“Someone else’ll have to catch them,” I said. “They don’t like me.”
“They don’t know you. You haven’t been home in ten years,” Alice pointed out.
“Crows can live up to twenty years.”
“Sure, it’s about you, then,” Alice said with a roll of her eyes.
“That’s not what I meant,” I snapped as I passed the will back to Karen. She tucked it neatly into a manila folder, where the receipt and a few other pieces of paper resided.
“We’ll figure Xavier’s funeral arrangements out tomorrow,” Mom assured us, clapping her hands together to dismiss everyone for the evening, before Alice and I could get into a fight. “That’s enough for one day, I think.”
After everyone had left, Carver, Alice （steadfastly ignoring me）， and I went around the house and turned off the lights in every room. It was second nature to us at this point, even if I hadn’t been around for ten years. Carver took the back rooms, I took the left, Alice took the right. We checked the windows to make sure they were closed; we locked the doors.
I would be lying if I said I wasn’t looking for Dad as I did.
Though I was about as subtle as an elephant, apparently.
“If you want to see him, he’s just down the hall, you know,” Alice said, breaking our silent fight. She hugged herself tightly, pulling her sweater sleeves over her hands again. “Third freezer on the left. The one with the shaky handle.”
I closed the door to the second parlor room behind me, and my cheeks burned with embarrassment. I was glad that most of the lights were off, so hopefully she couldn’t see them. “I wasn’t looking.”
“You were. For his ghost.”
“Maybe I was,” I admitted.
She pursed her lips and looked away. “Well, I don’t think he’s here.”
“I don’t think so, either,” I admitted.
“Who’s not here?” Carver asked, stomping loudly out of Parlor C. He stomped everywhere loudly. It was just what he did. Nicki followed out into the hall behind him, quiet as ever. It always struck me how different Carver and Nicki were—like a square peg and a round hole—but I guess they were like pieces in a puzzle. They found grooves where the other person fit, and that’s how they worked.
“No one. Everything’s locked up on my end,” Alice said, and left for the foyer, where Mom was putting on her boots and coat.
My brother gave me a sidelong look, and put his hands in his pockets.
“Don’t worry about it,” I sighed, and finished my rounds. I did pass the door to the basement—the mortuary—where we stored the bodies in cold fridges until it was time to prep them for burial. Those set for cremation went to a crematorium the next town over. The basement door was like any other, though the handle was different—a pull latch with a hard dead bolt.
For old times’ sake, I checked the dead bolt again. Locked. Probably Alice’s doing.
I hadn’t been down into the prep room in ages. I hated the smell of it—a mix of disinfectant and formaldehyde, and a distinct undercurrent of something you weren’t really born recognizing. It was a smell you found in the hospital, too, and extended care homes.
There’s a certain smell to death.
You didn’t really recognize it at first, but the longer you existed in those spaces, the more acquainted with it you became. I didn’t realize death had a smell until we moved out of this house. I always thought it was what the world smelled like—a little sad and bitter and heavy. On spring mornings, Dad would open up all of the windows, and turn up the radio, blasting Bruce Springsteen, and try to breathe life into the house again, wake up the old wooden floors and the creaky attic beams.