The summer he was sixteen years old, he had been awake in his room one night and listening out the window to the occasional automobile rumbling past on the street. He’d seen the oscillating red of the silent ambulance light before he’d heard the car’s engine, and knew then he’d heard the telephone ringing earlier, as he’d thought, though it had awakened him from a deep sleep and he hadn’t been sure just then that it hadn’t been a dream. But he heard it now pull up out back, the whining sound of its transmission as it backed up to the preparation room doors, heard the two doors of the ambulance open and shut, heard the longer creaking of the heavy rear door, and then the rolling of a cart being removed and the voices of his father greeting the men quietly, and the men greeting him in return. And then the closing of the doors, and the ambulance driving off, with no red light now flicking, and then quiet. He rose and slipped into his clothes and shoes and crept down the stairs, in case his mother hadn’t awakened.
This was in the year before the strange and mysterious illness of first his father, who died a horrible suffocating death about which no one had an explanation, followed just a week later by his mother. He’d been horrified by the strange noises they made in the room outside of which he crouched fearfully, old Dr. Heath going in and out, weary, and washing his hands, it seemed the old man washed his hands so furiously in the pail in the hallway outside the room. And the doctor would not let him assist with their preparation, not that he’d wanted to but he’d thought it proper, almost an obligation. Dr. Heath laid a hand on his shoulder and said, — Son, it may be catching. And when first his father, and then his mother, lay in their caskets and he stood over them one after the other in the parlor, as he had over so many they’d prepared themselves, he felt a separation of himself from something he couldn’t pin down, death reversed upon itself, become something less clinical and more strange, as if all the making way they’d done for other people to that point had been slowly absorbed by them until it became them, too. And so he felt it then, himself, that he’d already gathered some of his own dying, and it would be a lifelong process of accumulation.
There was no explanation of what had happened for some two years until Dr. Heath saw the article that led him to suspect the psittacosis, and then investigated to find out that the gypsy woman his father had embalmed just before he got sick had been a breeder of imported parrots. And had died in much the same way. And when word leaked out, a veritable posse of men from town, friends of his father’s, went out to the camp with torches and drove the gypsies away on foot, warning gunshots popping the air, burned the gypsies’ wagons, tents, and all their belongings in a conflagration of hatred, grief, and fear. Parnell had seen it from some distance away, having run to follow the men at a safe distance. What he remembered was the terrible sounds of the birds in their cages, trapped there and burning, their shrieking like women and babies, which settled into an awful silence replaced by the quiet crackling of the burning wagons — and the stench, faint but coming to him in little waves, of burning flesh and feathers. He could not stand a bird in a cage to this day.
But on the night he’d awakened to hear the ambulance bring its cargo he’d crept downstairs and quietly opened the door to the preparation room to see something that made him catch his breath. The figure on the table was a girl near his age that he knew from school. He’d never spoken to her as she was a year older and a quiet girl, though he’d admired her. Her face seemed a sleeping face, not one with the contortions of pain or even the blankness of death, but with her mouth parted and her chin lifted just so, she seemed to be in an expectant sleep, as if she might wake any moment from the dream she kept alive by somnambulent will. His father turned and saw him, and pulled the sheet back over her face.
— I know her, Parnell said.
— You go on back to bed. You can’t help with this one.
— What happened to her?
Her father looked down at the form beneath the sheet.
— Nothing, he said. -This one’s a mystery. Her parents are beyond grief. She went to sleep and never woke up.
— How long has she been asleep?
— She’s dead, son.
— I mean, how long was she asleep.
— A week or more, his father said. Then after a moment he said, — She’s too close to your own age, Parnell. I don’t want you helping me with the young ones. There’s time later in your life for that sad business.
— Yes, sir. There won’t be an autopsy, then?
— The parents said they can’t abide the idea. There’s no evidence of foul play.
— Will you do the embalming tonight then?
— No, his father said after a moment. -I’ve had my toddy tonight. I think I’d better wait till morning.
— Yes, sir.
— You go on back to bed. Here, I’ll wash my hands and come up, too.
So he waited while his father washed in the sink, though Parnell’s eyes never left the vague figure of the girl under the sheet. He looked at the shape of her feet beneath it and could tell she wore no shoes. He imagined she was in the nightgown she’d put on the night she lay down to sleep from which she would never awaken.
— Father, he said. -Was she even sick?
— Ran a little fever, is all, nothing much. His father turned, drying his hands and looked at the girl. -I cannot imagine anything more awful. I hate to know it can happen. But I knew it before. I’ll try to forget again, if I can. Though you should, more than me. He smiled at Parnell. -It’s you with your child-rearing days ahead of you.
Not something Parnell could imagine, though. He walked with his father back up the stairs to the parlor level, then up the curved staircase in the foyer to their living quarters, and his father kissed him on the forehead before leaving him in his room and going back to bed with Parnell’s mother. Parnell undressed, took off even his underwear and socks, and got into his bed. Some minutes later he heard his father’s steady sonorous breathing, and some minutes after that, stepping into his slippers and pulling on his cotton bathrobe, he stole back down the two sets of stairs and into the preparation room. He felt his way in the dark around the wall to the sink, switched on the little lamp there above it, and turned around.
She was like a ghost there under the sheet. He could imagine, felt almost he had been there with her when she had drawn her last breath. The sweet expiration. This loss to him, to Parnell, of that which had never been his nor could be in life, and now here alone with him in death, she was. His heart ached with it.
He drew the sheet away from her face, his hands trembling, and the shock of her features, more alone with him than he’d ever imagined a girl could be, moved through him like a mild electric current.
He hadn’t noticed her much, but a few times, passing her in the hallway at school he had observed her shyness, how she walked with her chin tucked down in her neck, her dark brown eyes glancing up to make sure she didn’t run into anyone or get run over in the between-class rush, hardly daring to make eye contact with anyone. Glance up with a smile that seemed almost apologetic, then look down again and make her tentative way along. She was beautiful, he could see now, but no one would have noticed this, she’d been so demure and invisible. Now so visible it seemed a crime that she had never been admired by anyone but her parents, or maybe some boy just as shy as she was, someone who’d never have had the nerve to talk to her or ask her to a game, or ask her to dance at one of the dances they sometimes held at evening in the gymnasium. Someone like Parnell. She was a little dark, and her dark eyebrows were narrow but thick and defined, with a little arch like a V pointing upward in the middle of each one. And her eyes, closed, were wide-set. But it was her mouth that transfixed Parnell. It was broad and full, her lips a little dry and cracked, and now parted in death he could only imagine how expressive it must have been when she was at home, with family, and uninhibited by her shyness, how much joy she must have given to her mother and father, how much they must have hoped for her.