Mortuary Confidential

by Todd Harra

“I saw a sign that said morgue!”

  “Yeah, a sign on the preparation room door. We’re not going in there; we’re going upstairs to where I live.”

  “You brought me to a morgue!” she screamed.

  I tried to quiet her down.

  She was having none of it. “You live at the morgue!”

  “I work here. It’s okay. I promise.” I beckoned with my hand. “Come on. It’s safe.”

  “I don’t care!” she cried. “You brought me to a place where there’s dead people, you psycho!”

  “Keep your voice down,” I hissed, looking around at the neighboring houses. It was just starting to get light out and I didn’t want to cause a scene on the front lawn of the funeral home. “People live around here.”

  “I don’t give a shit, psycho! There is no way in hell I’m going back in that morgue.”

  “It’s not a—”

  “I need a ride home!” she demanded.

  “Look, Paula,” I pleaded. “We came in a taxi. I have no way to drive you home.” My mind momentarily flashed to the hearse in the garage, but immediately nixed the idea. “My car is in the city,” I continued. “Just come in and we’ll go right to my apartment. There are no dead people up there. It’s safe.” I saw my chances of romance slipping away before my eyes and there was not a damn thing I could do about it.

  Paula stood there swaying in the front yard of the funeral home, under the big elm tree, her eyes half-lidded and clouded over with hatred. “I’ll walk then. I’m not stepping foot in that morgue.”

  She set off unsteadily down the road. “Wait,” I called after her. “Do you even know where you’re going?”

  She threw up her middle finger over her shoulder as she marched down the road. I stood at the back door, slightly bewildered, and watched her go.

  CHAPTER 44

  Gobble Gobble

  Contributed by a vintage LP collector

  I made settlement on my dream house on the Monday before turkey day. It’s a Cape-style house with all the amenities: random plank hardwood floors, stainless appliances and frameless cabinets in the kitchen, and copious amounts of marble in the bathrooms. My new digs are certainly a step up from my starter house on the West End and certainly a far cry from the fleabag apartment I used to rent in downtown Richmond when I first got my license. It’s in the kind of neighborhood where you’d expect June and Ward Cleaver to exit the house next door at any minute and welcome you to the neighborhood with a fruit basket and bottle of bubbly. I had been saving for this house since… forever.

  Naturally, eager to showcase my new bastion, I insisted to my family that I would host Thanksgiving dinner that year. Many of them had already made plans, but I begged, pleaded, cajoled, and threatened, and eventually got my way. It was settled. Word circulated throughout the family; Thanksgiving was going to be at Amy’s new house. I was thrilled.

  I pushed all the boxes into the basement, tidied up as best as possible, bought a Martha Stewart cookbook (my first cookbook ever), and set out to work in the kitchen. It was only a minor disaster, seeing as how my sister, who was little Miss Easy-Bake Oven when we were kids, came over and saved my ass—and my turkey’s. The dinner was a smashing success second only to the glory of my new house. The booze flowed—though not for my boyfriend and me who were working—and I gave tours of the house while my pup, Izzy, raced around her new yard. Right before dessert, I received a knock at the door.

  I opened the door and greeted a woman who held an extremely large covered roasting pan. Her dazzling smile suggested thousands of dollars of orthodontic work and many whitening treatments.

  “Hi. My name is”—I’m not kidding you—“June. I’m your new next door neighbor.” She nodded her head perkily as in affirmation of her own name. Not a single stand of hair in her perfect hairstyle moved.

  Did you bring Wally and the Beav? I thought derisively, but instead held out my hand and said, “Hi! Nice to meet you,” Then, realizing June’s hands were full, I withdrew it quickly, feeling foolish. “I’m Amy. Would you care to come in?” I stepped aside and motioned her in.

  “Oh no, dear, I’m just so sorry to meet you under these circumstances, but I thought this would help… on behalf of the entire neighborhood.”

  I was puzzled. Help? But I took the pan from her hands. It was so heavy that I had to set it down on a side table to peek under the foil. It was a giant roasted turkey. Seeing the look on my face, June chimed in, “Twenty-five pounds, dear.”

  I hated it when people called me “dear.” I straightened up, cocked my head, and said, “Well, thank you, June. You didn’t have to do that. It’s awfully extravagant, a whole big turkey.”

  “I know, but I had an extra one in the freezer and I thought you wouldn’t feel like cooking one. So I’m just glad I can give you some semblance of a Thanksgiving Day.”

  “How do you mean?” I asked, now clearly lost.

  “It’s always tough when a family member dies. I know. I lost my father two years ago.” She reached out, took my hand, and made a hand sandwich.

  “Nobody died,” I said slowly as understanding began to dawn on me.

  “The hearse—”

  I cut in, beginning to laugh. “I’m a funeral director.”

  “But the cop car, the medical examiner’s truck,” she stalled, and her perky manner fizzled into bewilderment.

  “My boyfriend is a county cop. We’re both working today, so I have the hearse in case I get called out and my boyfriend is ‘code seven,’ or on a meal break, right now. My good friend works for the Central District Division of Forensic Science, and like me, is on call today, which is why the Department of Forensic Science truck is here.”

  June looked absolutely deflated. The battle story she had been planning to tell the garden club had been ruined! I put an arm around her. “Come on in for a drink. You look like you could use one,” I teased.

  She shook her head. “No. I have to get back to my family,” she said. “But I guess it’s good nobody died.” The white smile was back, this time fake.

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “Means I can have a peaceful meal with my family.”

  June’s smile tightened in her face of foundation and lipstick.

  “You’ll get used to seeing the hearse. I bring it home every night I’m taking death call and unfortunately, it won’t fit in the garage.”

  “Oh,” June said in a tone that made it clear she abhorred the idea of a death mobile parked next to her house.

  “Want your turkey back?”

  “No. Consider it a welcome-to-the-neighborhood gift, and Happy Thanksgiving.”

  “Gobble gobble to you too!” I called after her.

  Chuckling, I walked into the dining room holding the covered pan and announced, “Guess what’s for dessert?”

  CHAPTER 45

  The Tapestry of Life

  Contributed by a homemaker

  My husband is a funeral director in a small town. We’re pretty much the only game in town. Everybody knows us and we know everybody. When I first moved to here it was suffocating. I grew up in the city—where I met Anthony while he was attending mortuary school—and thrived in the cosmopolitan atmosphere. Here, the only thing open after six o’clock is the billiards hall if you’re game for a pitcher of cheap beer. But I’ve grown to love the small-town atmosphere. This is my home now.

  I often help out at the funeral home. I usually go over for a couple of hours a day and do the bookkeeping and help clean the place up. Since I don’t work, other than volunteering at the elementary school library, I don’t mind lending a hand. Sometimes I’ll even greet people at the door; it’s the type of town where I can almost greet everyone who walks through the door by name.

  My husband and I have two children, a boy and a girl, who are exactly a year apart. Kelli is a senior and Trevor is a junior in high school. Four years ago, when the kids were in middle school, I had my first dose of providing service to a loved one when we got that middle-of-the-night call fro
m an Indiana State Patrolman. I guess I always viewed Anthony’s profession as serving the families of little old ladies and stately old gentlemen of the community. Clean death. Timely death. Theoretical death. Anthony is a little more steeled in dealing with death, but for me, the experience was all at once confusing and devastating. But even in the shadow of death, I ended up learning a lot about life.

  It all began with the dreadful call.

  It wasn’t unusual to receive middle-of-the-night phone calls, and it wasn’t until my husband sat up and exclaimed, “Oh, my God! Where? When?,” that I knew something was terribly wrong. Anthony scribbled something on a scrap of paper and said, “Thank you, officer. Please pass along to the family that we’ll be there as quickly as we can.”

  “What’s wrong?” I asked. There was a knot in my stomach, though I didn’t know why.

  “Marie,” he said. His face was white. “There’s been a terrible accident. Jim and little Jimmy are dead. Grace and Phoebe are in intensive care.”

  I felt like I had been punched in the gut. Jim and Grace Brewer are close friends of ours. Jim and Anthony had been friends in high school and when Grace and Jim had started going together shortly after Anthony and I married, we had double-dated a lot. Their son and daughter were exactly our son and daughter’s ages and they went to school together.

  “How?” I managed to get out.

  Anthony put his glasses on, got out of bed, and clicked the light on. “On their way back from Jim’s parents in Chicago, they got into a car wreck. That’s all I know right now.” His voice was unusually tight. “Get your clothes on. I’ll call my mom and see if she can come over and watch the kids.”

  “Me?”

  “Yeah, you’re going.”

  “What? Why?” I was confused, and scared.

  “Your friend’s husband is dead and she’s laying in a hospital somewhere. She needs you. We’ve got to go take care of our friends.”

  I got out of bed and mechanically put my clothes on. I felt like Tom Hanks in the movie Saving Private Ryan when he landed on Omaha Beach on D-Day; sounds were muted and everything moved in slow motion. It took me forever to put my clothes on and brush my hair back into a ponytail. By the time I got downstairs Anthony had every light in the house blazing and was gone.

  I sat at the kitchen counter. Anthony and his mother and father pulled up simultaneously, Anthony in the hearse, and his parents in their Buick. “Hi Mom. Hi Dad,” I said automatically as they trooped in. Anthony’s dad was still in his pajamas and his mom in her nightie. They had obviously been roused from a deep sleep.

  His mother rushed over and gave me a giant hug. “Oh, Marie!” she said. “We’re so sorry. Jim was such a nice boy!”

  “You okay here?” Anthony asked his parents. He was all business.

  “Of course, Tony!” his mother said. “Go, go.”

  “Get the kids up and off to school. Bus comes at ten of seven.”

  “Where should we tell them you’ve gone?” his mother asked.

  “I don’t know, Mom,” he said. He sounded tired all of a sudden. “Make something up. Marie and I will tell them about the Brewers when we get back. No sense you having to do that.”

  We said goodbye and Anthony and I got in the hearse.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “Looks like it’s going to be a four or five hour ride from here. Hopefully, traffic won’t be that bad this time of night.”

  I looked at the clock. It read 11:49.

  “How are you going to get two bodies into the back of this thing?” I asked, craning around to peer through the little window partition separating the cabin from the bed of the hearse. It looked like there was only one cot in the back.

  “Reeves cot.”

  “Huh?”

  “It’s a collapsible cot that folds up. Like a reinforced yoga mat, I guess.”

  “Oh.”

  “I’ll put the boy on that. They’ll both fit.”

  I noticed how he didn’t call Jimmy by name, but “the boy.”

  “Okay,” I said, still numb.

  As we drove up through Kentucky, Anthony and I were both silent. I wracked my brain for something to say to Grace. Anything. I couldn’t think of any words of encouragement or sympathy that fit this situation. Her husband and child were dead! Dead. For the longest time I just sat in silence, thinking, but not thinking. The tension built in me as I searched and nothing came. Finally, I couldn’t stand it any longer and blurted out, “What am I supposed to say to her, Ant?”

  He kept his eyes glued to the road. “What can you say? Say something from the heart.” He fell silent again.

  “What are you going to say?” I asked him. My words issued like gunshots in a library.

  “Dunno.” He pushed his glasses up on his nose and cleared his throat. “I’ll think of something, I imagine.”

  I shut my mouth. The silence descended back over the hearse. When we passed from Kentucky into Indiana, Anthony and I had not broken the silence and I was still drawing a blank. There was nothing I could say. We passed Indianapolis in silence and still I could think of nothing to say to my friend.

  Anthony consulted a map stored in the door pocket a couple of times and a scrap of paper several times over the course of the next hour before we pulled under the portico of the hospital.

  “Here we are,” Anthony announced. “I’ll go check things out. Wait here.”

  The interior light of the hearse flicked on and then off; I was left again in darkness.

  I was alone with my empty mind. The hot engine ticked loudly. I began to panic. We had driven over five hours and I hadn’t thought of a single thing to say! I hoped I would be spurred into some deep thought or philosophy to share with Grace, but the panic just compounded my mental block. I could think of nothing but my friend and her little girl lying upstairs with tubes and monitors attached to their broken bodies while her husband and son lay on slabs in the morgue. I shivered and clenched my fingers so hard in my palms I drew blood.

  So engrossed was I in my thoughts that when Anthony swung the hearse door open, I jumped.

  “Marie, everything all right?” he asked.

  He had a concerned look on his face, but I could tell his mind was elsewhere.

  “Sure. Fine,” I said quickly.

  “Okay. Why don’t you go on in.” It was a command not a question. “The lady at the reception desk will tell you where to go. I’ve already told her our situation. It’s not normal visiting hours, but she’ll let you go up. I have to take the hearse around back and park it. This will save you from having to trudge through the basement.”

  I nodded and got out of the hearse. Anthony dropped it in gear and roared away. I put my arms around myself and walked through the front door of the hospital.

  It was worse than I thought it would be. Grace lay propped up in bed with tubes and wires covering every inch of her body. I couldn’t imagine a human was under all the bandages and dressings. Her head was half covered by a giant bandage. The gauze had a giant brown spot of dried blood on it.

  The room held the pungent smell of hospitals: powerful disinfectants and fear. Grace’s room was dark save the glow of the monitors. One of the machines gave off a constant beep beep sound. The sound, marking the passing time, was maddening.

  To my relief, Grace was asleep. I dragged a chair next to her bed and laid my hand upon her tube-covered hand. She stirred. I’m not sure if she could see me as her face was so swollen, but she could certainly sense me. She tried forming words around the tube going down her throat.

  I swallowed and tried to speak, offer my sympathies, something, but my words sounded clumsy so I just finished with, “Anthony and I are here for you and Phoebe. Just rest. We’re here for you.” I made quiet shushing sounds and just stroked her hand until she seemed to drift off again.

  After a bit, Anthony strolled into the room. “How is she?”

  “She knows we’re here.” I looked at him. “That’s all that matte
rs.”

  “I stopped and checked on Phoebe. The nurse told me her prognosis is much better than her mother’s.”

  “That’s good,” I replied. It didn’t feel like it was me speaking the words. I felt so disconnected.

  We stayed for a couple more hours until it was time for Grace’s first scheduled surgery of the day. Anthony loaded Jim and Jim, Jr., into the hearse and we began the long trek back to Tennessee. The return ride was just as silent as the previous one. When we got home, Anthony went right to the funeral home to perform his work and I crashed in bed. I woke hours later, still tired, and made my way down to the kitchen, where I found Anthony.

  “Ant?”

  He gave me a look of pure exhaustion. Anthony was used to late nights, but I had never seen him this tired before.

  I massaged his shoulders. “How was it?” I asked.

  “Tough.”

  “Want to talk about it?” I wrapped my arms around him. The sweet smell of formaldehyde lingered on his shirt.

  “No.”

  He was silent. I knew it had been hard on him. His employee, Violet, had called to say she had found him crying in the garage in his embalming suit. I knew Anthony was too tough to ever admit it to me. I’d press the issue at a later time; give him a little space for now.

  “Ant,” I said tentatively.

  “Yeah?”

  “I think I need to go back—to the hospital.”

  “Really? Don’t you think Jim’s parents will drive down? And obviously Grace’s will fly out to be with them.”

  “I’m sure they will.” I paused. “I just need to go be with her.”

  “How long are you going to go?” he asked.

  “However long it takes.”

  “And the kids?”

  “We’ll tell them before I go. Then you can get some sleep. I’ll ask your mom and dad to come over and sit this evening.”

  “Okay,” he said. I could tell he was too tired to even function.

  “Kids—” I called.

  I sat next to Grace’s bed. She wore a number of casts, and the bandage on her head was fresh. The head nurse assured me the surgeries had been as successful as one could hope, and they were guardedly optimistic about her recovery.