The Violet Hour: A Novel (45 page)

“Oh no, I’m going upstairs.”

“I told Howie my guy’s on vacation. One of you has to help.” He was busy opening drawers and placing various metal tools on the counter. His voice was even and unconcerned; he expected her acquiescence.

“Well, he didn’t mention it to me.”

Alvin shrugged. “Regardless.”

“But my dad . . . this week . . .”

His eyes were sympathetic but no less relentless. “I know. It’s been very hard.”

“I’ve never done this before,” she pleaded. “I’m not even licensed! My parents never made me do anything more than keep accounts and answer the phone.”

“And that was very kind of them. But you’re an adult now, and this is an emergency.”

She couldn’t believe she was being spoken to this way, as though she really had no choice in the matter. Of course she had a choice. She didn’t work for Alvin. She didn’t even work for her family. She was an adult.

“It’s illegal for me to assist with an embalming.”

“Right, because you’ve never done anything illegal. Spare me. All you have to do is hand me these tools when I ask for them and follow simple instructions. You can’t mess this up.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“If that’s what you’re afraid of.” He blinked at her pointedly. Everything he did, it seemed, he did to make a point.

Cassandra shook her head. She wasn’t afraid of messing up. The only thing she was afraid of was Valeria. She didn’t want to touch her, or watch Alvin touch her, or look at her any longer than she already had. There might be slime, or dismemberment, or the sudden discovery of rot on the chest—things once seen, she could never unsee. She wished she had a cigarette, or better yet, a joint.

Alvin was now holding out the coat and goggles.

“I’m afraid of her,” she said, feeling instantly foolish. Alvin’s expression remained blank. He had no sympathy for cosmic anxiety in the workroom. She looked up at the place where the ceiling met the wall and tried very hard not to cry.

“I’m going to start on Mrs. Gonzalez’s paperwork now,” he said at last, his tone measured, if not tender. “That’s a one-person job. You have about ten minutes to find someone to fill in for you. Otherwise, I’ll see you right back here.”

“Okay,” she said, her mind already racing through her options in relief. “I will, I will.”

E
LIZABETH WAS WATCHING
Katrina coverage on mute when Cassandra popped her head into the den.

“Have you seen your aunt and uncle? Either? I have to find one of them for Alvin. He’s downstairs.”

Elizabeth glanced at her watch.

“I know, I know,” Cassandra yammered on. “It’s an emergency and I’m just not as strong as I thought I was . . . and well, I won’t bore you, but it’s a
very
long story.”

Elizabeth was still thinking of Teemu and Anya on the San Francisco wharf. She wondered if she should try to call Toby when she got back to New York. Even just to say she was sorry. “Remind me to ask you something later.”

“Okay, what?” Cassandra panted.

“Later. Have you been moving boxes? You seem out of breath.”

“I am!” Cassandra laughed. “I am out of breath! You couldn’t have said it better.”

Elizabeth didn’t quite get the joke. “Well, anyway,” she said, “Dad left.”

“I know. We’ve been talking, actually. I’m sure you’ve noticed.”

“I have.” She always noticed. She watched people, and the people she’d watched most were her parents. “I’d been trying not to get excited.”

“That’s good.” The words came reflexively, but Cassandra was saddened to hear herself say them. When Elizabeth was a little girl and still discovering her abilities, Cassandra would never have dreamed of encouraging emotional restraint. Everything was worthy of excitement. It was the same way she’d felt when she first moved to California, when she was really just a child herself. Elizabeth was not much older now than Cassandra had been then, and yet her eyes were already weighted with experience, her attitude resigned. She knew what everyone eventually learns: that it’s better not to get your hopes up, not to want or expect too much. She’d learned it from her parents, but unlike swimming or a love of modern art, it wasn’t something Cassandra was proud to have taught.

Sprawled on her grandfather’s gray sofa, Elizabeth’s color stood out more boldly than ever. There weren’t many true greens in the world. Cassandra had been looking at people long enough to know. Most were light or dark—pastel yellows and pinks for the happy, easy
people; blackish purples and reds for the wicked or sick at heart. You had to possess a special kind of variety to claim a whole spectrum of any shade, let alone one as living as green. But Elizabeth had it. She really did. She was at once fresh and spoiled: a new head of broccoli and a bag of last week’s wilted romaine, sharing quarters in the refrigerator drawer.

Cassandra sat beside her and grasped her daughter’s hand, wanting to meld it into her own.

Elizabeth’s fingers squeezed back, lively as ever. “Just tell me what you need, Mom. I’ve been a bitch. Just tell me what you need me to do.”

A
S
A CHILD
, Elizabeth had envisioned time as a never-ending staircase: straight and ascending with a landing here and there. And maybe it was a staircase, if you wanted to see it that way, but it was obvious now that it was also a Tilt-a-Whirl, revolving upon itself so fast that it was all you could do not to puke. Just like light was a particle and also a wave.

For here they were again, in her grandparents’ home, and here she was again in a standard white lab coat, just like the kind she wore at the hospital, and once again she was bending over a cadaver, learning something new. With both hands, she kneaded the woman’s right leg, imitating Alvin’s rapid motions on the arms and neck. Under her thumbs, the muscles relaxed inch by inch, as though finally accepting that they were dead.

Cassandra stood across from her at the preparation table, her hands gently working the woman’s other leg, her forehead illumined by the work lamp, which made her look rather young. Elizabeth worked her way from thigh to calf, glimpsing her white lapel every time she glanced down. The coat reminded her it was time for seriousness, and time to grow up, though she didn’t quite know what that meant. When she was a girl, she’d pictured herself somehow catching up with her mom.

When they were done with the postmortem massage, Alvin tucked a piece of cotton under each of the woman’s eyelids. “You wear contacts, right?” he said to Elizabeth. He handed her two small round disks. They were opaque and egg-toned, with a bristle of tiny spikes on the top side, and much larger than anything Elizabeth would ever dare put in her eye.

“Same principle,” he continued. “Just slide it onto the eyeball, put a dab of this cream on top, and close the eyelid over it—firmly, so it holds. Couldn’t be simpler.”

Elizabeth followed these instructions while Alvin set about threading a long, curved needle with string from a wall-mounted spool. It all felt very normal. Surgery was like this, though the dead seemed to have it even better. No surgery she’d scrubbed in on had ever begun with a six-hand massage.

“She’s a natural!” Alvin said after he’d examined her work.

“She
is
practically a physician,” Cassandra said. She was standing back against the counter, holding one hand over her heart.

“Transferrable skills. You could come work for me if your doctor plans don’t work out. I’m not saying they won’t. Only if.”

“God forbid,” Cassandra exclaimed encouragingly.

Elizabeth blushed. She was surprised to find herself feeling rather proud to have earned Alvin’s esteem. She wasn’t sure she’d ever performed a new medical procedure without first seeing it done by someone else. Even then, she often stumbled. For however close she was to becoming a physician, she was still unqualified for everything. It was the nature of medical training that for years, moments of real proficiency were rare—the opposite of her educational experience up until then, which was marked by one inevitable success after another. She’d forgotten how wonderful it felt to demonstrate a skill without much effort or study. For a brief but passionate instant, she wished she’d offered to help her grandfather with his work while he was alive, so that he could’ve witnessed a triumph like the one she’d just performed.

Alvin sutured the woman’s mouth shut with his needle, piercing
her first between the lip and gum, then securing the jaw through her nostrils. Before Elizabeth knew it, he was tying off the knot with as much flair as a master costumer securing a bodice backstage. Alvin nodded at Elizabeth, and as directed, she followed up with the mouth former, another perforated piece of plastic, this one resembling the apparatus her dentist had commissioned to stop her from grinding her teeth in her sleep. She slid it into place, topped it off with a dab of cream, and pressed the woman’s lips down over it until she was certain she felt them catch. It was somewhat gruesome, but she’d seen worse.

Alvin glanced over his shoulder. He was mixing a chemical cocktail in a contraption that, aside from the giant orange biohazard sticker, looked very much like an old-fashioned kitchen blender. “Right common carotid artery,” he said. “Right internal jugular vein. Know where they are, Elizabeth?”

Of course she did. They were right next to each other—neighbors in the neck.

“I need you to access them both for me,” he said. “Scalpel and hook are on the counter.”

He was as presumptuous as the most arrogant attending doctor she’d ever assisted. But he was right to presume. She knew just what to do. She used the scalpel to make an incision that cut through the skin and no farther. Then, with the aneurysm hook, she pulled back the tissue above the artery and vein, taking great care not to pierce either one.

“Ready,” she said.

Alvin came over with a rolling cart that held two tubes and two lengths of clear hose. With the scalpel and more suture string, he fed one tube into the artery, while Elizabeth continued to hold the tissue aside with the hook. He did the same with the vein.

When the fluid began to flow, the corpse perked up, as though coming alive once again. Her veins bulged visibly above the skin and the color returned to her cheeks. She almost seemed to be enjoying herself as preservatives, dyes, and perfume traded places with her
blood, which Alvin drained away in regulated pulses from the tube attached at the vein.

“So long, blood,” Elizabeth said. She had to admit she was enjoying herself, too.

“She’s looking good,” Cassandra said, in the supportive but semicondescending tone Elizabeth and her colleagues often adopted in the hospital. It was the signature tone of the funeral business, too—a wry appreciation for procedure in the face of human suffering. Elizabeth was filled with admiration, hearing her mother speak this way. Her mother, who hated everything to do with death and funerals, was now bravely placing her finger on the corpse’s wrist to feel the chemicals flow.
You can do this,
she seemed to be saying to herself, the way she might have encouraged Elizabeth when she was young.

The arterial embalming done, Elizabeth sutured her incision closed, while Alvin instructed Cassandra to remove the paper gown. She did, tearing it into two pieces that she used to cover the breasts and groin, revealing a stony white torso in between. Armed now with a new length of tube, an aspirator, and a trocar, Alvin pierced the abdomen and suctioned off the remaining liquids, this time from the body’s cavities. These, too, he refilled with chemicals, releasing into the room a scent of gum like the kind Elizabeth chewed in high school when she was preparing to make out with a boy.

Hours had passed, but no one seemed tired. Alvin screwed a plastic button into the puncture he’d made in the corpse’s stomach, plugging her up for all eternity. Cassandra removed the paper censor panels altogether, and the three of them began to wash the body, as if performing a religious bath, then clothed her in the dress provided.

“Now for restoration. Normally, we wait several hours. But time is of the essence tonight.”

“He means makeup,” Cassandra said.

“Our resident artist.” Alvin bowed. “I leave it to you. Cosmetics are in the far cabinet. Remember: always subtle, never dramatic. Just knock on my door when you’re done.”

He left them there with a snapshot of the deceased and an arsenal
of powders, lipsticks, and creams. They looked at the photo, which showed a laughing petite woman posing in front of the U.S. Capitol. Her infinite teeth flashed between red lips and her black, lustrous hair waved in the wind. So she’d been pretty. It was their job now to restore her, make her pretty one last time.

“Always, never,” Cassandra said, holding up two bottles of liquid foundation. “That was Grandpa’s mantra. I got to be his assistant a few times when I was young. Too young, actually.”

“Did Howie ever help him?” Elizabeth asked. “Howie or Mary?”

“Mary . . .” Cassandra said as though trying to recall who she was. “I
think
she did. . . . I don’t know. We’d have to ask her.” She looked at the bottles in her hands. “Nude or Buff?”

They looked the same to Elizabeth. “Mmm, Buff?”

Cassandra frowned and held the two choices at eye level. “Really, you think? I don’t know. I think it might be Nude.” She tested a drop on the back of Valeria’s hand.

“Wow, you’re right,” Elizabeth admitted. “Perfect match.”

They rubbed moisturizing cream into Valeria’s face, neck and hands, then with long, slender brushes, began applying the chosen shade. Cassandra painted the face in quick, crosshatch motions, working the color into something beyond pigment. On the hands, Elizabeth employed longer, smoother strokes, taking care to spread the foundation fully and evenly across the knuckles. She paused several times to wipe excess smudges from the nails, and at one point glanced up to observe her mother’s progress.

With the makeup in hand, Cassandra was at home as she hadn’t appeared all week—in a genuine state of flow, totally oblivious to how she might look to others. She bent close over the body, her chin doubled, eyes dim and posture slackened in concentration, as though she were transferring her own liveliness directly onto the corpse. Sure enough, as she worked, Valeria’s previously strewn features regained their proper positions. Nose and cheek were merging back together; a chin was coming out of the dark. Liner and shadow brought out the eyes, closed and rested. The lips budded with a trace of reddish gloss.
Dustings of blush added an air of amusement, and Elizabeth sensed for the first time the sort of person Valeria Gonzalez might have been: a mischief maker and free spirit who talked too much to strangers, loved helplessly by all. Elizabeth wanted to cry. Nobody made a face like her mother.