“You can ride with us if you like,” Detective Jameson suggested, looking as if he was about to reach out to grasp Claire and her floundering husband, who shook his head at his offer.
“No, that’s all right, we’ll drive ourselves,” Matthew said and Claire nodded as they walked with the detectives toward the door.
It was a short ride to the hospital across town. Claire had been there once before, when Preston had fallen out of a tree and they’d thought he’d broken his arm. It had turned out to only be a hairline fracture and Claire had thought at the time, “We dodged a bullet there, we really dodged a bullet.” They did not park in the front, in the sprawling hospital lot that went a half mile or so back to the road, but hung a right at the entrance and followed the detectives as they drove around back near a large garbage bin and out of the way picnic table, to a smaller, less well lit lot that had a back alley feel to it.
The hospital morgue was no place for a decent person to be, especially so late at night. It was clean, a woman in scrubs sat at a desk near its entrance and a doctor who wore a mask and ID badge was very polite to Claire and Matthew when they came in, but there was something tired, something dingy and subterranean about the basement room. The place was cold, all the furniture matched, identical muted brown chairs and loveseats that looked as if they’d been hijacked from the nineteen eighties, as if only the lowly, only the dregs came down here.
The moment Claire and Matthew stepped in they were met with clipboards containing forms and requests for insurance cards, not that Claire understood what a morgue would need with insurance. She was starting to think that soon you’d need to show your insurance card to grab a coffee at a hospital cafeteria. No one asked them how they were, not even the secretary, no one told them anything about the body they were there to see. They’d been calling it “The Body,” not John Doe, or Child Doe, just The Body, as if to give it a name, any name, would be too callous and might send Claire and Matthew spiraling.
After the paperwork, the secretary very calmly explained that the doctor would be out soon, he had another body in the morgue that needed to be handled. “I’m sorry for the wait,” the girl said kindly but professionally, “this isn’t what usually happens.” The girl at the front desk was young, with fresh green eyes and red hair that accented her royal blue scrubs. “Are you going to be all right?” she’d asked at one point. “Can I get you some water, coffee, a soda from down the hall?”
Claire and Matthew both sat forward, staring at the wall as if to will themselves away, as if to concentrate so hard so as to disappear completely, to make it so none of this was happening. Even a dull formless void would have been better than this.
“Well if you need anything,” the girl said into the void, smiling when they did not respond, “just ask.”
“Thank you,” Claire replied as they waited for the doctor to call them back.
After a wait that could have been five minutes or could have been an hour, Claire could not remember experiencing it she was so distracted, they were finally allowed into the morgue. Detective Jameson, who still seemed even after all this like a total stranger, followed them back. It was cold in the morgue proper and the doctor, a tall, thin man with long arms and skinny fingers came out with a white coat on.
“I’m Dr. Palmer, and if you have any questions, any concerns, please let me know.” He was kind, but Claire could tell he was staying as removed and professional as possible. “We have to keep it cold in here for obvious reasons, but there are jackets in the closet if you want them,” he offered after shaking their hands (his fingers were freezing).
“That’s all right,” Matthew declined the coat and Claire nodded that her husband’s answer came from the both of them. Detective Jameson, who had, one could assume, done this before, though usually the bodies were not those of young children found in the woods, took a jacket, which, although he was a big man, proved to be far too large for him. Nothing fit right here, nothing worked, nothing connected, not here inside nor to the outside world.
“Just follow me,” the doctor said, glancing back at them through his thick-framed glasses. “The Body is on the table. All I ask is that you please not touch anything. Nothing there is going to hurt you, but there’s going to be a police investigation and you shouldn’t touch anything, even the Body.”
“A police investigation?” Claire asked, still staring down at the white tiled floor. She’d been looking at it so hard and for so long that she could see the minute swirls of black and brown, intentional misdirection as she walked with her husband through a pair of double doors into a cold, sterile room, smelling of disinfectant. Most of the room was metal and glass, the epitome of modern medicine, and a humming came from the left side, where a wall of what looked like steel refrigeration units stood.
“I think you should be aware that—” the doctor started.
“Everything is fine,” Matthew interjected and a piece of the old college tennis player came out in the force behind his voice as they arrived at a table covered by a sheet about the size of Claire’s kitchen counter. It was long and rectangular, though there was something cold, something metal and alien (as if it had come from the mother-ship) about it.
“Let me pull this over so you can see the face,” the doctor went on. He pulled the sheet off with gloved hands and Claire thought, literally, Claire thought, figuratively, Claire thought actually and completely that time had stopped, that she had ceased to be, as the red pit, the one that had been building up since six o’clock when it had become painfully obvious that Preston wasn’t merely late coming home, burst inside her and she nearly toppled over.
He was there. She saw him. Claire had thought for sure that even if it were Preston she wouldn’t recognize him, since he was not himself anymore, but had now been transformed into The Body. She was sure that something about his dead form, his lifeless body would be so much less of him that she wouldn’t be able to tell, but there he was and she could see his face. It wasn’t the same face, there was something over it, a translucent film no one else seemed aware of, like his blood had turned to ice. His lips were blue, and the rings around his eyes were dark like swamp water, and yet it was the same face, the same hair, the same eyes, which were open, presumably so that he’d be easier to identify, as if a pair of parents didn’t know what their own child looked like dead or alive.
“Oh my God,” she said, and it had been him. She tried to get to him, to tell them that Preston was okay, that she’d seen him like this before (had she?), he was her little boy and there was no way he was gone, she would have felt it, she would have known. She would have died too. “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,” Claire screamed and she couldn’t remember anything afterward. She would recall his face, she would forever remember that instant whenever she closed her eyes but after that horrific moment it all went black. She could not recall rushing to the body as Detective Jameson held her back, she did not remember running in the opposite direction, tripping over a second table and spilling a bottle of green liquid all over the slippery floor. She could not recall rushing into the wall and the cut down the side of her wrist that it left or Matthew moving off into a corner, crying quietly to himself as he let the doctor and detective deal with his thrashing wife. She wouldn’t remember the doctor or Detective Jameson talking to her, the bandage tied around her wrist, the papers she signed or the permission she gave so they could do an autopsy, sew Preston up and send him to a funeral home of her choosing —as if she had the wherewithal just then to chose a funeral home.
Matthew left and did not return right away but Claire couldn’t recall trying to find him either. She didn’t ask where he was; she didn’t even want him there. After they ID-ed the body, everyone was very careful around her, the detectives, the doctor, the secretary, acting as if she might crack in half, right down the middle, if they looked at her funny (or at all). Back in the waiting room the phone rang and the secretary rushed to answer it, not wanting the sound to bother Claire. She whispered into the receiver, saying to whoever was there that she couldn’t talk just then. No one asked Claire if she was okay. Of course