Some of the Parts

by Hannah Barnaby

  Except in here.

  This place will stay exactly the same, cold and opaque and hard. It’s a time capsule. It’s a glacier. It’s the opposite of alive in every way. Nate would hate it here.

  The four of us walk into the building. My mother’s purse slides down her arm and I take it from her, the way I used to when she was carrying too many things. The weight of it feels good in my hands, across my shoulder when I put it on. Each of us fidgets mildly while we wait for…something. Instead, we get a someone. The tallest man I have ever seen emerges from around a corner at the end of the hallway and lopes toward us stiffly, as if he is walking on stilts. He folds himself at the waist and leans down to shake my father’s hand.

  “Eben Dolmeyer,” he says. “I am very sorry for your loss.”

  This, of course, is a phrase that all of us have heard many, many times in the last four months. But this man sounds like he truly means it, and I wonder how he manages to sound that way when he probably has to say it every day of his life. If he actually feels as sorry as he sounds, he must be the saddest man in the world.

  “Let me show you to your niche,” Eben Dolmeyer says.

  My mother compulsively compliments people when she is nervous. “You have a lovely mausoleum.”

  Eben Dolmeyer dips his head a bit. “Thank you. Although this is not a mausoleum.”

  “It’s not?” Mom clutches the urn a little tighter, like maybe we have brought it to the wrong place entirely.

  “This is a columbarium,” Eben Dolmeyer informs us. “From the Latin columba, meaning ‘dove.’ The term referred originally to compartmentalized housing for doves and pigeons.”

  My father coughs. “Pigeons?”

  Eben Dolmeyer chuckles dryly. “Of course, we don’t keep pigeons here. But you will notice that we have incorporated a dove motif in our wall carvings and much of our artwork.”

  I have a sudden urge to grab the urn from my mother. Urn, I think, seeing the word swim into the air in front of me. Then the u and the r switch places, making the word run. It’s tempting.

  “Here we are,” says Eben Dolmeyer. Our slow procession has stopped in front of a wall that looks like every other wall here. It is a grid, the entire surface covered with marble squares. Most are engraved with names and dates, but some are still smooth and blank. One open square awaits us, a tiny cubby that will hold the urn and whatever portion of my brother is inside. The cubby is flanked by blank plaques. My stomach flips, and I ask the question even though I’m pretty sure of what the answer will be.

  “Who are those for?”

  My father shuffles his feet uncomfortably. “Well, er…us, honey. Your mother and I will be in one, and the other one…”

  This is too much. They have brought me to look at my own grave.

  “I’m getting out of here,” I announce.

  “Tallie,” my father says, a warning in his voice. Do not disrupt things, it says. This is important to your mother.

  “It’s okay,” Mom tells him. She is staring into the dark open cubby. “Let her go.”

  “There is a waiting area at the front of the building,” Eben Dolmeyer offers. “There are magazines.”

  “We’ll meet you there,” my father calls after me, because I am already walking away from them, my rapid footsteps echoing in the glossy marble halls, my mother’s purse knocking against my hip.

  My heart is beating just as fast, and there is a needle point of pain in my left temple, which distracts me enough that I am quickly lost in the winding maze of the columbarium. I can still hear my parents’ voices, distant and small, and the low hum of Eben Dolmeyer comforting them. I do not want to go back to where they are, admit that I couldn’t find my way out.

  The pain digs into my head and I rub at it. I close my eyes, count to three, and open them again, expecting…what? To see a different hallway? I feel like Alice after falling down the rabbit hole, faced with innumerable tiny doors.

  The light around one of the corners is different, so I walk to it. The irony of walking into the light is not lost on me, by the way. But it works. I find myself, finally, at the entrance to the columbarium. I have escaped my tomb, for now. This has not helped my headache much, but at least I feel like I can breathe again.

  And I can think again, too, which means I can remember that Mom keeps a bottle of aspirin in her purse. I pop the cap and let a few tablets roll into the palm of my hand. The bitter, powdery taste when I chew them is like the taste of disappointment. I force myself to swallow.

  My teeth are gritty.

  Ashes, ashes. We all fall down. And then my parents are standing beside me, silent and statuesque. Empty-handed. The task is done, and I’m half wrecked with guilt for running away, half weak with relief that they did it without me. It was their goodbye, not mine.

  We could all ask each other if we feel better. But we don’t.

  I check my phone as we’re walking back to the car. There’s a text from Chase:

  call me

  I slow my steps, let my parents gain ground in front of me. My father glances back but I just point to my phone and he nods and keeps walking.

  Chase picks up right away.

  “I found something,” he tells me. And then there’s a long pause.

  “Yes?” I say.

  “Are you sure you want to do it this way?”

  “What way?”

  “All, like, cloak-and-dagger. I know you don’t want to involve your parents, I get that. But it seems like it would be a lot simpler that way.”

  They’re getting farther and farther ahead of me. They’re almost to the car.

  “I’m sure,” I say. “Tell me what you found.” Then I add, “Please.”

  “There was an exchange with a doctor named Samira Fikri at Brigham and Women’s. She’s doing a study with a bunch of organ recipients and she asked my dad for contacts at the procurement agencies.”

  “What kind of study?” I ask. “Like, to see if they live or die?”

  “No, she’s a psychiatrist. I think she’s trying to see…how they deal with it.”

  “With what?”

  “Doesn’t say, exactly. Having part of someone else’s body inside them, maybe?”

  I imagine a room full of these people, wandering around and trying to match themselves up like a human jigsaw puzzle. I do not actually care how they are coping or how they feel. But if some of them have parts of Nate…

  “What can I do, though? Pretend I’m one of them?”

  “No,” Chase says. “That would never work. You’re not going to be able to get into the study itself. But if I can get Dr. Fikri to share some of the data with my dad, maybe we can match up the surgery dates with your brother’s—”

  “She would do that?”

  “She might. If I can pretend I’m him and offer to consult on the study. Convince her it’s purely professional.”

  Now we’re both posing as our parents. It’s like some weird parallel universe, a world of deceit and decent intentions. I feel myself luring Chase slowly and steadily away from the benchmark of his honesty, like I’m pulling him underwater. “Do you have a lot of experience deceiving surgeons?”

  “I have a lot of experience eavesdropping on my parents’ cocktail parties. Excruciating. But I know how they talk to each other.”

  “So how are you going to ask for the info on the study?”

  “Simple,” he says. “I send an email from my dad’s account and bounce his email forward to mine so I can catch the reply.”

  “But what if he sees it first?”

  “He has his assistant filter through everything before he looks at it. And unlike surgeons, assistants don’t work weekends. I’ll send it right now and I’m betting we hear back from Dr. Fikri before morning.”

  “Thank you,” I tell him. It sounds like any other phrase, too short to carry the hope and relief I want it to.

  “Don’t thank me yet,” he says. “This may not work.”

  “Thank you anyway.” />
  There’s another a long pause. Then, “Tallie?”

  “Yes.”

  “Rosabelle, believe.”

  “What?”

  “That’s what Houdini was supposed to say to his wife if he could get a message to her after he died.”

  “Oh.” My parents are waiting by the car now, looking at me as if they’re surprised to see me. “I have to go.”

  “Okay,” Chase says. “I just thought you’d like to know.”

  “A message from beyond the grave,” I say. “Imagine that.”

  Except that Houdini’s message never came through, I think. But the psychic on the show I used to watch delivered hundreds of messages, maybe thousands. Even Absalom seemed to believe with absolute conviction that he was capable of channeling some kind of communication from another realm. If they can do that, why can’t I? Not every message is made of words. I can follow these bread crumbs, find Nate’s pieces and make things right. It doesn’t have to ruin my chances of being normal again. It might even be part of the plan.

  It has to be worth something, all of this aching and sadness and remembering, the broken glass and stitches and scars on my arms and hands. It cannot be for nothing.

  If I can do this for Nate, then maybe we can both move on.

  We get home from the columbarium and the three of us stand in the kitchen, none of us sure what to do next. It feels like there should be a statement of some kind, an announcement, a declaration. But my parents probably already said something after I fled the scene, and now whatever there was in that box, whatever was transferred into the urn and then into the marble cubby under the watchful gaze of Eben Dolmeyer, has been very officially laid to rest. There really is no more of Nate’s body in this house.

  “Well,” my mother finally says to no one in particular. She seizes a pen from the decorative cup on the counter and scrawls out a grocery list. “I should get to the store,” she says, and waves her list as evidence of this. Life goes on, the paper tells us. People have to eat.

  My father nods. The paper is right.

  “I’ll be in my study,” he says.

  I stand very still as my mother and her list retreat through the door to the garage and my father slinks silently away, and then I am alone again. If this was a movie, I wonder, would the director yell “Cut!” at this point or would the scene continue? Should I keep going? What’s my line?

  I picture a page, the screenplay. Stage directions. Tallie goes to the refrigerator, it says. Tallie selects a yogurt smoothie. Tallie drinks the smoothie thoughtfully.

  I do these things. I await further instructions.

  My phone buzzes.

  Mel has texted this:

  drv arnd? need rdkl

  Her name looks strange on the screen, like when you’ve been staring at a word for so long that you start to think it’s misspelled, or not a word at all. It’s been days since I actually talked to her, but she did sign me into school yesterday, so I feel like I owe her something. And there is nothing quite as effectively distracting as watching Mel, in coveralls and goggles, gathering roadkill. I usually stay in the car while she works and try not to catch any accidental glimpses of maimed and bloody animals. Although part of me feels like I should make myself look this time, after chickening out at the columbarium. Face the music, so to speak.

  I reply:

  ok

  Molton produces a wide variety of roadkill. It may simply be the combination of plentiful woodland creatures and reckless drivers, but whatever the reason, there is probably no better place for an aspiring taxidermist to reside. That may well be the reason so many members of Mel’s family have lived here, and explain why the only ones who move away are those who don’t participate in the family hobby. Mel’s mother is always looking for jobs on the West Coast, for instance. But so far she hasn’t gotten an offer good enough to take them away.

  According to Mel, she doesn’t love most of Mel’s interests (especially not the projects that bring the police to their house), but I guess she figures that they’re better than not knowing what Mel is doing. A girl like Mel could get into just about any kind of trouble that a paranoid mother could dream up.

  So could a girl like me. But no one seems to have caught on to that yet.

  Mel drives slightly more carefully than usual, for scouting purposes. I am the lookout, watching for circling turkey vultures, signs of unfortunate creatures up ahead. Molton is a small town but sometimes it seems like there is an infinite maze of side streets and cul-de-sacs, like we could drive for days and keep finding new turns to take. We wander, like Odysseus. Searching.

  I am normally attentive to my job but today I find I am distracted by the brilliant leaves on all the trees. There are so many trees and the sun blinks rapidly between them as we drive. It’s like someone is pointing a giant flashlight at me and turning it on and off, like Morse code. Nate used to do that every summer, try to learn Morse code, and he would practice with a pen in his room, tapping on his desk. He wanted me to learn, too, so we could tap messages to each other through the walls, but I never really got it, especially not the first year. He kept testing me, trying not to get totally exasperated when I got it wrong.

  “Okay,” he would say, “I’ll do it really slowly this time.”

  I listened as hard as I could, until I thought my ears would burst, but I got lost about halfway through his tapping and scraping, and in the end, every answer was a guess. The only words I learned that first summer were our names.

  The car stops suddenly and I almost scream at the sound of the brakes screeching. I’m still bracing myself for the crunch of metal when I hear Mel’s voice instead, saying, “Be right back.”

  She leaves the car running while she walks around to the trunk to get her shovel and a bag. I force my breathing back into a normal rhythm and crane my neck to see over the hood of the car. Looks like we’ve stopped to retrieve a raccoon. Or what used to be a raccoon.

  I imagine the raccoon’s family watching from the woods as Mel lifts their loved one from the asphalt and shimmies it into her garbage bag. I imagine them patting each other with their little paws and silently mourning their fallen relative. They cannot know what will become of him, that Mel will, in a matter of days, have done unspeakable things to his body and transformed him into a raccoon version of Zorro, galloping to new adventure on the back of a cat. Or, what used to be a cat.

  Mel deposits the bag into a cooler in her trunk, gets back in the car, and announces that we need to stop for ice.

  Which means going to the Y Not.

  Y Not Convenience.

  Y Not Convenience?

  It bothers me that there isn’t an actual question mark on the store, just the implication of a question mark. I sit in the car, glaring at the space where a question mark should be, while Mel goes inside. After a couple of minutes, I am tired of glaring and desperate for a beverage, so I head inside.

  Y Not inspires many questions, like Why not clean this place once in a while? and Why not hire someone other than Jason Rice to work here? Jason possesses an unfortunate combination of qualities that seem set in stone, even at the age of seventeen, and make him less than ideal for a job that involves human interaction. He is both ill tempered and overly confident, which has given him a superiority complex that seems all wrong on a cashier in a convenience store. Like a tuxedo on a sloth. He treats Y Not like a cave of treasures that he must guard, dragon-like. He insults customers openly, judges what they buy, and examines anything they put on the counter in front of him as if it is up to him whether or not they are allowed to purchase it.

  Also, for reasons that I never understood, Jason was Nate’s best friend. A fact that makes my trips to Y Not more complicated than either of us enjoys.

  The bell over the door announces me, and Jason looks up. A kind of grimace rolls over his face and he does not correct it. Not many people are happy to see you when you walk around draped in the stench of tragedy, but Jason openly dreads my appearances here. W
hich is why I’m willing to come in when Mel brings us here, despite my feelings about the store’s punctuation. Or lack thereof. Jason and Nate used to tease me when we were younger, because Nate became that kind of brother when Jason was around, and now I get to provide a bit of my own torture.

  “Hello, Jason,” I say, putting on a maudlin tone. “How are you?”

  He is still wearing a pained expression as he says, “Good. I mean, fine. I guess.”

  He does not ask how I am. He never does.

  Mel emerges from the back of the store, where (judging from the tint of her lips) she has been stealing cherry slushie samples. She slaps a couple of dollar bills on the counter.

  “Two bags of ice,” she announces.

  Jason slides the money toward himself but does not touch the cash register. We all know he will pocket the money after we leave. We stand there in silence, all of us caught in supreme discomfort, knowing what comes next but hoping, as we always do, for a different outcome.

  I want to grab Jason around the neck and scream, Why can’t you be a better person?

  He coughs. “Anything else?”

  I remember then that I wanted something to drink, so I reach into the fridge by the counter and grab a bottle. Only when I hold it up do I see that it is that half-lemonade, half-iced-tea stuff that Nate loved. I wave it at Jason spitefully. To shame him. To remind him of my brother, who was good and is gone, and to make him see how unjust that is when he—Jason Rice, unkind purveyor of snacks and cigarettes—sits here alive and well. Anger rises up like an underwater missile, threatening to break the surface, and I am very close to throwing the bottle at Jason’s head when Mel pulls me out the door and calls “Put it on her tab” over her shoulder.

  “Get in the car,” she says, and I do. I hold the cold, wet bottle of half-and-half like my mother held that urn, and I watch Mel haul two bags of ice out of the huge freezer in front of the store. She marches them to the trunk and it sounds like thunder when she dumps them into the cooler. She stuffs the empty plastic bags into a pocket in her door when she gets in, and then she turns to me.