The Violet Hour: A Novel (44 page)

He leaned back into his own seat. “No, sorry. I didn’t mean to hover.”

“It’s no trouble. I always request a window because I like to watch, but I really shouldn’t have this time.” She patted her belly, and he saw that she was pregnant. “I’m going to be getting up a lot.”

“Boy or girl?” he found himself asking.

“Girl.”

She was young, maybe even Elizabeth’s age, Elizabeth who was still tumbling, still shifting into the person she’d become. This woman wore a plain gold band on her ring finger and her hair in a large, curly knot. Because he’d just met her, she seemed already to be the person that she was. He wondered if Elizabeth appeared that way to strangers, too. Or if he did, for that matter. Or Cassandra. She had at one time to him.

He switched seats with the pregnant woman, chatted briefly about raising daughters, and eventually turned to watch the cloud face below, now unobstructed. It stretched like an endless mattress. He leaned his head against the cabin wall.

When Cassandra announced she was pregnant, they were living in their second apartment. She had by then begun art school, and he was a third-year resident. Their troubles, it seemed, were behind them. He remembered thinking how he’d once been a guy with friends, and what a comparatively small existence that was once he became a man with a wife.

He recalled her standing in their bathroom doorway and waving the beige e.p.t. box at the bed. She spoke with cautious pride and put a hand on her belly to make sure he understood. Tightly tucked under the covers and exhausted from another marathon shift, he had the sensation that he was an old man, and for a moment he envied the effortless athleticism of her body. He had never seen her exercise, and now here she was, lean, powerful, and invisibly replicating. He would’ve taken the time to really appreciate his own strength had he realized how quickly it would fade.

“Who are you?” he asked her, making a great effort to point his toes.

“Silly,” she said. “Do you think it’ll be a girl or a boy?”

“Come here,” he said. He stretched out his arms and she dove into his chest, evidently unaware of his infirmity. He rocked her and kissed her head.

“What do you think?” she said. “I bet you want a boy so you can play catch with him. Of course, you’d love a girl just the same—or maybe even more, the way some dads do.”

He was spent—how could he ever become a father? It was too late for him; he had no idea what to do. He tried to picture himself chasing after a small person, the back of a little red head bobbing and weaving through some yard. He saw himself reaching, missing, grasping air. An old man left behind. The truth was he’d never really been comfortable among people, never quite understood where they were going. And for a parent that was quite a liability. After his grandmother, who knew something about not belonging, only Cassandra had been able to tolerate his alienness. Cassandra and his patients, because they were uncomfortable, too.

“Oh, sweetie,” she said. “Are you crying?”

Of course he wasn’t. He wiped the very notion from his face. He slowed his breathing and tried again to point his toes. With a great effort, he brought up his knees, and along with them all the covers she’d carefully tucked.

He cradled himself around Cassandra’s body and squeezed, remembering that he was, after all, rather young. He was twenty-eight. He could bench-press his weight and run a seven-minute mile. He could surely catch up with a child. And his wife—his wife was even younger than he was. When she looked at him her face was the world, her eyes as deep and boundless as the sea.

“If it’s a girl,” he said, “I hope she’s just like you.”

V
aleria Gonzalez arrived on a gurney at close to ten that evening. The undertaker who brought her smoked a cigarette in the drive while his guys carried her inside. He was Alvin’s friend and colleague: thin and pucker-lipped, like most undertakers, who were ultracareful with their own lives but couldn’t survive them without smoking. Nothing kept depression at bay like nicotine, and nothing covered a death stench like the familiar fog of tobacco. It was a necessary evil, an occupational hazard. He maintained a wide stance beside his hearse, waiting patiently while Cassandra shook her pen to sign the forms.

When Alvin Dao called about Valeria, Eunice was already in bed. Howie had answered the wall phone in the kitchen and, not knowing what to do, had walked as far into the dining room as the cord would allow to call for his sisters’ advice. Cassandra and Mary came in to listen while Howie repeated the information he was receiving from Alvin on the line.

“He says not to wake Mom, but that someone has to be here to receive the body,” Howie said, the curly beige phone cord wrapped loosely around his midsection. “There was some kind of mix-up. An arrangement they’d had with another funeral home fell through, and
they need to have her ready tomorrow so they can fly her to Mexico for burial. Even without that, Alvin wouldn’t want to waste any time because this kind of heat really accelerates decomposition.”

Cassandra squeezed a grotesque vision from her mind. “Tomorrow?” she asked.

“That’s what he says.” Alvin could be heard insisting on something through the receiver. “He says you never turn a family down,” Howie repeated, “even on short notice. He’s doing this as a favor to an undertaker in Fredericksburg—” Alvin’s voice issued a corrective “—sorry,
Gaithersburg
.”

“Well, what do we have to do?” Mary asked. “Open the door?”

Howie nodded. “He’ll be here as soon as he can. His friend’s coming ahead with the corpse. I mean decedent. Sorry.” It was a more respectful word than
corpse,
and all three had known it as long as they’d known words like
senator
and
broadcast
.

“It’s going to be a rush job,” Alvin said, loud and clear. Cassandra couldn’t tell if he sounded irritated or excited at the prospect of such a grueling assignment.

“So you’ve got this one, then?” Mary asked when Howie hung up—Mary, who was usually the martyr.

He looked at her. “Just because I happened to answer the phone?”

“You know I hate seeing the decedents when they first come in.”

“Come on, Mary, no one
likes
it,” he said, stretching the gnarled phone cord away from his hip so that he could step over and out of its loop.

“But it’ll be easy,” Mary said. “Cassandra and I have the kids to worry about.” She looked at her sister hopefully. Cassandra had used the excuse before, in various selfish ways. She’d canceled professional appointments to chaperone Elizabeth’s field trips. She’d dodged chatterbox colleagues with the claim that her daughter was supposed to call at any minute. But this time, it seemed unfair. Why use Elizabeth against her brother, who didn’t have any kids, and—who knew?—might have wanted them once, very much.

“I don’t even know where Elizabeth is,” Cassandra said. Mary’s
hopeful look eroded into desperation. A lock of hair fell in her face, making a slash between her eyes.

“Please,” she said, heavily, not even bothering to brush the lock away. “I don’t think I can look at another corpse this week.”

“Again,” Howie said, indignant now, “
none
of us—”

“It’s fine,” Cassandra said. “I’ll do it.”

They blinked at her. “You?” Mary asked, bitterly. “You wouldn’t even look at Dad.”

Cassandra winced at this reminder of her reputation: the family wimp. “How hard can it be? It’s just opening a door. I’ll look away if I have to.” The more she thought about it, the better she felt about the decision. She was the oldest. Every now and then the oldest had to take on the burden of everyone else’s pain. She felt her chest rise and float a little, like a tablecloth outdoors. It was an unmistakably nice sensation: the levity of goodness. She understood why Mary was so often a willing martyr. It felt good, sometimes, to do the hard thing, and it felt even better when no one else would.

“She’s young, but she had cancer,” Howie warned. “She’s not going to look very pretty.”

A
FTER CASSANDRA
saw off the Gaithersburg undertaker, whose name she immediately forgot, she went into the embalming room where his crew had left the body supine on the porcelain table, still dressed in the rosebud-patterned pajamas she’d died in. Her head sat upon its block like a melon on a stick, her skin a pale, sea-foam green. She was bald, of course, like a wigless department store mannequin. Her toes and fingers were swollen and curled under and her mouth was slightly open, as though she had one last thing to say. Valeria Gonzalez looked old, and at the same time, no more than thirty-five.

Inappropriate though it might have been, Cassandra was taken now with the thought of how unfair it was that Valeria, like Howard, had died the same week that a major catastrophe had seized the nation’s attention. Compared with drowning in your home with a
thousand other Americans, succumbing to cancer wasn’t so bad. Neither was breaking your neck at age seventy-nine. At least Valeria had had time to say good-bye. At least Howard had lived a long life. Neither of them were casualties of government negligence. She thought of how much worse it must have been to have died, coincidentally, on September 11, 2001—in New York City, even. An old lady in a nursing home in Queens expiring peacefully in her sleep, as oblivious to international events as she was to the oatmeal growing cold in her bowl. A drunk man plowing his car into a sound barrier on the West Side Highway in the wee hours of the morning while the towers still stood, and no one but the terrorists and a few befuddled intelligence officers had ever dreamed that they could come down. Could you even mourn such banal deaths in the midst of national tragedy? It had to take a lot of determination to reserve a funeral parlor for a drunk driver when there were martyred firefighters and financial analysts waiting in the queue. But tragic deaths were always more important. One only had to read about the latest plane crash to understand this. The grainy faces of the victims would stare heroically from the newspaper page, as though they’d known all along that this would be their fate. Their career in product management, their recent engagement, their devotion to the Knicks—all mere preludes to this single, defining fact of their lives. You couldn’t help feeling guilty you’d survived when you read such coverage. You couldn’t help feeling guilty that your dead loved ones had avoided the panic of plunging altitude, shearing metal, and the acrid, unjust smell of fuel igniting into flames. If they’d been aware of how much worse the crash victims had had it, the assumption was, they’d feel pretty guilty, too.

Valeria lay on the table now guilt-free and, if not serene, then at least aloof. Alvin’s colleague had closed her eyes, but it would be up to Alvin to wire her mouth shut and relax her shoulders, which were narrow and had tightened upward.

Cassandra stepped closer and leaned over the body, holding her breath more tightly with every inch. Then, as if remembering a trick, she lifted the back of her left hand to her nose and exhaled, feeling
the warm, bacterial swampiness of life. Tentatively, she held her right hand in front of Valeria’s face, lowering it with care toward her nostrils. Nothing. Another millimeter closer. Nothing still. Any closer and she’d be picking Valeria’s nose. Her dead nose.

Cassandra withdrew her hand. She felt brave and in tune with the life cycle. She would be lying there herself one day.

“Boo!” she shouted.

The corpse’s right pinky finger moved, making a small brushing sound against the table. A postmortem spasm. To imagine anything else would be insanity.

“Gotcha!” Cassandra shouted, nervously.

Valeria’s left eye opened. She was looking at an empty spot on the wall near the ceiling, and she seemed no longer on the verge of speaking. Her mouth had shifted position so that she was now practically grinning at Cassandra, who backed away, all the while telling herself that rictus was just a part of death, and if she couldn’t accept that then she really was as weak as everyone had said. She retreated until her elbow touched the doorframe and she was halfway into the hall. The next thing she heard was the mannered tread of Alvin’s shoes coming down the basement stairs.

“You didn’t have to stand watch,” he said when he arrived. He was dressed like a golfer—khaki slacks, polo shirt, cotton sweater vest—and holding a brown briefcase.

“She’s moving a little,” Cassandra confessed.

“Well, she wasn’t about to get up and walk out, was she?” Alvin said, more loudly than she’d ever heard him speak. He brushed past her to get a look. “Aw, she’s winking at you!” It came out flat, like an impersonation of banter. He was not the sort of person for whom teasing or sweetness came naturally.

“This won’t be hard,” he said, after peering down her throat. “I’ll be right back.” He went off humming in the direction of his office. He swung his briefcase as he walked.

Cassandra looked back at Valeria, who was still winking, her mouth even more open than before, and oblong. She looked almost,
but not quite, like an opera character on her deathbed, summoning the breath to form the final note to her final aria. At the same time, it was clear that no breath would ever come.

Alvin returned wearing a monogrammed lab coat, and goggles on the top of his head. He moved with a physician’s sense of purpose, picking up where the actual doctors had left off. The words had changed—the woman who was once a patient was now a decedent, and wasn’t really even a woman anymore—but otherwise it was the same. A body with organs, just a little bit further along: yesterday dying, today dead. Alvin took a pair of latex surgical gloves from the box on the counter and snapped them onto his hands. He clearly had everything under control. Finally, Cassandra could leave. When she got upstairs, she was going to stick her face in the tin of coffee beans and take a long, deep equatorial breath. If that didn’t work, she’d fry a whole head of garlic in a pan.

“Yours are in the cabinet,” Alvin said.

“My what?” she asked. He gestured at his head. “You don’t mean goggles?”

“Goggles and lab coat, yes.”