Second Life. Paul Griner

laugh bubbling up, that she’d called and woken me and now was worried about my sleep, yet thankfully I stifled it. Nerves, but it would have been hard to explain, and I doubted she’d be willing to give me the benefit of the doubt. How much pain could you cause one family before you started to despise yourself? I’d passed that point long ago.

      It’s okay, I said. I don’t want more time to go by. It’s been two days already?

      Three, she said.

      Not good, I thought, as that’s usually the outer limit of how long anyone will hold on to a body. Okay, I said. I’ll just shower and dress and get started.

      She didn’t respond and I thought maybe she’d simply hung up, which would have made sense, given all the horrible worries she must have had about her daughter’s body, and that was the first time it really hit me that Lia was dead. I’d heard her say it, of course, but I’d just been startled awake and hadn’t really processed it, and now as I did, I felt battered and stunned, as if a friend had struck me in the face with a brick as I went to hug her. I bent forward until my forehead touched my warm, bare knees and started to cry. Lia. My oldest friend. It must have been the sound of my crying that made Mrs. Stefanini go on.

      Elena, she said, her voice thickening. I think she missed you these last years.

      Then she did hang up, and I was incredibly grateful for her words, the kindness and the small measure of forgiveness they held, a gift of gold. I sat in the dark holding the silent phone, thinking that it’s not often you get to try and balance the scales. They’d never be fully balanced—I couldn’t wipe away the past, and some crimes are simply unforgivable—but even a small weight on my side was something.

      Lia, gone. Not possible, I thought again, just a horrible mistake. We were supposed to reconcile. I’d let it go too long, though it had never seemed like that, and really, I knew that if it were ever to happen, the impetus would have had to come from her. On my bureau was a picture of the two of us at eighteen on the beach at Destin, the hillbilly Riviera, where half of Kentucky seemed to spend summer vacation or spring break. We were tanned and smiling, our legs buried in the sand and our brown arms raised as we held our mint juleps toward the sun. For the three years of silence between us, I’d never been able to put it away; some day we’d be friends again, I’d been sure of it.

      Now I turned the picture face down on the bed and dug my nails into my palms so hard it hurt, not wanting to fall apart; I had things to do.

      The image of her in a car rolling over on the highway came to me. The sound of it, of four thousand pounds of metal slamming into the concrete, over and over, throwing off bits of plastic and metal and glass, the tremendous bang as it hit the tree followed by a silence scooped from disaster, broken only by the hiss of escaping steam and ticking, cooling metal, of other cars screeching to stops. A 9-1-1 call, people rushing to the car, an ambulance setting out, its siren blaring. Too late.

      She would already have been dying. Her heart had probably killed her, a half-pound weight crashing around in her body as the car rolled, still rocketing forward as her body recoiled from the blow of the air bag, tearing the delicately crucial aorta it hung suspended from like a precious red fruit. In dozens of autopsies I’d seen exactly that. That which gives you life also takes it.

      I rocked on the edge of the bed, the cat up and rubbing against my legs, until the dial tone sounded, when I put the phone down and picked up the cat.

      This is a good thing, I said to him. But of course it wasn’t, since Lia was dead, and I burst into tears and buried my face in his warm dark fur, sobbing. He squirmed away, scratching my arm in his haste to escape, a deep scratch from which blood welled instantly. I sucked on it to make it stop, the coppery taste filling my mouth, and thought of Lia, of Mrs. Stefanini and her last words.

      Elena, I think she missed you these last years. When I replayed them in my head this time, they no longer seemed to carry the tincture of forgiveness. Instead, beginning to imagine Lia’s disordered life, I wondered if they weren’t meant to apportion blame.

2

      It was four AM before I got to University Hospital, a time I used to arrive there often. Tissue recovery happens at the oddest hours, and it seemed that whenever I was on call it happened in the middle of the night. A trick of memory, yet it still felt as if I’d been thrust back into my old life, and I had to stop myself from checking for my tools, the scalpels and skin shavers, the retractors and drills, which I’d always kept sterilized and ready to go during the ten years I worked for a tissue-recovery company, CGI. And, as in those times, I’d pressed frozen cucumber gel packs to my eyes before leaving the house, to reduce the puffy swelling, though this time, unusually, I’d left my phone at home. I didn’t want any data about where I was going showing up in front of curious eyes.

      But everything seemed now as it once was, that I’d returned to serving as a guide for the newly dead as they began their journey into the other world, the underworld, a kind of life in death, which had confused and exhilarated me—the exhausting work of mining the dead for the living. Oh, it was physical work I did, bones not easy to cut or break but necessary to harvest for those whose own bones had been eaten away by cancer or shattered in accidents or ruined by genetics, the gross motor skills called for there, and then the fine ones right after, stripping veins or tendons, ferreting out the tiny malleus and the tinier stapes bones, removing clavicles and pelvises and invaluable heart valves, harvesting collagen and corneas.

      I remembered that during my years as a body broker, peaches lost their savor, that weather reports became a predictor of accidental deaths, ice storms especially, but even heavy rains were good, tornadoes like diamond mines surfacing on their own, whole families wiped out, the surviving relatives, distant and stunned, willing to sign anything, that the eleven o’clock news told me whether or not the next day might be busy, that death had its seasons: winter’s murders, spring’s suicides, summer’s drownings, autumn’s coal-mine explosions, that eventually I became a kind of weird human spider, hiding in my lair, waiting for yet another fool to wander into the sticky web of death. That I didn’t fully realize it until the scandal broke, detailing my various misdeeds, thereby ending my connection with the Stefaninis, and turning me into a villain of almost cartoonish proportions.

      I don’t do well without breakfast, so I’d eaten a big one—eggs and Canadian bacon—despite what was ahead of me, and cleaned the kitchen (I’ve always hated coming home to a messy house, unlike Lia, who never let it bother her), and showered and stared at myself in the mirror for a long time before dressing. I was putting it off, afraid of violating my probation and filled with superstitious dread that once I walked out the front door I would make Lia’s death real, and at last I knelt on the floor and prayed.

      Not that I’m a believer, but I do pray at times, for strength. We live by hope, after all. But we cannot die that way. So I prayed for the strength to bring Lia home.

      There on my knees with my eyes closed, I called up pictures of her: at the beach in her apricot bikini; at junior prom in a high-necked emerald dress that I’d been envious of and that had always been her favorite; of her smiling at me over her shoulder in front of a tobacco barn in Anderson County, the clumps of drying ochre leaves hanging down behind her in a long tunnel inside the black, slatted barn, every other slat thrown open for circulation. Whenever I looked at that picture, I could always smell those leaves hanging from the rafters, their seductively rich, ruddy scent, which was funny, since neither of us smoked, but we both loved the barns, the crop, part of our adopted heritage. It was what first drew us together in middle school, our shared outsider status—she was from Wisconsin and I from upstate New York—and then our mutual love of the landscape of the new home that neither of us ever felt quite part of. That was the picture I still had of her on my phone, though she’d stopped taking my calls and texts years ago.

      The images allowed me to recall her loud, breathy voice and her loud footsteps too; you always knew when Lia was on the march, tall and so blonde her hair glowed at dusk.