I see you everywhere (36 page)

Buzz left me with the station wagon and directions to the airport. My plan was to walk down the street and have breakfast while looking at a map, then drive into Jackson and find the funeral home that has my sister’s body. Where she is, that much I know. If I survive that, I will find lunch and eat too much of it. Then I’ll pick up my parents. After that, I can’t imagine a plan of any kind.

I didn’t figure on the scruffy guy with the dogs waiting by the antler archway. “Hey,” he says pleasantly enough. The dogs, a pair of big freckled hounds, are already sniffing between my legs. Briefly, I touch their sleek heads. I say hello but keep on walking.

“You’re Louisa,” he says, in a tone that implies I might not know it myself.

I look him over. Of all the men I’ve seen out here, he comes closest to cowboy. He wears a sweat-stained felt hat with an asymmetrically curled brim, something like a Stetson, but it’s more the way he stands that makes me think he rides horses. He needs a haircut, a mustache trim, new knees for his jeans. His incongruously clean white T-shirt reads, in big brown letters, fauna.

“I’m subbing for your sister,” he says. “They asked if I’d come by and see if you wanted to join us. You don’t, they’d understand.”

I touch one of the antlers. Smooth as new skin. I look at my watch. It’s Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 243
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ten o’clock on a Saturday morning. I don’t know what on earth he’s talking about.

“Softball,” he says. “Some folks come from two hours downstate, or I’m sure they would have canceled.” He pauses, but still I’m speechless.

“They hope you don’t mind.”

“How could I mind?”

“Your sister would have minded.”

I look at the antlers again. “Doesn’t anybody find this barbaric?”

“Barbaric?”

“It’s like a great big souvenir of carnage.”

My mystery companion laughs. “Doll, these antlers get molted. No blood spilled to make this bric-a-brac. Does anyone think it’s
tacky
is the question.”

I follow him to his truck (guns, no surprise; the dogs run ahead of us and jump in back). He tells me his name is R.B. “We’ll just stop at the station and pick up the dogs.”

I glance at his hounds, confused.

“Hot dogs,” he says. “For the barbecue after the game.”

I remember what Buzz said: how Clem took care of this task just two days ago.
The usual plans.
I see her putting them in the fridge at her lab, alongside petri dishes growing invisible things and tubes containing the blood of rare animals.

We ride five minutes without talking. In my head, I’m asking questions about the sights we pass. It seems shameful to be curious about them.

R.B. is friendly but quiet. Once in while he looks over at me, perhaps to check if I’m crying. What would he say? Being with the sister of his dead colleague doesn’t seem to put him on edge. At the station, a low cement building that sprawls into a grove of scrubby trees, he doesn’t ask if I want to go in. He comes out with a brown grocery bag and sets it between us.

I peer inside. On top are the Not Dogs for Sheldon. Enough silence. I say, “You can get Not Dogs in Wyoming?”

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“Jackson,” says R.B. “Whether or not that’s Wyoming anymore is a matter of some debate.”

He drives back the way we came and stops at a public schoolyard.

“Anytime you want me to drive you back to the hotel, I will,” he says.

“We all just want to take care of you while you’re here.”

And afterward? How about then? “Thank you,” I say. The Fauna are one team; the other, as logic would have it, the Flora (Vern, the botanist, wears one of their T-shirts, white on green). From nearby wildlife stations, these are the personnel entitled to wear the ugly uniform I saw on Buzz and, in a photo my mother framed, on my sister.

“Rosie. June.” R.B. wedges a cooler under one arm, carries the grocery bag with the other, and starts toward the diamond. The dogs follow, and so do I. I’m grateful when he does not introduce me around. (Most of these people, I figure, knew my sister as an every-other-weekend shortstop, nothing more.) He leads the way to the bleachers. “Want to play? You can join the Floras. They’re pathetic if the prairie grasses guy don’t show.”

“Oh no. I’d only make it worse.” I can see Vern headed our way. R.B. nods. “Just checking.”

Vern shakes my hand and asks if I’m doing okay. I say I am. People are stretching out tendons, jogging around the bases, tossing balls randomly about.
Smack . . . smack . . . smack.
The ball lands in glove after glove after glove. An easy rhythm. A pregnant woman and two children have the bleachers all to themselves. What am I doing here? Suddenly, I ache for Ray.

Clem’s team takes the field. The Flora sit on a long wooden bench behind home plate. A man I haven’t met is on the pitcher’s mound. He has a loose build, not the least bit athletic. Buzz is at first base, Dave at second. Sheldon stands in the outfield. After the pitcher plays catch for a bit with the catcher, he says in a ministerial tone, “This one’s for Clem.”

It’s a strike. The pregnant woman applauds.

I sit at the top of the bleachers; no one joins me. I watch an inning and a half, absorbing nothing about the game except that it’s oddly businesslike, with none of the goofball camaraderie you expect in amateur Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 245
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sports (not that I play sports of any kind). Then I realize that the players who know about my presence have probably made an effort to mute the normal shenanigans. When R.B. comes in from the outfield, I climb down.

I don’t have to say a thing. He meets me with “I’ll just let ’em know I’m out of the order. Meet you at the truck.”

As soon as he gets in, he says, “That was definitely weird. I’m sorry.”

“Whose idea was it to invite me?”

“Mine.” He drives without looking at me. This allows me to examine his large, battered-looking nose and his big hands on the wheel.

“Thought I’d give you that place.”

When I say nothing, he adds, “Clement liked the games a lot. She was a real show-off. I thought this way you’d be able to look back and see her there. Wouldn’t kick yourself later that you hadn’t asked more about her life in these parts. She told me you wanted to visit sometime.”

“So here I am. A little late.” I ask if he knew Clem well. I ask if he thinks any of the people I’ve met knew her well.

“I knew her pretty well. I did,” he says. “She was good company. Nobody didn’t think so, I can tell you that. Even people who found her . . . a challenge.”

Who was in love with her?
That’s the question I really want to ask. Because everywhere she went, somebody fell in love with Clem. It seemed to be a rule of physics. And what, I think, will rush to fill the void?

“You don’t have to talk,” says R.B.

“I know.” Do I sound angry? (Does it matter?)

I look for and see his wedding ring. But on his right wrist, I see a band of paler skin, the ghost of a bracelet.

“Who was the pitcher?” I say. “The guy who mentioned her.”

“Dung-beetle paper-pusher up from Cheyenne, the guy they all report to. He’s here on account of her death. He’ll want to make nice with your parents. He liked your sister fine, but he’s got lawsuits on the brain.”

I could assure him that my parents are too Old World to sue, but right Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 246 246

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now I can’t bear to think about them. “You’re a biologist, too? A bear guy?”

He hesitates. “My job’s to track whatever animal I get told to track. Rosie and June do a lot of the work. I chaperone.” He raps a knuckle on the window behind us; his dogs snuffle and lick the glass where he touched it.

We reach the hotel. “How did she kill herself ?”

He parks. “Leavin’ no doubt she meant to get the job done.” Now he does look at me. “You mean method?” He reaches across the space between us and puts a big hand on my knee. “She gassed herself in the fieldwork Rover whilst overdosing on the anesthetic they stocked for that little cub’s surgery. Rigged an IV from the rearview mirror. She was always learning things. Stupid ingenuity. She was hours dead when Dave showed up next day and opened the garage.” He slowly pulls his hand away. He gives me a worried, tender look, which goes against the grain of his weather-beaten face. “I’m the first to tell you that?”

“Yes,” I say. “So then, if I . . .”

He puts the hand back on my knee. “If you want to see her body, it’s sure to be nice and tidy.” He has Clem’s sense of humor.

“Well. That’s good to know. How considerate.”

“Ain’t it,” he says. “I’d go now, if I was you. I can give a call, let the funeral home know you’ll be along.”

“Would you?” Tears start, but I will them back. I had planned to show up without telling anyone.

As I reach to open the door, he says, “You’ll be here a day or two. Yes?”

When I nod, he nods, too. “I have a few things of hers. I’ll get them to you later.” He looks at his watch. I understand that he doesn’t want to talk anymore right now, doesn’t want to answer more questions—though if I asked him, I know he would.

“You’d better get back to the game,” I say.

“Game doesn’t matter,” he says.

∞

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Never again will the scent of hyacinths touch me as sublime. In this place, it’s become a virulent stench, with a purpose obscure to no one. Turns out that even in an airy town like Jackson, the funeral home has no windows. Secret society of death.

The director murmurs his scripted condolences; she could have died of a stroke, in a plane crash, gunned down on the street. He sits me on a tweed couch facing a table with an open Bible. I fix my gaze on a small painting of mountain scenery, homely but safe. When the director returns, he tells me that bodies to be cremated are kept in the garage; would I mind viewing her there? No, I tell him. After all, I think but keep to myself, she died in a garage.

Without a word, a teenage boy leads me across the parking lot. The doors to the garage are wide open. Though it’s empty now, it has space for three hearses. Once we are inside this place, the boy tells me to wait. I obey, standing in one of the concrete bays, next to a dark oil stain. I watch him unlock a heavy door at the back; as he pulls it open, a cloud of frigid air spills out around him.

He wheels out a gurney carrying an oblong cardboard box, like a florist box, only six feet long. He removes the lid and leans it against a wall. He walks past me and says, “I’ll be out there.” Numb, I watch him leave. I’m glad he leaves the garage door ajar. He stands on the sunny pavement and lights a cigarette.

Clem is my first dead body. I’ve heard again and again—mostly from friends who’ve lost other friends to AIDS—that it’s essential to see the corpse of someone you love, especially someone who’s died undeservedly young; how it will confirm the way nothing else can that he or she is no longer here. The body won’t look like the person you know, the self of that person, at all. This tells you there has to be a soul because something’s missing; what else could that something be? The first thing I know, when I see her, is that this is not a piece of advice I will ever pass on.

Except for her violet lips, Clem looks as if she has just come in from the cold, from skiing or skating, frost on her lashes. Unadorned, uncam-Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 248 248

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ouflaged, she is covered to the neck with a sheet—or, I suppose, the sheet has been folded back from over her face. There is a blackish clot beneath her left nostril. On top of her head, inconspicuous because of her dark hair, there appears to be more of the same dull black substance. Blood, of course, though it looks more like tar. (The way she killed herself was bloodless, but there has been, by law, an autopsy.) What’s wrong here, what shocks and dismays me, is that in fact she still looks so much like the self I knew. Her lips may be unnaturally dark, but they are Clem’s lips all right. Still an old familiar self, like the one I searched for while trying on wigs.
Well, here you are!
I exclaim silently when I look down at my sister.
And to think I was so worried!

I look hard, I can’t say for what, but there’s something I’ve clearly missed. It’s as if, against all common sense, I need to memorize this image of Clem. As if this Clem is essential to the Clem who will inhabit only memories now. I begin to speak—babble, really (though quietly, conscious of the boy who waits in the driveway). I am beseeching, cursing, adoring, my vacillating passions more suited to a lover than a sister. I know that as soon as I stop looking at her, I’ll be looking at a void, not the transient void of the woman who captivated, who magnetized, the men—

that void will be filled because, as Clem would say, indifferent nature gets her way—but the void left by the departure of my genetic alter ego. It’s like someone’s gone and severed my shadow.

I notice two things I never noticed before: as ever unlike me (even now, with my follicles corkscrewed by intravenous toxins), she has gray hairs. And under an eyebrow, there’s a tiny mole I don’t recall. I always wanted her beautiful eyebrows—her most elegant tease.

My parents look wan and spent, specters of exhaustion. I make the mistake of telling them I’ve been to see Clem; do they want to see her, too? I make this offer timidly. I say I’ll drive them.

The look my mother gives me is one I haven’t seen since I was a teenager. “Honey, I saw that girl in. She can bloody well see herself out.”

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She’s always conflated grief with rage. “First you. You. Your damn disease. And now this. Now this.
This!
The whole way out here, your father said not a God damn word. What could he say? That he spent thousands upon thousands of dollars to educate this daughter, to turn her into the next Jane Goodall or whatever, that we gave her everything she could want, that . . . Well, until you have children you can’t imagine.” In other words, I will never imagine.