After the funeral Aunt Irene drives us home.
The dense cloud cover hides the stars. The smell of rain is in the air, more of it coming. Sandbags line the river but why we’re still fighting the water I don’t understand. We should abandon the city and move to higher ground: Cumbria, Northumberland, the Scottish islands. Except there won’t be enough room, will there? Not for everyone.
Inside the house, Aunt Irene drops her keys in the bowl on the table and pours herself a glass of water from the tap. Doesn’t drink it, just brings it to her lips, breathes out and places it carefully back on the counter. Mom fishes a bottle of pills out of the top cupboard where she keeps the medication. Then she climbs the stairs to her room.
“Sophie…” begins Aunt Irene. Like Dad. Like everyone. I’m getting sick of my own name.
“You don’t have to say anything to me.” I take off my dress shoes. The hardwood floor is cold against my bare feet. A moment later the heater boils to life, steam banging in the pipes. “I don’t want to talk. I just want to sleep. Please.”
She stares at me, exhaustion carving into her face. “Okay.” She grazes my shoulder with her hand as she passes. “I’ll be in my office. Whistle if you need me. Promise?” She holds my gaze until I do.
Upstairs I run a bath for myself. The extractor fan is broken so Aunt Irene has left the window open a crack. Still, black mould edges the cracks between the tiles. It’s so chilly in here that steam rises in a cloud from the tub, and gooseflesh spreads all over my arms and legs. I unzip my black dress and it pools at my feet.
Waiting for the tub to fill, I check my phone. Forty-three notifications. A link to a memorial page someone put up online. Dad? The words are cliché, filled with stock phrases. The brief gift of time Kira was given on this earth, how she touched the lives of her family. Markeys Ellison whom I kissed in ninth grade has posted a response: my condolencs on ur loss. His profile picture: tousled hair and a crooked smile, a Titans basketball uniform glued to his lanky, muscular frame. Our kiss feels like ages ago, a different lifetime.
I thumb off the phone and step gingerly into the water. Hot enough to scald me. Good, good. That’s how I want it.
I stare at my hands until they look utterly alien—thin blue veins, skin lined at the knuckles, mounds of bone. I remember holding Kira hours after she was born. Her hands were so tiny, her crescent moon fingernails. She gripped my finger and I laughed at the look on her face. That monkey O of surprise her lips made. When she took her first steps a year later, she walked from Mom straight into my arms.
The water is too hot but I don’t care. I like how each of my nerves feels bright and electric whenever I shift. The heat creeps up my neck, touches the tip of my ears. I could go lower, lower. How long can I hold my breath? Thirty seconds? Forty? Forty-five? And then what? For a moment it’s tempting. I drift, drowsy from the heat until suddenly I’ve had enough. I tug on the chain and the bath gurgles as it drains out.
My phone dings with another notification and I wish that I’d turned the stupid thing off. Still, naked in the tub and half-boiled, I can’t resist plucking it off the mat and reading what it says:
Jayhey04: just heard oh god
A long pause. I wipe the condensation from the screen.
FeeFeesFeed: yeah
Jayhey04: u wanna talk?
A veil of steam shimmers above my arms and I stagger, almost slipping, to my feet. I wrap myself in a large burgundy towel and sit down on the closed lid of the toilet, staring at the screen.
Jayhey04: soff? U okay?
Jayhey04: promised myself I wldn’t ask that
Jayhey04: but still
Jayhey04: u there?
FeeFeesFeed: yeah
Jayhey04: mom says u should talk
At the top of the feed is the link she sent me, a tiny thumbnail of Liam Barrett’s body. The starburst of light flashing off the cold metal table.
FeeFeesFeed: maybe later ok
Jayhey04: u sure?
FeeFeesFeed: yeah im with my family right now
Jayhey04: ok
Jayhey04: luv and hugs
Jayhey04: talk soon
I go to turn off the phone but my thumb hovers where it is. I click on the link and the video box pops up on my screen but an error appears in the box: Sorry, this video does not exist. A quick search shows a bunch of proxy links but each one of those has the same error message when I try to follow it.
A stab of anger dulls when I think, how would I feel if it were Kira?
I wrap the towel around me tightly and head to my bedroom, slip into my flannel pyjamas, climb up the ladder and beneath the sheets. Then, after a moment, I straighten up and open my tablet. I log into one of the forums Jaina showed me. I’ve never seen reports of anything like this in the mainstream news before now—but if it’s true there has to be more out there.
There are hundreds more posts than the last time I looked, mostly from usernames I don’t recognize. All of the new threads are about Liam Barrett. I open one at random. The first couple of comments are all about whether the video is real or not. A comment from “corrosive-transfer” says if you look at the twelve-second mark you can clearly see a disruption in the feed, which means it was doctored. A flood of messages afterward tear this theory apart.
No one can agree on what’s happening, what it might mean.
Someone claiming to be a scientist working for the CDC in Atlanta thinks the Lazarus effect theory might be right and the whole thing is being blown out of proportion. It isn’t a sign of something else, a spark of life.
“MumbaiBB” says that Liam Barrett isn’t the first. He’s seen others, seen their bodies begin to move. I trawl through his user profile to track some of his other posts and find a couple about cremation pyres in a place named Varanasi on the banks of the Ganges. People are dying there, loads of them. The pyres are running every day but they can’t keep up with the demand so people have begun to dump children’s bodies into the river at night. They’ve washed up in the shallows downriver. He has pictures. Bodies tangled together with brightly coloured sheets, red, magenta, orange and indigo. There are over a hundred of these, he writes. It is worse now that the Ganges has shifted its course. Sometimes they begin to shake and thrash around. No body will touch them, not even to dispose of them. In another browser I try to find more references to what’s happening in India but I can’t. The earliest mention is in a long-form article in National Geographic from several years ago but all it says is that the practice of cremating the dead beside the Ganges is thousands of years old, and is believed to bring the spirits of the departed closer to some sort of release. The Hindu attitude to death is not one of loss, it says. The body is shed just as one might throw away clothes that are too worn-out to wear.
I scrub at my eyes. A thought is growing in my head like an invasive weed. If I pay attention to it then I think I might just go crazy. So I read on instead, jotting down usernames, odd comments, in the spiral notebook Aunt Irene bought for my research. It’s comforting to know the words won’t vanish when there’s a power outage.
Another thread follows an interview with Liam Barrett’s father. He is fighting the court-mandated cremation order. He wants his son’s body to be released to him. What’s happening now is a miracle, he told a local reporter, it’s just that nobody can seem to see it. Christian groups are beginning to lobby on his behalf.
We dont know everything. how can we trust what they’re telling us? writes “JoshuaReturns” and below that is a large chunk of Bible verse: Mark 16 says as they entered the tomb they saw a man dressed in a white robe and they were alarmed. don’t be alarmed he said he has risen! He is not here. See the place where they laid him. But go tell his disciples he is going ahead of you into Galilee. you’ll see him just as he told you.
From there the chain of messages spins off into even stranger fantasies of locusts and plagues, the burning of the unbelievers. They are grasping after something, all of them. The hope of the dead rising, life returning.
I can hear Aunt Irene moving restlessly in her office downstairs. Her chair scraping along the floor, her desk drawer clicking shut. A moment later there’s a soft rapping on my door before it opens a crack. “Sophie? I saw your light on.”
“I’m okay.” My voice is hoarse. I hate the way it sounds.
“Can I get you a glass of water?” She comes closer. I see that she’s red-eyed just as I am. She forces a smile. “It was a hard day.”
“Yeah.”
She sees the notebook in my hand. “You’re not trying to work, are you?”
“I’m just…” I stare at the notes I’ve written, a collection of thoughts and feelings with no direction. It reminds me of an E. E. Cummings poem I read last year for a project on Buffalo Bill:
and what i want to know is
how do you like your blueeyed boy
Mister Death
“I’m just…writing it down,” I tell her. “What happened today.”
Her eyebrows form two delicate V’s. “Maybe that’s a good idea,” she says but I can’t tell from her voice if she thinks it is or not. “Get some sleep, will you? Try, anyway.” She reaches out and lightly touches my forehead, the same gesture Kira used to make when she was younger. It surprises both of us.
I feel a sudden rush of affection for her as she slips out the door again. She’s the sort of person I would like to be one day: strong, sure, but also full of kindness. Full of hope. Sometimes the dead are our only way of finding answers. We both like to write things down. What did she say? Bodies stacked like a macabre lasagna.
When I volunteered at Toronto East General I learned the weight of a man’s cremated remains is about seven pounds. A woman’s is five pounds. Sometimes the nurses would joke about it, gallows humour. “Death is the best weight loss remedy I can think of,” my supervisor told me once.
After they scrape the bone dust Kira will weigh about three pounds. And it’s this thought that sets the tears loose at last. Three pounds is nothing at all. It isn’t a person.
I should try to sleep like Aunt Irene says, maybe take a pill or two to help with the edge, but I don’t want to. I think about Mom in the hospital parking lot that awful first night, hoping Kira wouldn’t feel alone.
Except Kira isn’t supposed to feel anything anymore. That’s what Dr. Varghese told us.
But I have questions. So many of them. I can’t answer them though, not today, not tonight. I had to see her empty coffin, had to sit quietly while the priest talked about the survival of the spirit beyond all things, beyond darkness, beyond death.
It’s as if all of my life has been funnelling me toward this single point, this decision. Do I let it go? Do I let her go? And I can’t, I know I can’t. I stare down at the final lines I’ve written:
Things return to us.
Maybe. Maybe.
Please.