You’re hysterical. Pull yourself together. Stop blubbering. All the things he would say, but of course he isn’t here to say them. Not now. My cheeks throb and I can still feel the last time he slapped me.
The funeral home collected his body, so I didn’t have to see Viktor postautopsy, which was a relief. It had been hard enough to identify him at the morgue. I’d practiced in the mirror to look appropriately shocked, but as it turned out I hadn’t had to fake it. The dead man on the metal slab didn’t really look like Viktor at all, at least not at first glance. It took me a minute to see beyond the swollen face and redness and other odd marks. He’d been contorted in his precious car for so long that the blood had rushed to certain areas and not to others. No matter how prepared I was, it was still a shock to see him lying there, naked and dead. I half-expected him to sit up on the table and point a finger accusingly at me. I remembered to ask how he’d died, to act as if I didn’t know. I didn’t have to force a reaction. I shook and wept, not from sorrow, but from fear.
It took them forever to release the body. Apparently that’s pretty standard in cases like this, or so the police told me when I called every day to check. I wanted him to be cremated. Just get it done so I could get on with the business of forgetting. Of course, his mother wouldn’t accept that, she wants a big funeral, and I am afraid to protest. She insisted on being part of the planning, which meant that she picked the most expensive coffin available, but I let her have it. After all, she’ll be the only truly sad person in the room. I made sure to watch clips of sad movies on my phone so I could be red-eyed and puffy when we arrived at the funeral home to make the arrangements, and I kept up the pretense, dabbing at my eyes as we discussed the coffin, the suit Viktor would wear, the schedule for the visitation, while Viktor’s mother sobbed, using up an entire box of the funeral home’s tissues. The director, a dapper little man who smelled of hair gel, kept passing it to her, his face downcast as if he was moved by our loss, when I suspect the only emotion he truly felt was impatience at how long the process was taking. I was impatient, too, desperate to get out of the place. As we were leaving, Anna bustling ahead of me out of the funeral home, I turned back and quickly handed Viktor’s medal over to the director.
Worse than that first visit was having to return two days later, ahead of the official visitation, to admire the work they’d done. I wanted a closed casket, but of course Viktor’s mother wouldn’t hear of it. “Don’t worry,” the director said to me, “none of his, um, injuries, will show.” I still hesitated to approach the coffin, feeling almost as fearful as I had that night, standing by the door out to the garage, the gun trembling in my hand.
All Viktor’s swelling and redness was gone. Now my late husband was a waxy department-store mannequin, his skin so pale that they’d added makeup. I could see a knife-thin streak of foundation near his collar and knew that the faint hint of pink in his cheeks came from rouge. The medal was around his neck, lying on the outside of his expensive shirt and silk tie in a way that my husband never wore it, but his mother seemed pleased. The coffin was a huge, satin-padded mahogany box, Viktor tucked into its folds like a piece of expensive mail-order fruit that got delayed somewhere in transit, polished and presentable, hiding a rotting core.
There was a cloying, heavily perfumed scent in the room from the dozens of flower arrangements that had already arrived, drooping lilies and overblown roses, spider-like chrysanthemums and fussy white carnations, alongside pots of ferns and other green plants. But it wasn’t the odor from the flowers catching in my throat, making me gag. It was the blood.
The smell isn’t real. It can’t be. There is no reason to still have that salty, sweet-sour, metallic taste in my mouth, or feel that spray of blood and bone matter coating my body.
I’d been afraid that I wouldn’t be able to go through with it, afraid of what would happen if he saw me with the gun, afraid of him grabbing it from me, but when I held the gun I realized I was tired of feeling powerless.
Pinned against the wall, hand tight on my throat, his eyes boring into mine. “No one will ever love you like I do.”
Viktor turned his back as he got into the car and that’s when I fired. He jerked forward, head dropping, and for a moment there was nothing but that fine red mist, the ringing in my ears, and a faint puff of gray-white smoke.
Every time I close my eyes I replay the shower I took that night, all that blood circling down the drain, as if I were Janet Leigh in Psycho. Except I am the killer. Is this why the smell of blood lingers? Why aren’t I smelling the bleach that I scrubbed over every affected surface, including my own body?
I was afraid Anna would smell the bleach when she came to the house, but she didn’t say anything. Maybe the candles had covered up the scent. Or maybe she assumed it was from the cleaners. She is suspicious anyway. She’s never liked me; she didn’t like Viktor’s first wife either, all of her supposed devotion to that woman’s memory just a way of irritating me. Anna wanted a good Ukrainian girl for her son and she’d been convinced that she could just wait out this marriage. But it’s her son who has timed out, not me. Looking down on Viktor in his coffin I wondered if I’d ever truly loved him. How do you separate love from need? Or fear?
I kissed my fingers and pressed them to his cold lips, playing the grieving widow. No one else can know the truth, about him, about us. There are secrets in every marriage. This is my secret, Viktor’s and mine, and he’s taken it to the grave. No one must know.
chapter nineteen
SARAH
I didn’t tell the others, but Viktor Lysenko’s was not the first dead body I’d seen. When I was in my twenties and fresh out of law school, I worked briefly for a local defense attorney who handled a lot of high-profile and controversial cases.
“This isn’t right,” my boss said one day, waving around the autopsy results the medical examiner’s office had just faxed over. “He’s saying the marks are consistent with the knife found in possession of our client—that’s got to be some bull that the DA talked him into.”
He had to be in court, so he sent me, the fresh-faced twenty-six-year-old who’d cried when she accidentally ran over a squirrel, to talk with the medical examiner at the county morgue.
“There is no error,” the medical examiner said when I stumbled through why I’d been sent to see him. I made the mistake of implying that he’d made a mistake, and he traded the paternalistic smile he’d greeted me with for a frostiness that made me feel even smaller than I am. “The stab wounds are three centimeters long and jagged—apparently this is consistent with the weapon found in possession of your client.” He stood up from his desk. “Come along—I’ll show you.”
If the same thing happened today, I’d say no or walk out. But I was young back then and susceptible to bullies. He led the way into a chilly room with a long row of stacked stainless-steel drawers and yanked one open. “This way,” he said, gesturing impatiently with his hand, when he turned to see that I hadn’t moved from my position near the door. “Come here and look at the wounds yourself.”