I took the bones from her. “This woman was in her forties when she died. You can tell that from the erosion in the pubic symphysis, the joint where the two pubic bones meet.” I pulled the pubic bones loose from the hip bones and peeled off the wax. “You see how the bone is starting to look a little weathered and spongy here at the face of the joint?” I rubbed the rough surface with my index finger, and she reached in to do the same. Our fingers brushed, and I felt my pulse quicken.
Before speaking again, I swallowed hard. I could feel a stutter building, and I struggled to let go of the panic rising from my chest. “But there’s some t-ttrauma, here, too,” I said, “from childbirth.” I didn’t stutter often—hadn’t much since I was a child, and my mother took me to a speech therapist—but when I got nervous, it could sneak up and seize me by the throat. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt this jittery. Sarah leaned down for a closer look, taking my hands in hers to steady the bones and bring them close to her face. I could feel her breath on my fingertips. It was the most intimate touch I’d felt in a long time. “These grooves here and here,” I said, “are called ‘p-parturition p-pits.’
During childbirth, the ligaments sometimes start to pull free of the bones. That can cause bleeding and infection, which carves these small grooves in the damaged regions of the bone. Like I tell detectives, flesh forgets, but bone remembers.”
So does the heart. I took a deep breath. “My wife had terrible complications during pregnancy,” I said. “Three miscarriages, then a full-term pregnancy that ended in a very difficult labor and delivery. She should have had a C-section, but she wanted so badly to do natural childbirth. It nearly killed her.” Sarah looked stricken. “A couple more miscarriages and twenty years later, she died of uterine cancer. That was two years ago. The doctors say there’s no connection, but I can’t help thinking there was. Can’t help thinking we shouldn’t have kept trying to have children. Can’t help blaming myself for her death. I don’t know what to do. I can’t…”
Sarah turned her face up to mine. It did not look like the face of a student; it looked like the face of a bright and sensitive young woman, her eyes full of compassion. She reached up and laid a hand on my cheek, brushing away a tear with her thumb. Then she leaned toward me and touched her lips to the same spot. I felt a shudder run through my entire body. Then she laid both hands on the sides of my face and guided my mouth to hers. It was a kiss of pity first, I think, or consolation. Comforting and warm. And then it became something else. Her mouth opened, and I felt the heat and urgency of her tongue on my own. Her body pressed against mine—or maybe it was mine against hers—her breasts and thighs and pelvis melting into me, melting the cold that encased me in my grief. I groaned with pent-up sorrow and longing.
I pulled free to catch my breath, leaning back to look at Sarah’s face. Over her shoulder, in the open doorway, my eyes caught a flash of movement. Miranda Lovelady stood there paralyzed, her eyes wide with shock or embarrassment or betrayal or some awful mixture of them all. She met my gaze for the briefest instant, her face crimson and contorted, and then she whirled and ran. Instinctively I went after her, hearing her footsteps but never quite seeing her for the curve of the hallway. I heard the clatter of the crash bar on the stairwell door, and I knew she was gone. Cursing myself for a fool, I turned and retraced my steps to my office. It, too, was empty now—emptier than it had ever felt before.
God. How could I have been so foolish? I’d spent years cultivating a reputation for decency and decorum and professionalism, and I’d just chucked it in the trash can. Not only had I crossed the line with an undergraduate—a girl younger than my own son—I’d done it in front of the one graduate student whose respect mattered most to me. If she chose, Miranda could damage my reputation with the other grad students and the university administration as well. But that wasn’t my main concern. My main concern was the look of confusion and pain on her face. I hated to be the cause of that—hated to hurt her. I also hated the notion that there might be a deeper problem with Miranda as well. Had I somehow gotten too close to her, too? Was there something more serious and less appropriate than camaraderie lurking beneath our easy collaboration and rapidfire gallows humor? Had I crossed a line—a powerful emotional line—during all those hours in the morgue with her?
I thought and fretted about Miranda all the way home. Then, when I was in bed, in the dark, I thought about Sarah: the way her eyes shone at me, the way her mouth felt on mine, the way her breasts and hips pressed against me. For the first time since Kathleen’s death, I felt sexually aroused in my wasteland of a bed. For the first time in many months, I slept hard. And for the first time in many months, I awoke hard.
Now what? I remembered a line from Garrison Keillor, whose public radio show UT’s NPR affiliate had broadcast for years: “Life is complicated, and not for the timid.” Amen to that, brother, I thought. Amen to that.
CHAPTER 13