We Live Inside You (21 page)

I’m thinking too much. I sigh a long, shaky sigh and can feel myself on the verge of tears now, but I don’t know if I’d be crying for Darry or myself. I just know I hate the delicacy of trembling air leaving my chest.

In five more minutes I’m in my car, headed north on I-5.

Even as my right leg becomes fatigued to shaking from the two hundred mile drive, I take comfort in the inappropriateness of my situation; in the fact that I’ve received this misguided message. It’ll make for a crazy story at the least. I wonder how Darry will respond when I tell him that the rear end of a semi-truck tore off his head.

He’ll want details, of course. To flesh out the morbid fantasy of his own brutal, blood-and-diesel demise. I’ll tell him about this drive—how I flinched at every bit of sulfur-smelling road-kill that littered the roadside, at every tuft of skunk hair shifting in the wind of traffic. How the bright red flashing brake-lights of each semi-truck I passed were fists squeezing my heart.

Tonight, as we’re curled up in bed together, I’ll lay out the whole absurd affair for him. And he’ll laugh. That’s the easy thing to do. I’ll feel the familiar heat of his breath on my neck, rub my head against his chest, and we’ll both acknowledge this strange truth:

For a moment, he was dead.

This is what the world, excepting us, had believed.

The coroner’s name is Brad Fuller, and he has hands that could casually palm a basketball. Or a human skull, which must be a more common occurrence for him. He’s tall and butterfly symmetrical. Strong forehead. Wide jaw. Alpha all the way. He smells like nothing because he works in a place that goes to great lengths to smell like nothing, provided you don’t take a deep whiff. Brad’s younger looking than I expected from his professional demeanor on the phone, and I wonder if he’s even past his third decade.

I’m smiling at him and extending my hand, saying, “Nice to meet you, Brad.” I want to feel the size of his hand over mine. He seems a little off-center, unsure of how to respond to my casual greeting.

“Good to meet you, Mrs. Broderick.”

Even hearing myself addressed as Darry’s other half doesn’t save me from the feelings that have returned to my belly. Brad Fuller is politely dressed in a dark blue suit that I’d like to peel away from his skin.

The fact that I’m standing in the clinical foyer of an Olympia morgue does not make me want Brad any less.

It should. I know this as a basic truth. But it doesn’t.

The desires that I’d managed to repress on the long drive up are soaring through my skin now, crashing into my borders, speeding up every breath.

I’m not letting go of Brad’s hand.

“Mrs. Broderick?”

“Oh, sorry.” I release my grip, feel the heat from his fingers slide off the thin skin on the back of my hand. “My first name’s Elloise.”

“Are you expecting any other family members to arrive before we view the body?”

“Um, no. It’s just me. Darry’s mom lives in Tennessee, and his Dad’s passed on. So it’s just me.”

“Okay. We can proceed unless you’d like a moment for yourself.”

“Aren’t you closing soon?”

“Only technically. In our line of work, we can’t assign any set hours to our responsibilities. So take your time if you need to. Chantel at the front desk has already prepared the required paperwork.”

My pulse picks up, faster now, this time because of the confidence Brad Fuller has that I’m the right person to identify this body. He’s willing to go through with this charade.

I can do this. I’m not afraid. Go in there, give my negative identification, and head across town to Darry’s hotel. Surprise him with the best sex of his life. Behind my eyes, I’ll be seeing Brad Fuller. Darry won’t care. He won’t know, and I’ll make him feel so good.

“No, I’m ready to go now.”

“Alright then... I’d like to let you know in advance, that once you’ve made the identification, you can request to spend time with the body, if you want to. If you believe that this is something you want, you just let me know and we can facilitate it. In this case, Darry’s body will need to remain covered, due to the extent…”

“I won’t want to spend time with the body.”

“Okay. I’ll take that into consideration. But you can still let me know, once you’ve seen him.”

Darry’s body
. What the hell am I doing here? And I just checked out Brad’s ass. Strong, if a bit high up on his back. I’d love to feel it, love to wrap my hands around it and pull him into me over and over again. If there was ever an apex of wrong place/wrong time, I’m shooting for it. Drowning in compulsion, surrounded by the dead, fantasizing about this stranger in a sharp suit.

I should be hungry, but I’m not. Should be sad, but I’m not. Should be scared…

I am scared. I stood by my car for twenty minutes before entering the morgue, and now I’m headed into what Brad’s told me is the viewing room.

The viewing area is a carpeted closet with a window separating it from a tiled room. Two cheap chairs, a 10 gallon trash can with a fresh plastic bag in it, a small wooden table adorned with tissues and fake light blue flowers, and a wall-mounted microphone round out the décor.

Brad is in here with me, and his forehead shines with sweat even though the room sits at that clinical un-temperature. The sweat reads as discomfort. This is the part of the job he hates.

He flips a switch by the microphone and says, “Go ahead, Dale.”

Dale, looking uncomfortable in a gray Sears bargain-bin suit too tight for his many pounds, wheels a polished silver cart into the room. An opaque black bag is resting on top. Dale is sweating, too, with moisture beading on his polished, bald head as he struggles to push the cart in a straight line to the center of the room. No one is looking forward to this.

The body on the cart, it’s much shorter than my Darry. I take comfort in that.

The comfort lasts maybe half a second. I remember the words “under-ride.”

Dale unzips the body bag and reaches into it with one hand, his fingers twitching like latex-coated spider legs.

I did not want to spend time with the body. I didn’t want to stand next to it, or touch it, or hold it.

I did not want to spend another second in that low-ceilinged, piece-of-shit morgue.

I did not want to spend another moment looking at that tattoo of my name—Elloise—with nothing but torn flesh and empty space above it.

I know I didn’t cry, although you could ask me until the end of time what look was on my face and I couldn’t give you an honest answer. Can a face show nothing?

Paperwork was easy. I left Darry’s mother’s phone number with them so she could handle their questions about what to do with his body. I signed another sheet that let me have his effects, which turned out to be a wallet and some breath mints. His car keys were still in the wreckage.

I grabbed Brad’s business card while at the front desk.

Through the whole process, I just sighed. Constant, shaking sighs—contents under pressure. No tears, and I still wanted to get off.

I’m sick and I’ve pinned a confirmation on alone. The widow, throbbing and numb.

So now I’m solo and sitting shocked in Room 202 at the Valu-Rest hotel off I-5. The key to the room was in Darry’s wallet. It’s one of those plastic cards that pops in and out of the lock and greenlights your entrance.

Darry had already been here a day. His toothpaste tube was uncapped, and a towel was sitting in a wet lump on the floor of the bathroom. One twin bed remained unmade—the Do Not Disturb sign was on display when I arrived—and his open suitcase rested on the other, the clothes from inside sprawled across the bedspread. I always admired Darry’s tidiness at home so I’m a bit shocked by the disarray here.

By the bed stand there’s a half-gone cup of tap water and Darry’s alarm clock from home. He never trusted hotel alarm clocks. Press the over-sized snooze button on one of those and you miss the meeting you traveled so far to attend.

I can’t ignore the thought—Darry should have hit snooze just one more time.

My mind flashes on Percy and SHIT HAPPENS but not even a twinge of smile follows.

Television makes me anxious. Not an option. I want distraction.

What would I do if today were a normal day? How much better would it feel to be at home now, in bed, drinking an iced coffee and reading one of Darry’s Nabokov books and waiting for him to call?

But Darry won’t be calling. Darry doesn’t exist anymore. Jesus.

How alone am I now?

How hard do I have to deny this entire day to make it disappear?

I don’t know. I don’t. Stop thinking. Stay in motion.

I use the bathroom and smell Darry’s musky cologne amidst the stronger smell of mildewing towels and the fermenting, hair-clogged tub drain.

It’s easy to picture Darry running his morning routine, applying a spritz of cologne to each side of his neck before heading out for work.

Instead I picture rubber-gloved hands trembling under the weight of dead flesh, pressing into too-white skin beneath the black-ink scrawl of my name.

I picture myself, doing ninety down the interstate, looking for my own under-ride.

This is not the way. I may be sick, but I don’t have to be alone. There’s an army of men out there, lining up for me. They don’t know it yet, but I’m available. And I want them all. Right now it might take a legion to fill me whole.

I’m a goddamned widow. Which isn’t right. It isn’t the way my life is supposed to be.

A mistake like this has happened to me.

Darry’s clothes are quickly shoved off the made bed—I can’t bring myself to touch the one he slept in—and I have a seat by the phone.

Eleven digits, a nine and Brad Fuller’s cell phone number.

His voice comes through after the third ring. “Hello?”

Then, “Who is this?”

I almost hang up. Then I remember the width of his jaw, his broad shoulders.

“Brad, this is Elloise. Elloise, from earlier in the day. I need someone to talk to. I’m all alone, and I just… I’m thinking the wrong things and I can’t…”

“Do you have any family in the area, even that you can talk to on the phone?”

“Nobody.”

He’s hesitating, looking for an out. This call is going beyond the boundaries of his job. I use his words against him.

“‘In our line of work, we can’t assign any set hours to our responsibilities.’ You said that, right?”

“Well, yes I did, but…”

“Please, Brad, please come over. I can’t sleep and I can’t think straight and I’m afraid I might hurt myself.”

He asks where I am. I tell him. He’s ten minutes away, headed my direction.

I’m not wearing underwear, just a thin blue t-shirt and a pair of faded, soft khakis. My skin feels too hot, so I turn on the A/C and cool and wait.