“Your prescription is ready,” says an automated voice.
Hannah hangs up.
An hour later, the landline rings again: “Your prescription is ready.”
She presses the only number on the menu that promises a human voice.
“Your prescription is ready,” the pharmacist tells her after a ten-minute wait.
“For what?”
“Morphine.”
“I no longer need it,” Hannah says. “It’s too late.”
“You’ll need to come in to sign a form saying you never picked it up. It’s a Schedule II narcotic.”
“My husband died twenty-four hours ago, and I must appear in person with a photo ID to stop the harassing calls.”
“I’m sorry for your loss.”
After a harrowing drive of her own making, she strides past the candies, the shampoos, the pet food, to the rear of the store, where four people ahead of her are waiting for the pharmacist. Shouldn’t there be a separate line for the bereaved? Next to the register is the rack of tabloids. She drinks in the headlines, bracing herself for a mention of the trial, or, worse, the stalkarazzi’s photograph of her screaming, “ENOUGH!” Or, worse still, a telephoto close-up, taken from the angle of the woods behind her house, of her killing her husband.
A new face, as pretty as Stephana’s, now occupies the upper right-hand corner of OK! MURDER BY TEXT, the headline reads. “IT’S NOW OR NEVER,” MICHELLE CARTER TEXTED HER SUICIDAL BOYFRIEND WHEN HE FLINCHED BEFORE TAKING HIS LIFE.
We’re yesterday’s news, Hannah tells her husband. She isn’t talking to herself. Just because he is no longer here doesn’t mean that their marriage has ended. “Till death do you part” is a suggestion, not an edict.
She taps her foot, scratches her arm, glances around. A man is buying hearing aid batteries, a woman is reading a vitamin label. Hannah’s anonymity has been returned. No one is watching her.
Including her husband.
Grief doesn’t feel as if a rug has been pulled out from under her. There is no rug. There is no floor on which to lay a rug. There is no ground on which to build a floor to lay a rug.
Lenny calls.
“Did he leave directives?” he asks when she tells him that she hasn’t made any funeral arrangements.
Hannah vaguely remembers a file her husband once showed her, titled “Dementia or death.” She opens the cabinet in her husband’s study. The file contains all his passwords, copies of their wills, both monetary and living, a list of their bank accounts, his frequent flyer numbers, and a letter from the Anatomical Board of the State of Florida.
Dear Mr. Richler,
We have received one copy of the properly executed form on which you dedicated your body to the Anatomical Board of the State of Florida for use in medical education.
Please accept this letter as a very small demonstration of our gratitude and respect for your enormous generosity. You are to be commended for your broad-minded decision. It is our sincere hope, as we know it is yours, that such acts will contribute to the advancement of medical knowledge and thereby improve the quality of life for others.
The letter is dated twelve years ago, when her husband first started teaching at the university, before he knew about the anatomy professor.
“He willed his body to science,” she tells Lenny, then asks him, as her lawyer, to call the university and get her husband’s body transferred to another medical school.
She doesn’t explain her request. Lenny already knows about the anatomy professor.
He is quiet long enough for her to think the call was dropped.
“It’s not your decision to make,” Lenny says. “Last wish means exactly that, the very last hope someone had.”
If there is still hope.
A dissection isn’t only about how someone died, Graham had told her, it’s about how someone lived. Her husband, who had recycled rubber bands and tin foil, wanted his body not to be wasted.
He will lie prone, only his back exposed, supposedly the least personal part of the body, but Hannah was skeptical when Graham first told her that, the night he demonstrated on her. Maybe the back is impersonal to a stranger, but Hannah knows her husband’s back as intimately as she knows her own hand, the most personal part of the body, if she is to believe Graham.
Next, Graham, or one of his students, will roll her husband supine and make a series of lateral incisions, lifting off the rib cage, including the deformed rib. Graham will then explain to his students that the rib was deformed by a childhood case of rickets.
At some point, Graham will reach into her husband’s chest, into the mediastinum, to unleash the veins and aortas from the posterior sac, and hold up the organ to demonstrate to the students how her husband’s heart once beat.
She will never let those hands touch her again.