Читать книгу Quick Kills - Lynn Lurie - Страница 15

The first funeral I went to was on a day of record cold. The son delivered the eulogy, and when he finished, the family took seats in a perfect line in the back of a limousine. The old lady wore black satin gloves that disappeared into her coat sleeves. A caravan of cars followed with their lights on. A thin veil of snow hit our windshield and made an icy sound that echoed. The ice stayed ice, it didn’t melt or run.

No one took photographs even though he was painted back to life and his shirt collar was pressed. His cologne was so sweet it filled the funeral parlor and made my eyes tear. It seems now, because his frozen face is still so vivid, that I had been given a photograph of him as he lay there to take with me.

The coat Mother was wearing had once been alive. Silver fox, she said even though the fur was not silver and in picture books foxes were always red or brown. I rubbed my hand up and down her furry back until she pushed me away. I couldn’t help myself and kept going back. There was nothing about the feel that made me think it was something that had died or that had been killed. Finally she said loudly, go away. Others must have heard because at that moment the machine lifting the casket paused and the creaking stopped. The casket, now lightly dusted in white, was suspended above a gaping hole.

When he was lowered into the ground, each mourner was expected to throw a shovelful of dirt across the coffin’s shiny-varnished surface. My fingers were numb and Mother had forgotten my mittens. Still, she made me take the shovel, heavy with soil. The skin on the palm of my hand stuck to the handle the way my tongue stuck to cherry ice in summer. Helen turned away when I tried to give it to her. Rather than make a fuss, Mother took the shovel and passed it to the old man next to her. For that one time I wanted to be Helen.

The story we heard the rest of that winter and into the spring was how Patty Hearst had been kidnapped and sealed inside a coffin buried in the ground, even though she was still alive. The dead man looked so alive I was sure he, too, was breathing, that a mistake had been made. Even the newscaster couldn’t say if Patty Hearst was kidnapped or if she had gone willingly, and he didn’t answer the question everyone was asking, was she dead or was she alive?

Mother didn’t cry at the funeral, and when I asked why, she said there wasn’t anything that could have been done.