Shadows Have Gone (11 page)

Carly had seen many dead bodies since the Crisis. She knew immediately that Miz Marson was gone. Her eyes were closed, and there was dried blood under her nose where she must have struck it when she fell. Around her cheek and chin was a purplish-red patch, like a large bruise.

Carly’s legs went rubbery, and she sat down, hard, on the floor beside Miz Marson. Gazing up at Stacy, Carly was unable to figure out what question she wanted to ask first.

“It could have been a stroke or a heart attack,” Stacy said. Tears glittered on her cheeks. “We won’t know unless you want us to—”

“No.” Carly’s throat felt like she’d swallowed ground glass. “No, that doesn’t really matter.”

The kitchen was silent except for the breeze whistling through the screens over the window. Carly watched the curtains flutter for a moment before her gaze drifted down to the floor. Miz Marson had been cooking. There was an upside-down pot on the floor in a congealing pool of oatmeal. A spoon lay beside it.

Carly heard a soft sob from the doorway and looked up to see Veronica carrying in a blanket, which she shook out and then gently draped over Miz Marson’s still form. She took time to tuck it in, smoothing the wrinkles out.

“She told me I should be the town veterinarian when I grow up, because I love animals so much,” Veronica said. “I told her I didn’t want to be any kind of doctor. This is why.”

Carly knew she should turn to the little girl and say something about death being part of life and how community and love were what helped people through the toughest times, but the words just wouldn’t come. Stacy put her arm around Veronica, and the girl laid her head on Stacy’s shoulder.

How long Carly sat there, she didn’t know, but she swam back through the fog when Justin touched her shoulder. When had he arrived?

He looked down at Carly, sorrow in his eyes. “We should move her,” he said.

Carly started to object, but she realized there wouldn’t be an ambulance to come and take her to the hospital to be declared dead or to be taken care of by a solemn, reverent funeral director. No one was coming.

“Did she . . . suffer?” Carly asked Stacy. As a nurse, she had surely seen things like this before. “Did she . . . lie here? If we had come sooner . . .”

Stacy shook her head. “No. It was instantaneous. I’m sure of it. Look here.” Stacy showed her where one of Miz Marson’s hands had landed in the spilled oatmeal and left an almost perfect impression. “She didn’t move at all after she fell. She died instantly. Also, it looks like she broke her nose when she fell, but there’s only a tiny trickle of blood. Her heart stopped beating even before she struck the counter or the floor, or there’d be more of it. She didn’t feel anything, Carly. I promise. She was just . . . gone.”

“Her face?” The purple bruising on Miz Marson’s cheek looked so brutal.

Justin knelt down next to the body. “Postmortem lividity. It’s from lying facedown after she died.”

Carly closed her eyes. “Thank you.”

“Where do you want us to take her?” Justin asked.

Carly had no idea how to answer that.

“How about her bedroom?” Mindy suggested. “That way we can . . . get her ready.”

They’d have to do that themselves. The responsibility would fall to her, because she had been the closest to Miz Marson. Carly nodded.

Justin picked up Miz Marson’s blanket-shrouded body and carefully made his way up the stairs.

Carly followed slowly, gripping the rail like a lifeline. She felt like an intruder as she walked up the steps. She’d only been in Miz Marson’s kitchen and living room, never upstairs. They stood on the landing at the top and glanced around, wondering which room to use.

One of the doors was open, and Carly recognized a pair of Miz Marson’s shoes lying by the bed. “That one,” Carly said, nodding toward it.

Justin carried Miz Marson inside to lay her on her bed. It was neatly made, covered in a white chenille bedspread. On the night stand was a book Miz Marson had been reading, a bit of ribbon tucked inside to mark her place, and beside it stood a glass of water Miz Marson would never finish drinking.

Miz Marson was intensely private, and she never spoke of her life Before. From Miz Marson’s position in the community when they arrived, and the few things she’d said here and there, Carly had gathered she had lived in this house for a long time, but Carly had never been sure.

The rooms on the first floor were devoid of any clues about her life, spare and simply furnished and as impersonal as a model home. This room was overflowing with framed pictures of unfamiliar people and mementos, the significance of which Carly would never know.

On the dresser was a black-and-white photo of a woman with three little boys. It was either Miz Marson or a sister who very closely resembled her. The woman’s eyes sparkled with happiness behind cat’s-eye glasses. A heavyset man stood beside her, his hand resting on her shoulder. The boys had plump cheeks and were neatly dressed in identical corduroy shorts and buttoned shirts, their feet encased in buffed leather loafers.

Where were those children now, Carly wondered. None of them had survived the Infection, obviously, but had they lived to adulthood? Had Miz Marson had grandchildren, too? Carly had always respected the old lady’s privacy, figuring she’d talk about her family one day when she was ready, but now she would never have the chance, and Carly’s questions would never have answers.

The wall held a photo in a silver oval frame of a woman in a drop-waist dress and bobbed hair, and an even older photo in sepia tone of a woman in a long dress with huge, puffed sleeves. It was like a pictorial genealogy spread before her, but one that seemed to end in the 1970s. There were no bright color photographs framed on the dresser, no snapshots of the boys in graduation robes or wedding tuxes. She realized the dearth of those photos provided a silent answer, one she would have rather not heard.

Curiosity warred with the feeling that she was invading Miz Marson’s privacy. She turned away from the pictures, away from the past life her friend had kept to herself, and to the tasks at hand.

She heard Justin in the background, talking with the Reverend, and there were mentions of a coffin and a gravesite and a tombstone. But Carly didn’t have to deal with those things yet. The first thing was getting Miz Marson presentable. She couldn’t be buried in her nightgown.

She went over to the closet and opened the double louvered doors. Half of it was occupied by men’s clothing, old and faded, each garment shrouded in plastic. From the look of the wide lapels and loud fabric, Carly would have guessed it dated from the 1970s. Miz Marson’s husband’s clothing.

Carly closed her eyes and leaned her forehead against the door. Miz Marson apparently had been unable to part with his things even after all these years. The unexpected sentimentality caused her eyes to fill with tears. More of Miz Marson’s private world.

She forced her attention back to Miz Marson’s clothing. Summer dresses, slacks. A dress in a zippered plastic bag caught her eye, and she withdrew it, laying the bag on the foot of the bed. Under the murky plastic, she saw the color of ivory.

Was this Miz Marson’s wedding dress? It was cream-colored satin, calf length, with a full skirt. Carly smiled, because it seemed like the kind of wedding dress Miz Marson would have worn. Very simple, practical, with a minimum of frills. She looked back at the men’s clothing and then said to Mindy, “This one.”

Mindy nodded. “I think you’re right.”

Stacy shooed the men outside, and they set to work, stripping Miz Marson of her nightgown. Tears ran continually from Carly’s eyes, and she had to stop frequently to wipe her eyes. When her parents died, she had put her father’s body into the bed next to her mother, clasped their hands, and left. At the time, she had been in too deep a state of shock to perform any last rites for them. She understood, at this moment, Kaden’s dedication to hauling rocks under the hot sun.

“She’s so thin,” Mindy said.

Miz Marson’s ribs and hipbones stuck up in sharp relief, and her arms were little more than twigs.

“I hadn’t noticed her losing weight,” Carly said. A pang of guilt hunched her shoulders. How had she missed it?

Mindy frowned. “It wasn’t because she was going hungry. I was just in her pantry last week, and she has a good store of food in there. Canned vegetables from her garden and dried meat from the alligator.”

“She didn’t say anything to me about feeling sick or having loss of appetite,” Stacy said.

“You know Miz Marson. She wouldn’t have said anything.”

There was a scar on Miz Marson’s chest, a straight vertical line above her heart. It was old and faint but still stark against her untanned skin. “What’s this?”

Stacy froze, and her eyes widened. “That’s—that’s a pacemaker scar,” she said after swallowing hard.

A pacemaker? Carly looked down at Miz Marson’s still form and then back up at Stacy as the answer slowly dawned on her. “How long do they last?”

“About five to ten years, depending on the type of battery.” Stacy’s voice was shaking. “They have to be surgically removed and replaced when the battery starts to die.”

Could that have been what happened to her? Miz Marson would have known there wouldn’t be anything they could do about it.

Carly used her shoulder to scrub tears from the corner of her eye as she carefully bunched up the wedding dress skirt so they could slide it down over Miz Marson’s still form.

“She was in her eighties, you two. There could have been other health issues we didn’t know about.” Mindy lifted Miz Marson’s shoulders so they could work the gown down over her head and slip her arms through the sleeves. “That’s just the way life is sometimes. But I feel like it’s a certainty, if you’d asked, Miz Marson would have said she’d rather go suddenly like this than to linger in sickness or pain with something we couldn’t treat.”

She knew Mindy was right, but it still didn’t make Carly feel better. She felt like she should have noticed, should have known something was wrong.

The gown still fit Miz Marson, though it was a bit loose. They laid her back down, and Carly took the curlers from Miz Marson’s hair and brushed it, then took a damp cloth to remove the bit of blood from her nose. When all of it was done, she put coins on Miz Marson’s eyelids to keep them closed. She wished there was another way. The coins over her eyes gave them a round, cartoonish appearance.

Mindy scratched her head. “Should we give her any makeup?”

“Miz Marson doesn’t wear makeup,” Carly said.

“I know, but she looks so . . . bruised.” The livid purple mark where Miz Marson’s face had laid on the floor was startling.

Carly thought back to the funerals of Before, the dead pumped full of chemicals and fillers, painted with makeup and laid under pink-toned lights to look “natural,” as though they were merely napping. Miz Marson wouldn’t want all that artificiality, even if it were possible today. “This is death. The days of sanitizing it and trying to disguise it are over.”

They had finished. There seemed to be nothing else to do. Carly watched as Mindy settled in a chair over by the vanity table. “Where did Justin go?”

“He and Kaden are making the coffin. He thought you’d want one.”

Justin had taken up woodworking the winter they had stayed in North Dakota. He’d built Dagny’s crib himself, banging and cursing and trying over and over until he could figure out how to work the wood using primitive tools he’d scavenged from a local museum. It was one of those skills they needed to relearn now that they could no longer rely on technology. Carly thought back to Before, when her friend Michelle had a baby. Carly had blithely ordered baby presents from Amazon and had them delivered in just a few days. But the Internet had ended with the Crisis, and so had the electricity to run it, and mail delivery. Now, what they couldn’t scavenge in abandoned stores, they had to make themselves. It was as though the clock had turned back to the nineteenth century, and none of them were truly prepared for it.

The crib Justin had made for their daughter wasn’t a work of art. It was a work of love. Simple yet sturdy. He’d spent countless hours sanding it to make sure the baby couldn’t get a splinter. Carly knew he’d put the same dedication into anything he made for Miz Marson.

They sat around the room on chairs that Veronica brought them. They didn’t want her helping with the body—they didn’t have to discuss it. It was just something they automatically rejected as being beyond her age. So they sent her on errands, such as fetching chairs and making them drinks, gathering up candles for the parlor downstairs and preparing for the funeral to be held there.

Carly used an old magazine to fan herself and shoo away the flies that came to the body. This was an old-style wake, watching over the body while the other preparations were made.

She thought of Juneau, that empty city of the dead, and her parents, lying on their bed with their hands clasped, a blanket over them as their burial. She had once felt it was fitting they should remain among their things, with the mementos of their life surrounding them, but now she wasn’t so sure.

As dawn approached, Justin and Kaden returned. Bits of sawdust clung to their clothing. Justin took Carly into his arms.

“You okay?” he whispered.

“I am while I have to be,” Carly said. “Ask me later, when I have the freedom to not be okay.” She didn’t know when that would be, with the responsibilities she had hanging over her. If ever.