chapter 6
Decca
“You did what?“ Bethany’s jaw hung open as she slowly lowered the water bottle she was about to sip from.
I’d brought my friends together this afternoon to rip off the BAND-AID, but Bethany’s reaction was why I’d been dreading telling her. It was going to be a big thing now. I didn’t want it to be a thing. Not until after I’d cleared my head and talked to Gus about this silly plan in lengthy, exhausting detail.
I still couldn’t quite admit to myself it was real. That I was really going to marry him. How was I supposed to break the news to my best friends?
Maybe I shouldn’t have opened my mouth. The likelihood that he, or I, or both of us would back out was as high as the Himalayas.
“I proposed to Gus,” I repeated, willing my voice not to betray me. I would be calm and rational, dammit. “Besides. Soula just told us she’s pregnant again. I don’t know how my engagement garners a bigger outburst than Soula’s news.”
“Soula is Soula. Nothing she does shocks me.” She turned to Soula, who was slipping sock-footed down the hallway to catch a precocious six-month-old who didn’t want to take her nap.
“élla thó, Athena! Come back here,“ Soula yelled to her daughter as she crawled around the corner.
Bethany pointed a finger at me. “You, on the other hand.“ She rubbed her chest and took a deep breath. “You just zapped the life back into me.”
“I should have started with clear.“ I smiled. Somewhere a phone buzzed. All three of us were on call, so it was anyone’s guess as to what the emergency was this time.
“At least let me see you rubbing the paddles together,” Bethany said, checking her pocket.
The buzz came from my phone. I looked at the screen.
It was from Gus.
Looking forward to dinner. Can you text me your address?
I blinked, frowning at the words that highlighted the sheer weirdness of our situation. I almost wished it was a call.
I had a fiancé.
I had a fiancé who didn’t know where I lived.
I couldn’t blame Bethany for being shocked. It was shocking. Especially for me. I didn’t do things like this. I didn’t have the self-confidence to propose marriage to a man out of clear blue nothingness. Who did?
“Are my boobs getting smaller?” Bethany palmed her breasts. “I don’t know if I’m ready for new implants yet. Maybe fat injections.”
Bethany.She’d have the confidence to do something like that.
Soula, too. I was the timid one in our ghoul gang. I lived for my friends’ happiness, only keeping the dregs for myself. And that was if there were any drops left in the bottle.
“You didn’t do some kind of black magic, did you?”
“To your boobs?”
“No. To Gus.”
“No.” I rolled my eyes. I wasn’t opposed to black magic in principle, but I’d never use it, or any other type of magic to inflict my will on another human. Or their boobs.
“What did the cards say?”
“How did you know I read the cards?”
“Because you don’t make any decisions without at least a quick card pull. And if you act impulsively, I know there’s got to be something behind that.”
I sighed, but leaned closer, my eyes wide. “The cards told me to act impulsively.”
“You don’t even swipe on someone on the dating apps until you’ve fully vetted their C.V. But why the suddenness? Why does it have to happen so fast? You do recognize there’s a high likelihood of disaster here, right?”
“He’s been itching to start his work in the church.”
“He’s already been working for the church.”
“He’s been fixing up their website, answering phones. Nothing in a ministerial capacity. He wants to get ordained. It’s been years.”
“He doesn’t need to wear the robes in order to start his ministry. He can start counseling people. Everyone knows he’s a seminarian. He’ll be a priest soon enough. It’s not like they aren’t taking him seriously in the meantime.
“I understand him. I want this to happen for him.”
Bethany took a breath and opened her mouth to say something, but stopped herself. Her eyes narrowed as she looked at me, quiet for a moment. “And what do you want for you?”
“What do you mean?”
“What kind of marriage do you want to have? Is this an I’m marrying you to stay in the country so we’re sleeping in separate bedrooms marriage?Or is it an I’m proposing to be romantic because we’ve swept each other off our feet marriage?”
“I don’t know.”
“You should probably think about that before you sacrifice the rest of your life, just so a dude can get his dream job a few months faster.”
“Well, I mean. It’s not my whole life. If it sucks, we can just—”
“No, you can’t,” Soula said, reentering the conversation after putting Athena down for a nap. She tightened her high ponytail. “At least not without him losing that dream job. What I don’t understand is why Gus would say yes. I know he wouldn’t want you to throw your life away for him. He’s not selfish like that.”
I wasn’t throwing my life away, was I? My shoulders curled inward. “I kind of took his response to mean he was interested in a bit more than just a marriage of convenience,” I said meekly. Now I was second guessing everything those damn tarot cards had shown me.
“You’re a weird person.” Bethany prodded. “Only you can figure out what you want.”
“Thank you.”
Bethany sighed pointedly in my direction. “Weird people make weird choices that sometimes work out, despite pesky things like logic, and common sense, and societal norms. Besides, all three of us are weird. That’s why we’re a family. If anyone can arrange themselves a marriage and have it last fifty years, it’d totally be you.”
“Thank you,” I said, earnestly this time, squeezing Bethany’s hand. I might not have been looking forward to dropping this bomb today, but deep down, I knew my family would help sort everything into the right boxes and make sense of my situation.
I’d met Bethany and Soula in the worst place imaginable: the Body Farm, a one-acre patch of woods in the heart of the University of Tennessee campus, where forensic anthropologists placed real, donated corpses in simulated situations to study the effects of weather, insect activity, temperature, et cetera, on human decomposition. In doing so, the program revolutionized and standardized forensic science.
Naturally, the three of us smartypants weirdos bonded over the academically rigorous, aesthetically gruesome graduate program. We’d all originally planned careers as forensic anthropologists, but after a short stint in the Forensic Anthropology Center—its official name—my friends found themselves called down alternative paths in deathcare.
Soula discovered she was better suited to public health. Less fighting crime; more combating disease. After finishing that first year, she left us to attend medical school at Vanderbilt. She spent the better part of the next decade completing the required training, internships, and fellowships to become a forensic pathologist, performing postmortem exams—autopsies—to determine cause of death when cases were more immediate than mine. She published frequently in science and medical journals and worked with hospital pathologists and researchers to determine the exact point in which diseases killed. Now she was chief medical examiner and had started taking on fellows in the morgue.
Bethany was different. Fiery and gregarious.
And also, gorgeous.
It was an objective truth. The men’s nudie magazines thought so too, at least enough to award her centerfold of the year—three times. She was already famous by the time she set her booted feet on the sacred ground of the Body Farm, though none of us had any idea at the time. Even the few men in our program were more familiar with the Journal of Forensic Sciences than Playboy.
But she had something else the rest of us didn’t: Sofia, her then four-year-old daughter. And while Bethany continued doing the sex work she loved—she even started her own retro, female-gaze, pulp-smut nudie mag—she wanted a faster route out of the spotlight to give her daughter a normal life.
If you could call death work normal.
Bethany went to mortuary school and got her funeral director’s license, eventually buying the huge, white Victorian-era mortuary the three Smythe siblings, George, Gus, and Soula, had grown up in.
Bethany was born for funeral service. She could deal with horrific gore. She could handle emotional devastation. But she was exceptionally skilled when it came to comforting living, breathing humans. She was comfortable in her own skin, warm, compassionate, and generally made everyone else feel cared for.
Eventually, that even included George, her grumpy, misanthropic, buttoned-up co-owner who hated the very air she breathed—until she managed to send him into shock over his real feelings for her.
Now she and Soula were sisters. Officially.
That left me out there alone, digging up the bones and solving the unsolvable cases for the state of Tennessee.
I finished my Ph.D, worked one hot and miserable postdoc year in Gainesville, Florida, and then began my career, traveling back and forth across the state, from the mountains, where my people came from, to Memphis, and back.
Eventually, the three of us reconvened here in Franklin. Soula and Bethany started putting down roots. Settled into their careers and their families.
But I was still a nomad.
I couldn’t establish roots while this job involved tearing them back out again and again. But there was one perk. No one noticed I didn’t have a life of my own—especially me.
Then my granny died—the woman who raised me—and I absorbed even more obligations. More root ripping.
With a heavy (guilty) heart, I took over her role in the community as a death doula.
Whenever my state caseload was light, I sat in bedside vigils. I prayed with loved ones. I helped people atone for their “sins” and right their wrongs before death so they could leave the weight of their earthly shackles behind.
Of course, I didn’t love watching people die. But I did come to appreciate the challenge of helping them find a way to ease their minds as they transitioned. I watched them pass in peace. Sometimes people needed to do some hard work to feel okay leaving this plane of existence, and I was the right kind of outside-the-box thinker who could be of use in that arena.
When needed, I led DMORT, or Disaster Mortuary Operations Response Teams. That was the worst of it. The picking up tiny pieces of people who’d been blown apart in senseless acts of violence or high-casualty accidents. Sorting through tissue in refrigerated trucks after airline crashes or jobsite explosions.
One thing was true for all of us last responders. We were all willing to do the awful, painful shit normal people couldn’t handle.
But it was more than that. We put our own mental health at risk so no one had to know jobs like mine existed.
No one knew when I was in my lab for months, putting aside my fury and tears to identify the skull of a Baby Doe, dug up from under a highway overpass. No one knew that my friend Chris, a dentist with a forensics background would be called in to take molds of baby teeth, determining age—between 24-36 months—but finding no records of dental care, or any medical care, even after a broken and poorly healed mandible. No one knew that my brilliant artist friend, with paintings and sculptures in world-class galleries was also working tirelessly to help me analyze tissue depth thickness in order to sculpt the child’s likeness in the hopes that a family member could come forth with an identification.
No one should have to remember our jobs existed.
My old mentor used to say: if you can work with the dead; you should. You owe it to the world, because there aren’t many who are built like us. With stomachs strong as steel and nerves smooth as glass.
Those people were why I continued.
Even on the DMORT ops, I always managed to find some spark of joy. I worked with the funniest, brightest, best people. People with big laughs and even bigger hearts. The kind of people who cared immensely, but didn’t do it for show.
I went into the field of deathcare because I told myself I couldn’t stand the living, but it was the living, breathing people of deathcare who’d made my own life something spectacular.
Now, I was tired. Tired of the gore. Tired of the schedule. Tired of being alone.
Bethany had Sofia and now George. Soula had Waylon and Athena, plus a new little life in her belly.
I wanted someone to come home to. I wanted someone to worry if I was late. I wanted someone to ask if I remembered to eat real food and not just protein bars, and who’d reach for the aspirin when I got headaches from the LED lights in my lab.
It didn’t have to be love. Not love like the movies. That was often toxic anyway. Definitely not suited to the real world.
I didn’t want that. I wanted companionable silence, respectful theological debates, inside jokes and an easy partnership.
I wanted… Gus.