The Animators(15)

“I take it we won’t be stopping.”

“We’ve got places to go.”

“You sure? Don’t want to see your mom or something?”

“Hah hah.”

She shrugs. “All right, dude.” Pitches her smoke, curls against the window, and goes back to sleep.

—

We are waved through a security checkpoint and around the main facility, down a long concrete path to a separate building with a sign reading only MEDICAL SERVICES / FLORIDA DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS. At the entrance, another checkpoint. We walk through a metal detector. A grim female security guard pats us down and relieves Mel of two airline-sized bottles of vodka. “I’m coming back to get those,” Mel calls out. The guard narrows her eyes and throws them into a box. We are admitted.

Walking into the prison morgue is like entering a school, or a hospital: same industrial-grade lighting, same speckled linoleum, same two-piece office chairs skittering across Berber carpeting. I smell coffee grounds and the spike of bleach cleaner. It is all disquietingly public.

“Can I help you ladies?”

The woman at the desk is heavy, her makeup dark and slick. Kohl liner wings both eyes. A glittering cross hangs from each earlobe. There are rings on her fingers, mammoth QVC jobs. She smiles wide and easy at us.

Mel shifts beside me, but I refuse to speak. “I’m here to claim someone,” she says finally. “Or, uh, someone’s body, actually.”

The woman purses her lips in sympathy. “Of course. Can you give me the name of the deceased?”

“Kelly Kay Vaught.”

The lady gives her keyboard a few taps. “Okay. Are you a relative?”

“I’m her daughter.”

“Melody.” The lady straightens, reaches out to take Mel’s hand in both her own. “I’m Lisa Greaph, the mortician on duty here. We’re so sorry for your loss.”

It’s there on the name placard: G-R-E-A-P-H. I look at Mel. But Mel is distracted, slow. Her eyes trail from Lisa Greaph to the gray double doors behind her.

“If there is anything we can do in terms of guiding you through interment options, just say the word.” She grasps my hand. I catch a whiff of White Shoulders. A framed cross-stitch of “Footprints” sits on her desk: All that time, I was carrying you. “Are you also a relative?”

I take a deep breath. Mel cuts in. “This is my partner.” There’s an uncomfortable pause. “My business partner. She can come with me, right?”

“Of course.” Lisa Greaph gives me a warm little wink, turns. “The morgue is just through here, if you’ll please follow me.”

The double doors open to a white cinder-block hallway. Lisa Greaph sashays in front of us. She is dressed in head-to-toe plum muffled by a lab coat. She looks like a hairdresser suited up as a doctor for Halloween. “It’s a little drab in here, I know,” she says over her shoulder. “I’ve got a mind to petition to make this place a little airier. But we’re a state facility. Gotta do what the big guys say.”

Mel mumbles something under her breath. “It’s okay,” I say loudly.

Lisa Greaph smiles at us. It occurs to me that I can smell Mel. Pathos: corn dogs and Camel Lights. I wonder if Lisa smells what I smell.

She turns to Mel. “I worked in a salon before this.” Called it. “And I’m glad. I have to use so many of those same skills here. A lot of ladies in the facility didn’t maintain good diets or receive regular exposure to sunlight. And passing on takes the natural color from a body, you know. But I have to say, you wouldn’t have to do much to pretty your mama up. She was gorgeous.”

Mel snorts. “Looked better before she started doing crank.”

Lisa Greaph hesitates. Her lab coat swishes. “Life’s not easy,” she says finally. “We do the best we can.”

“Or not,” Mel says.

I take Mel by the shoulder. I don’t know if I want to shake her for being such an asshole or rein her in to keep her from bolting.

At the end of the hallway, another set of double doors. Lisa Greaph removes a large ring of keys from her belt, plucks one out with a shining fingernail. She pushes. There’s a cold blast of air. I immediately think of nursing homes, the unmistakable scent of something nasty wiped up and scrubbed down. The lights are still fluorescents, but dimmed down a shade, like something’s swallowing the power.

A stainless-steel table stands at the room’s center. On the far wall, steel cabinets and a row of sinks, each large enough to bathe a small child. A series of dark tubes and hoses curls along the wall above them. One of those eyewash stations from high school chemistry.

To our left, rows of metal drawers with handles at their centers. It occurs to me that they are just about the width of a pair of human shoulders when Lisa Greaph, latex gloves straining over her fingernails, steps over and tugs one open.

It rolls out soundlessly. There’s a table attached to the drawer face, about three feet wide. On it, a body draped with a blue sheet.

Lisa Greaph turns to Mel. “We just need your confirmation that this is your mother. Then we’ll go from there.”

We both freeze. No one’s willing to go any closer until Lisa steps gently between us and pulls the sheet down with both hands.

It turns my stomach cold to see Mel’s face in the still, slightly blue one on the table. Same nose curved at the end, cheekbones rising up Cherokee-style. The profile’s gaunt, but it is obvious she was once beautiful, that she probably carried that beauty like women who know how pretty they are do—boldly, casually, ungratefully. A few lines crease around the eyes, deeper than sun wrinkles.