For my sixteenth birthday I got a dead body to play with: Mrs. Soder, the oldest woman in Clayton County, finally died. The corpse was laid out on the stainless steel embalming table, the body bag removed and the body motionless. It had died in the hospital, and they’d shipped it to us in a hospital gown. This made it a lot easier; rather than wrestle with real clothes, or try to get the family’s permission to cut them off, we could just snip a tie here and there and have the hospital gown off in seconds. The embalming would be almost too easy—I wanted to take as much time as possible, so I could really enjoy it.
Mom was in the office, signing some papers with Ron, the coroner, and Margaret wasn’t here yet. Lauren was technically our office assistant, but she still wasn’t speaking to Mom and, naturally, wasn’t here either.
All the more time for me.
I touched its hair, long and white and very fine, like corn-silk. Mrs. Soder had been nearly a hundred years old when she died, and the body curved oddly on the table thanks to the old-age hump in its spine. The first thing you do with a body, naturally, is to make sure it’s dead: it’s definitely going to be dead by the time you’re done with it, so you’d better make sure it’s not alive when you start.
We had a small makeup mirror in one of the drawers, and I held it in front of the body’s nose. A living body, even in a coma, would start to mist it up with its breath. I counted to twenty as I held the mirror, but nothing happened. It wasn’t breathing. I put the mirror back and pulled out a sewing needle, small and sharp but large enough to keep a solid grip on. I poked the body in the fingertip—not deep enough to break the skin, but hard enough to shock the nerves and spark an involuntary reaction. Nothing moved. It was dead.
I pulled over a portable sink, basically just an elevated bucket on wheels, and placed it under the head. Step two in an embalming was to wash the body, and the hair was one of the most important parts because it was one of the most visible. It didn’t look like anyone had washed or brushed this body’s hair in a while, but that was fine with me. More time for me. We had a small rubber hose hooked up to our stationary sink, and I pulled it over and sprayed it just enough to wet the hair. We didn’t have a special shampoo for corpses, just a bottle of the same stuff we used upstairs, and I squeezed a bit onto the upper side of the head, near the forehead. Then I started to brush it through.
“Hey John,” said Mom, bustling into the room in green medical scrubs. She had on her flustered face—eyes slightly wide, mouth slightly open, teeth clamped together—but she was moving loosely, almost casually. Sometimes I think she enjoyed being flustered, and acted like it even when she was relaxed. “Sorry to leave you alone so long; Ron had some kind of new state form I’d never seen before.”
“That’s okay,” I said.
Mom paused, turned, and looked at me. “Are you okay?”
“Sure,” I said. “I’m just washing its hair.”
“Her hair,” said Mom, turning back to the counter.
“Her hair,” I repeated. “Sorry.”
I always called corpses “it,” because . . . well, obviously. They’re dead. But apparently that kind of thing really bothered normal humans. It was just so hard for me to remember.
“Where’s Margaret?” I asked.
“I told her not to bother,” said Mom. “This is an easy one—you and I can do it without her, and she can take care of all the service planning with the family.”
“Don’t you usually do that?”
“Maybe I just want to spend some time with my son,” she said, scowling in what I had come to learn was a humorous way. “You ever think of that?”
I looked at her earnestly. “My favorite part of family togetherness is when we aspirate body cavities. What’s yours?”
“My favorite part is when you don’t talk like a smart aleck,” she said, and pulled a bottle of Dis-Spray down from a shelf. “Check for cradle cap. She was in the hospital nearly two weeks, and goodness knows if they washed her hair at all.”
I looked at its head—her head—and parted the hair to peer in at the scalp.
“There’s some kind of muck in there.”
“Cradle cap,” said Mom. “It’s oil and dead skin cells, and it’s a bear to get off. Try this.” She stepped over and squirted the area with Dis-Spray. “That should eat through it. Just keep brushing.”
I pressed a little harder with the brush, scraping gently at the scum on her scalp. After a few minutes the Dis-Spray started to break it down, and I brushed it out. When I was content that the hair was mostly clean I sprayed it again with water, soaking it more thoroughly this time, and brushing it even more to help rinse it all clean.
I timed my brushes to the beat of my own heart, one stroke per beat. Both were slow and measured; calm for the first time in weeks. Embalming was a job, like any other, but the people who did it for a living each had their own way of going about it. For my dad it had been a form of respect, a way to honor the lives of those who had passed on. For my mom it was service—she got to spend hours helping someone who was truly helpless, and even more time with the family helping to arrange the funeral and the burial and the services that went with each. For both of my parents embalming was a good thing—an almost reverent thing. It was their shared sense of deference for the dead that had brought them together in the first place.
For me, embalming was a form of meditation; it brought a sense of peace that I had never found in any other aspect of my life. I loved the stillness of it, the quietness. The bodies never moved or yelled; they never fought or left. The dead simply lay there, at peace with the world, and let me do whatever I needed to do. I was in control of myself.
I was in control of them.
While I brushed the hair, Mom cut away the hospital gown and replaced it with a towel for modesty. She washed the limbs and body, and when I finished the hair I pulled out a razor. We shaved the face of every corpse, no matter the age or gender, because even women and children had a bit of peach fuzz here and there. I massaged a dab of shaving gel into the cheeks and upper lip, and gently slid the razor across the skin.
A few minutes later I set the razor down. “I’m done shaving,” I said. “Are we ready to set its features?”
“Her features,” said Mom.
“Her features,” I repeated.
“We go through this every time, John,” she said. “You have to think of them as people, not objects. You of all people should recognize how important that is.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, putting away the shaving things.
“Look at me, John,” she said. I turned to look at her. “I’m not kidding about this.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Her. Let’s set her features.”
“Don’t slip up again,” she said, and I nodded.
She had died so recently that her body was still stiff from rigor mortis, and before we could arrange her face we had to massage her body back into mobility. Rigor mortis was caused by a natural buildup of calcium in the muscles; living bodies used that calcium for various things, but in dead bodies it just built up and built up until the muscles grew rigid. In a day or so she’d be loose again from decay, but for now we had to knead the calcium out by hand, stroking and pressing and rubbing the flesh until it was soft and pliable.
Once we could work with her again we started on her features: positioning her head, closing her mouth, and so on. We put tufts of cotton under the eyelids to keep them from looking sunken, and then sealed them closed with cream. We embedded two small hooks in her gums, one behind her upper lip and one on her jaw, and then cinched the mouth closed with a small black string. It was important to place the hooks carefully, and to tie the string just right: too loose and the mouth would flop open; too tight and the nose would look pinched and unnatural. The last thing a family wanted to see at a viewing was their dead grandmother sneering at them from her coffin.
Once the features were set we started the first internal phase of the process, called arterial embalming. While Mom gathered the proper chemicals and mixed them in the pump, I used a scalpel to cut a small hole near the body’s collarbone, then used a blunt hook to fish out a pair of slick purple blood vessels. Each was about as wide as a finger, and I cut them open carefully to avoid slicing all the way through. The whole process was very bloodless, since there was no beating heart to provide pressure and pump the blood out. I attached each vessel—one artery and one vein—to a metal tube, then connected the arterial tube to the pump when Mom wheeled it over. The tube in the vein connected to a hose, which we snaked down to a drain in the floor.
Mom turned on the pump and it went to work, pumping in a cocktail of detergents and preservatives and perfumes and dyes, and forcing as much of the old blood as possible down the drain. I looked up at the ventilator fan as it churned steadily overhead.
“I hope the fan doesn’t give out on us,” I said. Mom laughed. It was an old joke—our old ventilator was so bad, and the embalming chemicals were so toxic, that we used to have to step outside while the pump worked. The fan never actually gave out, but Margaret said the same thing every time. After all the extra business we’d had over the winter, though, Mom and Margaret had invested some of their profits in a new ventilation system. The new fan was high-tech and reliable, but we still had to make the same comment. It was practically a ritual.
Cavity embalming has the same general purpose as arterial embalming: you take the old fluids out and put new fluids in, to kill bacteria and halt decomposition long enough for a viewing and a funeral. But whereas arterial embalming used the body’s natural circulatory system to make the job easy, cavity embalming involved a lot of individual organs and unconnected spaces that had to be dealt with one by one. We accomplished this with a tool called a trocar—basically a long, bladed nozzle attached to a vacuum. We used the trocar to puncture a body and suck out the gunk, a process called “aspiration,” and then once we’d sucked everything out we cleaned the trocar and attached it to a different tube, so it could drizzle in another chemical cocktail similar to the one we put in the arteries.
A trocar, overall, was a very handy tool. I’d even used one to kill Mr. Crowley.
I hooked up the vacuum hose while Mom added a second modesty towel, rearranging them both to expose the body’s abdomen. I put my hand on her stomach, feeling the rough, wrinkled skin, and probed for the right place to insert the trocar. The ideal spot is above the navel, a few inches up and to the right. I braced the skin with my fingers spread, placed the tip of the trocar in the right place, and drove it in—just a little at first, enough to prick the skin and anchor the blade, then deeper into the abdomen, shoving hard to punch through one layer of muscle, then another. A small bloom of red bubbled out of the hole, then sank back in as I thumbed the button and activated the suction. The vacuum wasn’t strong enough to suck up an organ, but it would suck out fluids, gasses, and even bits of food in the stomach and intestines. I probed around in the body, listening to the gurgle as the cavity contents trickled up through the hose.
This was good. This was how life was supposed to be: simple, peaceful people doing the things that made them happy. The troubles of the last few weeks seemed to melt away, and I was calm. There was a sense of rightness to the world that made me smile for no reason at all.
I could do this; I really could. Not just the embalming, but life—I felt, in that moment, that I had a handle on it. That I could control it. Even Mr. Monster seemed to fade, until he was so small I almost forgot about him. What had I been so worried about? I was strong, I was in charge of my own mind, and nothing bad was going to happen. I wasn’t a threat to anyone.
I thought again about Brooke, and about what Max had said. Maybe he was right—maybe it was time to ask her out. I liked her, and she apparently liked me, so what was the problem? I’d spent years training myself to look and act completely normal. And normal teenagers went on dates. In a way I owed it to myself to go on a date.
I adjusted my hand on the stomach of the corpse, moving the sharp trocar carefully and puncturing another organ. Yes, I would ask Brooke on a date.
In a way, I owed it to her.
_____
All night I tried to come up with a plan, and all day at school I wracked my brain for ideas. I had to move carefully, saying the right words at the right time; I decided it was best to wait a few days and come up with something perfect. I am not, as you may have noticed, an impetuous person.
Brooke was silent on the way home from school, which was normally fine, but today it worried me. Was she sad? Was she angry? I checked my blind spot on the next street, stealing a glance at her as I did. The sun lit up her hair like a halo of white gold. What would I do just to touch that hair? The thought terrified me.
A few blocks before our street she spoke up suddenly.
“Do you think the killer’s back?” she asked.
“You mean because of the body?” I asked. “I . . . well . . . It doesn’t seem like the same killer at all, I mean, the victim is different, the methods are different; you know what they say on the news. It’s probably just a random murder.”
Brooke tapped her finger on the window, softly. “But what if it is the same guy?” She tapped again. “What would you do?”
“I think I’d. . . . Well, if he was just back, in general terms, I don’t know that I’d do much of anything. Not anything different, I mean—just live my life as normal.”
“And if he came back here?”
We turned another corner and I glanced at her again, catching a quick look at her face—thin and delicate, eyes intense, mouth closed and thin. She was looking right at me, but what was she thinking? There was some kind of emotion behind those eyes, but what was it? She was a cipher to me. How could I explain what I was thinking if I wasn’t even sure how she was perceiving it?
The Crowley’s house came into view ahead, lonely and ominous at the end of the street. All the memories came flooding back—a night of darkness and violence, and of victory. “If the Clayton Killer came back here,” I said, “and he was attacking someone I knew, then I’d fight back.” I was being more honest than I usually allowed myself to be. Why? I glanced at Brooke’s face again, involuntarily, and saw her staring back earnestly. She was listening. It was intoxicating. “If it came down to him or us, to kill or be killed, then I’d kill him. If it would save somebody, I’d kill him.”
“Huh,” said Brooke again.
I pulled up in front of Brooke’s house—it was only two doors away from mine, but I never wanted to make her walk all the way back when it was just as easy for me to let her out here. I wanted more time, but I didn’t know how to ask for it.
Brooke didn’t move. What was she thinking about me? About what I’d said? I let the tension grow until I got too nervous—just a couple of seconds, really, and then turned toward her. I kept my eyes on her door handle, avoiding her face and body.
“It’s so weird,” she said, as if prompted by my look. “You live in a small town like this and you think you’re so safe, and then something like that happens right here, right on our own street. Like a horror movie come to life. I was terrified when I found out what happened, but I was a hundred, two hundred feet away. You were right in the middle of it.” She paused, and I stared silently at her door. “You never know how you’ll react to something like that until it happens,” she said. “I guess I just . . . feel safer, knowing that people—that you—are ready to do what you have to do. To do the right thing. You know?”
I nodded slowly. “Yeah.” This was not what I’d expected.
“Does that make any sense?” she asked. I could tell that she was staring right at me, so I pushed my rule a bit and turned my eyes to meet hers. She was so beautiful.
“Yeah,” I said again. “It makes perfect sense.”
“Anyway,” she said. “Thanks again for the ride.” She unlatched her seatbelt and pushed open the door, but before she could step out I spoke up to stop her. It was now or never.
“Hey,” I said, “are you going to the Bonfire?”
The Bonfire was a big party they held every year at the lake, on the last day of school. Only sophomores, juniors, and seniors were invited, and here I was, asking Brooke to go with me. I was asking her on a date.
“I was thinking about it,” she said, smiling. “It sounds like a lot of fun. Are you going?”
“I think so,” I said. I paused. This was it. “Do you wanna go together?”
“Sure,” she said, smiling even wider. “I’ve been hearing about the Bonfire since kindergarten, you know? I can’t wait to see what it’s really like.”
“Cool,” I said. Was I supposed to say anything else?”
“Cool,” she said. We sat there a minute, unsure what to do. “Awesome,” she said, laughing and getting out of the car. “I’ll see you then.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’ll see you then.”