When they reemerged from the dark tangles of the forest’s grasp, the clouds and rain had scattered and the sun had pulled up all the little hidden details from the day and started everything over with the renewal of its promise. They crossed over Agate Pass, onto San Piedro Island, took a left and two rights, and drove an airy single-lane stretch to where the bend hit the westernmost point, and through the dew-covered windshield together they gleaned the damp wooden sign that read CLOVIS LYNCH, CREMATOR.
CHAPTER 19
DEB CALETTI
“ARE WE HERE?” LINDA SAID.
“I guess. Clovis Lynch is our man.”
“There’s a chimney.”
“OK, that’s creepy. I guess we’re in the right place, then.”
“Smoke is coming out of the chimney,” Linda said.
“Jesus.”
The sign read CREMATORIUM. The place wasn’t what Alexis was expecting. She’d somehow envisioned big, rolling golf-course lawns and funeral-place men in dark suits wearing grim expressions. One of those cemetery buildings that looks like a faux colonial house, a plantation house—the kind you’d see in Virginia, where some guy would come out and show you how they made horseshoes in the old days. Definitely somber someone-just-died-and-we’re-respectful-about-it music. “Wind Beneath My Wings” played by a church lady on an organ. Piped-in religious elevator music, if there were such things as religious elevators.
But not this. Not this creepy brick building down this damp path. Not in this wet place, with muddy leaves on the ground, sticking to the bottom of your shoes.
“All right. Let’s do it.” Linda was suddenly cheerful. Alexis didn’t know if it was the promise of finally ditching the dead body in the back of the car, or if it was that caramel macchiato she’d just had at the drive-thru espresso place. Her straw was at the bottom of the cup. It was making that slurping sound.
Linda put the car in park. They sat there for a moment, staring down that brick. They looked for a long time at that chimney with the smoke pouring from it. Shit. It was too real.
“Do we carry her in?” Alexis asked.
“I don’t know! She’s your dead mother, not mine.”
There were things to like about Linda, for sure, but sensitivity was not one of them.
“Let’s carry her in,” Alexis said.
They struggled getting the box out the back. Alexis grabbed the handles, and they scooched Edith out, sliding and wiggling until the casket was free.
“It weighs a ton,” Linda said.
“Let’s go fast.”
“More than a ton.”
“Just . . . hurry.” Alexis took a big breath and lifted. They headed for the door. They were stumbling and knocking around, and the wood was hitting hard against Alexis’s thighs.
“Wait, wait, wait,” Linda panted. “I’ve got to set my end down.”
Goddammit! “No, no! we’re almost there.”
“I can’t. Heavy, heavy! I’ve got to rest.” Linda plunked down her end before Alexis was ready. There was a disturbing slide-clunk.
Linda shook out her shoulders. “OK.” She exhaled. “Ready.” She picked her end back up again, and they wrestled the casket inside, holding the door open with their elbows, and with Linda’s hip.
“Set her down easy,” Linda said. Like she was talking about an appliance. Like she’d all at once become some refrigerator-delivery guy.
This was not what Alexis pictured at all. At all. Inside, the building looked a little like the vet’s office where they’d brought Habib after LJ found him. Or else, the Sears Outlet store on Aurora, where she went with LJ once to return some defective band saw he’d bought on super discount. Yeah. This place—it had that same speckled linoleum, the tired fluorescent lights, a row of vinyl chairs with distressing splits and cracks from years of too-weighty asses.
“Do you have a quarter?” Linda asked.
“What? Oh for Christ’s sake,” Alexis said. There was one of those machines in the corner of the room, filled with those plastic globes with the various toys inside.
“I want to try for a tattoo.”
“Come on. Focus. I need you, here.”
The place was empty. There was a counter with a bell on it—one of those silver ones you see in the hotel lobbies in the movies. A lucite tray, too, holding some stupid pamphlets about the grief process. Five stages of grieving, whatever. The words on the cover read LOST SOMEONE? which reminded Alexis of those GOT MILK? ads. Grieving, grief. Had she even had the chance to grieve?
“Look,” Linda said. She pointed up toward the wall. It was a sign. No Smoking. “Heh, heh,” Linda chuckled.
“Hilarious.” Alexis stared at the bell, wondering if she should use it. Those things always seemed so rude, but they didn’t exactly have time for good manners. Before she could decide, though, a man appeared. A thin, ancient man—it had to be him. That had to be Clovis Lynch. Ancient, but wearing old cowboy jeans and a cowboy shirt with pearly buttons and one of those string ties, whatever they were called, Alexis couldn’t think of it. Bowl? Ball? Started with a B.
“St. Bernard?” the man said.
“Excuse me?”
“You got a St. Bernard in there? Damn big box.”
Alexis thought this was a rude way to treat the grieving. Maybe he needed to read one of those pamphlets.
“Clovis Lynch?” Alexis asked.
“Who else?”
“I’m . . . Alexis Austin? My mother. Edith? Edith Austin? You knew each other.”
Clovis looked at her blankly. He found a toothpick on the counter and began chewing on its end. “Don’t put much faith in the past. The past . . . poof.” He gestured with one hand, wove it in the air like a column of smoke.
“You were friends.”
“Don’t know,” he said.
Alexis wasn’t sure what to do now. She’d thought they were friends. Good friends. And this was the first cremation discussion of her life. “We need . . . your services?”
“What kind of animal you got in there?”
“Animal?”
“Pet? Dog? Gotta be a dog, by the size of that thing.”
“Maybe we got this wrong,” Linda whispered.
“Pets?” Alexis said.
“Pet cremation? That’s what we do, that’s what we always done. Beloved Fido? Rover? Binky? Who you got?” The man chewed.
Alexis thought. “My mother. My mother, Edith.”
Clovis Lynch blinked once. “We can do mothers.”
Alexis exhaled.
“For a little extra.”
OK. She’d have to figure out that part later. Take up a collection at the Angeline? Focus. First things first. “Fine,” she said.
“Edith Austin, you say?” Clovis pulled out a pen and a soiled notebook.
“Um. Yes.”
“Paperwork?” Clovis’s eye twitched.
“I’m not sure what you mean.”
Linda kicked the side of Alexis’s shoe. They’d missed something important, here.
“You think you can just go light people on fire? Burn any old person right up? That could be anyone in there. That could be the mayor for all I know. Paperwork. Death certificate. I don’t do humans without one.”
“We . . .”
“Left it at home,” Linda said. “We can get it. No problemo.”
Alexis shot her a look. A death certificate? How were they going to manage that? What was that even?
Alexis felt desperate. The linoleum, the toothpick, her mother in that casket down there on the floor . . . And, Jesus, God, what did she hear in the back there? What was that sound? A television. Wheel! Of! Fortune! She heard an audience cheer.
It was surreal. But maybe it was a sign. Was it possible? Her mother had loved that show. She was good at it, too. She always seemed to know the phrase, even after a few letters. She would shout advice to the players. And her mom loved when they spun that big wheel. It represented hope and possibilities, maybe, the kind of chances that her mom never ha
d. That show was glittering dresses and people clapping and new Buicks.
Wait. A smell. Could you smell a body burning? All at once, Alexis felt sick. Probably it was her imagination. In this place, an imagination could run away with you. There it was, though. Charcoal and flesh . . .
“Meatball sub,” the old man said.
“What?”
“I saw your face. I know what you’re thinking. Meatball sub. My lunch. It had the foil on when I put it in the microwave.”
“OK.”
“I always forget about the foil. You think I don’t know what you’re thinking? I’ve been doing this job for most of my goddamned life.”
“The death certificate . . . ,” Linda said. She wanted to get out of there.
“No shirt, no shoes, no service,” the old guy said. “What, I want to get sued? I want to lose my license?”
“Pets,” Alexis said. “Have you done people before?”
“I’ve done people. You get me the paper, I do people.”
Alexis’s mind was tumbling, racing. How to get a death certificate? Could you Photoshop those things? Could you find one online somewhere? Some legal service you pay $19.95 for?
“I’ll keep her for forty-eight hours. This isn’t some kind of hotel,” Clovis said. The end of his toothpick was wet and frayed now.
“All right. We got it,” Linda said. “Come on, girl. We better get a move on.”
Clovis Lynch’s jaws kept working as he watched them. His eyes narrowed suspiciously. “You sure you don’t have someone important in there? A political figure, maybe? Governmental official? Celebrity? I don’t want to end up on the news. I don’t want big stories written up about me. Books. Movies. Clint Eastwood playing me. I’d have to go to some Hollywood premiere.”
“Just my mother,” Alexis said. She felt her throat close up, suddenly. She might cry.
“Fine. Get what you need, then, and come back,” Clovis said.
Alexis paused. “Can I have a moment alone here?” Alexis asked.
“Got no issue with that.” Clovis gave them a last look, disappeared through a doorway. His old cowboy jeans were slumping in the back. His creepy old watery eyes were probably still watching her.
For the first time, Alexis realized something. It hit her hard, a surprise. How can it be that she’d never thought about this before? That this moment would even come? This would be the last time she would be with her mother. Clovis would carry her to that back room and she’d be gone forever. She waited for her mother’s voice to say something, anything, but Edith had gone silent. No advice came Alexis’s way now.
Alexis could hear the tick-tick-tick of the wheel on the television in the back room, the muffled voices buying vowels and taking guesses at half-finished phrases.
So much felt half finished. Still, it was time to go.
Alexis wished she had some of that sherry her mom used to drink every day at four o’clock. A proper toast, or something. Ashes to ashes. Everybody dies, right? “The existential response,” her mother had said.
Alexis wasn’t sure how to do this. She knelt down, right there on the floor of the Sears Outlet Crematorium. She laid her hand on the smooth wood. She felt Linda’s hand on her shoulder. She felt the heat of Linda’s palm through her shirt.
“I might love you,” Linda whispered into her hair, but her timing was off. This didn’t have anything to do with her. Other things, but not this.
Alexis brushed Linda away. After Linda stepped aside, Alexis closed her eyes. Maybe it was a prayer. It was stupid, probably. Definitely. The box was wood, and her hand was only flesh, and it was too much to ask of either. But Alexis hoped her mother could feel her love, from here to wherever she was.
“Ready?” Linda asked.
It wasn’t much of a good-bye.
But, then again, when is a good-bye ever good enough?
CHAPTER 20
KEVIN EMERSON
DESPITE ALL THE FLOTSAM SWIRLING around her, like she was the central whorl of that garbage patch out in the middle of the Pacific, Alexis always considered herself a prepared person. Of the many—far too many—pieces of advice that her mom had repeated, seemingly over and over, the one that went something like, never get caught with anything around your ankles, was one that Alexis actually subscribed to. Not that she’d told her mother that. That would have been like the time when she was nine and she’d clicked YES on that Disney DVD Club e-mail and suddenly princess after princess had started arriving at her door on a monthly basis. Stopping that had been a nightmare. It would have been the same with the advice. But still . . .
I could use a few of those old tips now, Mom, she thought, and for a moment, listened into that space in the top right corner of her head, where her mother had seemed to reply from.
They were pulling up to the hotel. Alexis had been thinking that maybe her mother was still here, the ghost having taken up residence—that would have explained the recent silence— but there was only silence in her head.
“You want me to come in?” Linda asked.
Alexis didn’t. They had taken the ferry home, a long and mostly silent drift through a gloomy late afternoon of misty rain, with the droplets that seemed too small for wipers to corral, the kind that made everyone drive like idiots and so everything took forever. Alexis supposed not everyone was trying to beat a search warrant home.
“’Cause I’ve probably got a little longer,” Linda continued, “you know, to hang out, or”—she reached over and ran her index and middle finger up Alexis’s forearm—“if you need some coffin time.”
Alexis snatched her arm away, thinking, Jesus, no! How much of the EVERYTHING that’s happened have you missed? But she held it back, had to hold so much back lately, and instead just pretended that her sudden retreat had been to check her watch. “Nah, I . . . I should just get back in. Everyone’s going to need me.”
“OK, fine,” Linda said, the end of each word nosediving with disappointment. “I just want to make you feel better.”
“Yeah, well, me feeling better is a lost cause at this point. Why don’t you check back in when I’m out of jail? I’ll see you later.”
Alexis popped open the door and dropped out of the Escalade. She was suddenly glad to be out of the car, glad to be out of Linda’s reach. Linda, who thought that Alexis’s last moment with her mother was a good time to drop the L-word, like she sensed a dramatic stage and just assumed that she had the right to step on in, like every goddamn spotlight was hers to occupy.
“Fine,” Linda snapped. “Hey, Linda,” she said, “thanks for driving my ass all the way to San Piedro Island with a cadaver, and on that note, here’s some cold shoulder.”
“No,” Alexis said with a sigh. “Come on. I am thankful, just . . . come by later. Get the car back before you get busted.”
“See ya.” Linda reached over and closed the door. The car lurched away, tires grinding the pavement.
Alexis watched her go for a moment, feeling a hundred things, or nothing; the two sensations had become similar at this point. She didn’t need to be hard on Linda, but maybe she did because Linda didn’t get it, did she? Because what were the current standings? Linda plus parents 3, Alexis 0. She hadn’t been through something like this. Not even close.
Alexis turned toward the hotel. She surveyed its damp and sagging exterior, the windows grimy, each old inhabitant’s belongings pressed against them. It occurred to her that this would be the first time she stepped inside on her own. Sure, she’d been on her own for weeks now, but at least her mother had still been there. It had still been their place. What was it for her anymore? Memory, logistics, pain.
An urge struck her: Run. Just turn and start across the park and maybe take a bus or just keep moving over the hill and down to Amtrak. In Portland by midnight, sleep in the terminal, Sacramento by midday Sunday—Mexico, Alabama, wherever. Just disappear. Because if she stepped back inside this place now, she was inviting it back into her life, making it part of her future.
Last chance, she thought.
Then her eye fell on a pirate’s flag flying from the far corner of the third-floor balcony. Ursula’s. It hadn’t been there before. What would become of them if she left? Who was left for these people?
Something dropped away inside her, a heaviness falling from the underside of her diaphragm, down into unknown depths. She started up the stairs.
The door was locked. She fished out her key, turned the lock, but the door wouldn’t move. Was it blocked?
She knocked, calling, “Hey!”
There was a commotion inside—a long, squealing sound of furniture moving. Alexis pictured the burgundy chair in the sitting room—that was how well she knew this damned place—and the door creaked slightly open.
“Who calls?”
“Duh, Kenji, it’s me.” Alexis leaned in toward the door, only to jump back as something darted out toward her.
It was Pluto, gazing at her and flicking his tongue curiously.
“No one gets in without the password!”
“Roberta, let me in!”
“She doesn’t know the password,” Mr. Kenji whispered.
“We said that everyone had to know the p—”
Alexis huffed to herself. Half a day she’d been gone, and already things had gone to hell. She grabbed Pluto just behind its jaws and yanked. There was a thud against the door. Alexis leaned in again. “It’s me, Alexis, and I don’t know the password and you are going to open this door. Right. Now.”
“She doesn’t know the—”
“Shut up!”
The door finally opened a foot, and Alexis squeezed in, tossing the python back at Roberta. “Jesus, what’s with you two?”
Mr. Kenji and Roberta looked away sheepishly. “Sorry,” said Kenji, “we—”
“What’s going on down there?” Otto tottered down the stairs, leaning over the railing. Alexis saw that he was in some kind of costume, wearing a hat and a military uniform. “This bunker is on lockdown!”