by M Sawyer
Rebecca’s body was a treasure map of tattoos. Flowers and swirling planets wrapped around her arms. Winding leaves curled behind her right ear. A giant deer skull stretched across her back, antlers poking out the shoulders of her tank top. Tree branches down the back of her calf. Words she loved across her collarbones. Tiny leaves floated down the crevice between her breasts. Her body was her storybook; each mark was the heading of a new chapter of her life, or a nod to an old one.
Sometimes Nolin wondered if she should get tattoos also, but what did she have to celebrate or remember? And the needles. She would never let needles near her again.
Nolin pushed the door open. Usually, Rebecca played music while she worked. Today, there was only the sound of the pumps. That usually meant she was in an exceptional mood, because she didn’t need the music to drown out her thoughts.
“I like working with the dead,” Rebecca had once told her. “They don’t lie or whine; they don’t rush or get worked up about things they can’t control. The living could learn a thing or two from this.”
Rebecca looked over her shoulder as Nolin entered and then turned back to her work. Nolin walked around the table to the stool Rebecca kept in the corner. Rebecca worked silently. Nolin watched, thinking her usual thoughts as if she were unwinding a massive knot.
She’d watched Rebecca perform hundreds of embalmings over the years. The process wasn’t difficult to watch. The cadavers didn’t look like people anymore, but more like lifeless movie props. It was no longer a “someone,” but something empty, left behind. The same way someone would leave behind a house or a stamp collection.
“You look tired,” Rebecca said, glancing up.
“Do I?”
“You have bags under your eyes.”
Nolin leaned to catch a glimpse of herself in the glass door of one of the supply cupboards. She’d been tired for so long that she hadn’t really noticed how she looked. Two deep grooves were already forming between her eyebrows at twenty years old. Two little wounds. Her eyes, once bright green, had faded to a murky brown framed by purple shadows. Her thin lips, pointy nose, and straight, dark eyebrows cut her face into a permanent frown.
“Have you been sleeping lately?” Rebecca asked as she inserted a needle into the corpse’s neck.
“Not really,” Nolin said. Right on cue, she yawned.
“Are you still having nightmares?”
Nolin nodded. “Sometimes. I almost sleep. Then I have those dreams that happen in between, when you’re not awake but not sleeping either. Then I wake back up.”
“What do you dream about?”
“Still that tree, and the girl with dark eyes,” Nolin said. “My mom sometimes.”
Rebecca shook her head. “You really need to talk to a professional, Nolin. This isn’t going to go away on its own. It’s been going on for way too long.”
Nolin bit her lip. They’d had this conversation so many times. She’d told Rebecca about her mother, the mental ward, and what she could remember about the day she ran into the woods, which wasn’t much. Sometimes she wished she’d never said a word. Rebecca cared; Nolin appreciated that, but she didn’t always understand. Nolin had more than enough experience with “professionals,” and little to show for it.
Rebecca left late that day, just as the sun started to set. Nolin planned on spending the evening alone. She loved the cemetery at sundown when it was mostly shadows. It scared her a little. She loved to walk barefoot on the cold grass and imagine ghosts walking alongside her. Surely they were there, watching her drift through the trees and tombstones. She regarded them as invisible friends, not good or evil, but more honest than most living people. Death had a way of making people honest.
She reached the edge of the woods, looked over her shoulder to make sure no one was looking, and stripped down to her undershirt and boy’s boxers. She started running.
Nolin leapt into the trees like a deer, challenging herself to see how fast she could sprint, how high she could jump, like a child in an open meadow. She smiled as she scrambled up and over a boulder. She didn’t feel human when she ran like this.
She felt like so much more.
Chapter 19
SHE COULDN’T SLEEP.
Nolin perched on the roof where she watched the sunrise each morning, but the sun wouldn’t be up for hours. The outlines of the headstones around the church glowed in the moonlight, casting their long shadows toward her like pointing fingers.
The dream again. Her heart thrashing in her ribs as she ran through narrow spaces between the trees, not sure if she was running to or away from something. Melissa’s hollow face, and a pair of dark, searing eyes—all spun together in a maddening slideshow, too quickly for her to think or focus on anything.
Nolin hugged her arms tightly around her thin legs. So tired. Exhaustion sunk into her bones, swam in her mind. Most of the time, she didn’t realize how tired she was because it felt normal. She pushed through the days.
At night, though, she couldn’t avoid it.
Will it always be like this? Would the little sleep she managed always be poisoned with dreams, her body weighed down with fatigue, her heart heavy with the guilt of leaving her mother?
Maybe I should leave here.
The thought came from nowhere. It seemed so obvious. How could she let go of her past when her hometown was a three-hour drive away? It would always be right behind her, watching over her shoulder.
She loved her life here, her independence, her job, her friendship with Rebecca. But, she realized, very little had changed in five years. What were her plans? What would she do with herself? Part of her would be content to stay here forever, in her familiar routine of work, running, visiting Rebecca to read late into the night with mugs of tea on the small couch in her apartment.
Another part of her twitched like a restless animal, itched for something new, the answer to a mystery she’d been trying to solve all her life.
She could leave her past behind, farther than just a few hundred miles south.
Nolin slid back through the window. Without bothering to turn on the lights, she grabbed her wallet, slipped out of her room, and descended the narrow stairs.
Eli never locked his office. Nolin let herself in, settled into the old office chair behind his desk, and turned on the computer.
She’d never bought a plane ticket, or even flown before. It was the fastest way to get as far away as she wanted. But where? She didn’t have a passport. She’d have to stay in the country, at least for a while. She cast her mind around, thinking of places she’d ever thought of visiting. Her mind fell on the box of books in her room, mentally flipping through the worn covers with faded titles. Finally, she remembered the old copy of Jack London stories.
The Yukon. Alaska.
Glaciers, snowcapped mountains, evergreen forests. Sparsely populated. Something clicked in her mind.
She searched for flights from the nearest airport, scanned the list of options and before she could talk herself out of it, clicked “purchase.” Her stomach fluttered as she punched in her debit card number and clicked “confirm.”
It was done. In two weeks she’d fly into Fairbanks, Alaska, and go from there.
In that frozen paradise so far away from where she’d started, she could forget everything. Whatever she’d been searching for, whatever she was missing, she was on her way to finding it.
***
The cell phone rang at three-twenty in the morning, the generic three-toned trill jerking Nolin out of her doze. She swore, cursing herself for never getting around to picking a less-jarring ringtone, and groggily took the call.
“I’ll be there in ten minutes,” she croaked before snapping the phone shut.
She’d fallen asleep at Eli’s desk. The computer screen lit up as she wiggled the mouse, and she shut it down before shuffling into the lobby.
She slipped down to the basement and out the door to the driveway, where a white van was parked next to her own tiny blue Toyota. Sh
e climbed into the mortuary van.
This was the other part of her job, the important part. The van started with a roar, and she guided it out of the mortuary driveway and through the back roads to the freeway toward the city. Her hands guided the steering wheel along the familiar route. She liked driving at night when she had the dark road almost all to herself.
Within minutes, Nolin pulled off the main road and into the back of the Maxfield City Hospital complex. The van sputtered as she turned it off.
Behind the hospital, she gripped the steering wheel tight, head bowed and her eyes squeezed shut. Her job didn’t make her nervous, but hospitals did. Always hospitals. Her heart thudded, hard, rapid. She filled her lungs and squeezed them out again. Calm down, she told herself over and over until her heartbeat softened to almost normal. Memories flooded her: the glint of needles, the acrid smell of medicines, echoing footsteps, the moldy-green blur of hospital walls and floors.
Calm down.
She’d done this several times a week for two years. She was being stupid.
When her breathing slowed to normal, she let herself out, walked around the van, and opened the door to retrieve the ancient, squeaky gurney. It creaked as she unfolded it and placed it on its wheels. Finally, she took a deep breath and entered the building, nerves tingling. Her senses sharpened to a point, instinctively ready to fight at the first sign of a needle.
The wheels of the gurney squealed like a shopping cart. Her eyes darted sideways into the doorways of storage rooms, then patient rooms as she got deeper into the hospital. Snoozing patients tangled in tubes, tired-looking nurses, echoes of raspy coughs and beeping respirators. Her heart started to pound again. She forced herself to breath slowly. Not a pleasant environment, but not threatening, she reminded herself. Not anymore. She unclenched her hunching shoulders and concentrated on softening the muscles in her neck and face.
On the third floor, a young male doctor in a rumpled white coat leaned against the wall, writing on a clipboard. Nolin had seen him before. She never remembered his name. He didn’t look at her. She cleared her throat.
“I’m here to pick up the body,” Nolin said.
The doctor looked up. His eyes moved to her feet, then back to her eyes. She was used to this, doctors and retirement home nurses taking in her short, thin stature and wild hair. Her arms crossed impatiently.
“Can I see some ID?” the doctor asked, as he did every time she came in for a pickup. She wrenched the slipcase out of her pocket and flipped it open, dangling it in the doctor’s face. He nodded, satisfied.
“I’ll get someone to take him down for you.”
“Don’t bother, I’ve got it.”
The doctor smirked. “Aren’t you a little petite to be hauling bodies around the city?”
Nolin’s jaw tightened. “I can handle it.”
He shrugged and led her into a room across the hall. The shape of a man lay under a sheet on a gurney. The bulge, though clearly defining a face, chest, flat stomach, and limbs, didn’t seem human. Just an oddly shaped sheet.
“Only forty-five. Shot himself in the head,” the doctor said, shaking his head.
Nolin shifted her weight uncomfortably. The cause of death wasn’t her business. She preferred not to know. Maybe these weary doctors wanted something from her—empathy or reassurance, a sounding board even—but she refused to give it to them. She knew mistrust of doctors was irrational, but she didn’t care.
They exchanged signatures on paperwork that neither of them read. With practiced motions, she then wrapped her arms around the stiff torso and the sheet and jerked it onto the gurney, then did the same thing with the legs. The body clunked as it hit the metal frame.
Eager to leave, she wheeled the body out of the room and down the hall to the oversized elevator. She glanced over her shoulder. The doctor watched her bend forward to push the heavy load, but when she turned, his eyes darted back to his clipboard.
Men’s gazes still surprised her. At best, Nolin considered herself plain. Her body was a tight wad of sinews and muscles taut as bowstrings; everything about it was thin and straight. Though she preferred undershirts to the fancy bras Rebecca tried buying her, her tiny swells often attracted downward glances.
The corpse already smelled a little ripe—oddly sweet and a bit pungent, like meat that had been sitting out for too long. The first time she’d experienced that scent, she’d smelled it for days, caught it everywhere she went. The odor followed her, the way Rebecca always smelled very faintly of formaldehyde.
Nolin pushed the gurney out the back door. The sky was a flat stretch of black velvet, all the stars drowned out by city lights.
She opened the back of the van and irreverently shoved the gurney inside, its wheels tucking under itself like a bird taking flight, then slammed the doors shut.
Poor stiff; this would be his second car ride on a gurney tonight.
Nolin rarely listened to the radio when she drove. She preferred quiet, but tonight she switched on the college station that only played local indie bands. It was noise to her, blocking out the music of the silence. Tonight, she didn’t want that empty solitude. Something about this night unsettled her. She gripped the wheel a little tighter than usual and drove a little faster.
Streetlights passed overhead and illuminated her pale hands on the steering wheel before they faded into a moment of darkness. A web of veins stood out on the backs of her hands. She could almost hear the blood pushing through them.
She exited onto the back road that led to the cemetery. The old church loomed in the darkness as the van made its way up the driveway and backed into the garage. The old engine clunked as Nolin yanked the key out of the ignition.
The back of the van smelled sweet, like something fermented. The wheels of the gurney snapped down and clattered on the cement floor. One of the wheels squeaked its usual tune as she rolled the body through the door and into the basement. The sheet snagged on the rough wooden doorframe, exposing an icy white shoulder. Nolin tugged the sheet back into place, her fingers tingling slightly where she brushed the cold flesh. She took a breath and suppressed a shudder.
The ancient cooler stood by the door of the embalming room, a large, gray refrigerator two feet taller than Nolin and about seven feet deep. She pulled the heavy door open. A blast of cold air laced with the same sweet smell poured out in nauseating waves. Two pale scalps poked out of the bottom shelves—a balding man with a scalp splotched with black bruises, and an old woman with dyed tufts of red hair. Rebecca hadn’t finished today; Nolin would have to get the new body onto the higher shelf.
She pulled the metal shelf out and wheeled the creaky gurney beside it. Then, she wrapped her arms around the stiff legs to shift them. They clunked on the cold metal. She shoved the hips, and the rest of the body went with them, firm with rigor mortis.
The sheet snagged the edge of the gurney and unveiled the white face.
She should have screamed, or cried, or something. Instead, Nolin stood still, watching the cold face for several seconds, minutes, maybe an hour. She didn’t know.
Finally, she closed her eyes, swallowed hard, and pulled the sheet back over her father’s face before pushing the shelf back in the cooler.
Chapter 20
NOLIN SAT IN front of the cooler the rest of the night.
Maybe if she spent the night staring at her father’s body, she’d get a twinge of sadness or remorse. The awful emptiness gnawed at her like termites.
Her elbows rested on her bent knees, and she tipped her head into her hands, digging her fingers into her tangled hair. She stared into the blurry green eyes of her reflection in the cooler. They never blinked.
Anger. The void gave way to a dull ache in the hull of her stomach, boiling like the underground chamber of a geyser.
Nolin didn’t remember him leaving. Her life was a haze of sedatives back then. She just knew that when she finally came home, briefly, he wasn’t there. Melissa hadn’t seemed angry; she just retreated dee
per inside her shell until she was in a perpetual cocoon. In some ways, she got better. She was able to work again and picked up a stream of temporary jobs to pay the bills. When the shift was over she’d lock herself in her room. Nolin would never hear a word, never make eye contact. Melissa took on a hard, frightening calm.
After he left, Nolin wasn’t enough to hold her family together anymore. Was she mad at him for leaving or mad at herself for not being able to take his place?
If he had stayed, would she have run away?
Nolin pressed her temples.
She thought about opening the cooler to see his face. Dead bodies never looked like the people they once were. It was just a shell without answers or apologies. Nolin’s eyes stung. She wiped her face and forced the tears back into her head. Deep breaths.
Finally, she leapt up and swung her foot against the side of the cooler as hard as she could. She kicked it over and over, the clanging sound echoing off the decrepit stone walls like a giant brass drum.
“You son of a bitch!” she shrieked, hair whipping her face.
It was his fault she’d been stuck alone with her mother—that she’d had to take care of her all by herself. How could he do that to her?
She hurled curses and kicked until sharp pains shot up her leg. She pounded her fists into the door instead, slammed into it with her shoulder and her elbows, attacking it like she used to fight in school. Her knuckles cracked and ached. She kept kicking until she knocked a dent in the door.
“Nolin, what the hell?”
She hadn’t heard Rebecca come in. Nolin slowed her attack and finally stopped, but didn’t turn around. Her shoulders slumped with exhaustion. She leaned into the cooler, her sweaty forehead pressing into the cool metal. A hot tear dripped down her nose.
Rebecca placed a cool hand on Nolin’s shoulder. Her faint chemical scent, masked by a mist of expensive sandalwood perfume, burned in Nolin’s nostrils. Rebecca shook her gently, cooing concerned words. Nolin only heard a soft buzz. Nolin felt herself being coaxed into a sitting position on the floor, leaning against the wall. The cooler was streaked with orange-tinged blood where she had kicked and punched it. She looked down at her own bleeding toes and knuckles.
