The Vanishing Half(97)
She gripped the suitcase handle, staring down at the worn carpet.
“I gave it to my sister,” she said. “She needs it more than I do.”
Kennedy stopped. “Your sister?” she said. “You went back there?”
“Come on, honey,” Stella said. “We can talk in the car.”
Traffic would be a nightmare. She knew this long before she inched onto the 405. Bumper to bumper, red taillights as far as she could see. When she’d first moved to Los Angeles, she’d found the traffic a little beautiful. All those people going places. She was frightened to drive on the freeway, but once she got the hang of it, she went for drives alone in the middle of the day for the peace of it. She liked studying the cloudless sky, the pale blue mountains up ahead. Her baby girl strapped in the backseat, babbling along with the radio.
“You can ask me what you’d like,” she said, gripping the steering wheel. “But when we get home—”
“I know, I know,” her daughter said. “I can’t say anything.”
“It hurts to talk about,” she said. “You understand? But I want you to know me.”
Her daughter turned away, glancing out the window. They weren’t far from home but this was Los Angeles. You could cover a lifetime in eleven miles.
Seventeen
They named the dead man Freddy.
He was twenty-one, six foot two, one hundred eighty pounds, the victim of an enlarged heart. In their more morbid moments, the lab called him Fred the Dead. At the University of Minnesota, all of the medical students named their cadavers. It personalized death, the faculty said, it restored dignity to the undignified process of dying. To the undignified process of science. This was what people had in mind when they imagined donating their bodies to research: a group of twentysomethings in lab coats jokingly brainstorming names, each year at least one group so lazy they dubbed you Yorick and got on with it. Weirdly enough, naming Freddy made his body less intimate to Jude. It wasn’t his real name. He’d lived and died a completely different man, one they would never know beyond the details inscribed on his chart. He’d barely lived at all, really, and now he would quite possibly live a more interesting life here on the slab in their basement laboratory.
Once she got past the smell, Jude liked working with cadavers. She didn’t have to joke about them to mask her discomfort; she never felt sick at the sight of a dead body. Lectures bored her but she was rapt during labs, always the first to grab her scalpel when the professor asked for volunteers. People lived in bodies that were largely unknowable. Some things you could never learn about yourself—some things nobody could learn about you until after you died. She was fascinated by the mystery of dissections as well as the challenge. They had to search for tiny nerves that were impossible to find. It was almost like a little treasure hunt.
“That’s gross, baby,” Reese said. He always squirmed away when she came home smelling like formaldehyde. He made her shower before kissing him. He never wanted to be touched after the dead people. He’d always been more sentimental, at least she thought, until the afternoon that her mother called to tell her that her grandmother had died. She stood in her windowless office, holding the phone against her cheek. She was TAing that semester and had been given an office she rarely used. Nobody had the phone number except for Reese and her mother, in case of emergencies. She’d been so startled to hear her mother’s voice that it hadn’t dawned on her the only reason she might be calling.
“You knew she was sick,” her mother said. She was trying to comfort her or maybe just alleviate her shock.
“I know,” Jude said. “Still.”
“It wasn’t painful. She was smilin and talkin to me, right up until the end.”
“Are you all right, Mama?”
“Oh, you know me.”
“That’s why I’m asking.”
Her mother laughed a little. “I’m fine,” she said. “Anyway, the service is Friday. I just wanted to let you know. I know you’re busy with school—”
“Friday?” Jude said. “I’ll fly down—”
“Hold on. No use in you comin all the way down here—”
“My grandmother is dead,” Jude said. “I’m coming home.”
Her mother didn’t try to dissuade her further. Jude was grateful for that. She’d already acted as if notifying her of her grandmother’s passing had been some inconvenience. What type of life did her mother think she was living that she couldn’t interrupt with that type of news? They hung up and Jude stepped out into the hallway. Students buzzed past. A friend from the biology department waved his coffee at her as he ducked into the lounge. A weedy orange-haired girl tacked a green poster for a protest onto the announcement board. That was the thing about death. Only the specifics of it hurt. Death, in a general sense, was background noise. She stood in the silence of it.
* * *
—
WEST HOLLYWOOD WAS A GRAVEYARD, Barry said the last time he’d called. Every day, a new litany of the dying.
There were the men you sort of knew, like Jared, the blond bartender at Mirage with the heavy pour. He’d wink then tilt the bottle of gin into your glass, as if he were doing you a personal favor and didn’t treat everyone to his generosity. His memorial was in Eagle Rock. There were exes or enemies like Ricardo, known as Yessica, a queen who’d beaten Barry at more balls than he would ever admit. He’d asked to be cremated and Barry had stood along the shore at Manhattan Beach while he was scattered into the ocean. Then the men you loved. Luis had just been admitted to Good Samaritan Hospital, and when Jude called, he kept talking about how a nurse told him that Bobby Kennedy had died there.