“Of course.” Lisa Greaph gives me a warm little wink, turns. “The morgue is just through here, if you’ll please follow me.”
The double doors open to a white cinder-block hallway. Lisa Greaph sashays in front of us. She is dressed in head-to-toe plum muffled by a lab coat. She looks like a hairdresser suited up as a doctor for Halloween. “It’s a little drab in here, I know,” she says over her shoulder. “I’ve got a mind to petition to make this place a little airier. But we’re a state facility. Gotta do what the big guys say.”
Mel mumbles something under her breath. “It’s okay,” I say loudly.
Lisa Greaph smiles at us. It occurs to me that I can smell Mel. Pathos: corn dogs and Camel Lights. I wonder if Lisa smells what I smell.
She turns to Mel. “I worked in a salon before this.” Called it. “And I’m glad. I have to use so many of those same skills here. A lot of ladies in the facility didn’t maintain good diets or receive regular exposure to sunlight. And passing on takes the natural color from a body, you know. But I have to say, you wouldn’t have to do much to pretty your mama up. She was gorgeous.”
Mel snorts. “Looked better before she started doing crank.”
Lisa Greaph hesitates. Her lab coat swishes. “Life’s not easy,” she says finally. “We do the best we can.”
“Or not,” Mel says.
I take Mel by the shoulder. I don’t know if I want to shake her for being such an asshole or rein her in to keep her from bolting.
At the end of the hallway, another set of double doors. Lisa Greaph removes a large ring of keys from her belt, plucks one out with a shining fingernail. She pushes. There’s a cold blast of air. I immediately think of nursing homes, the unmistakable scent of something nasty wiped up and scrubbed down. The lights are still fluorescents, but dimmed down a shade, like something’s swallowing the power.
A stainless-steel table stands at the room’s center. On the far wall, steel cabinets and a row of sinks, each large enough to bathe a small child. A series of dark tubes and hoses curls along the wall above them. One of those eyewash stations from high school chemistry.
To our left, rows of metal drawers with handles at their centers. It occurs to me that they are just about the width of a pair of human shoulders when Lisa Greaph, latex gloves straining over her fingernails, steps over and tugs one open.
It rolls out soundlessly. There’s a table attached to the drawer face, about three feet wide. On it, a body draped with a blue sheet.
Lisa Greaph turns to Mel. “We just need your confirmation that this is your mother. Then we’ll go from there.”
We both freeze. No one’s willing to go any closer until Lisa steps gently between us and pulls the sheet down with both hands.
It turns my stomach cold to see Mel’s face in the still, slightly blue one on the table. Same nose curved at the end, cheekbones rising up Cherokee-style. The profile’s gaunt, but it is obvious she was once beautiful, that she probably carried that beauty like women who know how pretty they are do—boldly, casually, ungratefully. A few lines crease around the eyes, deeper than sun wrinkles.
Her jaw is shut, but the possibility for movement is still loosely, dangerously there, as if her mouth could open at any moment. Several silver hairs cling to her temples. Her clavicle is a wide, knobby V, descending to meet points under the sheet.
Will I have to do this one day? Maybe not. It will probably be my sister. It’s the women who do this job. My brother will be excused, left to wait in a living room elsewhere, television flickering on mute in a time of crisis. In order to spare me from being awakened in the middle of the night, they will call me the following morning. None of them know me well enough to know I’d probably still be awake.
I think of my dad’s funeral, how he looked in his coffin, the strange way his lips were spread over his mouth. He’d worn dentures for years and was ashamed of this fact—never let anyone see him without them. They’d flown from his mouth in the accident, which happened my sophomore year at Ballister. The EMTs had misplaced them in the hurry to get him from the wreckage into the ambulance, and the mortician had no choice but to seal his lips over the void. It was the deadest-looking part of him, the only part that kept me from hoping he would wake up.
I step behind Mel and let her look.
“Is this your mother, Melody?” Lisa asks.
I hear Mel swallow. The back of her head is still. “Yeah.”
The sheet is draped back over the body. The drawer wheels shut into the wall.
Lisa Greaph reaches behind her and produces a fat sheaf of forms. When Mel doesn’t take them, she tucks them under her arm and says, “Why don’t we step out? I’ll make coffee.”