Flesh

by Laura Bickle

  I shake my head against her shoulder, fighting down the ball of anxiety swirling inside me. “No. Not very well.”

  But now that she is here, in the Body Shop…I think I’m about to.

  *

  The police depart to notify Amanda’s family, leaving us alone with the body. My mother insists on taking me upstairs, but I resist.

  “Look,” I say. “I knew her. Sort of. I want to stay.”

  “Let her stay,” my dad agrees.

  Mom relents. She lets me remain in the room with her while she conducts the examination of the body. Normally, this is something Garth would do, but I feel like I should be the one to help this time. I’ve done it often enough. And, absurdly enough, I feel protective of Amanda. I know that I would be mortified by the idea of being undressed by men. I know that she is past caring, but this seems like a kindness I can do for her.

  Mom ties a smock over her clothes and pulls on a pair of latex gloves. I do the same. I know that my mother is watching me closely, as if this is a kind of test, to see if I can—if I want to—fill her shoes. I bring out the evidence bags, labels, and some vials for trace evidence. I line them up on the counter, take a deep breath, and turn back to the body. I tell myself that I will not have a panic attack. Amanda is dead. I only have panic attacks around the living.

  My mom turns on a voice recorder, motioning for me to keep silent as she works. She unzips the body bag, reciting the date and time into the air, to be captured by the recorder for transcription. I am accustomed to hearing my mother talk to herself in the Body Shop, after hearing it all my life. When I was small, I thought she was talking to ghosts.

  “Subject is approximately sixteen years of age, identified as Amanda Simms.” Mom flicks a glance at me, then down at the bag again. She rolls it back. I silently help her pull the edges of the bag away to expose Amanda’s mud-streaked body.

  “The body was found facedown in a ditch on the south side of State Route 450.”

  I help my mother pull the bag out from beneath Amanda. Mom searches the creases of the bag for evidence and takes some photographs of the body with her digital camera. “Body and body bag include traces of dry grass and bits of gravel consistent with the site where the body was found.”

  She turns her attention to Amanda. “The body is fully dressed in a light-purple T-shirt, black jeans, gray sneakers, and a black jacket.” She pushes Amanda’s hair back. “Her ears are triple-pierced, with three silver earrings in each.” She picks up Amanda’s hands and looks at them. “She’s wearing one silver ring on her right ring finger.”

  Mom nods at me. I think she’s expecting me to flee at this point. I swallow the lump in my throat and get a plastic bag. Carefully, I remove the earrings from Amanda’s ears, listening to the drone of my mother’s voice. They are crusted with mud, but they come loose with a little bit of tugging. I drop them into the plastic bag, mindful to get all the parts in there, counting twice. When I reach for the ring, I can’t get it over Amanda’s swollen knuckle. I look askance at my mom. She shakes her head, making a note on the record that it can’t be removed, and I leave it alone for now. I take her shoes off, instead, placing them in an evidence bag. They’re wet, and so are her socks.

  There is blood on her clothes. I didn’t notice it before, with the mud and the jacket being black. But there’s an unmistakable residue there. There’s some of that dried stickiness that smells like copper on her shoulder, near the drawstring of her jacket, and on her side. My mother notes it, describing the ragged holes torn in the jacket before taking a few photos with the digital camera. It looks like something that Lothar would have chewed.

  We pull the jacket off. There’s a lot more blood here, seeping into the lavender of Amanda’s T-shirt. I swallow hard.

  My mom switches off the recorder. “You can leave now. Really.”

  I shake my head. I put my hands on the edge of the slab to steady myself. “No. I’m okay.”

  My mom nods. There is a light of something like approval in her eyes. “This is how I got my start, you know. In the coroner business.”

  “You went to medical school,” I said. “Lots of cadavers there to work on.”

  “Before then. I helped my father with the dead, ever since I was old enough to reach the table. That’s just how it was, with people in the business.”

  I nod quietly. I knew that she was never insulated from the dead as a child. My parents had never taken any particular pains to distance Garth and me from them, either. We were in and out of the morgue as if it was our living room. In retrospect, I’m sure that wasn’t advisable, even if it was technically legal. I remember a new deputy throwing a fit about twelve-year-old Garth writing out toe tags while my mom was wrist-deep in a cadaver, and the Sheriff shut him down. But that was the way the Sullivens had always done things, for generations. To me, it reinforced the idea that we were weird, that normal people don’t let their kids do that. So strange that my parents didn’t try to shield us from the dead. Just living people.

  “When I was fourteen, there was…” She looks away, as if struggling with what to tell me, how much to protect me. “Something really bad happened. There was a girl in my school who had been raped. She died of her injuries.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say, automatically.

  My mother chews her lip. “I didn’t really know what that meant back then. A bunch of boys in the high school had gotten her drunk. She’d been raped with a tire iron.”

  I close my eyes, listening to my mom’s talk. “She might have survived her injuries, but the boys shut her in the trunk of a car overnight. Left her to die. Next day, they dumped her body out in a field.”

  I force my eyes open. I need to look at her. “Did you know her well?”

  “She was my best friend.” My mother’s voice drops to a whisper. “I was supposed to go to the movies with her the night that it happened. But I decided to stay home and read a book, instead.”

  I reach for my mom’s hand. The gesture is awkward with the gloves between us. Helplessness leadens my voice. “I’m sorry.”

  “My father wouldn’t let me see her. No matter how much I howled and yelled. But I sneaked down to see her anyway. To say…goodbye. Something. And I knew that she wasn’t in there anymore. Not in that torn body.” My mom gazes at me. “I wanted to help make sure that this kind of thing doesn’t happen anymore. That people who do this are caught. But…” She glances down at the body. “This is my world. Not yours.”

  I squeeze my mom’s hand. I have no answer for that, other than: “I want to help.”

  “I just wanted you to know what you might be in for.”

  I nod, releasing my mother’s hand. I understand something of tragedy, as a bystander. I know that it sometimes slips past us and strikes others in a completely random fashion. And that we don’t realize it until it strikes close to home. When it takes the ones we love, or when it takes someone who, under the right circumstances, could be us. Whether it’s feeling a shiver at seeing a fatal accident at an intersection that you travel every day, or feeling the cold hand of a relative, it is much the same. Death brushes too close.

  My mom switches the voice recorder back on. I put the jacket into a paper evidence bag, folding it gently. The holes in it are large enough that I can get my fist through. It makes me shudder, but not as much as the story about my mom’s best friend does.

  We return to Amanda. My mother examines the edges of the ruined T-shirt, recording the ragged edges with the camera. She decides to cut the shirt off, avoiding the damaged areas. Her scissors slice evenly through the thin material, and we pull it away. I place it in another evidence bag.

  I turn back to the body, forcing myself to look. I suck in my breath. There are red, gaping holes in her shoulder and her side. Big chunks of meat missing. Bile swells in my throat, but I force it back down. I wonder what could have done this.

  “…no evidence of buckshot or birdshot…” My mom is murmuring over the camera flash. “Possibly wild an
imal predation. But the amount of blood and the margins of the wounds indicate that the assault was accomplished while she was alive.”

  She cuts Amanda’s black bra away, and we work at her jeans with blunt-edged safety scissors. I’m careful not to nick her flesh. Her skin is cold as we try to peel the damp fabric back, reminding me of how difficult it is to remove a wet swimsuit after a day swimming.

  I hope to God that she hasn’t been raped. I really can’t think of a worse crime than that violation. Whatever gouged her skin was gruesome, but an intimate violation could be so much worse. I busy myself with putting Amanda’s panties in a separate bag and labeling everything correctly. Amanda’s nude body lies under the fluorescent light, pale and unmoving under my mother’s examination. I focus on her fingernails, painted purple, and her toenails, which are an acid-green color.

  “No evidence of sexual assault,” my mother announces at last. I’m sure that my sigh of relief is audible on the recorder.

  My mother’s fingers and instruments work over the body. She scrapes Amanda’s fingernails and examines every inch of her body with a magnifying glass. She takes her fingerprints and combs her body for fibers and hair. Amanda’s palms are covered with some kind of dried muck. My mother takes a sample of this for later examination.

  Then we wash the body. I shampoo Amanda’s hair, watching as mud and blood sluice down the drain. In a living person, scrubbing this hard would cause skin to redden. Amanda’s doesn’t. Not when I wash the makeup from her face or scrub the gunk from her hands with a bristle brush. She looks very young without the makeup. Younger than me.

  For a minute, I envision myself on the cold slab of metal instead, and then shake off the morbid vision.

  I wasn’t Amanda. I was at home, safe with my mom….

  With a stolen artifact in my pocket and no clear explanation of how it got there.

  When the water rinses clean, my mother begins the autopsy. I have seen many, many of these over time. When I was small, Garth and I would peer into the keyhole to watch, fascinated as my mother pulled the skin away from bodies to later be replaced by my father and painted by my grandmother. These are the rituals, never changing.

  But there is something about this particular ritual that has gotten deep under my skin. When my mother’s scalpel presses to Amanda’s chest, she glances at me.

  I don’t know what she sees in my face. I think she can see the paleness and the dizziness radiating beneath my flesh. My knuckles are white as I clutch at the edge of the table, blood pounding in my ears.

  She puts the scalpel down with a click that rings against her instrument tray. “I think we should save the internal examination for tomorrow.” She shuts off the recorder, tugs a sheet over the body, then comes to embrace me.

  My limbs feel wooden, and I can’t respond. I’m fixed by the ghostly shape under the sheet, knowing deep in my marrow, as my mother had, years before…

  …that this tragedy could have just as easily been me.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Some people don’t respect the dead in person. Others don’t respect them online.

  News about Amanda’s death spreads quickly. The school administrators even canceled school so students could “come to terms” with Amanda’s passing. Like I could ever come to terms seeing a girl my age gouged out by some…thing.

  I am grateful for the break, though. I’m not ready to face my classmates after the weekend’s bizarre events. This is a small town. Dead bodies don’t just disappear, and classmates don’t turn up dead. Both of which happened at my house in just a few days’ time. My school already thinks I’m the creepy Ghoul Girl for living in a funeral home, and this will certainly seal the deal.

  I go up to my bedroom with my laptop after dinner. I check Facebook and find a mixture of reactions:

  “I heard she was a devil worshipper.” Three likes.

  “I feel so bad for her!” Forty-one likes on that.

  “She was a really good artist.” Twenty-five likes.

  “W00t for a day off school!” Fifty likes.

  “Do you think she was murdered?” Zero likes.

  At least some classmates are posting links to a memorial page for Amanda. I click on the link.

  I’ve seen a lot of these over time. Usually for Dearly Departed under thirty, or those whose families aren’t local. They’re usually put together by family members and include posed portraits, guest books, and virtual flowers. There are pastels and soft lighting and teary stories about how the deceased always had a ready smile.

  This is not the tone of Amanda’s memorial page.

  Her page loads with a black background and a photo of her in the center. This photo—one that someone must have taken with a camera phone—is a little grainy. Amanda’s hair is falling over her face, and she’s laughing. She has a nice, broad white smile. She’s wearing fingerless gloves that come up past her elbow, and she seems to be pushing the camera away.

  At the bottom of the page, in white lettering, it says: AMANDA LYNEE SIMMS. There’s a banner at the bottom that says: ENTER.

  I click on it.

  The next page that loads is full of candid photos of Amanda and her artwork. I scroll through photos of her holding a black cat with a splotch of white on its chest. Her sketches are interspersed, pictures of birds and mermaids and goldfish, rendered in charcoal and watercolor. They all have a somber, stylized cast. I reach to the screen to touch them. They are lovely.

  I realize that this site has been put together by Amanda’s friends. I see the black-haired boy from the bus and a girl with pink hair standing beside her in an outdoor shot with a car in the background. There are no pictures of her relatives.

  I wonder if anyone would do this for me.

  There are notes posted below, in the comments section. There are seven so far. One is from the art teacher, complimenting Amanda’s art and talent as a student. Another is from the boy from the bus and the girl with the pink hair:

  “Amanda, we can’t believe that you’re gone. You were with us, and then you vanished. You brought much joy for the short time you were here.

  Little Bird, we will miss you.”

  A lump rises in my throat, and I close my laptop. I stare at my reflection in the glossy black surface for some time, waiting for my heart to slow. Amanda is gone, never to surf the internet and see her memorial page. I wonder how many people go their whole lives without knowing how much they are loved. Or if the love comes after, in the force of regret.

  The house is silent, wrapped in a blanket of night. I pull socks on my feet. Lothar looks up at me and jumps from my bed, following me as I open the door and slip down the back stair. I avoid the creaky steps, but Lothar’s chain jangles against his neck.

  I stand before the door to the Body Shop, flicking on the light. Lothar waddles behind me, his toenails clicking on the green tile. Amanda’s neatly-labeled evidence bags are lined up on the highest counter, well beyond Lothar’s reach. The fluorescent light buzzes overhead.

  I reach for the door to the refrigerator compartment. I pull the door open with a clang, and flip on the light overhead.

  I know which one is hers, ignoring the others. Amanda’s body lies beneath a sheet, shrouded like a ghost. I walk up beside the cart, uncertain. I want to talk to her, to apologize to her for the how the world went wrong.

  My voice sounds small and young in this close space, and my breath fogs before me. “Amanda, I’m sorry that this happened to you.”

  I reach tentatively for her hand, covered by the sheet. “You should know that your friends have put up a memorial page. It’s really pretty. They miss you. They love you a lot.”

  I stare at the pristine sheet. I don’t think I want to peel it back to talk to her directly. I feel like I need this barrier here, a veil to shroud her world from mine. “You sound like a really amazing person. I wish that I had gotten to know you.”

  The shroud seems to shift a bit over her face. I take a step back, look down at Lothar. He’s n
ot chewing the sheet. He looks up at me and whines.

  An illusion of the light. Our own minds can play tricks on us. It’s part of the fear of the unknown, some atavistic fear of the dead. I know this intellectually. My father has explained it to me many times. But the hair still rises on my arms.

  Gingerly, I reach toward the sheet, pull it away from Amanda’s face.

  Her expression is still and unmoving, her skin pale as it had been on the slab earlier this evening. She is the same as she was. Dead.

  Except a vapor of steam curls from her parted lips.

  I take a step back and stifle a cry.

  Amanda’s lower lip trembles, and I swear that she sucks in a breath.

  Oh my god, she’s breathing.

  I take another step backward and trip over Lothar. He squeals, and I land on my ass on the floor. The shock of the fall races up my spine in a flash of pain, and tears gloss my eyes. My breath quickens, and I feel my heart pounding in an imminent panic attack. But I don’t have panic attacks around dead people…

  I can see Amanda’s face in profile, a wobbly pale shape. As my vision clears, I see her eyelashes twitch.

  Trick of the mind, I remind myself as I force myself to breathe. Dead people don’t blink.

  I crawl forward, pulling myself up on the side of the cart. I’m terrified. Terrified that someone somewhere has made a mistake. And I’m terrified that they haven’t, that this could be real.

  “Amanda?” I croak.

  Her eyelashes flutter open, slowly, like butterfly wings flexing. I hold my breath…

  ...and Lothar lunges up on the cart and lands a huge gobbet of dog slobber on her lips, like Prince Charming.

  “Lothar!” I snarl, dragging the dog away. He squirms in my grip, but my gaze fixes on Amanda.

  She screws up her face, exactly as someone who’s just been kissed by a strange dog would. Her eyes open, and she takes a deep shuddering breath.

  Her eyes. Her eyes aren’t right. I saw in her pictures that her eyes were the color of faded blue jeans. But they’re not blue anymore. They’re black, black as night sky, the pupils swallowing the irises. I don’t know if it’s the sign of a major concussion or brain damage or what, but it’s eerie.