CHAPTER 4 NIGHTMARES AND NOAH #2
I try to peer between the seats again as my dad lets go of my hand and readjusts himself in his seat. Now his jacket is covering the space between the seats.
“It’s probably just something that slipped under the seat,” my dad says. “Leave it.”
Leave it.
He keeps saying that.
He’ll probably use this as an excuse to detail the whole car himself, which he loves doing anyway, so I let it go.
Outside the foggy glass, the night is black.
Little veins of crystalized condensation have begun to spread from the bottom of the passenger window, as if the temperature outside is plummeting.
I press my forehead against the cold glass and shut my eyes.
I’m more tired than I realized. I let myself drift, my finger still throbbing in time with my heartbeat.
We hit another pothole, and I hear the bag in the back shift again.
Slowly, our car comes to a stop. Behind my closed lids the glow of what is probably the stoplight presses in on me. It feels ominous . . . familiar. Like the dream.
“Meka,” my dad says softly.
“Uh-huh,” I murmur without opening my eyes.
My dad’s breaths come in short, quick gasps.
I open my eyes.
We’re at the intersection of East Court Street and North Aurora.
St. Paul’s sits on the corner, its familiar pride flag gently swaying in the biting breeze.
A man in a safety vest is climbing out of a vehicle with bright green lettering on the side that reads Ithaca City Electrical Utility.
He’s putting orange cones on the road but waves us through.
“Dad, he’s letting us go. We don’t have to stop.”
My dad doesn’t say anything and he doesn’t drive past the utility worker. He’s looking straight ahead, eyes wide, his lips slightly parted.
I put my hand on his shoulder. “Dad?”
Then I realize, in the red glow of the stoplight, he’s not looking ahead.
He is looking in the rearview mirror.
From the corner of my eye I register a brief movement, like a shadow moving across an already darkened space. A cold tremor rocks my body.
The black bag rustles again.
The person inside it is moving.
I turn my head even as everything in me screams not to.
The guest we just loaded into the back of the hearse is sitting straight up.
The head-end portion of the body bag has come partially unzipped. In the folds of the black plastic is a milky white eye and an open, gaping mouth.
“Meka,” my dad whispers. “Don’t panic. It’s—”
The noise that comes out of my throat is less of a scream and more like a ragged tear.
It rips through the inside of the car. My dad flinches so hard he hits his head on the low ceiling.
I fumble with the lock and spill out onto the pavement at the intersection.
The cold whips my face as I slip on the frost-covered pavement, trying to get enough traction to run.
My dad stumbles out, rounds the front of the car, and grabs me by the shoulders.
“Meka! Meka, please calm down!”
“He—he sat up! He’s not dead!”
“Yes, he is,” my dad says. “He is dead. Meka, I need you to breathe.”
I try to remember how to do that.
“Remember your training. Corpses do that sometimes.” He holds on to me firmly as the panic begins to subside.
“My training?” I ask as I peer through the window of the hearse. The man is still sitting up, the black plastic body bag draped around him like a shroud.
The utility worker walks over, a look of concern stretched across his face.
“Everything okay?” he asks. He looks between me and my dad, then glances at the hearse. His eyes grow wide. “What the hell is happening in the back of your car?”
My dad tries to shoo the man away but he doesn’t budge.
“I’m Jonathan Redwood and we’re transporting a guest . . . ?a body . . . to the Redwood Funeral Home.”
“He ain’t dead!” the man says as his tone creeps up.
“I can assure you he is. This happens sometimes,” my dad says, turning back to me. “You know this. It’s happened before. In the prep room. I told you about it, remember?”
I search my memory for this and find it tucked away among other things I don’t like to think about.
Last year, during spring break, my dad had come up from the prep room looking more distressed than usual and told me and my mom that one of our guests had sat partially up during embalming.
Not many things scare my dad but this had shaken him.
“That’s all this is,” my dad says in a flat, monotone kind of way. “An anomaly that is all too common in our business. Breathe, Meka. Just breathe.”
I do and it helps. Some.
I can see our house from the intersection. I consider walking the rest of the way but my dad ushers me to the side of the car. The utility worker returns to his vehicle and I can tell by the way his face is lit up in the cab that he’s on his phone.
My dad ducks halfway into our car and reaches over the seat to give the body a little shove. The corpse falls back and settles into the cardboard coffin.
“Let’s get home,” my dad says, giving my shoulder a little squeeze.
I sit backward in the front seat, keeping watch on the man in his body bag. I don’t take my eyes off him until we wheel him out of the hearse and into cold storage in our basement. I double-check the door is locked.
My dad puts his arm around me and I allow myself to relax a little.
“So sorry about this,” he says, but he was right.
These things do happen. There have been lots of documented cases of corpses moving, even making sounds.
My dad has seen bodies move on their own and when I think about it, so have I.
Nothing like the horror show I just witnessed in the hearse but I’d seen an arm or leg twitch while I was doing a guest’s makeup or hair.
I’d seen the eyes or mouths of some of our guests open.
Images of me supergluing Mrs. Lang’s eyelids closed flood my brain.
“It’s okay,” I say. “It just scared me.”
“Me too,” my dad says. He’s staring at the door to the cold storage room with a familiar kind of distance. Like he’s thinking of something far away. “I’m so sorry.”
“Dad,” I say. “It’s really okay.” It is, but he’s taking the incident much harder than I’d expected. He just looks so sad.
He gently takes my hand and examines it. “Is your finger okay?”
I’d forgotten about it. Seeing a dead body sit up in the back of your car kind of makes everything else irrelevant, I guess.
“It’s fine,” I say. “It doesn’t even hurt anymore.” There was a lingering tingly sensation, but no pain. “What was that under your seat anyway?”
My dad shrugs. “I’m not sure. Something must have slid out of my bag. I’ll clean it out tomorrow. You should get some rest.”
I give my dad a hug and head up to my room.
I strip off my sweats and throw on some shorts and a T-shirt, cut out the lights, and crawl into bed.
The nighttime is still and quiet. I hear my dad downstairs still, though.
I expect him to trudge up the steps and past my room but instead, the back door opens.
Its distinctive creak filters up to me and I sit up.
Pushing the curtain aside I peer out my window.
I have a bird’s-eye view of the rear driveway, the dumpster, and the garage.
My dad is slinking across the drive and he goes to the driver’s side of the hearse.
He’s got his work briefcase in his hand.
He leans into the car and that strange green light filters out.
Had he taken his phone to the car with him?
I can’t tell from my vantage point but a moment later, the light goes out and he shuts the door, returning to the house with his bag.
He comes upstairs and pauses just outside my door.
I can see his shadow in the faint glow of the hall light.
It’s quiet for a second, but I can tell he’s there; then he continues into his room, shutting the door with a soft thud.
I grab my phone and google how often corpses sit up on their own.
The answer that pops up . . . ?is none. The results say that a corpse fully sitting up is not something that happens—ever.
Twitching extremities, yes. A deep sigh that’s attributed to the buildup of gases inside a body, yes.
But full-on seated corpses? According to Beyoncé’s internet, that’s not something that happens anywhere except right here at the Redwood Funeral Home.