Check in at the Pine Away Motel (ARC)

by Katarina Bivald

  The funeral home Dad is using is in one of the handsome turn-of-the-century buildings a few blocks from Sally’s Café. Huge oak trees shade the whole street, on which a number of old family doctors and prominent lawyers are also based. The pretty wrought-iron sign above the door reads Annie Smith’s Funeral Home.

  Annie Smith herself comes out to meet them in the reception area. “Mr. Broek,” she says. Her steel-gray hair is slicked back, and she is wearing a dark suit and a pretty cream-colored blouse, buttoned right up to her prominent chin. When she speaks, her voice is deep, with just the right amount of professional compassion.

  “I am so sorry for your loss,” she says, showing Dad and Cheryl into her office.

  I linger in the doorway, peering down the corridor, but since I can’t figure out where they keep the bodies, I decide to follow Dad and Cheryl inside.

  Annie Smith closes the door behind us. All other sounds grow faint. It’s as if the thick walls and soft carpets are shielding us from the world outside.

  The sudden silence makes Dad nervous. He pats the pocket containing his keys and seems slightly reassured to feel their shape through the thin fabric. His other hand is clutching the folder to his chest.

  “Please, take a seat,” Annie Smith tells them.

  The armchairs are soft and creamy white. The receptionist, a motherly woman with unruly gray hair, brings coffee, and Dad tries in confusion to juggle his folder, the cup, and the thin china saucer.

  The office we are in is as timeless as the china. Pale-striped wallpaper and beautiful woodwork, with soft curtains over the high windows, preventing both nosy glances and too much sunlight from entering the room.

  The walls are covered in black-and-white photographs from the era when the parlor was known as Smith and Sons. Several seem to be of Annie Smith’s father; they have the same dignified, broad forehead and deep-set eyes, and identical charcoal-gray suits.

  “I brought my folder,” Dad tells her.

  Annie gives him a warm glance.

  “I’ve prepared everything. Coffin and flower arrangements and psalms.”

  Jesus Christ, I think.

  “For myself, that is. For my death. So that everything would be ready for Henny. But now, well, I obviously have no idea. She wasn’t supposed to die first. But I thought it could be…helpful…” His voice trails off.

  He eagerly tries to hold out the folder, like a child with a piece of homework, but he has it upside down, and everything spills out onto the floor.

  Neatly written psalms, newspaper cuttings about coffins—all at least fifteen years old—a completed form marked Testament, a whole stack of paper about flowers, and three different drafts of an obituary scatter around their feet.

  Dad doesn’t move. He sits still with his full cup of coffee and his empty folder as Cheryl and Annie bend down and try to gather everything together.

  Annie takes the folder from him and carefully, almost tenderly, puts the papers back inside. Dad’s cup rattles, and both Cheryl and Annie turn to look at it.

  “Oh, Dad,” I say.

  “You don’t need to make any decisions today,” Annie explains. “We can just have a little chat. There’s plenty of time before we need to decide on anything.”

  Dad sits upright. Straightens his spine, raises his chin. His cup is still trembling slightly, but this time he resolutely places it on the floor beside him.

  “I’ve buried my parents,” he says. “I’ve buried my wife. I’ve even buried my mother-in-law, though God knows I often doubted that day would ever come. I’m perfectly capable of both discussing and making any necessary decisions here today.”

  He steels himself. Takes a deep breath. “I want her to be cremated.”

  “But…cremated?” Cheryl says. From the tone, it’s clear that she thinks cremation is for hippies and hipsters. The kind of people who want to scatter their ashes in the ocean or at a microbrewery. In her mind, normal people are buried. In a proper coffin, with a proper headstone.

  “Yes.” Dad is firm. “Cremated.”

  “But where will people leave flowers or candles?”

  Dad hesitates. “Maybe a headstone, too. But I want her to be cremated.”

  I swallow. Cremation. I don’t exactly want to be trapped in a dark, stuffy coffin, but…fire? Heat? It sounds so violent. I try to picture it, what little I know about it, probably from one film or another. A coffin slowly rolling into an oven. Or is it lowered into it? I don’t know.

  “I…I just can’t bear the thought of her lying there in the darkness. Shut away in a coffin. It would have been fine for me, but not her. She… I don’t know what she would have wanted, but not that. Not in the darkness.”

  Maybe he’s right. I don’t want to imagine a group of dignified, black-clad people standing around a coffin, either. A hole in the ground. Earth being thrown down onto it, maybe a rose or two. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, and then being stuck six feet under for all eternity.

  I force myself to remember the most important thing here: none of this is going to be necessary. I’m going to find my way back.

  “And I think I’d like to see her body.”

  I nod eagerly. “You’re on the right track now!”

  “Are you sure you…” Cheryl begins.

  “Of course we can arrange a viewing,” says Annie. “But perhaps not today? Henny died in an accident. She’s a little…the worse for wear. Naturally we’ll make her look fantastic for the funeral; there’s nothing we can’t fix. But right now…she doesn’t look the way she did when you last saw her. Death changes all of us, in both big and small ways.”

  You don’t say, I think.

  “What do you mean, fix?” Dad asks.

  “That’s what we do here. We make sure that relatives can have a dignified goodbye, regardless of the circumstances. We once had a man who had been beheaded. Industrial accident. But he had an open casket funeral.”

  Cheryl looks sick, Dad alarmed.

  “No need to go into detail,” Annie says. She decides to change the subject. “Have you given any thought about an open or closed casket for the funeral? That affects the time frame. If you want an open casket, the funeral will need to be held within the next day or two. For…practical reasons. Any out-of-town relatives that need time to get here?”

  Cheryl answers for him. “No,” she says.

  “I don’t care about the casket,” Dad says, and then he looks embarrassed by the outburst.

  “Let’s just go for the closed option, then, shall we?” says Annie. “Gives you plenty of time to prepare things. Talk to your pastor. Perhaps just a private viewing before that?”

  “I want to see her now. The way she really looks. Before you…change her.”

  Annie studies Dad. He stares stubbornly back.

  “As you wish,” Annie eventually tells him. “But I want to reiterate that this isn’t standard procedure.”

  She gets up and walks over to her desk and makes a brief phone call. Five minutes later, she leads us down a winding passage to a more modern addition to the building and through a carefully looked door.

  Everything in here is stainless steel: practical and functional for dealing with bodies on a daily basis. Along one wall, there is a cabinet with the kind of hatches you see in mortuaries on TV, only smaller. Nine doors, space for nine bodies. One of them is open.

  Along another wall: a workstation, also stainless steel. I refuse to look at the tools set out on top. Or the bottles of chemicals on the shelf beyond. And yet I still manage to catch the word formaldehyde on the bottle closest to me.

  In the middle of the room, on a stretcher-like table on wheels—stainless steel, again—is a body covered by a sheet. There’s no mistaking the shape.

  My body.

  The room makes me feel uneasy, but I know I have to do this. I just have to be strong for a
tiny, tiny bit longer, and then I’ll be able to come back to them. Do it for Michael, I tell myself. And MacKenzie. You’ll be able to see her smile again. That grayish tinge will disappear from their faces.

  Dad walks straight over to the table. Determined, without hesitating. Cheryl has to force herself to follow him. Annie stands at a carefully considered distance, ready to provide comfort but also offering space. All I can hear is the hum of the refrigerators and the faint stifled sound that Cheryl makes as she looks down at the table. The bright lights gleam on all of the steel.

  I walk around the table and fight to keep my eyes on their faces for as long as I can. Dad’s, impassive; Cheryl’s, shocked; Annie’s, calmly participating. There is so much at stake here that I don’t know where to begin.

  Annie slowly and respectfully folds back the sheet covering the body. I look down.

  That’s not me lying there.

  It’s a stranger. I don’t recognize her. My stomach turns with compassion and sorrow for the dead woman in front of me. Her poor face is flat and sunken, not at all like mine. She’s around my age. Did she have someone she loved, too? Family and friends who miss her?

  And then I feel a selfish flash of hope, sudden and unreasonable. There’s been an awful mistake. Maybe it wasn’t me who was run over, maybe I’m still alive somewhere, I don’t know where, but that isn’t me on the table. Someone else has died, and God help me, all I feel is relief.

  “She looks so…strange,” Cheryl says.

  “Her jaw was broken,” Annie explains. “That changes a person’s appearance.”

  I turn around and run.

  The last thing I hear is Annie saying: “And Henny’s…partner? She couldn’t come today?”

  * * *

  I head straight back to the motel.

  I check reception, the restaurant. It’s the middle of the lunch rush, but how can anyone think about food right now? I check the corridor outside the rooms, in case MacKenzie is cleaning. Eventually, I find her in the laundry room, where endless loops of white material spin around inside the machines.

  “You have to do something!” I say. “My body is just lying there. How am I supposed to come back with my body looking so weird and nothing at all like me?”

  Then I freeze. “Or worse! Who knows what chemicals they’re going to pump into me. Formaldehyde doesn’t exactly sound healthy. We need to do something. Before it’s too late.”

  Yes, it would be nice if they managed to reunite me with my right arm before I came back, but I have a strong suspicion that I’d be a bit like Frankenstein’s monster. Patched up or sewn together in a way you can hide under clothes. Who knows? Maybe they would just glue it on.

  I shake my head to get rid of the thought. “Everything’s going to be fine once I get back. It’ll be like nothing even happened. We can fix my jaw later. But someone has to do something. I don’t really know what. CPR? Electric shocks to get my heart going again?”

  MacKenzie doesn’t reply. She is busy throwing a white wash into one of the tumble driers. Her face is so waxlike that I find myself getting annoyed. Who’s the dead one here, me or her?

  “MacKenzie,” I say firmly. “Concentrate.”

  But nothing happens.

  Okay, I think. I’ll have to do this on my own.

  * * *

  Society is built on rules, Henny.

  It’s not up to us to decide which of the rules we like or not.

  Our country wouldn’t exist if people broke the rules whenever they felt like it.

  Committing a break-in is pretty easy when you’re a ghost. The difficult part is ignoring a lifetime of good manners.

  The old house is even more beautiful at night. A streetlight casts a faint glow onto the ornate letters on the sign above the locked door.

  So, Henny, I think. Let’s do this.

  Thankfully it isn’t pitch-black inside the funeral home. The light from the street outside seeps in, and the lamp above the empty reception desk is dimmed rather than switched off completely. I glance around to make sure I’m alone. Stick my head around the door into Annie’s office. Empty. The desk is neat and tidy, all of the papers in perfect order. Ready for another working day.

  The next room is bigger, with rows of plastic chairs and a kind of altar up front. You can choose to have the ceremony here rather than at the church, something that’s probably wasted on a religious town like Pine Creek. Maybe it looks different when it’s full of flowers and people, but right now the room just seems sad and tired. More like an empty conference room than a place to say your goodbyes.

  And there it is. The door we went through earlier. I straighten up and quickly rush through it.

  I stare at the refrigerator. Which door was open? I re-create the image from earlier that day. Second row. Far right.

  I haven’t really thought any further than this, but I’m assuming that I just need to get into the compartment somehow, and then lie down on top of my body. Float into it the way you see people do after a near-death experience on TV. A white light lowering toward the body in the hospital bed.

  This would have been much easier if my body was in a hospital bed, but I’ll just have to do my best. I close my eyes again. Swallow. Psych myself up and practically dive through the door.

  It’s definitely dark in here.

  Jesus Christ, it’s dark. And cramped. I wonder if there’s an echo?

  “Helloooooooo?”

  No echo.

  Okay, Henny, pull yourself together. You can do this. You know what you have to do.

  “You are one with your body,” I say.

  I squeeze my eyes shut and repeat it, with more emphasis this time, like a mantra. Pressing the tip of my middle finger to my thumb. I say: “You are one with your body. You’re a white light lowering over your body. You’re going to open your eyes and be alive. Trapped in here, Christ alive, but don’t think about that right now. One thing at a time.”

  I press my fingertips more firmly against one another.

  “One with my body, one with my body, one with my body, Jesus Christ, it’s dark in here.”

  * * *

  What a fiasco.

  I don’t even last twenty minutes before scrambling out of the dark and running back to the safety of Michael’s cabin.

  I have no idea what I’m going to do now, but I know one thing. I’m not going back to the funeral home. I’ll have to find another way to get myself back.

  I’m still shaken as I climb in bed beside Michael. Though it’s in the middle of the night, he isn’t sleeping. He twists and turns as though his very body is uncomfortable. I close my eyes and try to repress the memory of that dark space in the refrigerator.

  He finally manages to doze off just after four. I feel him relax, and draw closer to him. His body is warm and heavy and real.

  I used to think that whatever happened between me and Michael in the future, my body would preserve the memory of us, and that would keep it alive for years. Long after he might have left me.

  Our days together were like dialysis. They cleansed my body of loneliness and provided me with fresh, new blood; red and white blood cells of closeness and another warm body next to mine, of fantastic sex and sudden laughter and the way he looked at me when he smiled.

  Outside the cabin, a blanket of fog hangs low over the meadow. The silver birches by the stream look delicate, as though they’ve lost their way and just paused for a moment to work out where they are heading. I can’t see the mountains from here, but I tell myself that they are still out there, anchoring everything.

  “About me coming back,” I say. “I might have run into a slight problem…”

  But I’ll fix it, I think. Somehow. If it’s not my body that’s going to keep the memory of us going, maybe there’s something else. Maybe there’s something I’ve overlooked.

 
The sun rises eventually and chases away the fog. Michael smiles in his sleep. His eyelashes flutter. Even now, with everything going on, the sight of him sleeping still makes me feel better.

  Then he opens his eyes. His gaze is warm and unfocused, as if he can still see whatever was going on in his dreams. Then he wakes properly, and it’s as though the fog has seeped into the cabin instead. Everything turns gray and cold and warped. I don’t know what his eyes are seeing now.

  He rolls over onto his back. Squeezes his eyes shut. Presses his palms to his eyelids.

  When he eventually manages to drag himself out of bed, he moves slowly and wearily, like a broken man. He doesn’t bother about breakfast, but fetches a laundry cart from the motel, and then he spends the entire morning cleaning the cabin. I only just manage to jump out of the way as the rug from the living room comes flying toward me. He tears the sheets from the mattress, but leaves them lying in a heap at the foot of the bed. Then he wipes the coffee table and the chest of drawers and every other surface.

  The entire cabin smells like cleaning products, and suddenly I hate that smell.

  I spot Mr. Callahan’s car before Michael does. His father pulls up outside and slams the door with far too much force. He does most things with too much force.

  The noise makes Michael step outside. Mr. Callahan’s eyes are drawn to the dishcloth in his hand. Michael blushes faintly and then looks irritated at having blushed. I move over beside him. For the first time, I notice how tense his body is. He has to make a real effort to keep his hands from balling into fists.

  “You show up here after years and don’t even bother to tell your own family?”

  “Hi, Dad.” Michael tries to sound nonchalant, but his jaw is clenched as he speaks.

  “I had to hear it from someone in town, for God’s sake. How do you think that makes me look?”

  Mr. Callahan has an aura of aggressive disappointment. There’s a threatening power to him that his civilized exterior can’t quite hide. Though maybe I’m just biased.