dour grandfather.
Living around people who regarded any talk about the human body as perverse and where death, especially unexpected death, was talked about in whispers, the boy grew up in a world divided in two: above and below the thin floorboards of the old house.
Downstairs, in the cool basement, were two great porcelain tables suspended on large metal cranks. There were shelves filled with bottles and jars that held embalming fluid, and tubs of putty-colored skin enhancer, and even flat tins of hair crème and thin tubes of vermilion lipstick. There were blue cardboard boxes filled with syringes, and red ones bursting with rubber gloves, and a large glass apothecary jar filled with cotton balls.
The floor had a drain in it, and there were lengths of rubber hosing coiled in a corner, and hanging from metal hooks on the far wall were dark oilskin aprons.
Without the bodies it reminded him somewhat of the drugstore in the main street of town, the same medicinal smells and shelving, the same orderliness, and while the shop had penny candy and magazines for sale, the main business of the place was the care and treatment of the body.
The dead were brought to the basement by his father in the back of the hearse, or dropped off by refrigerated van courtesy of the coroner’s office. Sometimes they were wearing the same stained clothes in which they’d died and sometimes they came in naked, their bodies already subject to the various indignities visited upon them by the coroner and his assistants.
They were laid upon those slabs of tables and then the boy’s father or his assistant, a single man named Poe who lived on the top floor of a rooming house and owned a basset hound named Lucille, would begin what Poe called “prettifying” the body for the viewing public.
The first body the boy could remember seeing was that of a coal miner who died when the shaft elevator slipped on its journey, dropping the cage more than sixty feet into the darkness, and landing so hard that people said the noise was heard above ground and even a half mile away in the small, dirt-rimmed homes of the miners’ wives and children.
The boy was four or five, small and young enough that his mother and other neighborhood women talked around him about how the man died and how two other men were crippled and about the dead man’s pregnant wife and their two other children and how shameful it was that the company’s policy was that she’d have to vacate the house in just two weeks.
He stayed long enough to hear the story, taking small sips of slightly sour lemonade from an enamel cup his mother set down next to him on the floor where he pretended to play with his toy cars.
As soon as he was able, he escaped through the door to the basement, carrying down a glass of iced tea with pieces of fresh mint floating on top, that sharp smell of spearmint forever associated in his mind with the sight of the body emerging from dirt and blood-crusted clothes.
The miner’s face and exposed arms were black with soot, and he could still remember that jerk of surprise he felt when Poe cut neatly through the man’s trousers and an icy white length of leg emerged. That powerful contrast between light and dark stayed with him, as did watching Poe carefully wash the man’s body once it was fully naked, sluicing the dirt and blood down the drain, washing the dead man’s face with a cloth just as the boy’s mother did to him at bath time. The assistant’s touch had been slower and softer somehow, something he wouldn’t understand until much later, until his own life’s work began and he experienced firsthand the change to human skin when blood flow ceases.
He felt a frisson of excitement when Poe’s gloved hands moved down the body to lift the thick, flaccid penis, washing the nest of reddish gold pubic hair, and dipped lower to swipe once around the scrotum. His own penis twitched against him.
The boy’s father moved between the man’s body and the shelf beyond him, selecting several vials and mixing various lotions and powders into a small bowl. He paused to take the tea from the boy, holding the glass with a gloved hand and taking a long swallow before smiling at the boy and pronouncing it nicely sweet. All the while the smell of blood and soot and mint mingled in the boy’s nostrils.
Music played on a small radio high above the boy’s head, a woman’s mournful voice skating along a scale from high to low. “Jazz,” his father said when he saw the boy listening. “It helps the concentration.”
When the buzzer sounded, two sharp, short bursts of noise, he reached up a hand and turned off the voice, moving quickly to strip off his gloves and hang up his apron before walking to the back door concealed from view by a floor-to-ceiling striped curtain.
The boy sidled after his father and watched him open the door to a moon-faced woman with red-rimmed eyes holding a small pile of clothes with a framed photo on top. A grim-faced man wearing a black suit and a gray hat held her elbow.
The boy watched as his father took the clothes from the miner’s widow, watched as he took a long look at the photo.
“He was a fine-looking man,” he said, and something about these words made red flare across the woman’s wide cheeks and new tears tremble in her swollen eyes, though she smiled, too, pleased with the comment all the same.
These were the things he would remember: that woman’s smile with her swollen eyes. The way his father carried the clothes carefully back into the other room and showed the picture to Poe, both of them discussing how they’d put that flattened face back into the visage looking out at them from the photo.
After they were finished and the body had been carefully placed in the burnished wood coffin with gleaming handles that the company would pay for, the boy crept into the empty viewing room to take another look. Moving swiftly past the rows of folding chairs, he placed his small hands onto the box and carefully lifted the lid.
The face of the miner looked peaceful, clean, his eyes shut as if he were just resting, his arms folded across the breast of the cheap blue suit that had been his best. A wreath of lilies sent by the company stood on one side of the coffin, a cross of roses on the other. The scent of flowers was powerful in the closed room.
Later, much later, he would find the drawer filled with photos, dozens of snapshots of corpses dressed and made up to look like they were living. “I like to keep a record of my work,” Poe said with a little smile when he caught the boy. “Best not to tell your mama.” He let the boy play with them, sifting through the dead like they were a set of playing cards.
The man took another sip of coffee and watched a young police officer wearing gloves carry a manila envelope out of the antique store. Did the officer remember the last time they’d found a photo like the one he was carrying, or was he too young? Eight years was a long time to live on memories. It was time to create some new ones.
Chapter Five
When Ian and Grace left each morning, Kate double-checked the lock on the front door before retreating to the kitchen to prepare a pot of tea. While waiting for the water to boil, she flicked aside the curtains on the kitchen window several times to scan the backyard and driveway. A new talisman of sorts. In the months before they’d left New York, she’d taken to checking the peephole in their front door multiple times a day. Obsessive. She knew that, knew what spurred it, knew what Ian would say about it if he saw her.
When the tea was ready, she poured it into a thermos and carried it out the kitchen door, pausing to lock the door carefully behind her.
It was no more than ten steps from the back door to the door of the studio, but it often felt like a gulf. She unlocked the studio with a silver key, trying not to hurry it so that it stuck in the lock, and when the door opened
