But more than anything, it was me who seemed most affected, most visibly turned inside out. My hair just seemed to fall right. My legs, rather than being the two twin pegs holding up this huddled bundle of self, looked to me like the means a beautiful girl might use to get where she wanted to go. Every one of my fingers, entwined in his, looked like it could handle a ring. And though I did my best to hide the exquisite pain of this awakening, I’m sure that something different was showing in my eyes when I looked over at him. How strange, I said to myself, that it was Leonard who brought Travis and me together. So typical of him. He had found a way to give me a makeover after all, working from the inside out.
thirteen
MOM DIDN’T INTEND to close up the shop. Her original plan was to wake up early, get busy with appointments, and hopefully forget that people were searching the lake for Leonard’s body. But when her first customer of the day, Mrs. Artman, jokingly accused Mom of rolling her curlers too tight as a way of giving her a natural face-lift, Mom threw down the tools of her trade and stomped upstairs to her room.
I finished up Mrs. Artman and then called the rest of Mom’s customers to reschedule. Everyone was very understanding. I spent the rest of the day trying to distract myself by reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Every time the phone rang, I held my breath; even Lady Chatterley’s orgasm, which is described by D. H. Lawrence as a kind of rippling brilliance with flapping feathers, couldn’t hold my attention. I listened with all my senses until I heard Mom’s voice reassuring the person on the other end of the line that nothing had happened—nothing yet. No word. And then I went back to the shuddering convulsions of Lady Chatterley’s molten insides.
At about five o’clock, Chuck’s car pulled up in front of our house. Through the living-room window, I watched him get out and walk toward the house looking like bad news in shorts and hiking boots.
Of course he would come by in person. Chuck wasn’t the type to make you cry over the phone, then hang up and leave you so that you could wander around the room, trying to figure out what to do next.
“Mom!” I called upstairs, trying to sound as normal as any kid in a TV sitcom. I opened the front door for Chuck before he even had a chance to ring the bell. He just stood there looking at me. That’s when I knew. His blue eyes were brimming with the lake and everything that he’d seen down there. The corners of his mouth were turned down in what I would call an expression of grim determination. He didn’t need to say a word.
Mom came down the stairs slowly, carefully, like a blind person feeling her way along the banister. When she reached the bottom step, she looked up at Chuck and her legs just gave way and folded underneath her. She fell onto the first step and sat there, looking horribly helpless and small. When she finally let out a loud, unruly wail, the hairs on my neck and arms stood up like the tiny antennae of a bug trying to figure out the best direction forward.
Chuck tried to speak, but every time he opened his mouth, Mom said, “No.” She said it a lot. She said it so many times that Chuck finally gave up trying to offer his condolences or to explain anything.
Deirdre, who had rushed downstairs when she heard Mom’s first anguished cry, tried to take control of the situation.
“Pheebs! Get Mom some water. Hurry!”
By the time I came back from the kitchen, sloshing the water over the rim of the glass and onto the carpet, Deirdre was already helping Mom up the stairs and back into her bedroom.
“No,” she kept saying. “No.”
Chuck and I stood there at the bottom of the stairs, watching until they were out of sight. I had no idea what to do next. Nothing like this had ever happened to me before. Not even close. When Nana Hertle had died, we had been expecting it for months. After her cancer progressed and she slipped into a month-long coma, death was the logical next step. Barring a miracle, we knew what was coming. But this was different.
I stared at Chuck, but to be perfectly honest, he looked about as clueless as I felt, so I adopted the tone and gestures more appropriate to a daytime TV drama than to my usual self. I was on automatic, using remote control.
“Shall we sit down?”
As Chuck described the scene down by the lake—the divers, the boats, the netting, the walkie-talkies—I began to imagine that he was just someone on TV and any minute they would break for a commercial so I would be able to leave the room and get a snack. But the commercial never came. And when he finally got to the part I’d been dreading, the part where they found Leonard, I was stuck in my seat.
“One of the divers came up,” Chuck said, wiping his brow with the back of his hand and then continuing with the story. “They’d been up and down all afternoon. Good guys. Really good guys from over in Atlantic City. Total pros. But they didn’t find anything. Not till this one time when he comes up. Brian’s his name. Brian came up and shouted over to us. All the boats headed to where he was. I was in one of the boats. We gave a signal to cut the motors. It was quiet. Both divers, Brian and this Russian guy, Vlad, went down again. After a while we lowered a towline with a gurney type thing from one of the boats. The boat had a winch, and once we got a signal from below, we brought it up … brought him up … Leonard.”
Chuck paused here. He spotted the water glass that had been sitting on the coffee table; he picked it up and took a long gulp. This is what people do in movies or novels, I thought, when they want a dramatic pause.
“You sure you want to hear all this?” he asked me.
“Yes.”
Chuck had come all the way to our house, and I figured he needed to tell someone. Besides, this was just a TV show I was watching. None of it was real. Dad didn’t live with Chrissie Bettinger; he still lived with us and was due home from work any minute. Deirdre was upstairs, her old self, listening to music on her computer, talking on the phone, combing her long, luxurious chestnut-colored hair. Mom was in the kitchen making microwave meat loaf and julienne vegetables. Leonard was downstairs wrapped in tulle and covered in glitter, inventing a look that would quietly appall us when he finally made an entrance at dinner. Meanwhile, I was watching public television in the living room, no commercials.
“We’re considering it a homicide,” Chuck said. “We still have to do an autopsy, but there’s enough evidence to suggest foul play.”
Homicide. Autopsy. Evidence. Foul play. This, I said to myself, was not your usual Wednesday. Peggy Brinkerhoff must be having a field day.
In an effort to keep my voice from trembling out of control, I pretended that I was Sam Waterston in an episode of Law & Order.
“What kind of evidence?” I asked Chuck. I thought I sounded pretty convincing.
“The body was tied up,” he said. “Tied up with rope and weighted down with an anchor.”
This was the first time anyone had referred to the “body”—as though Leonard himself had been separated from it, as if they had become two separate things.
We sat there together letting the news sink in. Leonard was gone. Someone had killed him. And though the question remained unspoken, it was enormous. Why would anyone do such a thing to Leonard? I’ve watched enough TV in my life to know that sometimes a motive can lead you to the person responsible for the crime. But, as Chuck explained it to me, “We’re up the river without a clue.” In other words, we didn’t have a motive or a suspect.
“Is my dad in the running?” I asked him. “As a suspect, I mean.”
Chuck grabbed the hefty knobs of his knees tight, gave them a hard squeeze, and then looked around the room. He was either making sure no one was listening to our conversation or he was hoping to get a second opinion about how to proceed.
“We’re not ruling anything out,” he finally replied. “We need more information. But I had a talk with him yesterday, and it seems unlikely.”
Deirdre came down the stairs and made apologies, told us Mom was resting, and asked if Chuck needed anything.
“Well, actually,” Chuck said, “there is something.”
Then
he lifted the water glass and took another dainty sip. A fly was buzzing around the living room; it was a mad thing, colliding with lampshades, ponging off the window screens, and desperate for an exit.
Chuck put the glass down, took a deep breath, and said, “We’re going to need someone to come down and identify the body.”
Since Deirdre didn’t know the full story, I was afraid she might volunteer without understanding exactly what was involved. Mom couldn’t do it—not until she had moved beyond the “No” stage, and I figured that wouldn’t be happening any time soon.
“When?” I asked.
As soon as I opened my mouth, I realized that I had signed up for the job without meaning to.
“Tomorrow morning. About ten o’clock. I’ll give you the address.”
Then Deirdre, who was still standing in the middle of the room, asked, “Are you sure, Pheebs?”
I was not sure. I was not sure of anything. And wasn’t she the older sibling? Wasn’t she supposed to take care of these difficult, dreadful things when they came up? Wasn’t it her job to protect me? But the world was spinning way too fast, and I was scared that any minute gravity would stop working and we would all be flung off the face of the planet into an outer space of danger and uncertainty. Somehow the simple movement of my head bobbing up and down kept us all in place. It was the least I could do.
Chuck wrote down the address of the morgue on a piece of paper that he had torn from his blue binder. And as he did, he said, “It’ll have to be your mother who identifies the body. Or your father. Someone over eighteen.” He then left the information on the coffee table, as if handing it to me would have been too much of a dare. Deirdre and I walked him to the door. He turned and looked at both of us, as if he wanted to say one last thing.
“What?” I asked.
“Nothing,” he said wearily. And then, focusing his big baby blues on me, he added, “Be good, okay?”
“Sure.”
Later, when I was lying in my bed, I could almost feel the piece of paper still sitting on the coffee table; it was vibrating down there, throbbing, keeping me awake. Minutes went by. Hours. But at some point I must have fallen asleep, because I had a dream.
In the dream I was sitting up to see Leonard standing at the foot of my bed. He was soaking wet, his face and clothes dripping lake water onto the yellow carpet in my room. I worried that the water would stain the carpet even though it’s old and worn and faded around the edges. Leonard was smiling at me as if there were nothing in the world worth getting upset about. I opened my mouth to speak, but before I could say a word, he reached out and offered me his closed fist. Then slowly, very slowly, he opened his hand to reveal the gold Yves Saint Laurent money clip.
“Thank you,” he said.
When I woke up (this time for real), it was morning and my eyes were wet with tears. I had been crying in my sleep, and Leonard was still dead.
By nine o’clock Mom had pulled herself together just enough to get herself down to the county morgue at the appointed time. She said I could come along for the ride, but really I could tell she needed me there more than she was willing to express. Without her makeup or breakfast or her trusty smile, she looked like a temporary version of herself, a stand-in sent to do the job.
We sat in a large wide corridor with high ceilings. The floors were highly polished and there wasn’t a single picture on the wall, no plants, no people, and no sign of life. The place smelled of antiseptic and formaldehyde. The stillness bothered me, because every sound was amplified and seemed more important than it actually was—a door opening, a cough, a pen hitting the hard floor. These noises were proof that even in a place where life had stopped for some, life was going on for the rest of us.
There were swinging double doors, and just beyond them, I knew, bodies were laid out in cool compartments, oblivious of the ongoingness of everything. And perhaps out of respect for those bodies, we the living tried to keep the ongoingness to a minimum.
Chuck arrived right on time, and the minute I saw him, I realized what a sorry sight Mom and I were, the two of us sitting there on the bench, leaning against the wall, dressed in whatever, no makeup, waiting. Chuck tried to prepare Mom for what she was about to see. As he spoke, I focused on his mouth, his teeth, his big tongue, and wondered if he liked his dentist, if he flossed regularly, and if he had a girlfriend.
“Is it all right if Phoebe comes in, too?” Mom asked as she slipped her hand into mine. She was shaking.
Chuck looked me straight in the eyes and then gave a quick glance down the empty corridor.
“Sure,” he said. “Come on.”
We followed him through the swinging doors. Immediately I was aware of a deep hum in the room. I tried to pretend that the high-pitched buzz was the baseline of some angelic chorus keeping a vigil over the corpses as they began the long, unsteady journey away from their corporeal selves, but it didn’t work because I knew it was really the sound of the refrigerated units that lined the wall.
We were introduced to a guy wearing wire-rimmed glasses and a knee-length lab coat. His job couldn’t be less fun, I thought to myself. I mean, opening and closing drawers with cadavers in them, arranging bodies for viewing and dealing with the undisguised grief and horror of family members is nobody’s idea of how to spend a summer day. And though for the life of me I couldn’t tell you the guy’s name, I found myself wondering about his home life and what his wife thinks about when he kisses her. I noticed that the guy’s hands were delicate and waxy looking, like fake fruit; he used both of them to grab hold of the bright chrome handle on one of the refrigerated drawers and give it a good, solid yank.
I had never seen a dead body before. Nana Hertle had been cremated, so when we went out in Mr. Federman’s boat to dump her into the high sea on a stunningly hot day in the middle of October, she had already been reduced to a box of ashes. We poured her remains over the side of the boat, and though some of the dust of her blew back onto our life jackets, most of her disappeared into the ocean without a sound. My dad said a few words, and that was that. Other people I’ve known about who died were famous, so their bodies live on in celluloid form, untouched by decay or rot or the effects of having spent a month at the bottom of a lake. Leonard’s death was something entirely new for me.
His whole body was covered with a white sheet made of a very coarse material, like linen or sailcloth; I forced myself to look at the lump of him under the sheet, lying on a shining, cold slab of chrome. He came out headfirst. I told myself to pay attention, pay attention, pay attention, because really, when would you ever have this kind of experience again? But the moment I saw that shocking bit of flesh sticking out of the bottom of the cloth, too swollen and bluish to be the big toe of the Leonard I remembered, I felt all interest drain from me. The toenail seemed like just an old piece of plastic that had been stuck on like an afterthought with Elmer’s Glue. Then the hum in the room got louder and seemed to be coming from inside my head. I heard the high notes of other angels coming in as if on cue. And then there was nothing.
They say that fainting is the body’s response to a sudden lack of blood flowing to the brain. The central nervous system is designed in such a way that in moments of extreme distress, the brain has a plan; it knows just how and when to knock you out and send you down for the count. Then, whether the cause is physical or psychological, the idea is to get your head down closer to the ground, where the blood can once again begin to circulate in your brain. It’s an ingenious safety mechanism.
But when it happens to you and your body is sprawled out on the cold tile floor, time stops and the movie of your life is, for a moment, interrupted. You are gone. When your eyes finally flutter open and you grope your way toward consciousness, the picture has been changed completely. You are horizontally arranged at shoe level, staring up at the concerned faces that are hovering above you. And there is a gap of time you can’t account for.
“What happened?” I asked.
“You fain
ted,” said Chuck. His eyes were as big as teacup saucers, and he was offering me water from a paper cup that was shaped like a little upside-down dunce cap. “Here. Drink this.”
Chuck and the guy in the lab coat got me onto my feet. They helped me out through the double doors and then into the hallway, where they propped me up on the bench. Mom kept saying, “I knew this wasn’t a good idea.”
Once everyone was convinced that I was fine, considering that I’d just fainted and fallen on my face, they all went back inside to finish what they’d come to do.
As I sat there in the chilled and narrow corridor of the county morgue waiting for my mother, I tried not to think about the horror of Leonard’s toe. I forced myself to focus instead on the details of last night’s dream, the image of Leonard standing wet and happy at the foot of my bed, thanking me for finding his clip. I tried to reconstruct the living Leonard to counteract the image of that toe—him ridiculously dancing like Britney Spears in front of a full-length mirror; him standing beside the before-and-after photo booth and waiting for his first victim; him with his toenails glued and glittered and leaving tracks across the living-room carpet; him tearstained and mortified when we had to wake him from a nightmare; him walking like wrecked royalty down the corridors of our high school while everyone made fun. And as I played these memories over in my mind, I suddenly realized how difficult it must have been for Leonard, and how much he had had to overcome in order to appear that happy. Despite his circumstances, he’d always put on a good face and rarely let on that he was struggling. He was so determined to make the best of everything, to fit in, to triumph over his tragedy.
I sat there on my bench, breathing in the antiseptic air, aware of the ongoingness of the world and thinking of everything that Leonard would miss. And then, because I couldn’t stand it another minute, I crowded my mind with memories of the living Leonard and flooded them in a light so absolutely bright, tragedy didn’t stand a chance.
Absolute Brightness Page 15