by Riley Mason
I had found myself whispering that I was sorry, my voice never left my lips, my mask hid the framing of the words. It’d been more for me than for her. I had needed her to know, even if she had no way to know, that I was remorseful, I felt guilty for doing what was asked of me. That I had understood losing someone just as much as she did, if not more. If not slightly worse, knowing what a death in the family could do to change the dynamic of a person. To alter who we are as people. I had seen it firsthand, I'd learned from its mistakes, I'd struggled from its aftershock.
It was something that never quite left once it got in there. It lingered, and it festered, it was persistent despite attention to detail in removing it, its survival instinct was second to none because it didn't know how to die, it also didn't know how to fail.
CHAPTER 4
I had done my best to avoid this at all cost. Knowing full well it was going to get to me. Knowing I wasn’t going to be able to lock back those emotions once they got going, whether there was someone in the room with me or not.
There were some things, some certain aspects of one’s self that just had no turn-off valve. There was no way to break certain things in the body when suddenly deciding they were no longer needed.
There were support groups for us. People who worked with death as often as we did, there were more than enough people who worried about our mental condition, there were plenty of people just as concerned with those left alive as those who had passed on. What we were doing to ourselves day in and day out. There was a common enough understanding that we had turned our brains to some channel that respected this as science rather than seeing a cadaver as what it was.
The former vessel of a human life laying there on a table. Waiting patiently for us to carve it up, to provide files with information, to provide families with the news. To saw through a human vessel for answers that had to be left long after we were gone ourselves was important, vital to the grieving process, or so they told us.
I had tried to forget it, I’d tried to drink and drown it out of me, especially when it was so fresh and raw inside of me that night when that day had finally ended.
I wanted it gone but I knew it had some place in me. That this was what I wanted for my life and if that was the case, I had to take what came with it for better or for worse. It was just hard to realize the worse was so much more efficient in showing up than the better was.
CHAPTER 5
I had debated doing this all morning from the time I walked in with my morning coffee, poring over the agenda for the day. Sometimes there were some surprises that rolled in the middle of the day, insistent at times to alter a schedule or violate a mood.
Sometimes, just sometimes, there was a surplus from law enforcement, and they needed to outsource some of their ME work for us to handle, providing local hospitals with bodies and rules, rules which we had to follow, timelines we had to adhere to at all costs or else we might stifle an ongoing investigation.
The day had finally come when I had to encounter something I had shied away from for most of my career. Up until now, I'd never done it, I'd never had a reason. I'd always made myself unavailable, absent at a time when a moment like this called. It used to be for general reasons. It had grown over the years to something more intimately personal. Something I couldn't quite face in a public setting, something I could barely handle in a private setting.
I knew I should be able to handle it. There were more than enough reasons to think I could. I was no longer the rookie I was when this career of mine began. I had seen horrific things that I’d been able to turn my imagination off to. That had left my mind the second I walked outside the building, and I’d forgotten all the finer details until I walked back in the next morning and had to recall them.
It was like my mind had found a way to compartmentalize these things for me and keep them out of reach of the parts of me that were tied directly into my emotions, those wires that had direct access to the muscle in my chest.
The ones that got too close to my heart were simply off limits. This one, however, I felt defied all those rules I’d put in place to make sure I didn’t completely lose it.
Even now as I looked at the agenda for the day seeing this viewing had to happen. It’s not that I was disgusted with myself, but I was at the same time.
I’d established myself as more of a professional these past five years and something like this only made me feel like more of a rookie who’d never had the cards to cut it when it mattered. That I wasn’t a real doctor but instead just some woman who was trying her hardest to pretend to be one because I thought I might matter to someone.
I had done autopsies before, especially on kids. This wasn’t the first time someone had to go under the knife. I just knew what was going to be on the other side of the fence. It wasn’t going to be the parents, for someone this young, there were going to be a lot more people who were directly involved in the life of the person under that sheet, waiting to be exposed to their family.
The people who had yet to drift apart because years of adulthood had wedged itself between them when families grow thin because time begins its attack on all of them.
There was a whole reality which belonged to this baby that had started to dissolve, but then hardened and pulled everyone back together when the sickness in him had taken over. This was harder because the efforts of the hospital had already made it clear to the immediate family that the child hadn’t survived. That while an autopsy still needed to be conducted, the result was there and unchanged. They already knew the worst of it, it wasn’t going to be a quick reaction, that breaking I had to witness. They were already broken. I was just there to observe.
I just didn’t want to deal with this, I don’t think there was any day this was customary to have to endure. It went against what I knew to be my own professional posture to want to run out on this, but I did. I wanted to get as far away from here as I could, but I knew too at the same time, I had no choice.
CHAPTER 6
I stood there in the bathroom, rinsing my face with lukewarm tap water to try and rinse out everything that was backed up in my head—using the water to try and clear my thoughts, balance my anxiety.
I took a moment to slide the cooled water over my skin, imagining that I was washing away all the damage I carried with me, all the baggage that had clung to me over the years. Hoping I could make this process easier on myself.
My eyes were raw, I could see them in the mirror as water slid down my face. Looking at the woman there, studying her reflection, because while I recognized her, at times, it’s like I didn’t know her.
I looked at her dark hair, tied back as it always was when I was in the lab. Thin eyes, a royal blue against skin that was fair but not quite transparent like it could be on someone hidden from the sun. I like the way I look, I just don’t appreciate how I feel at the moment—broken and pressured, a failure at what I do.
I was having a hard time coping with what this was. I knew it was something that should fall so simply under my control. That I had the expertise and the knowledge to know how to overcome something like this.
CHAPTER 7
Sooner or later, I knew I was going to have to confront this, whether I wanted to or not. Death was an inevitability and sooner or later, it was going to strike someone below the age of what my expectation was. Someone who wasn't a teenager, someone who wasn't an adult.
It was easy when it was elder people. Knowing their time had come. That they had led a full and meaningful life, at least some of them. But, by all rights, their time had concluded, it was understandable when they passed.
To have someone taken so young, I always felt it was a way of robbing something so innocent. It was the one place my scientific background and my personal life usually butted heads with one another. I didn't feel youth should know pain like that so young in life. I also didn’t want to have to deliver the evidence of death to the waiting family. I didn’t want to officiate the loss of their child, to make it r
eal, to kill their love.
I was deep into my own thoughts when I heard the alarm begin to blare overhead. It wasn’t like the ones in the movies—that blare at full volume letting you know there was an incoming missile and we all needed to duck and cover in some shelter, but it was loud enough that you heard it. There was no ignoring it.
CHAPTER 8
I got up and went to the main entrance. That sound only blared through my depths for one reason and one reason only. It warned the freight elevator was coming in with a spill-off body on loan from the police department.
For whatever reason, the Medical Examiner, the officially licensed ones at least, had run aground and were too backed up with their own workload and had decided this case had to be put on someone else.
I walked through the dark halls, over the institutional tile, the smell of sterility from all the disinfectants floating in the air sliding into me, familiar smells, but ones I’d learned to adapt and transfix to the sight of death, tying them into perpetual matrimony with one another.
My hands were plunged into my lab coat pocket, I could see the two technician Coroners wheeling the cradle out of the freight elevator and toward the examination room.
“Aly, how are you?” one of them said to me. He was a tall guy with tattoos all over the place, especially on his hands and neck—mostly skulls and roses.
He held out his hand and I shook it cordially the way that it’s always done, professionally. He smiled at me, I didn’t smile back, it never felt right exchanging certain manners over a corpse, instead, my attention was right where it should be, on the cadaver they just brought for me.
I looked the body up and down. A glaze fell over my eyes that blocked out one of nature’s most difficult events and to see nothing more than a science piece that was prepared and waiting for whatever examination I put it to. I was already thinking about the procedure the body was going to have to undergo.
Eventually, I looked back at him. A slim smile one of professional courtesy slid across my face. Nothing too fancy, nothing at all welcoming. There was no feeling behind it, it had absolutely no emotional support to stand on. I knew he didn’t care, and I knew he’d take what he could get.
He kept a smile plastered on his face while he handed me the document I needed to sign to authorize I was receiving the body. He would hand the paperwork back to his superiors signed and sealed so if there was a mess up he could place the blame on someone else.
I look for a second at the other man with him. Much smaller, covered in glasses and acne, old, most of it scarred into the skin of his cheeks, and a lot slimmer.
“Thank you,” I said to each of them, my tone dry, my voice arid, I never expect any sort of cheer to accompany an exchange like this. Perhaps it was normal for everyone else but for me it has always been such a baron encounter, empty and dry.
CHAPTER 9
I knew I should be prepping for the family, but at the same time I wanted to distract myself as much as I physically could from what that was going to be like.
I diverted. It seemed like the right thing to do at the moment, but I didn’t forget. I knew full well that sooner or later I was going to have to wander into that room and stand there. A vessel of scientific obedience while I waited for those tears to fall and pray to God I didn't hear the sound of them hitting the ground. I barely trusted my own will power, I trusted my own emotions, especially with my history, even less.
I already could feel the stutter in my defense systems. That lockdown I’d gotten so good at had already pointed out to me the chinks in the armor and I knew full well this was going to run right through them and drag all of that out of me.
I’m no more protected than I was on that first night I’d had to stand there and endure what was placed in front of me. Alone and missing the parts that were supposed to keep me preserved.
Pushing the gurney through the empty corridor, I wheeled the body into the lab, pulled up the computer system, and waited for the screens to come to life killing off the screen savers.
When they were up and running I got up and put on the glasses and the mask, the same ones I was going to have to wear into that room as the clock continued to roll toward the time I knew the family was going to be there. Coming downstairs to the basement to see what was left of their son before he was handed off to the funeral parlor for the after-life care they’d bought and paid for.
I looked down at the woman, at this point I wanted anything that would sidetrack me. Take me out of the mix of whatever my mind was doing and whatever tricks it wanted to play. I was sure it had a few good-ones in store for me, but I wouldn’t engage. Now was not the time for that.
I needed to put a stop to it because I knew it was coming, I didn't want to have to dwell on it in the meantime, either. There was enough time to have to suffer and count seconds, I didn't want this to be one of those moments. As I inched closer, that would change, it had to, I knew myself, it would envelop me, drive me insane if I let it. The calmer I could stay now, the more occupied I could keep myself, the better for my sanity, the better chance I had to hold on when I had to do this. When I had to expose myself to something I wasn’t sure I was quite ready for regardless of my preparation, irrelevant of my mind-state.
The woman tucked into this black body-bag reminded me that there was a piece of professional maturity still inside of me, a piece of me I should cherish.
CHAPTER 10
I looked down at her and I felt nothing, absolutely nothing.
There was no turning in my stomach. No knot I had to try and unwind to get my blood and digestion back to typical speeds and maneuvers. There was nothing but science and education—that flat look that covered my face, even and unchanging. There was decisiveness in me, of what was expected of me in a time like this when I had to put my best foot forward. Knowing I had to get this information back to the NYPD, knowing I had to work on it now, knowing I wanted to forget about the clock until I had no choice but to look at it.
I stared down at her, I did this typically to start. There were no instruments in my initial evaluation. I felt they stifled the situation and took the humanity out of it.
Despite how much I was running from humanity in one aspect of my job, I was forcibly injecting it into another part of the procedure. I wanted to see the victim as it was, study the body with my own eyes, in what natural state I could identify. I wanted to see what I could take in and then back it up with scientific equipment that could confirm whatever I’d seen or whatever hypothesis I formed.
I always tried to tie something to the body. To find some emotional breakwater to walk through and get my feet wet with. To understand the body because to do that leads to a better understanding of what had happened. I needed to understand them better than the instruments could decipher, I needed to know them to know how they may have died.
Personalities couldn’t be identified through measurements let alone in any conventional way post-mortem, old scars couldn’t be outlined in the same way.
I needed to know her because I needed to rip her open and to do that, I needed to have a certain amount of care that I dragged with me into the procedure. I didn't want to just shred her up and not think twice about it.
Her hair was black and sheened. It still had some shimmer to it, catching the glow of the fluorescent lights lining the ceiling above me. I skimmed through the document that came along with her. The few words inscribed into a report detailed where and when they had found her and the condition of the body, what was moved and what changed.
The document said they found her in a ditch, somewhere over on Eighth Avenue. That’s funny and doesn’t make a great deal of sense because there wasn’t a bit of dirt on her that I could see. There was no grit, no scent, not a single thing to indicate she was on the street at any time whatsoever.
CHAPTER 11
I looked down at her, studying the body lying there, wanting to know all I could, curious at what I was brought. Even more—uncertain why they had let it out
of their possession.
I studied her, scanning the parts of her that I could, examining her face, her hair. Snapping a glove on, I tangled her hair into my fingers and bent down and took in its scent. It smelled fresh. I couldn't smell dirt anywhere on her.
The girl was a gorgeous one, innocent, and young. Despite the circumstances of them finding her, she was too young to be dead, too young to be laying here on the table, waiting for a bone saw the cut through her ribcage, waiting for someone like me to examine her.
I tried to guess her age, thinking she couldn't be more than a few years younger than I was, if that. Her face wasn't aged, there were no wrinkles on her skin, no blemishes, no birthmarks. Her eyes had no bags under them, her skin was flawless and despite the time which had come and gone since they’d brought her in, rigor mortis hadn't set in. I could see it by her hands, her fingers still lay limp at her side like she was in a deep sleep rather than actually gone.
For a second, I eyed her, curious to know if she was gone. I took my fingers and applied them to her neck, right under her jaw, and pressed in. Waiting to feel that small pressure push my fingers back, vibrating from the pulse of her heart, but when I did, waiting a few seconds, I felt nothing.
The next thing I started to do was feel around her forehead, running my fingers through her hair. Her eyes were opened, that wasn’t something that I usually saw. At least not like this.
Her eyes were almost a pure, blinding white. That was rare to see. I typically saw eyes clouded with either grey or red depending on the official cause of death. With this girl being found in a ditch, the story could be anything, the body was going to be the thing that helped define what I was looking for, the source for the story the NYPD was looking for.