I run instead of write. I go to my apartment’s gym and listen to loud, throbbing music and run until the image of her body is replaced with breathless black spots. If my heartbeat slows too much or there is a break in the music, she appears, her back on the tile floor and her feet resting on the bathroom counter. For a moment she is laughing, and I am next to her. I can feel her feet lean against mine. Her socks are soft and gray, and they are warm against my bare toes. I do not want to write this. The ending is always the same: I am not there, she is not laughing, and her feet, while still perched on the bathroom sink, are cold and four days dead.
I have spent years conjuring her body, have envisioned myself next to her as she died again and again. And yet, in all of those versions, I never imagined her with her back on the floor, feet balanced on the sink. I never imagined the smallest details of her clothing, black-and-gray-striped leggings, soft gray socks, layered blue and black tank tops. There is something called a “coroner narrative” that is included in the coroner’s report. I was not expecting this when I ordered the report from the coroner’s office. This is how I know the position of her body when she was found. And this knowledge, the exactness with which I can see her now, is shattering in its precision. We would lie like that as children, in the living room, our backs pressed against the carpet and our feet on the sofa.
The narrative included in the report is written by Lucy Gray, the coroner investigator who was called to the scene when my sister was found. It is a page, single-spaced, and details Lucy’s movements through the house, what she saw, what she did, who she talked to. After initially being named in the report, Sarah is referred to as “the decedent” throughout. I read through this official story of my sister’s found body and cannot help but think of that same evening, the phone ringing at my stepmother’s house, and all that followed.
Before Lucy receives a call at her residence at 2010 hours to examine a deceased subject, my stepmother receives a call from Jack, who is hysterical, so loud that I can hear his tinny weeping from across the room. I make Sharon ask if Sarah can be resuscitated, not knowing she has been dead for days. When Lucy arrives at the house that holds my sister’s body, I am holding my stepmother’s shoulders over three hundred miles away, shaking out of her a promise not to hurt herself in response to Sarah’s death. As Lucy walks into the house, down a hallway to the bathroom where the decedent is lying supine on the floor, I am on the phone with my therapist, incoherently asking her what to do next. While Lucy and an officer load the decedent into the body bag and secure her in the back of the coroner’s vehicle, I am in my truck, beginning the hour-and-a-half trip to my mother’s house. As Lucy processes the decedent into the coroner facility, I am moments away from telling my mother that her other daughter has died.
She weighs a hundred and ten pounds when the coroner examines her. She is five foot four and has long blond hair. She appears older than her twenty-four years. Her pupils are equal in diameter. There are noted needle marks and damaged veins consistent with IV drug use. She has tattoos on the left forearm, left bicep, right forearm, and the left lower quadrant of her abdomen. Her chest and breasts are unremarkable. Her nail beds are remarkable because of their bluish discoloration.
She is a young white female; cause of death is anoxia, cause of anoxia is pulmonary edema, cause of pulmonary edema is the toxic effects of methamphetamine. I know what these words mean now, know what happened in her body when meth flooded her system, how her lungs filled up with fluid, how she most likely hallucinated in her final moments before her brain shut down from lack of oxygen. Due to strong suspicion of drug overdose and evidence found at the scene, Lucy rules out an internal exam.
When I spoke on the phone to Lucy, days after Sarah’s body was found, she told me that when she looked at my sister, she knew that she had been a good person who ended up in the wrong place. When she said she was sorry for my loss, I believe she meant it. I am okay with the last person to touch my sister’s body being this woman, who took the time and care to talk to me. She explained to me the results of the toxicology report, and while I was surprised that Sarah died of a toxic meth overdose and not heroin, I did not fully take in what it all meant. This is why I ordered the coroner’s report, expecting a few pages with numbers and exam results, Sarah’s body reduced to data: 13.25 ml of heart blood is removed from Sarah’s body and placed in two vials; 1 ml of vitreous humor is also taken.
When I read this, I somehow make the association between humor and funny bone and wonder why they took a sample from her elbow. In reality, vitreous humor is the transparent, jellylike tissue that sits behind the eye lens. Why did they need to pierce the most vulnerable places? I wish for her heart to be intact, even though I know it is eventually burned, turned to ash, and thrown into the sea. I resent these strangers pressing a needle into her eyes; Sarah didn’t like anything touching them when she was alive.
The report details that three kinds of drugs are found in her system: benzodiazepine, methamphetamine, and opiates. The only drug found at a truly toxic level is meth. A chart shows the range for potentially effective levels of the drug (what would make you high) and the range for potentially toxic levels of the drug (what could kill you). The range for potentially toxic levels of meth is listed as 0.2 to 0.5 mg per liter of blood. Sarah’s toxicology report shows a meth level of 2.7 mg per liter, more than ten times the lower end of the lethal range.
Many addicts live on the edge of overdose. If you had tested me at the height of my coke habit, I am sure my lab numbers would have been in the potentially toxic range. This is part of why addiction is dangerous: the more you use, the higher your tolerance gets, and you push at the line between high and dead. But the level of meth in Sarah’s blood is not on the edge of overdose, it is miles past it.
The heart blood tells me everything and not nearly enough. It tells me that Sarah’s death was inevitable, that it did not matter if Jack had found her four minutes or four days after shooting up; she was gone as soon as the milky white liquid entered her bloodstream. It tells me that either she had little experience shooting up meth or Ray knew exactly what he was doing when he slid the needle in. It tells me that her tired heart held on to whatever evidence it could until Lucy could look inside.
The coroner’s report sits on my desk. Josh takes my hand, tries to pull me to a room where this narrative is not lying in wait. But I read it again and again, trying to understand the story. The ending is always the same: I am not there, Sarah is not laughing, and her feet, while still perched on the bathroom sink, are cold and dead.