Читать книгу Second Life - Paul Griner - Страница 8

1

Her body is missing.

What? I said, still waking up, the darkness humming around me. I shifted the phone to my other ear, thinking I’d misheard.

Lia’s body, it’s missing, Mrs. Stefanini said. Can you help, Elena? Please?

The normal question would be, How does a body go missing? But I’d been in the business long enough to know that bodies often did. Once someone died, all kinds of things could happen. After the family left, if there was family, a nurse or an attendant took the body down to the morgue on a service elevator so the public wouldn’t see it, an understandable sleight of hand. Commendable, even.

The body was trundled off to the morgue in a mostly silent last walk, signed in, and left. The diener had it then, and I’d been a diener, so I knew the routines that followed. The paperwork, the cleaning of the body, the autopsy and the phone calls: to an undertaker, if one had been specified, to the coroner, if there’d been a crime, to the med school, if interns and med students needed to practice intubation and catheterization. To the body brokers, if the body wasn’t claimed.

None of that for Lia, it seemed, save perhaps the body broker.

Still, I was surprised that Mrs. Stefanini had called. I hadn’t known that Lia was dead, for one thing, and I hadn’t heard from the Stefaninis for three years, and the last time I had, Mrs. Stefanini herself told me never to call again.

Now, her voice unnaturally loud in the dark, she said, She crashed on the other side of the river and they brought her back to operate. Then she disappeared. We can’t find her. Won’t you please help? I can’t go through this another time.

It was crossing the river that gave rise to my memories of body brokering. How many bodies had I ferried across it myself? Victims of car and motorcycle accidents, gunshots both intentional and accidental, strokes, drownings, poisonings, hangings and domestic violence, old age and cancer, ruptured veins, failed kidneys, bad hearts.

The list was nearly endless, sometimes peculiar (one man who drank too much water), usually predictable (people who drank too much alcohol), occasionally piercing (a child who drank a gallon of blue antifreeze, thinking it Kool-Aid), but ultimately numbing, because as their numbers climbed, your sensitivity lessened and your connection to life altered in ways even now you don’t fully understand.

You began to think you carried with you everywhere the scent of the dead, a taint that even a savage scrubbing couldn’t remove, and that made you more than mildly paranoid, so that you went out less often. The rare times you did meet someone it was only for a quick hook-up, and even then it was easy to note their skin tone and study their limbs, thinking of them as product. Tibias first, then the fibula, long and lean and lucrative, and the spine, the spine, the golden spine, which, as you ran your fingers up the knobs of some stray companion, making your temporary bedmate shiver, made it nearly impossible not to calculate cost and profit, or how you’d peel their skin and bag it, since those long, smoked-salmon colored strips of skin came at such a premium, $1,000 per square foot. How you told the dead you were about to harvest that this was a good thing, as if they might understand you.

It came back so easily, though that was partly due to the time and the call: two AM and the name on the caller ID; I almost hadn’t answered, thinking Mrs. Stefanini might be drunk and angry, lashing out. She wouldn’t be the first, only the most personal, but I was glad I’d had the fortitude to answer once I heard what she wanted, and then ashamed I was still making this about me.

Lia. Lia was gone, which seemed impossible.

My throat thickened, but I cleared it and said, Of course I’ll help, ignoring the voice in my head shouting, You’re still on probation (Lia’s voice, really, as she had always been better at warning me off my various stupidities), sitting up and gathering the covers around me, chilled despite the muggy air. I’ll do everything I can. Please, I said, grabbing a pen and paper and squinting as I turned on the light. I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to ask some questions. Is that all right?

Her exhausted voice shook, but she gave me all the details of Lia’s accident. That the car had rolled on the highway and hit a tree, that Lia had been crushed but not killed, that in the hospital they’d operated. That Lia had died anyway.

Do you know where they operated? I asked.

This was University Hospital, Mrs. Stefanini said. Sorry, Elena. I should have mentioned it. That’s why I called you. Will that make it difficult?

No, that’s okay, I said, glossing over it, my stomach growing heavier, as if I’d swallowed cement.

Her breathing sounded liquid now, as she imagined her daughter under the bright operating room lights, the surgeons opening her up, and I remembered that she was a big crime show fan, meaning that her mental movie would be graphic. Such a small thing, really, the bits of your life you never expect to add up to anything, but now it would loom large in her mind.

Where were her injuries?

Her chest, she said. Why would that matter?

It might not, I said, thinking, body parts, not wanting to go down that road but unable to stop myself from recalling the tissue recoverers, the screeners and the processors and distributors, the medical company reps and the implant surgeons I’d worked among for years. To a large but mostly secret world beyond your family and friends, once you stopped breathing, your body was a resource. That was good, really; it helped a lot of people—a walk through the burn or transplant wards was all you needed to be convinced of that—but it could go horribly wrong. Had, with Mr. Stefanini, and often did, on my end of the spectrum. If, to the public, organ donation was a Hallmark-card moment, tissue harvesting was more like adult bookstores, big business no one wanted to discuss because they fulfilled a need barely acknowledged to exist.

I said none of that. Instead, I stood and began to walk and said, The more I know, the better. It should help me focus my search. Was there an autopsy?

No. Not that I know of.

That’s good, I said, heading down the warm narrow hallway. My reflection in the window startled me, peering back in while I tried to see out; I turned away from the apparition on the dark glass and hurried on.

Is it good? Mrs. Stefanini said. No autopsy?

Yes, it is, I said, knowing that an autopsied, unclaimed body was almost always cannibalized for parts. I said, Did you sign any consent forms, for transplants?

I didn’t sign anything.

Okay. That’s a good thing too.

No, it isn’t.

I’m sorry? I said, stopping in the kitchen, where the mismatched clocks on the microwave and stove blinked. Another round of thunder storms, another power outage, which I must have slept through, the second time in a week; summer in Kentucky. Was Lia’s death somehow tied to that? There was so much I didn’t know.

Mrs. Stefanini said, I mean, I didn’t sign anything because I didn’t know she was even in the hospital. The accident was a few days ago. I’m sorry if this is confusing. It’s still confusing to me.

Of course it is, I said. The wood floor was gritty under my bare feet. I wiped my soles on my unshaven calves and said, Don’t worry. Take your time.

No, she said, growing angry, as if I was being willfully stupid. I don’t mean confusing that way. I mean the accident and its aftermath are a mess. A complete, fucking, unadulterated mess. There was no purse in the car, and the car wasn’t hers, and they didn’t even have her name.

She was a Jane Doe?

No, Elena, not a Jane Doe, Mrs. Stefanini said, her voice cracking, the fight going out of her. When she spoke again it was nearly a whisper. They had her down as Cindy.

Paper rustled in the background and she said, Cindy Lownes.

Was she talking when she came in? Did she give them that name?

No, her boyfriend did. Belmont. Belmont Pitkin. Do you know him?

I gripped the counter so tightly my fingertips turned white. No, I lied, and immediately regretted it. What if she found out? Well, she couldn’t have any lower an opinion of me than she already did. Still, it wasn’t a good sign that in a crucial moment lying came so easily to me. I wanted to stop.

Was he in the car with her?

Lia took his car. Or at least we think she did. It’s confusing. She’d been living with him and they broke up and it seems Lia went back to get some of her things and borrowed the car. For a bit, I’d lost touch with her. Her life grew . . . complicated. But he seems to have thought it was a new girlfriend, who he’d just had a fight with, this Cindy, so when the police called him about it, that’s the name he gave them.

Didn’t he go see her in the hospital?

They’re both blond, evidently, both very tall.

But surely, I started to say, and didn’t stop quickly enough.

Her voice quavering, Mrs. Stefanini said, It seems her face was battered.

Or, I thought, he was drunk. I headed back into the bedroom, eyes straight ahead so I wouldn’t see my ghostly self passing again in the window.

I’m sorry, I said, disoriented and at a loss, and really, what else could I say? The words around death are never quite right and never enough, as they don’t bring back the dead or erase the pain; it’s like trying to fill a canyon one pebble at a time. Still, we have to try. And when did they clear it up? I said. This confusion?

After.

Okay, I said. So they had to switch around the names, and maybe something happened then.

Probably, she said. All of his girlfriends looked the same, I think. He gave them three or four names. She might have been listed under any of them.

The police know, I take it?

Yes. They’re looking for her.

Good. That’s good.

Is it? she said. Will they find her?

I lied again, knowing it was the right thing to do, even as I felt bad doing so. Her voice was so full of desperate hope that I didn’t want to disappoint her. They should, I said, though truthfully a missing body wouldn’t be a high priority. There hadn’t been a crime, other than the stolen car, and the one who stole it was dead, so there wouldn’t be any charges.

Can you help them? she said, meaning, Can you help me?

Of course, I said. Though they might not want me to. It would help if you let the detective know I was going to ask some questions. The police don’t like to be surprised, I said, meaning, The police don’t like me.

Yes, she said. I’ll call him today. Or tomorrow, if you need some time.

No, I said, sitting on the bed again, though only the edge. I felt it would be somehow disloyal to move any deeper into it. I’m going down there now, I said.

Now? It’s two thirty. You should sleep.

I felt a laugh bubbling up, that she’d called and woken me and now was worried about my sleep, yet thankfully I stifled it. Nerves, but it would have been hard to explain, and I doubted she’d be willing to give me the benefit of the doubt. How much pain could you cause one family before you started to despise yourself? I’d passed that point long ago.

It’s okay, I said. I don’t want more time to go by. It’s been two days already?

Three, she said.

Not good, I thought, as that’s usually the outer limit of how long anyone will hold on to a body. Okay, I said. I’ll just shower and dress and get started.

She didn’t respond and I thought maybe she’d simply hung up, which would have made sense, given all the horrible worries she must have had about her daughter’s body, and that was the first time it really hit me that Lia was dead. I’d heard her say it, of course, but I’d just been startled awake and hadn’t really processed it, and now as I did, I felt battered and stunned, as if a friend had struck me in the face with a brick as I went to hug her. I bent forward until my forehead touched my warm, bare knees and started to cry. Lia. My oldest friend. It must have been the sound of my crying that made Mrs. Stefanini go on.

Elena, she said, her voice thickening. I think she missed you these last years.

Then she did hang up, and I was incredibly grateful for her words, the kindness and the small measure of forgiveness they held, a gift of gold. I sat in the dark holding the silent phone, thinking that it’s not often you get to try and balance the scales. They’d never be fully balanced—I couldn’t wipe away the past, and some crimes are simply unforgivable—but even a small weight on my side was something.

Lia, gone. Not possible, I thought again, just a horrible mistake. We were supposed to reconcile. I’d let it go too long, though it had never seemed like that, and really, I knew that if it were ever to happen, the impetus would have had to come from her. On my bureau was a picture of the two of us at eighteen on the beach at Destin, the hillbilly Riviera, where half of Kentucky seemed to spend summer vacation or spring break. We were tanned and smiling, our legs buried in the sand and our brown arms raised as we held our mint juleps toward the sun. For the three years of silence between us, I’d never been able to put it away; some day we’d be friends again, I’d been sure of it.

Now I turned the picture face down on the bed and dug my nails into my palms so hard it hurt, not wanting to fall apart; I had things to do.

The image of her in a car rolling over on the highway came to me. The sound of it, of four thousand pounds of metal slamming into the concrete, over and over, throwing off bits of plastic and metal and glass, the tremendous bang as it hit the tree followed by a silence scooped from disaster, broken only by the hiss of escaping steam and ticking, cooling metal, of other cars screeching to stops. A 9-1-1 call, people rushing to the car, an ambulance setting out, its siren blaring. Too late.

She would already have been dying. Her heart had probably killed her, a half-pound weight crashing around in her body as the car rolled, still rocketing forward as her body recoiled from the blow of the air bag, tearing the delicately crucial aorta it hung suspended from like a precious red fruit. In dozens of autopsies I’d seen exactly that. That which gives you life also takes it.

I rocked on the edge of the bed, the cat up and rubbing against my legs, until the dial tone sounded, when I put the phone down and picked up the cat.

This is a good thing, I said to him. But of course it wasn’t, since Lia was dead, and I burst into tears and buried my face in his warm dark fur, sobbing. He squirmed away, scratching my arm in his haste to escape, a deep scratch from which blood welled instantly. I sucked on it to make it stop, the coppery taste filling my mouth, and thought of Lia, of Mrs. Stefanini and her last words.

Elena, I think she missed you these last years. When I replayed them in my head this time, they no longer seemed to carry the tincture of forgiveness. Instead, beginning to imagine Lia’s disordered life, I wondered if they weren’t meant to apportion blame.