CHAPTER 4 NIGHTMARES AND NOAH
SITTING PRETTY
A knock at my door.
I turn toward it as it slowly creaks open.
“Mom?” I ask.
No answer.
My heart ticks up. There’s a loud groan as the floorboard outside my room protests.
Someone is standing on it. I swing my legs over the side of my bed and open my mouth to call for my mom again when my dad pokes his head in, but he’s distracted, looking down at his phone as it lights up his face.
I let out a long, slow breath. Noah’s questions have me on edge.
“I hate to bother you,” Dad says as he eyes the phone in my hand. “Who were you on the phone with? Noah?”
I nod. “Yeah. Just saying good night.”
My dad’s expression softens, and the corner of ??his mouth turns up. “Me and your mom used to talk all night when we were dating. We never wanted to be the first one to hang up. That’s when we had landlines and we had to be tethered to the living room. You don’t know nothing about that.”
I laugh. “I know what a landline is, Dad. Give my generation some credit.”
“Right,” he says, straightening up. I notice he has on his official business suit—a charcoal two-piece with a white shirt underneath.
“I was hoping you’d be up for a late-night pickup.
I normally wouldn’t ask, but your mom’s exhausted.
That stomach thing is really kicking her behind and we’ve just had a call about a guest.”
I get up and search around in my various piles of clothes to find something to wear. “I’ll get dressed. Be down in five?”
My dad nods and closes the door. I settle on a black sweatsuit. I probably won’t have to talk to anyone so it’s fine to wear my best nobody’s-gonna-see-me outfit. I smooth out my hair, slip on a pair of sneakers, and meet my dad in the downstairs hallway.
Following him out back, I step into the frigid night air and wonder if I should have brought a jacket. I glance back at the house, then decide against it. My dad slips behind the wheel of the hearse and I slide into the passenger seat.
My mom has a Prius that she drives sometimes but I think all of us consider the hearse our main vehicle.
I learned to drive in it which means I can basically drive anything because driving this thing is like driving a tank.
Our 1957 Cadillac Superior Royal Crown hearse is an almost identical vehicle to the one they used in Ghostbusters .
I’ve picked up my friends in it to go to the movies and on Halloween, we do a trunk-or-treat, handing candy out of the back.
The car is old, but my dad has maintained every detail, from the sleek black exterior to the tan leather insides. It’s his baby.
“Where are we going?” I ask. “Is the pickup in Ithaca?”
“It’s about ten minutes from here.” He sighs. “Another elderly guest. He had some kind of cardiac event. He’s been gone a few hours. He had a DNR so he’s probably in good shape.”
A DNR. Do not resuscitate, a legal document that a person sets up before they die that says don’t try to bring them back if they die.
Sometimes when we pick up bodies where lifesaving measures were used they can be in rough shape—broken sternums or ribs from CPR, holes from tubes and needles, broken teeth from emergency intubation.
It seems like this old guy, whoever he was, had had enough of this life.
“Should be a quick transfer,” my dad continues. “Thanks for coming with me, Meka. I appreciate it.”
I lean across the front seat and put my head on his shoulder. For all his strangeness, he’s just a good guy. Our bonding activities might include picking up dead bodies in the middle of the night, but it’s what works for us and I wouldn’t want it any other way.
“You want me to go in and talk to the medical staff?” I ask. “I can get the paperwork and stuff.”
He pauses, like he’s considering it. “No, I—I think I can manage. They’re waiting for us so hopefully it’ll be fast. Sooner we get him into cold storage, the better.”
I laugh a little.
“What’s funny?” my dad asks.
“Nothing,” I say. “Just casually talking about putting people in freezers. Not weird at all, right?”
“You worried about us being weird?” he asks.
I sigh. “Most of the time I don’t care.”
“And the other times?” he asks.
I shrug. “I don’t know. I love what I do, I just—sometimes I think if I worked at Target or at the movies, people wouldn’t have so much to say.”
“Oh,” my dad says softly.
“I don’t want to work at those places, I’m just saying.
” I pause. What am I trying to say? “Other people don’t get it.
They think what we do is scary.” I think of how many sideways glances I get from people at school just because they know that my family handles the funeral arrangements for their deceased loved ones.
They avoid me like I’m the reaper or something.
My dad is quiet for a moment. “We are who we are,” he says. “We come from a long line of people who take this work very seriously.”
“I take it seriously too,” I say.
“I know,” my dad says. “But you don’t have to. I want other things for you if this isn’t the right fit.”
“It is the right fit,” I say. It is. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t wish there was some way to make people understand it better.
My dad reaches over and pats me on the leg. “You know, the people in our family—they did this work for so long, maybe it can end somewhere. Maybe you can be the first Redwood to beat the curse.”
“Now we’re cursed?” I ask, sitting straight up.
My dad chuckles to himself but it’s sort of hollow sounding. “I’m joking,” he says.
Ten minutes later my dad pulls the hearse up to the back door of a small senior living facility on the north side of town. Two night-nurses are waiting outside. I get out and open the rear door of the hearse while my dad talks to them.
“His family will be in touch in the morning,” the nurse with the long blond hair says.
My dad nods as I pull the rolling floor out of the car, flipping down the loading ramp and making sure everything is secure.
My dad disappears inside the building and a few minutes later returns pushing a gurney with an adult-size cardboard box on top of it.
The top is open and tucked inside is a black plastic bag wrapping the remains of our new guest.
“Where’s the lid?” I ask.
“They’re out of them,” my dad says.
The makeshift cardboard coffins usually come in two pieces and I’ve never had to load one without a top.
“Want me to cover it?” I ask. “I think there’s an emergency blanket in the glove box.”
“No,” Dad says. “Let’s just get him loaded up.”
My dad wheels the gurney to the back of the car and I help him slide the box onto the ramp.
We get the box and its contents into the rear of the hearse and my dad signs some paperwork with the blond nurse as I secure the temporary coffin.
I climb into the rear compartment to make sure the lip of the rolling floor is flipped up, so the box doesn’t slide off while we’re driving.
We’ve never had a body tumble over in the back of the car and I’d like to keep it that way.
“Appreciate your time,” the nurse says.
“Right,” Dad says. The nurse reaches for his hand to shake it and he does a weird half salute, then almost falls as he trips back toward the car. I smile to myself. I love my dad, but I think if you look next to the definition of “awkward” in the dictionary, you’d find a picture of him.
I’m about to get into the front seat when a loud cawing draws my attention up to the pitch-black night sky. A half dozen ravens circle high overhead. I quickly get in and shut the door. My dad gets in too.
“That’s over,” he says, exhaling loudly. “Thank goodness. Your mom is so much better at this stuff than me.”
“She is,” I say, smiling.
My dad steers us back through downtown Ithaca.
He avoids the city’s cavernous potholes like they’re land mines.
Maybe it’s because the hearse’s suspension isn’t great, maybe it’s because our guest is in a drop-top coffin, but either way, he avoids as many as he can but he can’t miss all of them.
We bounce over a rut in the road and the bag inside the coffin rustles.
I glance back making sure everything is still where it should be.
My dad reaches into his pocket and takes out his phone. “Can you text your mom and ask her to open the loading doors at the house?”
I reach for his phone but I fumble it and it disappears into the crevice of the front seat.
My dad grunts. “Why do they make the phones so slippery? It’s ridiculous.” He fishes around under his seat as he tries to keep his eyes on the road and his other hand on the wheel. Suddenly he sits bolt upright.
“What?” I ask. “Is it broken? Is the screen cracked?” I lean over and glance down between the seats.
His phone is wedged in there but just below it is something else.
It’s a square corner of something—a book, a small flat box, I can’t tell.
A soft green light emanates from between the seats. “What’s on your phone that’s green?”
“What?” my dad asks but he says it so low I can barely hear him.
“Your phone,” I say. “The lock screen, is it green?”
“Leave it,” my dad says abruptly. “I’ll get it when we’re back at the house.”
I stick my hand between the seats. “I can see it. It’s right there.” I grab the phone and my hand brushes the other object. There’s a quick snap, like somebody popped a rubber band against my bare skin. I quickly withdraw my hand and examine my fingertips. I absolutely expect there to be blood.
“What is that?” I ask. My fingers are fine. No cut. No blood. Just an odd stinging sensation. I give my dad his phone. “There’s something else under there. I thought it cut me.”
My dad keeps his eyes forward as we pull to a stop at a red light. He reaches over and takes my hand, examining it closely.
“I thought something cut me,” I repeat. “Or maybe, I don’t know, burned me?” I look at the tips of my fingers. “It’s the weirdest feeling.”