had rotated into the darkness that welcomed me.
The door opened. Again, they had extinguished the nearest banks of fluorescent panels, and the only light in the corridor came from other rooms along its length.
Nearly as tall as the doorway, Dr. Cleveland entered the room and came gravely to the foot of the bed.
With sandpiper-quick steps, Angela Ferryman followed him, one sharp-knuckled fist held to her breast. Her shoulders were hunched, her posture defensive, as if her patient’s death were a physical blow.
The EKG machine beside the bed was equipped with a telemetry device that sent Dad’s heartbeat to a monitor at the nurses’ station down the hall. They had known the moment that he slipped away.
They didn’t come with syringes full of epinephrine or with a portable defibrillator to shock his heart back into action. As Dad had wanted, there would be no heroic measures.
Dr. Cleveland’s features were not designed for solemn occasions. He resembled a beardless Santa Claus with merry eyes and plump rosy cheeks. He strove for a dour expression of grief and sympathy, but he managed only to look puzzled.
His feelings were evident, however, in his soft voice. “Are you okay, Chris?”
“Hanging in there,” I said.
4
From the hospital room, I telephoned Sandy Kirk at Kirk’s Funeral Home, with whom my father himself had made arrangements weeks ago. In accordance with Dad’s wishes, he was to be cremated.
Two orderlies, young men with chopped hair and feeble mustaches, arrived to move the body to a cold-holding room in the basement.
They asked if I wanted to wait down there with it until the mortician’s van arrived. I said that I didn’t.
This was not my father, only his body. My father had gone elsewhere.
I opted not to pull the sheet back for one last look at Dad’s sallow face. This wasn’t how I wanted to remember him.
The orderlies moved the body onto a gurney. They seemed awkward in the conduct of their business, at which they ought to have been practiced, and they glanced at me surreptitiously while they worked, as if they felt inexplicably guilty about what they were doing.
Maybe those who transport the dead never become entirely easy with their work. How reassuring it would be to believe as much, for such awkwardness might mean that people are not as indifferent to the fate of others as they sometimes seem to be.
More likely, these two were merely curious, sneaking glances at me. I am, after all, the only citizen of Moonlight Bay to have been featured in a major article in Time magazine.
And I am the one who lives by night and shrinks from the sight of the sun. Vampire! Ghoul! Filthy wacko pervert! Hide your children!
To be fair, the vast majority of people are understanding and kind. A poisonous minority, however, are rumormongers who believe anything about me that they hear—and who embellish all gossip with the self-righteousness of spectators at a Salem witch trial.
If these two young men were of the latter type, they must have been disappointed to see that I looked remarkably normal. No grave-pale face. No blood-red eyes. No fangs. I wasn’t even having a snack of spiders and worms. How boring of me.
The wheels on the gurney creaked as the orderlies departed with the body. Even after the door swung shut, I could hear the receding squeak-squeak-squeak.
Alone in the room, by candlelight, I took Dad’s overnight bag from the narrow closet. It held only the clothes that he had been wearing when he’d checked into the hospital for the last time.
The top nightstand drawer contained his watch, his wallet, and four paperback books. I put them in the suitcase.
I pocketed the butane lighter but left the candles behind. I never wanted to smell bayberry again. The scent now had intolerable associations for me.
Because I gathered up Dad’s few belongings with such efficiency, I felt that I was admirably in control of myself.
In fact, the loss of him had left me numb. Snuffing the candles by pinching the flames between thumb and forefinger, I didn’t feel the heat or smell the charred wicks.
When I stepped into the corridor with the suitcase, a nurse switched off the overhead fluorescents once more. I walked directly to the stairs that I had climbed earlier.
Elevators were of no use to me because their ceiling lights couldn’t be turned off independently of their lift mechanisms. During the brief ride down from the third floor, my sunscreen lotion would be sufficient protection; however, I wasn’t prepared to risk getting stuck between floors for an extended period.
Without remembering to put on my sunglasses, I quickly descended the dimly lighted concrete stairs—and to my surprise, I didn’t stop at the ground floor. Driven by a compulsion that I didn’t immediately understand, moving faster than before, the suitcase thumping against my leg, I continued to the basement, where they had taken my father.
The numbness in my heart became a chill. Spiraling outward from that icy throb, a series of shudders worked through me.
Abruptly I was overcome by the conviction that I’d relinquished my father’s body without fulfilling some solemn duty, although I was not able to think what it was that I ought to have done.
My heart was pounding so hard that I could hear it—like the drumbeat of an approaching funeral cortege but in double time. My throat swelled half shut, and I could swallow my suddenly sour saliva only with effort.
At the bottom of the stairwell was a steel fire door under a red emergency-e
xit sign. In some confusion, I halted and hesitated with one hand on the push bar.
Then I remembered the obligation that I had almost failed to meet. Ever the romantic, Dad had wanted to be cremated with his favorite photograph of my mother, and he had charged me with making sure that it was sent with him to the mortuary.
The photo was in his wallet. The wallet was in the suitcase that I carried.
Impulsively I pushed open the door and stepped into a basement hallway. The concrete walls were painted glossy white. From silvery parabolic diffusers overhead, torrents of fluorescent light splashed the corridor.
I should have reeled backward across the threshold or, at least, searched for the light switch. Instead, I hurried recklessly forward, letting the heavy door sigh shut behind me, keeping my head down, counting on the sunscreen and my cap visor to protect my face.
I jammed my left hand into a jacket pocket. My right hand was clenched around the handle of the suitcase, exposed.
The amount of light bombarding me during a race along a hundred-foot corridor would not be sufficient, in itself, to trigger a raging skin cancer or tumors of the eyes. I was acutely aware, however, that the damage sustained by the DNA in my skin cells was cumulative because my body could not repair it. A measured minute of exposure each day for two months would have the same catastrophic effect as a one-hour burn sustained in a suicidal session of sun worship.
My parents had impressed upon me, from a young age, that the consequences of a single irresponsible act might appear negligible or even nonexistent but that inevitable horrors would ensue from habitual irresponsibility.
Even with my head tucked down and my cap visor blocking a direct view of the egg-crate fluorescent panels, I had to squint against the glare that ricocheted off the white walls. I should have put on my sunglasses, but I was only seconds from the end of the hallway.
The gray-and-red-marbled vinyl flooring looked like day-old raw meat. A mild dizziness overcame me, inspired by the vileness of the pattern in the tile and by the fearsome glare.
I passed storage and machinery rooms.
The basement appeared to be deserted.
The door at the farther end of the corridor became the door at the nearer end. I stepped into a small subterranean garage.
This was not the public parking lot, which lay above ground. Nearby were only a panel truck with the hospital name on the side and a paramedics’ van.
More distant was a black Cadillac hearse from Kirk’s Funeral Home. I was relieved that Sandy Kirk had not already collected the body and departed. I still had time to put the photo of my mother between Dad’s folded hands.
Parked beside the gleaming hearse was a Ford van similar to the paramedics’ vehicle except that it was not fitted with the standard emergency beacons. Both the hearse and the van were facing away from me, just inside the big roll-up door, which was open to the night.
Otherwise, the space was empty, so delivery trucks could pull inside to off-load food, linens, and medical supplies to the freight elevator. At the moment, no deliveries were being made.
The concrete walls were not painted here, and the fluorescent fixtures overhead were fewer and farther apart than in the corridor that I had just left. Nevertheless, this was still not a safe place for me, and I moved quickly toward the hearse and the white van.
The corner of the basement immediately to the left of the roll-up garage door and past those two waiting vehicles was occupied by a room that I knew well. It was the cold-holding chamber, where the dead were kept until they could be transported to mortuaries.
One terrible January night two years ago, by candlelight, my father and I had waited miserably in cold-holding more than half an hour with the body of my mother. We could not bear to leave her there alone.
Dad would have followed her from the hospital to the mortuary and into the crematorium furnace that night—if not for his inability to abandon me. A poet and a scientist, but such similar souls.
She had been brought from the scene of the accident by ambulance and rushed from the emergency room to surgery. She died three minutes after reaching the operating table, without regaining consciousness, even before the full extent of her injuries could be determined.
Now the insulated door to the cold-holding chamber stood open, and as I approached it, I heard men arguing inside. In spite of their anger, they kept their voices low; an emotional note of strenuous disagreement was matched by a tone of urgency and secrecy.
Their circumspection rather than their anger brought me to a stop just before I reached the doorway. In spite of the deadly fluorescent light, I stood for a moment in indecision.
From beyond the door came a voice I recognized. Sandy Kirk said, “So who is this guy I’ll be cremating?”
Another man said, “Nobody. Just a vagrant.”
“You should have brought him to my place, not here,” Sandy complained. “And what happens when he’s missed?”
A third man spoke, and I recognized his voice as that of one of the two orderlies who had collected my father’s body from the room upstairs: “Can we for God’s sake just move this along?”
Suddenly certain that it was dangerous to be encumbered, I set the suitcase against the wall, freeing both hands.
A man appeared in the doorway, but he didn’t see me because he was backing across the threshold, pulling a gurney.
The hearse was eight feet away. Before I was spotted, I slipped to it, crouching by the rear door through which cadavers were loaded.
Peering around the fender, I could still see the entrance to the cold-holding chamber. The man backing out of that room was a stranger: late twenties, six feet, massively built, with a thick neck and a shaved head. He was wearing work shoes, blue jeans, a red-plaid flannel shirt—and one pearl earring.
After he drew the gurney completely across the threshold, he swung it around toward the hearse, ready to push instead of pull.
On the gurney was a corpse in an opaque, zippered vinyl bag. In the cold-holding chamber two years ago, my mother was transferred into a similar bag before being released to the mortician.
Following the stone-bald stranger into the garage, Sandy Kirk gripped the gurney with one hand. Blocking a wheel with his left foot, he asked again, “What happens when he’s missed?”
The bald man frowned and cocked his head. The pearl in his earlobe was luminous. “I told you, he was a vagrant. Everything he owned is in his backpack.”
“So?”
“He disappears—who’s to notice or care?”
Sandy was thirty-two and so good-looking that even his grisly occupation gave no pause to the women who pursued him. Although he was charming and less self-consciously dignified than many in his profession, he made me uneasy. His handsome features seemed to be a mask behind which was not another face but an emptiness—not as though he were a different and less morally motivated man than he pretended to be, but as though he were no man at all.
Sandy said, “What about his hospital records?”
“He didn’t die here,” the bald man said. “I picked him up earlier, out on the state highway. He was hitchhiking.”
I had never voiced my troubling perception of Sandy Kirk to anyone: not to my parents, not to Bobby Halloway, not to Sasha, not even to Orson. So many thoughtless people have made unkind assumptions about me, based on my appearance and my affinity for the night, that I am reluctant to join the club of cruelty and speak ill of anyone without ample reason.
Sandy’s father, Frank, had been a fine and well-liked man, and Sandy had never done anything to indicate that he was less admirable than his dad. Until now.
To the man with the gurney, Sandy said, “I’m taking a big risk.”
“You’re untouchable.”
“I wonder.”
“Wonder on your own time,” said the bald man, and he rolled the gurney over Sandy’s blocking foot.
Sandy cursed and scuttled out of the way, and the man with the gurney came directly toward me. Th
e wheels squeaked—as had the wheels of the gurney on which they had taken away my father.
Still crouching, I slipped around the back of the hearse, between it and the white Ford van. A quick glance revealed that no company or institution name adorned the side of the van.
The squeaking gurney was rapidly drawing nearer.
Instinctively, I knew I was in considerable jeopardy. I had caught them in some scheme that I didn’t understand but that clearly involved illegalities. They would especially want to keep it secret from me, of all people.
I dropped facedown on the floor and slid under the hearse, out of sight and also out of the fluorescent glare, into shadows as cool and smooth as silk. My hiding place was barely spacious enough to accommodate me, and when I hunched my back, it pressed against the drive train.
I was facing the rear of the vehicle. I watched the gurney roll past the hearse and continue to the van.
When I turned my head to the right, I saw the threshold of the cold-holding chamber only eight feet beyond the Cadillac. I had an even closer view of Sandy’s highly polished black shoes and the cuffs of his navy-blue suit pants as he stood looking after the bald man with the gurney.
Behind Sandy, against the wall, was my father’s small suitcase. There had been nowhere nearby to conceal it, and if I had kept it with me, I wouldn’t have been able to move quickly enough or slip noiselessly under the hearse.
Apparently no one had noticed the suitcase yet. Maybe they would continue to overlook it.
The two orderlies—whom I could identify by their white shoes and white pants—rolled a second gurney out of the holding room. The wheels on this one did not squeak.
The first gurney, pushed by the bald man, reached the back of the white van. I heard him open the rear cargo doors on that vehicle.
One of the orderlies said to the other, “I better get upstairs before someone starts wondering what’s taking me so long.” He walked away, toward the far end of the garage.