“I’ll talk to him,” I said, hoping to end this conversation. We had been standing in my driveway for several minutes. Kate would be wondering why we didn’t come in.
“He stalked and seduced this girl, even though you explicitly told him to stay away,” Evan said. “We need to know what he’s up to right now.”
“Fine.” I took out my phone and dialed my son’s number. It went straight to voice mail. “His phone is off,” I announced. “I’ll try again later.” But my lawyer did not let me off so easily.
“What if he’s there?” Evan asked. And it took me a second to process what he meant.
“What, you mean at her house?”
He raised an eyebrow. I got a prickly feeling on my arms and neck. I didn’t think my son would do anything to inflame the situation, but I knew my lawyer wouldn’t relent until we had tracked him down and made sure.
“Fine, let’s go,” I said.
I had no idea what my son was up to, or what he was capable of. I tried to ignore the growing feeling of dread in my stomach as I got in Evan’s car to go find out.
SAVANNAH
Three months ago
They told me not to go, that the accident had left my dad “unrecognizable.” But I wanted to say goodbye, and they were transferring his body tomorrow, so today was my last chance.
Mom already told me we weren’t going to have a funeral. She didn’t want to cry in front of a bunch of people she barely knew. Marines might come, I guess they have a habit of showing up when one of their own dies, and Mom didn’t want to endure their hardened faces and somber salutes. The funeral home would pick up the body, he would be cremated, and that would be that.
The funeral director said the cremation would take a week. You would think setting a body on fire would be quick and easy, but apparently people’s bones take a long time to burn. Mom had to sign a form saying we understood that even though they sweep the oven between cremations, they don’t always get everything, so there may be little bits of other people mixed in with my dad. I wasn’t sure I wanted bits of someone’s favorite aunt coming home with us, but they said it couldn’t be helped. I hoped the person they burned after my dad came from a nice family, so if some of my dad’s ashes wound up with them, at least he wouldn’t be surrounded by assholes.
After Mom signed the forms, they gave us a catalog and asked us to pick an urn. Even the plain ceramic ones were ridiculously expensive for what they were—$400 for a vase with a lid? I could buy a perfectly good canning jar at the dollar store that would work just as well, but “That’s not how they do it,” Mom said, so I just let her pick. Some of the urns came with twin mini urns, but they didn’t put ashes in those, because “Souls split in two different containers can’t find their way back to God,” the funeral guy told us. That didn’t make much sense to me after what they said about bits of bodies being left behind, but I didn’t want to make a big deal about it, so I didn’t say anything.
Mom said she didn’t want to see Dad’s body without him in it, so I had to go to the morgue by myself. I called the hospital, and a nice lady with a fancy job title arranged for an orderly in pale-green scrubs to meet me at the hospital and escort me to where my dad was chilling.
We met in the lobby of the emergency ward, then walked in silence to an elevator you needed a special key to operate. As my escort inserted the key into the slot, I noticed there was only one button on the panel. It didn’t have an arrow, but I assumed it was “down.” I watched enough bad TV to know the morgue is always in the basement.
The elevator was wide and lined with metal panels textured in a crisscross pattern that reminded me of monster truck tires. The orderly hesitated before depressing the button. “You sure about this, kid?” I wasn’t, but I nodded. I had no reason to be afraid. It was just my dad. And it’s not like he could yell at me for what I’d done, he was dead. For once I would get to do all the talking.
The elevator stuttered as it started moving, and I gripped my toes in my shoes to keep from lurching forward. The doors opened to a wide, brightly lit hallway, and I followed Mr. Scrubs around a corner, past a whiteboard with names neatly printed in a grid. A dry-erase marker hung from a string, and I almost laughed at the obvious metaphor of how easily a life could be erased.
My escort stopped in front of a door with a little window in it, then turned to look at me. “Take as much time as you like,” he said simply, then opened the door.