The Animators(102)

“I’m not hungry.”

“It’s there if you are later. Are you feeling well enough to go out?”

“Go where?” There’s shuffling and whispering from the hall. Someone mutters, She’s awake. “Who’s here?”

Donnie rolls her shoulders, presses her palms into her neck. “Company people. Friends. You think you could run an errand with me?”

“I guess.”

She sits next to me. “I’m very sorry to do this to you right now, but you were listed as Mel’s next of kin. I have to take you to identify the body.”

“Oh.”

“They flew her back here. She’s in Flushing. I have my car with me today, so we can go whenever you like.” She leans over, takes my wrist. Her hands are hot. “You have to identify her before we can do anything in terms of arrangements.”

I see the long, flickering hallway, smell the bleach and blood in the darkness. “Mel’s mom,” I tell Donnie. “We had to go to Florida. To identify her.”

“I remember that.”

“It was to make sure they had the right person.”

Donnie blinks. “Uh huh.”

I splay my hands out in front of me. I can’t remember anything after the emergency room. I want to ask Donnie how I got here, why I don’t remember being put on a plane in California to come back, what’s happened in the meantime.

It all falls apart as soon as I open my mouth. It’s from frustration that I tear up, pissed that I can’t say what I mean.

Donnie picks up a wool shawl and wraps me in it.

—

Donnie’s assistant waits with me, holding the shawl closed with her fist while Donnie pulls up to the curb. The ride over the Queensboro Bridge is mostly quiet. Donnie mentions arrangements again. She flicks the turn signal and wings the car onto a side street. “She hadn’t chosen a method,” she tells me. “She had a lot of stuff in place, but not that.”

“What other stuff.”

Donnie watches the road. “She did that next-of-kin document after her mom died. Made a will with a lawyer sometime after your stroke.”

“That’s weird. Considering I was the one who almost died.”

“Act of faith? I don’t know. You’d have to live to get the money. Right?” She glances over. Her eyes are still pink. “You didn’t know that?”

“No.”

She takes a long, deep breath. “A lot of us made wills when you had the stroke. And I’ll bet even more of us will be doing it now.”

I look out the window. “If she did all that other shit, she should have just picked if she wanted to be cremated or not.”

Donnie blinks rapidly. Her Roman nose flares. “She was thirty-three years old. She didn’t really think she was going to die.”

This shuts me up.

We pull in front of a new high-rise: OFFICE OF CHIEF MEDICAL EXAMINER, CITY OF NEW YORK/BOROUGH OF QUEENS. The guy at the desk is young, wears throwback Reeboks with his scrubs. Says only, “Name?” when we approach the desk. Donnie reaches out, takes my hand.

We’re led down a hallway through double doors. I hear our footsteps, the buzzing halogen lights. The hairs on the back of my neck prickle. I see the hot Florida parking lot, Lisa Greaph with her purple fingernails pulling the handle from the wall. The table within. The clavicle.

I start to sweat. Donnie glances at me.

It’s an enormous room of stainless steel and linoleum, with a hallway leading to other rooms, cavernous, hyperlit. We follow the guy to a wall of drawers, the same kind we saw in Florida. The room tunnels, my ears cotton. It’s suddenly harder to breathe.

He takes hold of the handle and pulls. The table extends. I bend at the waist. Donnie whispers, “Sharon, honey.”

I close my eyes and tuck my chin in, trying to breathe. My lungs are collapsing. “I can’t do it.”

The morgue guy rubs his nose, distracted. Says, “You’re required by law to identify the body as hers before we can release it. That requires looking.”

Donnie puts her hand on my back.

“She doesn’t look, the body stays here,” he tells Donnie. “Tell her to look.”

She pulls me in. “Don’t you dare talk to her that way. This woman was her partner. Have some respect.”

He rolls his eyes.

Donnie rubs my arm. “Sharon.”

I look.

Mel’s hair has been slicked back from her face. She’s blue from her forehead to her chin, skin sleek and glasslike. She is thin, so thin. Her collarbone is like a knife handle through the flesh. Her mouth is small and white.

I think about Dad. I think about seeing him in his casket at Damron Brothers in Faulkner, how he seemed so temporarily stilled, the air electric with energy unused. Maybe it was physics, maybe it was dumb hope, but I was never more sure of the unkillable quality of energy particles as when I looked at his dead body: Life has to go somewhere. This can still be reversed. He doesn’t have to be dead. He doesn’t have to be.

But here, Mel is the opposite of movement. Maybe because she was so constantly in motion, jumping and fidgeting and wriggling and flailing all the time. She was ADHD incarnate. She doesn’t even look asleep. She is tapped, inanimate. Hard. There is no smell. This is not the body of someone who will talk or drink or dance or draw ever again. My belly starts to burn.