SHE KNEW OF Parnell’s sickness, something she had divined anyway, through various things he said to her which first implied it and later confirmed it for her in the months of their courtship. When she had first taken his hand in the funeral parlor she had sensed something strong in terms of his relation to the dead, but had not included sexual passion in what she sensed until he told her of the girl who’d been in the farming accident and how she had changed him. A general anxiety had to that point given him such problems he thought they would undermine his chosen career: sweaty palms, a nervous pallor, a popeyed uncertainty in his speech. His father barred him from working the parlors. This continued until one day when the body of a girl in his high school class, mortally wounded in a hay baling accident, was brought from the hospital to the Grimes embalming table — naked, flayed, pale, and cold. Her child’s face mauled by indifferent machinery. It had been a face, Parnell recalled, upon which none of her peers’ eyes had rested in admiration. She’d been as plain, even homely, as a day-old drop biscuit. And now he looked upon her remains (beyond the corruption of his confused imagination, Selena would come to understand), disfigured with slices and gashes from the baler, and he saw beyond them more clearly than anyone had ever been able to see just what her perfection had been, and realized that he loved her and mourned her loss. That day, he began to understand something of his mission, and the experience was liberating. His grief filled him with a bouyant joy, and immediately he arrived at a deeper understanding of all that he’d felt and feared. Later, when they had no such secrets between them, after he had further confessed the nature of these fears, telling her what had happened with the Littleton girl, she comforted him, absolved him. Together they giggled like children over the fact that the messenger of such a mission had been unspeakable lust.
From the time they married and she moved into the second floor of the funeral home with Parnell, this place that had been his lonely habitation since his parents had died when he was only sixteen, when he had taken over the business at that young age and done quite well with it, she had felt more at home than she had since the day her mother died. Her own home, since then, had been such a lonely place, even with her father and brother living there with her. She had felt more comforted by her cat, Rosebud, than she had with her family, though they loved her and she loved them. The cat, Rosebud, had a way of looking at her that was so unguarded, so frankly a look into who she really was and what she felt, that she knew no living human being could match it. And the week she’d been at the Gulf with Parnell on their honeymoon, Rosebud had disappeared, and she knew this was because Rosebud’s role in her life had come to an end. That her life with Parnell in the funeral home would now supplant it in ways she would come to understand. So she grieved for Rosebud, but not unconsolably.
In only that first week she had asked Parnell to let her assist him in the embalming downstairs in the basement. He hesitated only a moment, and then she could see settle into his features the knowledge that this was her destiny as much as it was his own. He gave his regular assistant, Mr. Peach, a two-week vacation, and she worked with him on every body that came to the home during that time. The greater her experience at handling the dead, the greater her desire for communion with them.
It had been entirely a risk, an experiment, that first time she had drifted herself to near-death to be revived by Parnell on their honeymoon. As a child, and soon after her mother’s death, she’d discovered the ability quite on her own. She’d walked away from the house on a cool and overcast day when low gray clouds carried over with a breeze from the front that pushed them. She walked to an old pecan grove a couple of blocks away and lay down in the tall grass that had grown up around them, an old crop of nuts from the now sterile trees knobby on the earth beneath her back and legs. She could see the clouds pass as if through the gnarled and flay-barked limbs and ragged narrow leaves of the pecans. She closed her eyes and pushed herself in her mind toward where her mother had gone. She saw a nebulous blue glow aswirl in the spot just between her closed eyes and put her concentration into it. And passed into it and through it. She felt herself traveling somehow in this direction, not through the limbs of the trees and the billowy clouds above them but beyond them in some other-dimensional way. As if sucked in upon herself the weight of her body seemed released, she herself was weightless. She traveled as if flying in a dream but without the sense of moving through the world, or of there even being a world. Through time, perhaps, but not thinking that, either. And after some time of very swift but relative travel in this way she slowed, something like slowing, or came into herself, what that was she couldn’t say, and seemed to float there, and had the sense she was waiting. Some harmonious and distant, untraceable musical sound. And she began to fill with a kind of happiness. She was content to be just there, and was not disturbed for a time with the expectation of there being anything else. But something began to nudge its way into this state, and gradually she became aware of it as a presence, and something physical in the world, and there was a heaviness on her as well as a warm wetness about her face. She opened her eyes. There sat Rosebud two inches from her eyes, sitting on her chest, licking her face. Rosebud mewed, a question, Mggrrrow? As her sense of being in the world again curled into her body, she roused, petted Rosebud. How did you follow me way down here? she said. Rosebud wound her way around her legs, her tail straight up, stopped and looked up at her words. They walked back home together.
In time, with Parnell, she began to love thinking of the new places and the new ways. At first she had merely lain in their bed waiting for Parnell to come upstairs to find her there, to speak to her as he removed his business clothes, to stop and turn his head slightly toward her when she did not respond, to creep over and touch her here and there. And she was in that state she had somehow perfected, of being there but not there, in her body but out of it too, somehow breathing though her lungs all but still, all but dormant, and she seemed to see him through her closed lids, which in those moments seemed to her as thin a membrane as the protective covering on the eye of a fish, she could see right through them, the image before her pulsing almost imperceptibly behind the tiny, spidery veins.
But this gave way soon enough to other places. The supply closet off the main hallway. In a plush chair in one of the parlors, Parnell having to pull her lifeless body from the chair onto the carpeted floor. Collapsed into a heap on the kitchen floor, half a sandwich left on her plate at the table. Once, in the little hedged bit of private yard they kept behind the home. And finally on the preparation table itself, surprising Parnell there as he came in tugging on a pair of surgical gloves, only a miracle he hadn’t brought a policeman or distant relative of the deceased in there, of the one who lay under the sheet just feet away from Selena’s supine, naked, chilled but latently vital form.
They rarely went through the long elaborate playing out of the game, after the honeymoon, as it was Parnell’s genuine fear that had led to it that time, and he was no real actor, Parnell. Which is not to say he had no imagination. For when he stood over her and she didn’t respond, though he knew she was only playing again, his imagination soon took him to the time and place when this would be no game, when he would be speaking to a Selena who would never respond, and it filled him again with the old grief and lust.