by Nan Higgins
“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess I’ll find out tomorrow.”
“Is there anything I can do?”
“You can let me focus on killer klowns and try not to think about this.”
She gazed at me for a few moments before nodding and pressing play.
* * *
Macy left the next morning, and as soon as she got home, I got a text reminding me of my promise to tell her every detail of the mystery that was unfolding.
After I showered and dressed, I went downstairs and found my mom in the kitchen, sitting exactly where she’d been last night. I would’ve wondered if she’d been there all night if her hair hadn’t been damp from her shower.
“Morning,” I said. I walked to the cupboard that held the mugs and got my coffee cup down.
“I haven’t made coffee yet,” Mom said.
“No problem,” I said, trying to act like it wasn’t unusual that it was 9:00 a.m., and she hadn’t fixed coffee. “I’ll make it.”
Much like wanting to bury myself in the movie last night, this morning I focused solely on mundane tasks. When I’d showered, I talked myself through every aspect of it and focused on the sound of the water, the smell of my shampoo, the feel of the droplets—turned up as hot as I could stand it—as they bounced off my flesh. I counted every tooth when I brushed, concentrating on the lather, the sharp minty taste, the abrasive scrub of the bristles. Now I was making coffee, and I looked deeply into the dark granules as I scooped them into the filter. I convinced myself that if I focused on what was normal, maybe normal was all that could exist.
When the coffee was ready, I grabbed a mug for my mom and added lots of artificial sweetener and powdered cream. I couldn’t stomach my coffee like that, but it was the way she liked it. In my cup, I added a solid pour of butter praline creamer and sat across from her, studying her. She gazed out the sliding glass door, and I turned to see if a hummingbird was at the feeder or a squirrel was on the patio…or even if there was a ghost behind me. There was nothing there, at least not that I could see.
A shiver worked its way up my spine, and I took a big gulp of hot coffee, which did nothing to chase my chill away. I had barely slept all night. The pitch black of the basement had never bothered me before, but every creak and sigh of our old house jerked me awake, gasping panicked breaths and straining in the darkness to try to see if a ghost was lurking above me. Finally, I ended up putting The Princess Bride on TV and set it on mute so I wouldn’t wake Macy. From time to time, I looked over at my blissfully sleeping friend, and a wash of jealous anxiety poured over me. Ghosts could just walk up to me. Would I ever get a good night’s sleep again?
“Good morning.” Dad crossed the kitchen to get his own coffee.
“Morning.” I glanced at my mom, who raised her cup to her lips to take her first sip, not speaking.
Dad sat beside me and blew into his cup of black liquid. He never added anything. “Dark, like my soul,” he always said.
Several moments passed before he gently rested his fingers on my mom’s hands. “Joanna,” he said softly, “we need to show her.” My mother shook her head. “Joanna.” My mom yanked her hand away.
“I’m not going,” she said. “This is all your…” She stopped and swallowed hard. “This has nothing to do with me. You’ll have to show her yourself.” With that, she dumped what was left of her coffee into the sink and went upstairs. She didn’t slam the bedroom door, but I definitely heard it shut.
“Well,” my dad said quietly, “are you ready to go?”
“Where are we going?”
“To the funeral home.”
Chapter Five
My dad turned on the car and reached up to the old-fashioned CD collection strapped to the visor above his head. There was a definite theme to the songs he favored: those performed either by my mom or me. He chose an old performance my mom did at Carnegie Hall in the 1990s. My jaw tightened as I prepared for what I knew he was going to say.
“This. This is the performance where I fell in love with your mother. I knew that day that I was going to marry her.” He smiled wistfully. “It only took three years to convince her she was going to marry me.”
“Dad, are you and Mom okay?”
He frowned at being removed from his reverie and took a moment to think. “We’re not okay right now. But we’ll be okay again. You have to understand, this is not what your mother and I planned.”
“How can I understand anything when you haven’t told me what’s going on?”
He rested his fingers on my hand, mirroring the gesture I’d seen him make with Mom earlier. “Soon,” he said. “By the end of the day, you’ll know everything.”
* * *
Nick Beckett, my dad’s managing funeral director and best friend, met us at the door of the funeral home. The two murmured words I couldn’t hear even as much as I strained.
“Aria, we’ll be right back,” Dad said before hurrying off with him.
I moved out of the doorway and into a small room down the hall. My mother called this room the secondary showroom. When two funerals took place on the same day, this was where we held the one with fewer mourners. When a funeral was going to be very large, we opened the accordion door between this room and the main room and arranged chairs in here. For me, this room carried nostalgic weight, with none of the official titles bearing any importance. It was my playroom when I was small, and both my parents were working, and as I grew older, it was where I would study and read and dream.
I sat on my favorite couch—gargantuan, ancient, green, shiny, and resembling a sea monster—and looked around the room. It could have been any formal living room: plush carpet, comfortable couches, lighting that was both effective and restrained, paintings of cityscapes and lighthouses on the walls. I supposed most formal living rooms didn’t have a casket with a body in it, and this one did. On the opposite side of the room, a white-haired woman nestled on soft cushions inside a bronze casket.
I turned to the small table beside the couch, picked up one of the folded bulletins, and began to read about her. Clara Braverman, seventy-three years old, died after a short battle with intestinal cancer. She was a loving mother and grandmother who was preceded in death by her husband, Solomon. She was an avid traveler and bingo player and would be missed by those who loved to listen to her stories and hear her raucous laugh.
I walked over to the casket, looking down at her. Whoever embalmed her and did her hair and makeup had done a really good job. She looked as if she’d gotten dressed in her smartest pale pink suit, taken extra care on her hair and mascara, and then decided to take a nice nap before going out for brunch.
I had a tradition that started when I was a child and was sent to this room to occupy myself while my parents worked. Sometimes the room was empty, but it often held the body of a deceased person at the end of a day after calling hours but before the funeral, the last stop before they went to their final resting place. I found a lot of comfort in saying good-bye and wishing them safe passage on their migration to the afterlife.
I’d forgotten about my tradition. Since I’d gone away to college, I hadn’t been coming to the funeral home much. When was the last time? A year, maybe two? I couldn’t remember, but I did remember how all my visits to this room started when I wasn’t alone in it.
I reached into the casket and rested my hand on Clara Braverman’s hand. “Peace on your journey,” I said softly.
“Thank you,” said a voice beside me.
I screeched and jumped away. When I turned to see who was speaking, it took several moments for my brain to compute. I looked at the woman in the casket and back up to the woman beside me, trying to understand how they could be one and the same.
The smiling lady didn’t look like a ghost, or not the way I’d ever seen ghosts look in movies. I couldn’t see through her, and she didn’t look hazy with blurred edges. She looked…alive. A glance at the woman lying before me confirmed that wasn’t possible.
“Mrs. Braverman?” My voice came out papery and thin.
“You can call me Clara, dear.”
“Clara.” Now what? “You’re not wearing your pink suit,” I said finally.
Clara looked at the light gray sweat suit and bright white sneakers she wore and adjusted the visor on her head. “We get to choose one outfit to wear while we wait. Since they couldn’t give me a definite time frame, I wanted to be comfortable. This is what I wore last time I went hiking at Hocking Hills.”
“While you wait?” I asked. “Wait for what?”
I was suddenly angry that she, this ghost, knew more about what was going on here than I did. This place was my family’s business, and clearly, there was a lot more to it than I ever knew because they’d kept me completely out of the loop.
“Aria.”
My father stood in the doorway with Nick just behind him. They didn’t seem angry exactly, but they were very serious. Nick in particular had a peculiar look on his face that I couldn’t decipher.
“Oh, Mr. Jasper, Mr. Beckett,” Clara cried, rushing to meet them. “Do you have any news on my case?”
My father gave Nick a pointed look, and Nick put his arm out to Clara, ushering her from the room and speaking softly. Once they were gone, I peered into the casket again, confirming the only thing I knew for sure: Clara Braverman was dead.
“Aria,” Dad repeated.
“Yes?”
“Come with me.” He extended his hand, and I slowly crossed the room and took it. He gave my palm a tight squeeze. “Are you ready?”
I wanted to ask what I was supposed to be ready for or point out that I couldn’t prepare myself for something about which I had no details, but instead, I nodded. My stomach, which I’d finally gotten to settle earlier in the morning by focusing on normal tasks, was churning away again. I felt a sudden and intense panic that made me want to run for the door, but I followed my father out of the room.
Chapter Six
“I’m not going down there.”
I stopped short when I saw where my father was taking me. We stood side by side, staring down into the basement. The basement where they embalmed the bodies. The basement where I’d been told, since the beginning of my life, that I must never go.
Dad flipped a switch, illuminating the oddly cheerful pale blue walls, and put an arm around me.
“We’re not going into the embalming room,” he said.
“Really?” I could hear the doubt in my voice.
“I promise. None of what you’re going to see has anything to do with…that.” He took one step down and looked back. I took a deep breath and followed.
At the bottom of the stairs was a small waiting area, and it reminded me of the one at my dentist’s office. Chairs stood along the walls of the room. A rack of magazines caught my eye, and I picked one up. It was called Next Time and had ads for articles like “10 Tips for a Seamless Transfer” and “Then and Now: Living Your Best Afterlife.” I set the magazine back in the rack. A brightly lit lobby that could have been in any office building or doctor’s office across the country was definitely not the ghostly basement chamber I had envisioned, and I breathed a jagged sigh of relief.
There was a square window cut into the wall across from me, and a rosy-cheeked, curly-haired woman slid it open when she noticed us standing there. She gave us a beaming smile when we approached.
“Hi, Nathan,” she said brightly. “Who do you have with you today?”
“Sally, this is my daughter, Aria.”
Her eyebrows lifted, and her smile widened. “The famous Aria.” I took her outstretched hand, and she gave me the most vigorous handshake of my life, pumping my hand up and down like the handle of a three-hole punch.
“I’m famous?” I asked.
“Well, of course.” Sally clicked a few keys on her laptop and spun it around so I could see that she was listening to a recording of me. It was playing softly enough that I couldn’t hear it until she lifted the computer, but that was my face on the music app. “I’ve heard so much from your parents about all your talents, and I’ve downloaded those indie singles of yours. I just can’t wait to see where your career takes you.”
“Sally,” my father said, “Aria is here to begin training.”
Sally’s eyebrows lifted so far this time, they seemed to be almost in her hairline. “Training?”
“Yes. She experienced her first signs of the quickening yesterday.”
“But wasn’t yesterday her—”
“Her birthday, yes.”
“Oh.” Sally’s eyebrows dropped. “Oh my.”
“Buzz us in, won’t you?”
“Of course.” Sally reached under her desk and pushed a button, and a glass door a few feet away from her window began to swing inward.
“Follow me,” Dad said.
When we walked through, I read the bold navy-blue words on it: Welcome to AfterCorps—Helping millions end their beginning and begin their end.
“First things first,” said Dad. “The grand tour. You’ve seen the waiting room, where the dead wait to be seen by an agent. Over here are small meeting rooms; we use those when we’re talking to our clients, both dead and living.” He guided me down a short hallway with a door on the left and right and a metal gray door at the end that read Do Not Enter. He opened the door on the left and flipped on the lights so I could see a huge table surrounded by chairs in a room painted a maroon that was way too dark for a basement with no windows.
“Conference room,” Dad said. “Where we do our conferencing.” I looked up, and he gave me a small smile. He was trying to do the dad joke thing even in the midst of our confusing, intense goings on. Normally, I was a sucker for his jokes, but I couldn’t even pull a smile this time. I was too nervous, and the pit of my stomach swirled more violently than before, as if a storm was raging inside.
He turned to the room on the right. When those lights came on, I felt blinded by bright yellow made extreme by the fluorescent bulbs.
“You need to talk to your decorator about these paint jobs.” I squeezed my eyes closed and opened them again.
“I am my decorator,” Dad said. “And your feedback is duly noted.”
When my eyes adjusted, I looked around. It resembled one of my classrooms at school. Well, kind of. There were only four desks, plus one that was presumably for a teacher, and there was an old-school blackboard like I’d only seen in movies and TV. There wasn’t a computer anywhere. It was the last kind of space I would’ve expected to find in the basement of a funeral home. I walked to the teacher’s desk and hoisted myself up on it.
“Tell me what’s going on.” I put my hand on my stomach and willed it to settle, willed my nerves to calm down.
My dad sat gingerly on the edge of one of the student desks. “We’ve always been open with you about the realities of death,” he began and shook his head. “What I mean to say is, we’ve always been open with you about a part of what happens when someone dies. The part that affects the living. The part of our business you know about, in its essence, is about those still alive. Helping them find ways to honor the deceased so they can say good-bye. Giving them the tools to have a final ceremony and bury their dead so they have closure that allows them to get back to the business of living. It’s important work, but it’s only one half of what we do.” He paused, checking as if to see if I was still with him.
“What’s the other part of what you do?”
“We facilitate the transition of the deceased from this world to the next.”
I wrinkled my nose. “Can you tell me what that means without sounding like a sales brochure?”
“I’ll try. You’ve heard ghost stories where someone who died can’t cross over because they have unfinished business, yes?”
“Yes.”
“Well, like most legends, there is something to that. But since the beginning of time, there have been those of us among the living who have the ability to see and communicate with ghosts. Interpreters, if you will
. For as long as we’ve existed, it’s been our responsibility to help the dead get their earthly affairs in order as well as work with counterparts on the other side to make the arrangements for their final transfer.”
“You make it sound like you work in customs.”
He nodded. “It is a bit like that, yes. The whole process is much more bureaucratic than those who romanticize ghost stories would ever imagine. Think of us as Death Agents, a combination of customs, bureau of motor vehicles, police detectives, judiciaries, and social workers.”
“And every agent performs all of those jobs?”
“No.” He pulled his pack of Juicy Fruit out of his pocket and offered me gum. I shook my head, and he popped a piece in his mouth, his brow wrinkled as he began to chew. “It’s sort of like being a musician. You have to learn many different facets of music in your training. The best musicians study classical, jazz, blues, rock, and the list goes on. Very few musicians play or sing in every single genre; they study them and find what speaks to them and what they’re good at, and that’s where they build their careers.
“Similarly, you’ll receive training on many aspects of working with the dead before you choose an area to devote yourself to in your career.”
My career? The gravity of what that suggested hit me, and a puff of air bubbled from my chest and escaped my mouth. I felt crushed and flattened as I began to realize the weight of what he was saying. “But, Dad, I already have a career. You know that. I’ve been studying and practicing my whole life to be a singer.” The years of vocal lessons with multiple teachers and constant auditions to gain entry into choirs or musical theater productions, refusing to consume dairy and citrus to avoid their negative impact to my vocal cords and practicing a minimum of four hours a day, these were the things flashing through my mind. What I said was, “What about Angela Osborn? What about Los Angeles?”