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.
85
Mr. 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.”
“Well, 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 entran
ce of the funeral home.
86
“Craig,” Perry had said when he left for Bad Axe with Professor Polson. “Just stay here, okay? We’ll be back late. Don’t do anything stupid.”
“Like what?” Craig had asked, forcing Perry to say it:
“Like going out looking for Nicole.”
Craig had tried not to. He’d paced around the apartment. Turned the TV on and off. He’d eaten a salami sandwich. Taken his second shower of the day. Gotten in bed. Gotten out of bed, combed his hair and gone next door to knock on Deb’s door, but there’d been no answer. Finally, he’d sat down next to the phone and willed it to ring, and, incredibly, it had:
“Hello?”
On the other end of the line, there was no sound.
Craig held the receiver closer to his ear, and said hello again.
Now he could hear something. It was very distant, maybe the sound of a car on a freeway. Maybe, very faintly, there was music playing on the car radio. Or maybe he was just hearing his own heartbeat.
“Hello?” he asked again. And then: “Nicole?”
Then the line went dead, and Craig stood up, grabbed his coat, and headed out to do the stupid thing Perry had told him not to do.
It was colder out than Craig had expected it to be. The snow fell in fat flakes that stuck to the sidewalks and to the roofs and windshields of the cars parked beside the curbs, although the traffic was churning it into a slick, wet shadow in the road.
It seemed to Craig that the streets and sidewalks were oddly thronged with students. Had he simply not been outside enough this fall to notice them, or were they out, for some reason, en masse?
As they passed him—walking two or three abreast on the sidewalk and in the streets and at the corners, it felt to Craig as if he knew all of these kids, or had at least seen them all before. They were whooping, slapping each other’s backs, pretending to be arguing, telling jokes. Couples were holding hands. Girls had their arms slung around each other’s shoulders. Everyone seemed happy. No one was dressed for the cold or even seemed to be noticing it, and Craig was painfully, completely, aware of how separated he was from the lives of his peers. He was like a ghost come back to haunt the scene of his last days. No one seemed to notice him at all.
He remembered that life, and what it had been like to be a part of it. He remembered Lucas with a flask in his back pocket, stumbling off to the fourth bar of the night, and Perry, disapproving, walking a few steps ahead of them. He remembered how they’d stopped to shout something stupid up to the Omega Theta Tau house. Something about fucking virgins.
He remembered loving it.
How dumb and wonderful he had felt.
He remembered that a girl had come out on the porch, and that she was all lit up from behind. Even from that distance he could see how beautiful she was.
He had loved being a stupid, drunk college kid. An asshole shouting up at a sorority house. He loved the girl standing there, looking down at them, and the house, and the sense that, inside the house and behind that girl, some solemn ceremony was taking place in candlelight. Chanting. Holding hands. He’d loved that there would be such a house, such a secret society of beautiful girls, and that he was outside of it, shouting obscenities at it, being a real jerk—an oaf—while a big equally stupid moon was hung over it all, and he was fumbling for the flask in Lucas’s back pocket as Perry walked off without them.
But this was all before Nicole. Before she joined this sorority. Before all of it.
Now he was passing the first of the terrible landmarks. The stone bench beneath the weeping willow where he’d slipped the amber ring on her finger, and where she’d given him the poem he still kept in his wallet:
Time may take us far apart,
But you will always be the lover of my heart.
I have not given you my body yet.
But I have given you, forever, What I Am
He stopped, looked at the bench, at the layer of snow accumulating on it, and he was so cold, shaking so hard, that if he hadn’t had his jacket zipped, it would have rattled off of him, he thought. He blew a long scarf of frosted breath into the air above the bench before he continued to walk, and he didn’t look up again until he’d gotten to the spot where, on Greek Row, you could see the hill from which the brooding Omega Theta Tau house looked down.
How had it gotten so dark so fast?
How long had he been walking?
Craig looked from the house to the sky, where a big blank moon was hanging, and then he looked toward the house again, where, in the light of that moon he saw two dark-haired girls walking down the front steps in puffy winter coats but very short skirts, knee-high boots.
They were still far away, but he could see that they were laughing, tossing shaggy wool scarves over their shoulders as they emerged through a scrim of snow.
He took a few steps toward them. They hadn’t noticed him, but they were heading in his direction. When they were less than a block away, Craig rubbed his eyes to be sure, but now he had no doubt:
One of them was Josie.
Craig would have recognized that black silk hair, that pointed chin, anywhere. He could even hear her familiar laughter as she got closer. That high, sharp cackle. “Oh, my God!” she was saying. “You are totally kidding me. Tell me you’re kidding.”
Craig continued to stand in the center of the sidewalk, watching. They were directly ahead of him, and so close now that their shadows, stretched ahead of them on the snowy sidewalk, nearly touched him, would soon envelope him.
Yes.
He knew without a doubt that the one on the left was Josie, but he had to rub his eyes and blink the snowflakes out of them several times, shake his head, before he could be sure of what he was sure of:
That the second girl, the dark-haired one walking with Josie, was Nicole.
Nicole.
“Nicole,” he said.
She didn’t hear him, and she hadn’t seen him.
He stood where he was and watched her, taking all of her in. The way she walked and the corners of her mouth. The little folds at the edges of her eyes. The perfect little bump on the bridge of her nose.
The silky straight hair was dark now, like Josie’s.
But the tilt of her head.
The delicate ear behind which her hair was tucked.
Those were the same.
He’d have recognized them anywhere.
She was wearing a leather skirt. And tights with a silver sheen, and high-heeled boots. More eye makeup than she’d ever worn in—in what? In life?—and dark red lipstick. Her skin was pale in the moonlight, but her cheeks were bright, either with cosmetics or the cold, or maybe she’d been drinking. She seemed to stagger a little. She held a hand to her mouth to laugh at something else Josie had said, but Josie’s voice shouted over the sound of Nicole’s laughter, and Craig was grateful for that, because if he’d heard her voice, her actual voice, he might not have been able to stand it.
“Nicole,” he said again, and then he was walking straight toward her, saying her name over and over, shouting it, and he was sliding on the slick cement toward them, and then they saw him, and there was no denying it:
Nicole.
She saw him, too. Her eyes filled with alarm. She turned and ran with what seemed like incredible speed back from where she’d come, back up the hill to the OTT house. Craig ran after her, slipping on the sidewalk, stumbling like a drunken man but managing somehow to stay upright, to continue the chase.
But she was so much faster than he was. She did not slip at all. How was that possible? In those high-heeled boots? In his life, Craig had only ever seen a deer run that gracefully, that quickly, that wildly and swiftly and without a backward glance, across the freeway, into the woods, without a sound. He was, himself, a much clumsier, heavier animal, slipping after her, panting, not with exertion but with panic, excitement, ecstasy.
She was ahead of him, but he was closer to her than he’d ever really believed he’d be again. S
he wasn’t within reach, but she might have been. She might be, eventually. If he could only—
But then Josie Reilly had slammed her body fearlessly into his, knocked him to the ground, and then she was on top of him, pummeling him with her fists, straddling his hips with her legs spread, slamming her small, white, balled-up hands against his face, his head, his eyes. She tore off her soft gloves so she could claw at him. “You motherfucker. You asshole. You murderer. Get out of here. Get out of our lives. Get off this campus you fucking bastard.” He tasted blood, and though he heard the sound of a bone snap somewhere in his face, and although it seemed to Craig that the whole thing lasted for decades, he felt no pain—and suddenly, just as he was getting used to it, he opened his eyes, and she was gone, and he was alone on the sidewalk, staring up at the moon as it seemed to toss cold white flakes down on his throbbing face.
“Holy shit,” a guy in a Red Sox cap said, looking down at him. “You okay, dude? I hope whatever you did to piss her off was worth it.”
87
“Oh, goodness. That certainly wasn’t the image I intended to show you,” Mr. Dientz said. “I’m sorry.” He sounded as if he were apologizing, belatedly, for having absentmindedly forgotten to offer someone sugar for his tea.
Perry had come back from the men’s room and was standing with his head against the window, looking out onto the Dientz Funeral Parlor parking lot, which was shadowed by the casket-shaped rectangle of the Dientz Funeral Parlor sign.
Both of these things—the parking lot and the sign—he’d passed in cars and on his bike maybe ten thousand times in his life, and yet there was something so unfamiliar, so unreal, about them in that moment that he knew that, if he were asked to, he’d be utterly unable to read the sign, to name the function of a parking lot, to place these things or himself on the surface of the earth. Back in the men’s room, he’d rinsed his mouth out, but he could still taste the bile. Professor Polson came up behind him and touched his arm. “Perry.” She said it firmly, pulling him back from the window.