Her eyes were watering badly. Dry eye it was called.
Paradoxically, dry eye results in watering eyes. For the afflicted eye lacks sufficient moisture, precipitating tears and blurred vision.
Such tears are easily mistaken for the tears precipitated by emotion.
“And through here. I’ve got the door . . .”
She was being led somewhere. There was an elevator, that moved slowly. Descending into the earth.
She had not spoken more than a few words for approximately five hours. In the interim her throat seemed to have closed.
There had been no urgent need for speech for whatever had happened, had happened.
Are you sitting down? Please.
“Step through here, Mrs. Voorhees.”
Whoever these strangers were—Broome County, Ohio, medical examiner, law enforcement officer, county prosecutor—they spoke softly to her. She’d been introduced to them upstairs, she’d even shaken their hands—(had she?)—but the memory had already faded, sucked into a kind of vacuum.
This day had begun a very long time ago as if on another planet.
Ringing telephone in an empty house. Her first instinct had been the correct one: do not answer.
Beyond that now. Too late.
When confused, smile.
A faint courteous questioning smile—Yes? Excuse me?
Like most girls she’d been trained to smile since childhood. Smile at your elders, at individuals who have authority over you. Smile if frightened. Smile if you can’t quite hear what they are telling you. Smile to express yourself—sweet, docile, cooperative, surpassingly well-mannered, “good.” Smile at men.
Like crossing a balance beam, in gymnastics. You move with exquisite caution and concentration so that you will not “lose” your balance and crash ignominiously to the hardwood gym floor.
What was expected of her. As the slain man’s widow she would comport herself with dignity.
Would not dissolve into weeping, hysterics. Would not collapse into a paroxysm of self-pity.
What the widow must avoid: self-pity.
They left the slow-moving elevator and were making their way along a corridor of the ground floor of the Broome County Hospital. A strong odor of disinfectant made her nostrils pinch.
Again, a door was being opened for her. A heavy door.
“Please step through here, Mrs. Voorhees.”
Mrs. Voorhees. So carefully enunciated, you would think this was a rare medical condition or illness.
Now she felt a flurry of something like panic. Very much, her instinct warned her not to enter this room.
Yet amid a roaring on all sides she stepped—bravely—into a large refrigerated room humming with ventilators.
Her eyes glanced upward involuntarily. The ceiling was high overhead, covered in slate-colored squares. Frigid air flowed downward from vents in these squares like grimacing teeth.
“Mrs. Voorhees . . .”
The medical examiner was explaining something to her. He seemed less kindly than the other men but perhaps that was her imagination. He was a short square-built gnome-man with a bald head, tufted white eyebrows who dwelt here, in the netherworld below the hospital. He was a physician, of course—a pathologist.
What had Gus said about pathologists?—no malpractice insurance, their patients never complain.
Her brain was exhausted from strain and for a confused moment she worried that she was supposed to know the gnome-man, he’d been a medical associate of Gus’s?
In anyplace where he lived, or spent a duration of time, Gus became acquainted with many individuals and of these, a number were invariably persons of distinction.
Fellow doctors, public health officials. Local politicians—mayor, congressman, senator. Lawyers. By now Gus would know them on a first-name basis.
“It’s a formality but it’s state law. You only have to look briefly, Mrs. Voorhees.”
The roaring of the ventilators made hearing difficult. Or perhaps it was a roaring in her ears.
Gus had told her, many times—It’s just your heartbeat. Breathe calmly, relax. It will subside.
She was being led—inexorably, inescapably—to a table on aluminum rollers, beneath a pitilessly bright light. On the table was what appeared to be a human body entirely covered by a white shroud.
By the dimensions of the body and the size of the (vertical, bare) feet beneath the shroud, you would surmise that this was a man’s body.
Cautiously, the shroud was drawn away from the face and upper body.
“Oh.”
She stepped back. A gust of cold wind pushed her.
But this terribly mutilated individual was not Gus—was he? Almost, Jenna felt a wave of relief.
For it was not Gus after all. Even the hair that looked shredded, clotted with something dark like paint, was not her husband’s streaked-gray hair. There’d been some misunderstanding . . .
She was a visitor here, a guest. She did not want to make too much of such a misunderstanding. For (it was unavoidable to think) her husband’s remains might indeed be in the room, elsewhere. These well-intentioned gentlemen had led her to the wrong table and they had drawn away from the lifeless body the wrong shroud.