‘How long have you been here?’
‘Where are you staying?’
‘What made you choose New York?’
Finding her tongue fat from weeks of underuse, Ruby can’t quite form the words to answer this last question. She goes for what she hopes is a carefree shrug, a kind of Who knows! But her face flushes red, and she is grateful when the waitress interrupts her floundering to set down a glass of red wine. Give me the whole bottle and perhaps I can explain it, Ruby wants to say. Instead, she takes advantage of the break in conversation to switch the focus to Lennie.
‘Were you born here?’
‘Where do you live?’
‘Are you studying, or working?’
Her answer to this last question makes Ruby’s mouth pop open in surprise.
Lennie, a born and bred New Yorker, is an embalmer at a funeral home in Brooklyn. She specialises in reconstruction, which means she works with bodies that come to the mortuary visibly damaged. It’s her job, she tells Ruby, to repair these bodies, to bring each dead person back to how they looked before it happened.
It. Whatever tragedy reached in and stopped the heart.
Ruby feels as if she can’t breathe.
‘I’m half make-up artist, half magician, I suppose,’ Lennie continues, licking whipped cream from her fork, before waving it like a wand. ‘If I do my job well, you never notice the tricks.’
Immediately, I can see the care Lennie takes with girls like me. So much of her work has an element of brutality to it; most people would recoil from the tasks she repeats on a daily basis. Puncturing organs, clearing intestines. Packing throats with cotton wool, stitching mouths closed. Inserting eye caps, draining blood, threading wire through jaws. These are just some of her so-called tricks. Dressing the deceased, doing hair and make-up—these gentler moments come after the hard work is done, at which point Lennie is as intimate with her bodies as any person could be. Taking her time, showing her respect, she offers her artistry as the smallest of consolations, and I see how this generosity of hers glows amber from her fingertips when she works, glistens like gold across anything she touches.
Lennie stumbled into this career a few years back, after failing to get into med school.
‘Funny, right? If you won’t let me near the living, I can at least fix the dead!’
She had been working over the summer, helping at her cousin’s beauty salon, when she started talking with a client seeking treatment for her super dry, red-flaked hands.
‘This woman was complaining about how her skin was so damaged from all the chemicals she works with, saying that everything seeps in, no matter how much she tries to protect herself. Turns out she was a mortician. Until then, I’d never met a mortician. I assumed they were all creepy old guys running the family business or something. But this woman, Leila, she was young, and beautiful, and running her own show. I had a gift for doing hair and make-up, and she told me there were other ways for me to use that gift. Ways to make a difference. I mean, at first it was just curiosity. Leila told me some crazy shit about her job, and at the time, I was in the mood for crazy. But then, well, it got important. The needs of the dead, and all that.’
Ruby nods, then shakes her head. ‘I think I can understand that,’ she says, though it comes out more like a question.
‘You know how magicians take people who are whole and saw them in half, Ruby? Think of what I do as a reversal of that trick. I take broken people and put them back together again.’
Lennie does another wand-wave of her fork, sweeps it across the table—‘Ta-DAH!’—making Ruby jump in her chair.
Lennie immediately sets her fork down.
‘I’m so sorry, Ruby. I don’t mean to be flippant about this stuff. I’ve been doing this so long, I forget it’s not everyone’s idea of normal.’
Normal.
Ruby laughs at the word, but the sound comes out brittle, breaks when it hits the air between them. She wants to tell Lennie that normal feels like a foreign country these days. Wants to say she knows why the dead need magicians to put them back together again.
Tell her the truth, I am thinking, when something bristles on Ruby’s skin, a gust of cool air in this warm room.
She shudders, and Lennie leans forward in concern.
‘Someone just walked over my grave,’ Ruby starts to explain, and then stops, shakes her head, as if to dislodge something.
Tell her the truth, she thinks.
‘Turns out it’s not so abnormal to me, Lennie. I found the girl. The girl who was murdered in Riverside Park.’