The Dead Romantics (24)
For old times’ sake, I checked the dead bolt again. Locked. Probably Alice’s doing.
I hadn’t been down into the prep room in ages. I hated the smell of it—a mix of disinfectant and formaldehyde, and a distinct undercurrent of something you weren’t really born recognizing. It was a smell you found in the hospital, too, and extended care homes.
There’s a certain smell to death.
You didn’t really recognize it at first, but the longer you existed in those spaces, the more acquainted with it you became. I didn’t realize death had a smell until we moved out of this house. I always thought it was what the world smelled like—a little sad and bitter and heavy. On spring mornings, Dad would open up all of the windows, and turn up the radio, blasting Bruce Springsteen, and try to breathe life into the house again, wake up the old wooden floors and the creaky attic beams.
It was about that time again, when the mornings were crisp but the sun was already warming up the buds on the trees. The air in the house felt heavy with incense and disinfectant and that sad, soft smell of death, waiting to be let out into the wind.
My hand closed tightly around the handle to the basement. Maybe Dad was down there, sitting on one of the cold steel tables, smoking a cigar and wondering when one of his kids would realize he’d been playing us the whole time. He’d laugh and say, “I couldn’t die, buttercup, until I’m good and ready.”
But he was dead, and he wasn’t ready.
And his ghost was not here.
“We’re leaving,” Carver called from the front of the house. “Florence? You still back there?”
I let go of the handle. I’d come back later when it was light out. When I was in a steadier state of mind.
“Coming,” I called and hurried down the hallway to the foyer, where everyone else had already put on their coats and shoes. Carver handed me my heavy winter coat, so misplaced here in Mairmont where everyone had already brought out their cute spring cardigans and jean jackets.
He kissed me on the temple and said, “It’s good to see you home.”
“Grossssss,” I complained. “Sibling affection.”
As we left the funeral home, Mom locked up behind us. We meandered down the stone pathway to the sidewalk. The crows were gone from the oak tree. Had I actually seen them? Or were they just a part of my messed-up head, like my editor?
Mom said as she caught up to me, wrapping her arm around my shoulder, “Oh, it’ll be so nice to have you home! Right, Alice?”
I gave a start. “She’s home, too?”
My sister said pointedly, “Some of us fail quieter.”
“That’s not what I meant—”
“Oh, yikes!” Carver interrupted me, his arm interlocked with his boyfriend’s. “It’s past Nicki’s and my bedtime. We’ll see you in the morning? Over at the Awful Waffle?” Code for Waffle House. “Ten?”
“Sounds beautiful,” Mom replied. Carver kissed her on the cheek as he said his good night, Nicki telling me how nice it was to see me, and they left down the sidewalk in the opposite direction.
Mairmont wasn’t terribly busy in the evenings. Most of the restaurants down Main Street closed up around eight, and the ones that stayed open were packed with sports fans watching a late-night basketball game or families gone for a late-night ice cream run. Nicki and Carver had bought a house together just on the other side of the town square, on a cute road with rainbow-colored houses and white mailboxes, and in five years I could see them fostering a few kids and introducing some pandemonium to their quiet little street.
Honestly, I couldn’t wait for it.
When they had disappeared down the sidewalk, Mom pulled Alice and me close to her, a daughter on each arm, and led us home. The walk was quiet, the night air chilly but not cold like it would’ve been in New York. The flowering Bradford pears did stink, though. A lot. In that unpleasant way teen boys’ bedrooms did. But the trees did look beautiful with their small white buds glowing in the streetlights that lined Main Street. The soft golden glow reflected off the windows, and the wind was quiet, and the sky was wide.
My parents moved into the unassuming two-story house around the corner from the funeral home when I was twelve. Neither Carver nor Alice really remembered ever living in the funeral home—they didn’t remember that the third stair creaked, or that at night when the wind rattled the old rafters they moaned, or that sometimes you could hear footsteps in the attic. (Though, later, I managed to get rid of them.) I was the only child who remembered living—truly living—in the funeral home. Dad chasing me across the hardwood floors, and Mom humming as she restored the stained glass window above the door. Alice wandering around the front yard in her underwear, a funeral bouquet fixed onto her head like a flower crown. Carver drawing great stick figure epics on the parlor walls, improving the fifty-year-old wallpaper filled with flowers and orchids. Me, with my bedroom door locked, whispering to the ghosts who came to find me.
Alice and Carver didn’t remember why we moved, but it was because of me. Because one night, when I had been pulled out of bed by a mischievous young spirit, I had found myself wandering toward the basement.
“Are you sure this is your unfinished business?” I had asked the ghost. “To see—to see you?”
He had smiled at me. “Absolutely—I wanna see. I have to see,” he said as he led me down into the mortuary. I had gone down there a few times with Dad, but never alone. It was where the dead were stored in narrow freezer boxes until their funeral came. I didn’t know the facts yet. I just knew Dad prepared them for the rest of their journey—like Charon over the river Styx.