* * *
—
It was her fault. This was what she tried to explain to the policeman. The leash. She’d bought it. But no matter how often she said it, he didn’t seem to understand, and because of it, she thought there was a chance she’d imagined the whole thing. Calvin wasn’t dead. He was rowing. He was on a trip. He was five floors up, writing in his notebook.
Someone said go home.
For the next few days, she and Six-Thirty lay on her unmade bed, sleep impossible, food out of the question, the ceiling their only vista, waiting for him to walk back through the door. The only thing that disturbed them was a ringing phone. Every time it was the same whiney voice— a mortician of all people—demanding that “decisions must be made!” A suit was needed for someone’s coffin. “Whose coffin?” she said. “Who is this?” After too many of these calls, Six-Thirty, seemingly exhausted by her confusion, nudged her toward the closet and pawed open the door. And that’s when she saw it: his shirts swaying like long-dead corpses at a hanging. And that’s when she knew: Calvin was gone.
* * *
—
Just like after her brother’s suicide and Meyers’s attack, she could not cry. An army of tears lay just behind her eyes, but they refused to decamp. It was as if the wind had been knocked out of her: no matter how many deep breaths she took her lungs refused to fill. When she was a kid, she’d remembered overhearing a one-legged man tell the librarian someone was boiling water somewhere in the stacks. It was dangerous, he explained; she should do something. The librarian tried to assure him no one was boiling any water—it was a one-room library, she could see everyone—but he was insistent and shouted at her, and because of it two men had to remove him, one of them explaining that the poor guy was still suffering from shell shock. He’d probably never recover.
The problem was, now she heard the boiling water, too.
* * *
—
To stop the ringing phone, she had to find a suit. Calvin didn’t own one, so she gathered what she felt he would have wanted: his rowing clothes. Then she took the small bundle to the funeral home and handed it to the funeral director. “Here,” she said.
Long practiced in the art of dealing with the bereaved, the solemn man accepted the assortment with a courteous nod. But right after she left, he handed it to his assistant and said, “The stiff in room four is about a forty-six extra long.” The assistant took the bundle and threw it into an unmarked closet where it joined a small mountain of other inappropriate outfits family members, in their grief-stricken state, had brought over the years. The assistant proceeded to a large wardrobe, grabbed a 46 extra long, shook the pants, blew lightly at the dust that grayed the shoulders, and headed for room 4.
Before Elizabeth was even ten blocks away, he’d successfully stuffed Calvin’s rigid body within the suit’s confines, shoving the hands that had once held her down dark sleeves; cramming the legs that once wrapped around her through woolen cylinders. Then he buttoned the shirt, buckled the belt, adjusted the tie, and knotted the laces, all the while brushing the dust that was so much a part of death from one end of the suit to the other. He stepped back to admire his work, then adjusted a lapel. He reached for a comb; reconsidered. He closed the door and walked down the hall to retrieve his brown-bag lunch, pausing only to give instructions to a woman who sat behind a large adding machine in a small office.
Before Elizabeth had made it twelve blocks, the dirty suit had been added to her bill.
* * *
—
The funeral was packed. A few rowers, one reporter, maybe fifty Hastings employees, a handful of whom, despite their bowed heads and somber clothing, weren’t at Calvin’s funeral to grieve, but to gloat. Ding dong, they cheered silently. The king is dead.
As the scientists milled about, several noticed Zott way off in the distance, the dog by her side. Once again, the damn dog wasn’t on lead—this despite the city’s new leash law, and notwithstanding the signs that encircled the entire cemetery prohibiting dogs from entering in the first place. Same old, same old. Even in death, Zott and Evans acted as if the rules didn’t apply to them.
* * *
—
From a distance, Elizabeth shielded her eyes to take in the crowd. A well-dressed nosy couple stood apart at a separate grave site, watching the proceedings as if it were a fifty-car pileup. She rested one hand on Six-Thirty’s bandages and considered how to proceed. The truth was, she was afraid to get close to the coffin because she knew she would try to pry it open and climb in and bury herself with him, and that meant dealing with all the people who would try to stop her, and she did not want to be stopped.