It was after five when Mom and her assistant, Manny, returned from the autopsy with Erin in the back of our hearse. It beeped slowly down the incline in reverse and stopped. Mom emerged, looking frazzled, while Manny proceeded to the rear, flipped open the latch, and removed the gurney.
My gaze fell to the black vinyl body bag. That was all that was left of Erin. Bones and rotting flesh. Mom and I stood side by side quietly while Manny rolled the gurney through the garage door and into our peach-colored prep room, where that night Boo would perform her magic. With my assistance.
“Do you have a moment?” Mom asked, gingerly pulling off her leather gloves finger by finger. “I’d like to have a talk.”
This was more of a command than a request.
We headed upstairs and down the blue-carpeted hall, with its creamy walls and framed paintings of pastoral landscapes, along with a zillion boxes of tissues. Though our rooms were designed to induce calm, I was feeling anything but.
She ushered me into her office, the pretend one for meeting with clients, not the real one upstairs loaded with files and her computer. This room was all tidy tranquillity. The air was scented with lavender and a small machine emitted white noise to mask the sound of weeping clients. Two green leather chairs faced a mahogany desk, above which hung a framed photo of five-year-old me, smiling gap-toothed between Aunt Boo and a young version of my mother, our hands positioned protectively on the shoulders of Oma.
Mom took her usual position behind the desk. “We have a problem.”
“I gathered as much,” I said, perching on the chair across from her.
“Bob would like you to come down to the station and undergo a buccal smear.”
She could not be serious. A buccal smear was where they swabbed the inside of your cheek to get a sample of your DNA. You didn’t have to watch as many true-crime shows as Sara did to know that much.
“I’m not happy about it,” Mom continued. “Needless to say, Bob and I have differing opinions, but he has finally managed to convince me that this is for your own good, and he’s promised that this will be the end of your involvement in Erin’s case.”
I said, “Case? What case? Erin committed suicide, end of story, right?” Since Mom had no idea that I’d snooped in her upstairs office, I had to play dumb.
She exhaled through her teeth. “Not exactly. Now, I know this is upsetting, but it seems there is evidence that Erin was, well, I guess the only right word is . . . murdered.”
I popped my eyes wide in feigned disbelief. “No way! That’s awful!”
Mom did a calming-motion thing with her hands. “Try not to panic, Lily. You’re perfectly safe. Bob says the police have a suspect on their radar, and they won’t let him out of their sight until he’s arrested.”
This was why I was panicked. I perked up. “Tell me it’s not someone from school.”
“I can’t say who it is, but you’ll just have to trust me for now that everything’s under control.”
“Then why do the police need to do that swab thingy if they already have a suspect?”
Mom began tidying the desk, rearranging the stapler and magnetic paper clip holder with her usual OCD efficiency, a sure sign that this was driving her crazy. “The way Bob explained it was that if Erin fought off her attacker then his DNA might be under her nails, and they needed to separate it from yours.”
“Oh.” I deconstructed what Mom said, looking for clues. “So they think it was definitely a guy who did it.”
My mother shrugged. “Supposedly, a neighbor saw Erin in an argument with a boy on Saturday night and . . . How come you’re not more surprised? I thought for sure you’d be shocked that Erin didn’t commit suicide.”
“I am. I am!” I brought my hand to my chest to emphasize my ignorance. “It just hasn’t sunk in yet.”
Mom knit her brows, reflecting on this explanation. “At any rate, it would be best if you didn’t announce this to the world, including Sara. And definitely not to Matt Houser.”
“I get Sara, but why not Matt?”
“I have no idea,” she said, her elbow accidentally bumping the stapler to the floor. “Anyway, the best thing for you to do is to let the police handle it, sweetie.” She leaned over to pick up the stapler and resurfaced with the complexion of a tomato. “Let it go.”
How could I let go of something so nightmarish as a nice guy being framed for a murder he didn’t commit? “But—”
“No buts,” Mom said firmly. “Stay out of it and that’s that.”
We stared at each other across her desk, and not for the first time I wondered what had happened to this woman.
When I was little, Mom was my own personal goddess. I would imitate her every move, the way she graciously listened and never interrupted our overwrought clients, the discreet manner in which she averted her gaze when grieving families erupted into tears or arguments, often simultaneously. Everyone called me Mini Ruth.
That was fine as long as I played by her rules. But in middle school, when I started dressing the way I wanted, in sweeping black lace and dyed hair to match, Mom got all agitated. She became even more uptight when she found under my bed The Tibetan Book of the Dead, along with several mortuary catalogs, dog-eared to beautiful urns and caskets I particularly admired.
“This is not normal,” she’d murmur, tracing the lines on my neck where I’d outlined the crucial embalming veins in red Sharpie.
I found that kind of ironic, since I clearly remembered her doing the same to her own body when she was in community college studying for the mortuary science degree she needed to run the funeral home after my father died.
Besides, I figured she’d have been thrilled that her daughter wanted to go into the family business, right? At age eleven, I lusted over custom-built, hand-crafted pine caskets from Vermont the way other girls craved Vera Bradley backpacks. At fifteen, I solo-prepped my first body from head to toe, and the corpse looked so alive Boo proclaimed me a “gifted natural.”
Instead, Mom thought I was, as she put it, “acting out.”
“Let me see those scratches again,” she said with a tilt of her chin.
Reluctantly, I showed her my arm. A healthy dose of Neosporin had reduced the menacing red streaks to faint pink swirls. Even so, my arm was swollen, ugly, and bruised a greenish purple.
She winced. “Is it still painful?”
“You have no idea.” I pulled down my sleeves and tried to ignore the burning pain from even that light friction.
“Speaking of Matt, have you heard from him lately?” Mom asked.
This was turning out to be the million-dollar question. I shook my head.
“Can’t say I’m disappointed. Matt is a boy with”—she bit her lower lip—“bad intentions, I think. The more distance between you two, the better.”
But I would never distance myself from Matt. And Mom knew it.
You could tell by the fear in her eyes.
While my mother supervised a wake, I ate a quick dinner of chicken soup and PB and J at the kitchen table, accidentally dotting my calculus homework with sticky purple spots of jam that I tried in vain to erase. Then I washed the dishes and waited for everyone to file out into the crisp October air, chatting amicably as they stepped into their cars and sped off.
It was my job to clear away the coffee cups and cake crumbs afterward, to refresh the tissue boxes and wipe the bathroom sinks and run the carpet sweeper everywhere, from the Serenity to the Eternity parlors, with a stop in between to dust Paradise. Only when those duties were finished was I free to escape to the prep room.
“Hey, Lil!” Boo said, turning off her radio. “Perfect timing. I was just about to come upstairs and get you.”
Boo had come straight from working in the hair salon, so she was still in her professional clothes: a red faux-leather miniskirt, black fishnet stockings, and fabulous studded suede boots. Her blond hair had been tinted purple at the ends to match the amethyst stud in her nose. It kind of clashed with the red, but I liked that, and the K in Karma that peeked out from the cleavage of her white blouse.
“I did what I could. It wasn’t easy.” Boo waved to Erin, stretched out on the steel table, her autopsy incisions neatly sewed. She was so thoroughly preserved in formaldehyde that her corpse emitted the slightly vinegary smell reminiscent of those fetal pig dissections we did in bio. It burned the insides of my nostrils.
It was odd to see Erin this plasticized and defenseless, her newly washed red hair in a halo around her vacant face, her mouth glued into a pleasant smile. On closer examination, I noticed her inner thighs were riddled with scars, as were her waist and breasts.
Weird.
Boo pointed to Erin’s left hand, which was permanently positioned over her right now that the embalming fluid had hardened them in place. “As you can see, she’s in need of a manicure. I thought it only fitting that you do the honors.”
The crimson polish was chipped and the police had cut all her pointed nails to nubs. My arm throbbed in memory.
“Think you can handle this?” Boo asked gently.
“Sure,” I said, getting out the blow-dryer. “Do you want to do hair or makeup?”
Boo chose makeup—Mary Kay cosmetics, since she couldn’t stand the morticians’ gunk—while I did Erin’s hair, blowing it dry, setting it, and brushing out the copper curls. We worked silently in unison, performing an ancient ritual that Graveses have done for generations.
When everything was sprayed into place, I brought out the polish remover, wiped off the crimson, and filed what was left of her ragged nails into blunt harmlessness. Then I painted them an insipid pink.
Boo massaged almond-scented lotion over Erin’s skin to keep it dewy-soft. We tacked on underwear and a bra before slicing open the back and arms of a delicate white cashmere turtleneck sweater the Donohues brought to cover their daughter’s body. Then we did the same to the black skirt, pinning it to her preserved flesh so it stayed secure. Boo unclasped a string of pearls—apparently a sixteenth-birthday gift—and gently draped them around Erin’s neck. A matching pair of studs went next, and finally she was finished.
Erin looked as if she were simply taking a nap when we closed her casket and rolled her away for storage until the viewing on Thursday.
Matt never could understand why I found prepping bodies so satisfying. I wished he were there now, to see.
“How you holding up?” Boo asked as we sanitized the prep room, sterilizing the instruments and scrubbing down all the surfaces with disinfectant. “Your mom says the cops want a DNA test. You okay with that?”
“Do I have a choice?” I spritzed bleach over the steel table. Cleanup: my least favorite duty.
“Probably not.” Boo peeled off her latex gloves, stepped on the garbage can pedal to open the lid, and tossed them in. “For what it’s worth, Oma and I are both of the opinion that you should have a lawyer present.”
I stopped washing, incredulous that my aunt and grandmother thought it was this serious. “Don’t tell me you two think I murdered Erin.”
“Puh-leeze. But you know this is Potsdam RFD, and the cops here have the IQ of doughnuts.” Boo rested her elbows on the table, right where I’d disinfected. “The thing is, your mom has to stay in the good graces of the police in order to keep getting the transport referrals.”
“And a date for New Year’s Eve.”
Boo diplomatically ignored my reference to Perfect Bob. “All I can say is that if your dad were alive, he’d insist on legal representation for you. Period.”
Boo was my father’s baby sister, so named because she’d been a “boo-boo” baby, born when Oma was forty-seven and, as Oma herself often said, “frankly, just too tired to give a damn.” In fact, at age thirty, my aunt was closer to me than to Mom—in more ways than one.
“Thanks, Auntie.”
She tapped my nose with her finger. “Just try to hang in there, Lily. This too shall pass.”
Before I went to bed, I went from door to door, window to window, locking each one in our ground-floor apartment, which was attached to the funeral home section of our mansion. There was only one window I couldn’t completely secure. It was the one in my room, facing the garden, the one Matt had tapped the night he asked me if he should break up with Erin.
That was the window I watched until I was eventually overcome by sleep.