Tethered

by Amy MacKinnon

  “Here,” says Mrs. MacDonnell, holding out the bottles to Mike before replacing her heft onto the seat. “Lipitor and the nitroglycerin that doctor gave him last month when we was at the emergency room. It’s for angina.”

  “Which hospital was that?” asks Mike.

  “Brockton City,” snorts Mrs. MacDonnell. “Did you think we’d go to some fancy Boston hospital?”

  Jorge turns to Mike, his expression imploring Mike to end the questions, but I can tell from Mike’s utter stillness he has more.

  “One more thing, Mrs. MacDonnell,” Mike says as the woman reaches for another cigarette to light off of the dying one. “Did Mr. MacDonnell ever do any drugs, say coke, methamphetamines? Something that might affect his heart?”

  She stops puffing, her eyes flicking to Mike’s face. I don’t want to be here any longer. I don’t care to see the vagaries of another’s drama play itself out, but I understand the unspoken rules of the scene and don’t move; only my eyes to see Mike tense, ready to pounce on Mrs. MacDonnell.

  Reaching for another napkin, she says, “I don’t know.”

  Mike bends to meet her head-on. “So if I ordered a test, a toxicology test to check his blood for drugs, I wouldn’t find anything there?”

  Mrs. MacDonnell’s fingers seek the hole in the chair again and rapidly pluck out large tufts of foam. “How the hell should I know?”

  “Mike,” says Jorge. “Can I talk to you a minute?”

  “You stay,” says Mrs. MacDonnell, pushing on the table to rise to her feet. “I got to go to the john.” Looking sideways to the foot that protrudes from her own bathroom, she says, “I’ll be next door if you need me.”

  They wait until the screen door slams before speaking.

  “Mikey, look,” says Jorge, stepping in close to his partner. “Case closed. He was on meds, the M.E. called it. I talked to his doctor for chrissake, it’s a heart attack. What the hell you doing?”

  “Come on.” Mike’s fingers rake his hair. “How many times have the police been called out here? How many times did they threaten to kill each other?” Lowering his voice—I can barely hear him: “If we look around, I guarantee you we’ll find some powder. We ask the dealers, they’ll tell you sweet Mrs. MacDonnell was out trolling for meth. I guarantee it.”

  I want to slip through the doorway, out to where Ryan is still pacing in the foyer. His company is better than this. But the tension freezes me in place. Other people’s anger does that.

  Jorge presses still closer. “Now you want to get a fucking search warrant? Case closed, Mikey. Case closed.”

  “Let’s just run a tox test.”

  “It’ll take the crime lab months before they turn something like that around. You know how backlogged they are, and this ain’t exactly a priority. Then what? Prove she put the drugs in his morning coffee? Even if she did kill him, all the evidence will be gone.” Jorge throws his hands in the air as if to toss confetti. “Gone.”

  He walks away from Mike, whose eyes remain locked on Mr. MacDonnell’s foot, and says, “Let it go.”

  “She gets away with murder?”

  Jorge rests a hand on Mike’s shoulder. “Mikey, he beat the shit out of her. Is it such a great loss?”

  Mike’s face is stricken, and I shrink back into the wall, afraid of what’s to come. “So she gets away with murder?”

  Jorge sighs. “What happened to you, Mikey, to Jenny, that was wrong. That kid should have been put away for the rest of his life, what he did. But this is different. There’s no evidence a crime even took place.”

  Mike continues to stare off as Jorge gives his shoulder an affectionate shake. “You know, maybe you should listen to the chief, take some time off, talk to that doctor—”

  “For chrissake, Jorge—”

  “Mikey, what do you want me to say? You’re seeing things that aren’t there again.”

  I think I’ve melted into the nicotined wallpaper; I’m no longer aware of myself, and it seems they aren’t either. There’ve been many times when this has worked, when no one in the room is aware of my presence.

  But then Jorge starts. “Jesus, Clara, where did you come from?”

  “I’m here to retrieve the body. The M.E. called me.”

  “How long you been standing there?” he asks.

  Mike looks past me to the hallway, where Ryan’s footsteps smack toward us along the hardwood.

  “The body’s in here?” I gesture toward the bathroom.

  “Yeah, on the pot, like I told you,” says Ryan, stepping into the kitchen. He nods in the general direction, rolling back and forth from his heels to the balls of his feet.

  The bathroom is only a few steps away, and as I walk toward it I’m suddenly awash in relief, eager to be rid of the tension over there. All is forgotten when I push open the door.

  “Oh.”

  Ryan peers over my shoulder, the awe or disgust settling him until he whispers, “Now that’s what I call a Big Mac Attack.”

  It’s true; Mr. MacDonnell is a very large man. He sits slightly askew, his head slumped against the shower stall. There is no bath. He’s wearing only a white tank top, coffee splotches dribbled along the front, and faded boxers around his ankles. Curly red and gray hairs cover every surface of his exposed body, a ruddy contrast to the bluish tint his lips have taken on. While his flesh isn’t soft and rolling, it is densely packed, an indication of enormous weight. His eyes are bulging slightly, a startling blue, unfocused and mute. His dignity is somewhat preserved by this morning’s edition of the Boston Herald, open to the sports section, covering his genitals.

  I stand in the bathroom doorway, assessing the particulars of this removal. If I were the praying sort, I’d give thanks he’s sitting on the toilet. Yet his mass is such that he’ll need to be removed sideways—a lot of lifting, since I won’t be able to wheel the gurney alongside the body and roll it into the body bag. This is one of those instances when I’ll need to page one of several removers Linus employs on a freelance basis. They’re usually young, work as landscapers in the spring and fall, drive plows in the winter, and assist in removals as necessary throughout the year. Linus may even hire one to drive a limousine if we have a particularly large funeral: a desirable position considering the pay and tips, but only a few are so privileged; not many of the young men own suits.

  “Why don’t you give her a hand, Ryan,” says Jorge.

  “I ain’t touching that!” Ryan shudders.

  “That’s all right, I can do it,” I say without turning. “Please keep the family outside while I remove the body.”

  “Jorge, I’ll meet you at the station,” Mike says. “I’m going to stay here and help Clara. I’ll catch a ride back with Ryan.”

  I almost face them. “Thank you, but it won’t be necessary.”

  Mike waves me off. I notice he’s still holding the prescription bottles and realize his motives aren’t altogether altruistic.

  “C’mon, Mikey, my shift ends at four. The wife’s expecting me with Chinese food in an hour,” says Ryan.

  “I need you to stay at the front door in case Mrs. MacDonnell or anybody else wants to get in,” says Mike. “It’s going to be ugly trying to get him out of here.”

  “I’d prefer to do it alone.” In spite of the cool autumn afternoon, I can feel the heat creep upward along my spine. Droplets form at the base of my neck and then bead down my back.

  Jorge glances at me and then over to the body. “Okay, Mikey, you stay here, but promise me no games. Remember, case closed.”

  As Ryan and Jorge walk to the porch, Mike heads into the bathroom. I check my pockets and then leave to fetch my things from the hearse. They don’t hear my approach, so make no effort to lower their voices.

  “Imagine hitting that?” Ryan says.

  “C’mon,” says Jorge. “Mikey’s got to start somewhere.”

  “Like the playground?”

  A sound like muffled laughter escapes Jorge. “Oh, mierda—”

  �
��Look, I know it’s been a while for Mikey, but Jesus, she has the body of a twelve-year-old boy.” Ryan’s hands press flat against his chest. “And since when has he been into black chicks?”

  “She’s not black, man,” says Jorge. “She’s a little bit of this, a little bit of that.”

  “Whatever. Is he that desperate, he’ll help remove a fat dead guy? I couldn’t get it up just thinking about where her hands have been, and that hair—”

  “Excuse me,” I say, and keep my gaze steady on the rose of Sharon just beyond them as I walk onto the porch. Still, I can’t close my ears as Ryan mutters and Jorge swears when I pass. Finally, I reach the hearse and busy myself, finding relief in the slamming of the detective’s car door and the roar of the Crown Vic as he pulls away.

  From the hearse, I remove two pairs of gloves, one small, the other large, along with the gurney, body bag, and my case. Ryan ignores me when I return to the house and struggle up the stairs. His teeth nimbly work over raw cuticles, reminding me of a man I once saw eating chicken wings, the way he splayed the tips from the drums, snapping them apart and then cleaning each bone until it gleamed white. Without glancing my way, still gnawing, Ryan holds open the door.

  Mike is standing in the kitchen now, holding fast to the prescription bottles, lost in thought. He’s shaking them: ka-ta, ka-ta, ka-ta. The percussive rattle of the pills startles me back to my childhood, to an outdoor concert I once attended with my mother. A glimpse of her whirling in a peasant skirt, long, wavy hair flying about her shoulders, and I see myself, or my hand at least, shaking an improvised tambourine made of a soda can and sunflower seeds, dancing with Patrice in my arms (that’s it, Baby Doll). Like my mother’s, my own hair long—though darker, thicker—hovers at my waist. A flash of her red smile and then she’s gone. Ka-ta.

  “Ready?” I say. It’s been a long day and fatigue suddenly overwhelms me.

  “Hear that?” Mike asks, still rattling the bottles.

  I lay his gloves on the kitchen table and lean my business card against the napkin holder. Mike places one of the bottles next to it, continuing to shake the other. I’m grateful for the sudden quiet.

  “Hear that?” Mike asks again. “There’s hardly anything in here. She said he got the nitro last month, but there’s hardly any pills left in the bottle.”

  “You think he OD’d on nitroglycerin?” I snap the small gloves on, watching puffs of talc waft about them.

  “No, I think she OD’d him on nitro,” says Mike. “They fill these bottles to the top, but you’re not supposed to take more than two or three when you’re feeling chest pains. It can cause cardiac arrest. She said he hasn’t been to the hospital in a month, and the bottle’s nearly empty.”

  “Should I remove the body or are you going to call the M.E.?” I imagine the time we’ll spend wrestling Mr. MacDonnell’s body out of here and then, alone, the hours I’ll spend filling his body with gallon after gallon of formaldehyde. And still I have the old woman to dress. It will be a long night in the basement. Perhaps the M.E. will intervene after all.

  Mike looks at the bottle a long while. I watch him, waiting for his answer. He’s motionless, impossibly still. “No,” he finally says. “Case closed.”

  Mike rests the bottle alongside the other and turns his back to me, removing his suit coat and then folding it over the back of the chair. I notice the erectness of his shoulders and the pant loop his belt missed, the tarnished handcuffs clasped to his left hip and the gun holstered on his right. The outline of a wallet is visible in the bulge of his back pocket, where his body curves full, and I wonder if he carries in it pictures of his long-ago wife. Jenny. Without realizing, I reach for a strand of my hair, nearly pull it free of the elastic before catching myself.

  He turns and takes the gloves I left for him on the table. He’s lost in thought as he slides first the right and then the left glove on, covering a dulled wedding band in the process. I find myself staring at that spot on his finger, trying to see the ring through the film. Then the cell phone tucked in his other rear pocket begins to wail.

  “Sullivan.”

  The room is too small not to listen, so instead I busy myself with adjusting the stretcher to its lowest setting in the space just outside the bathroom. I pull several alcohol wipes from my satchel. Though Mr. MacDonnell is resting on the toilet, he may need to be cleaned a bit once he’s lifted. The odor will certainly be worse. When I hold the mostly empty jar of Vicks VapoRub to Mike, he doesn’t notice, too consumed with his conversation. On my way here, I tried to stop at the Whitman CVS to buy more, but there were no parking spots in the rear lot. Seniors tend to frequent the pharmacy there, mothers of ill children too. I try to run my errands at night, when the hearse can be shielded; most of the stores I shop are the twenty-four-hour kind.

  “Yes, Reverend,” I hear Mike sigh. “I’m working my way through them.”

  A pause and then, “When did he call? Did he a leave a name or number?”

  Another sigh, then Mike says, “Let me call you when I get back to the station. I got to take care of something first.”

  Mike replaces his cell phone and turns to me. “Okay, ready. I’ll get under his shoulders, you get the feet.”

  It’s a struggle simply for Mike to squirm his way into the snug bathroom and position his hands under the body’s arms. While I pull at the ankles just outside the door, Mike lifts and turns, pushes and grunts. As our efforts grow louder, Mike slips and falls against me, almost on top of Mr. MacDonnell. Our heads knock together, not hard. He waits a moment too long, his nose presses into my hair, his cheek brushes my forehead. He inhales. Surely it’s my imagination. Before he pulls away, I notice he smells of peppermint and stale coffee.

  “Sorry.”

  I try to shrug. Holding on to the door frame with one hand, I reach across the body to slide Mr. MacDonnell’s lids closed. It’s been several hours and one eye has already hardened, refusing to cooperate. Mike is breathing through his mouth as he stretches behind Mr. MacDonnell to flush the toilet. The stench is getting worse, but Mike doesn’t ask for the Vicks. He leans against the wall, perspiration gathering about his brow. “That was Reverend Greene calling about the Precious Doe case.”

  No, I don’t want to hear. Instead I look down at Mr. MacDonnell. His tank top is rolled up along his chest now, exposing a kettle-drum belly; his underpants are hooked around only one ankle, dangerously close to slipping off; the newspaper lies askew on the floor. It’s too late, I’m already returned to thoughts of Precious Doe.

  I remember the hundreds of stitches I wove, the layers of makeup, a shiny brown wig of human hair donated by another girl who’d read of Precious Doe in the newspapers, a little girl who said her alopecia seemed a small thing when compared to Precious Doe’s fate. The long layers of hair were a perfect shield for the sutures that crisscrossed Doe’s skull, a perfect headdress to replace the strands that had been shorn away. It was a closed casket.

  The girl’s body, left in a strip of woods stretching between Brockton and Whitman, was discovered by a man and his dog while out for a New Year’s Day walk. The dog picked up the scent of the shallow grave in spite of the scattered coffee grounds buried with her. A deep freeze left her remains mostly intact, though her fingertips had been burned away. No child fitting her description had been reported missing; no one stepped forward to claim her. Her head was found a day later, concealed some yards back in a trash bag, her eyes still open, the whites sprinkled with the dust that invades this city. Usually in such a case, a body would remain in the medical examiner’s office until the next of kin signed a release; it could take years. But this was different.

  Reverend Greene took it upon himself to convince the district attorney, a longtime friend and parishioner, to seek a court order releasing the girl’s remains to the Baptist congregation. No one could bear the thought of her body languishing in the medical examiner’s office.

  In his eulogy, it was Reverend Greene who christened her Precious Doe:<
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  “Lord, this child who lies here before us today is known to You and You alone. But she is no Jane Doe. This child may not have been cherished by her mother, she may not have been cherished by her father, by an aunt, an uncle, or a grandfather. But, Lord, her life was no less precious because they did not abide by her. Yes, Lord, we here today, all of the hundreds gathered from Whitman and Brockton and beyond, we Baptists and Catholics, we Protestants and Jews, we people of faith and even the faithless, are here to cherish this little girl, our Precious Doe.”

  Linus donated his funeral services and a white coffin with pink satin lining and matching tufted pillow. He opened the doors to the Bartholomew Funeral Home for two full days to accommodate all of the people who came to pay their respects. An anonymous donor bought her a cemetery plot in Colebrook Cemetery, just across the street from the funeral home; another donated a gravestone. For now, the marker identifies her simply as Precious Doe; the headstone still waits to be engraved with her true identity. Alma made her a white high-collared nightgown and I arranged a bed of daisies to lay her on within the coffin. Fine white Shasta daisies (innocence).

  For a while, some of those who crowded her wake would visit her grave and leave an assortment of mementos: velveteen teddy bears holding cutout hearts, a cacophony of helium balloons that would droop pitifully after a morning’s dew, and, once, a tattered baby blanket with faded carousel horses.

  But I am done with that body; I don’t have any desire to know more. I’m not caught three years in the past. I’m here with Mr. MacDonnell’s body now, and soon with the old woman waiting for me at the funeral home. I try to envision the promise of chrysanthemums (cheerfulness) and burning bush (wisdom) blossoming in my garden, my patio chaise, the down comforter, and a pot of tea. Tomorrow. For now, Mike forces me back to yesterday.

  “Clara, you listening?”

  “Yes?”

  “I lost you there for a minute. Something you want to share?”