Come Little Children (3 page)

She missed them badly. The three of them had agreed all the way up until convocation that they couldn’t wait to leave school for the freedoms of privacy, a paycheck, and everything else associated with “real life”, but in retrospect, mortuary school had been the first place Camilla had actually
had
a life. All of a sudden she wasn’t so sure she was ready to start from square one again.

Square one had always been a difficult spot for Camilla. She could trace her string of bad starts all the way back to the first grade, back to her very first run-in with death.

The memory started twenty years ago, early in September, when summer had just ended and the leaves were already changing.

She was dragging her yellow-and-white sneakers on her way to elementary school when something had snagged her heel in the gutter. Looking down, she spotted a dead robin lying on the bars of a sewage grate, its head cocked unnaturally to the side and its little body deflated like a leaky balloon. She remembered
bending down, poking the bird twice and then, without any hesitation, scooping it into her pencil case and taking it up to the playground. Later that afternoon—when it got to her turn at show-and-tell—she unzipped the pencil case and pulled out the bird by the tip of its disjointed wing, holding it up so the whole classroom could get a good look. Mrs. Stinson had screamed the loudest. Her shrieks had been so shrill that years later, when the students had moved on to high school, they still joked about suffering PTSD—Post Traumatic Stinson Disorder. Camilla wondered how many of them were actually joking.

The memory skipped forward, like a disk with a scratch on it.

She was now in a dingy office. Beside her, sixty-two-year-old Wanda J. B. Stinson was telling the school’s walrus-like principal exactly what had happened, start to finish, with a textbook story arc that only Shakespeare and grade-school English teachers could appreciate. He hardly reacted. After Stinson was finished, the principal had turned to Camilla and said in a slow, raspy voice: “Don’t touch dead things. They’re bad.”

That was it from Administration’s perspective. Case closed, send in the next little shit. And had it been solely up to the principal, Camilla might have gotten off with a simple warning. But no.
Oh no
. Old Stinson made sure of it: no recess for three weeks and garbage duty all year long, justice served.

The truth was, Camilla couldn’t have cared less about the punishment. She didn’t have anyone to play with at recess anyway, and garbage duty didn’t take more than fifteen minutes tops at the end of every week. But something else had bothered her. It was the principal’s reaction—those six slow, raspy words that she still remembered over twenty years later.

Don’t touch dead things. They’re bad
.

The idea that a dead thing could be bad was troublesome and confusing, especially to six-year-old Camilla. The bird was dead; how could it be anything? And how was it any more harmful than a Barbie or a bicycle or a hotdog?

That settled it: she would have to find out. Scientifically.

(Another skip, another scratch in her memory’s disk.)

It was the day Camilla’s recess ban was lifted. She smuggled out her safety scissors and found the dead bird still stuffed under the dumpster in the teachers’ parking lot. Clip by clip, she performed her first autopsy at age six on the wooden seat of the school yard teeter-totter (a good location, she reasoned, since there was no risk of being interrupted—everyone hates teeter-totters, children especially). The entire time of the autopsy, the bird didn’t move. Its talons and innards and eyes were just a bunch of bloody bits; no detectable evil, nothing insidious. Nothing “bad.” She smiled, satisfied, and buried everything in the gravel before rinsing off her scissors in the drinking fountain.

The dean was wrong. His warning hadn’t deterred her at all; in fact, it enlightened her. She spent the rest of her elementary recesses at her teeter-totter autopsy table, dissecting all manner of dead things, including insects, mice, and, one time, a bat. She didn’t kill the animals; she only studied the carrion that she could scavenge in the boundaries of Alice Park Elementary. Back then it was the only way to answer her budding questions, seeing as her family didn’t own a computer and—as a medical practitioner—Dr. Seuss seemed grossly unqualified.

Camilla blinked back from the memory. Her eyes hovered around the stomach of the hearse again, pausing on the box of human remains.

She snickered. It was funny how a person can think they’ve come so far since learning their ABCs and 123s, when really, she
was more or less in the same boat that she’d been in since the first grade: alone with a dead thing.

The hearse curved along the Klondike Highway into Dawson City. They kept on the road closest to the shoreline, skirting around the edge of town with the long, tall hills following on the left.

The car passed an old whitewashed courthouse, then the chapel and inns on Front Street. If it weren’t for the pickup trucks that were parked in the driveways and the satellite dishes slapped on the sides of the buildings, Camilla would swear she was back in time at the turn-of-the-century gold rush.

Farther down, a row of pickups and hatchbacks were parked along a boardwalk of cotton-candy-colored buildings that housed five-and-dime souvenir shops. Klondyke Cream & Candy, Goldbottom Tours, the Downtown Hotel (home of the Sourtoe Cocktail, your choice of drink served in a glass with a
real
human toe). Camilla smiled, charmed, when she spotted a sign that read “Jimmy’s Place: All Kinds of Stuff.”

As the funeral coach passed the colorful shops, Camilla picked up on something strange: she hadn’t seen a single person since they drove into town. The curtains in everyone’s windows were pulled shut, and no matter how long she stared, she couldn’t tell if anyone was watching from the shadows of the porches and alleys.

Then suddenly there was a sound of another car’s tires turning off the road. Camilla pressed her cheek to the window and put her eye flush against the glass, hearing other tires turn off the gravel in tandem. She saw a string of vehicles parked along the boardwalk, and when she looked closer, she noticed there were people sitting inside them. Some had their heads
bowed—eyes trained on their laps—while others gawked in their rearview mirrors as the coach swept by. They had pulled over to let the funeral car pass, but they didn’t seem in the least bit pleased to do so.

Camilla stared back, frowning. The last time she remembered seeing looks like those was at Damien Brown High School. DBHS: Home of the Brown Bears,
rah-rah-rah
, and the biggest assholes east of the Glenhurst Creek. Damien was best known by the outside world for its senior football team, but to anyone who actually went there, it was bullying capital of the tri-state area.
The girls were the worst
, she recalled. Any time she got a new outfit or changed her hair, she could guarantee a dozen eye-daggers would sail her way from both sides of the hallways. Name-calling was typically reserved for when she wasn’t around, but one time she overheard a cheerleader telling the squad that she was a “butter brain.” “Everyone thinks that Carleton chick’s pretty,” the girl explained, “but something about her brain is
messed up
. It’s ugly in there.” Camilla had been used to her share of trash talk, but that specific comment landed like a deathblow. She proceeded to run to the bathroom and lock herself in a stall all afternoon, turning on the waterworks and cursing the name of every cheerleader she could remember. Now, thirteen years later in the back of the hearse, she was surprised to recognize the same feeling—the eye-daggers from the high-school hallways—in the eyes of the people watching the funeral car roll by.

They didn’t like it; it didn’t belong.

They wanted it to go away.

The road curved down to a riverbank where the water lapped at the edge of the Dawson City shoreline. A six-car ferry was tethered in the froth, its gangplank already lowered and
waiting, with a long steel arm holding a flickering propane lamp above its deck like a watchman on the foggy waters.

The hearse slowed down as its tires touched the loading point and boarded the vessel. Camilla still had her cheek against the window, excited to be on a ship, and noticed a rack of buoys and bright-orange jackets hanging outside the tinted glass. She smiled at the juxtaposition of a funeral car surrounded by life preservers.

The car stopped and the driver killed the engine.

Everything went quiet for a full minute. The hearse was silent, bobbing unevenly on the water, and then the ferry rumbled to life with a massive groan and drifted off the shoals. In under a minute they were making decent speed, and in another thirty seconds Dawson City disappeared behind them in the heavy mist.

The ferry glided along the glassy water in complete silence. There was no telling how long this trip would last, and without a view, Camilla was trapped alone with her nerves again.

She unzipped the front pocket on one of her suitcases and took out a hardcover book, peeling it open to a diagram of Da Vinci’s
Vitruvian Man
alongside a modern CT scan. Her fingers traced the terminology, but it wasn’t much of a distraction. As her hand drifted over the skeleton’s abdomen, another stanza of “The Hearse Song” bobbed lazily into her head.

A big green worm with rolling eyes
,

Crawls in your stomach and out your eyes
.

Your stomach turns a slimy green
,

And pus pours out like whipping cream
.

“Darn, me without a spoon,” she mumbled the extra line out loud, even though it was usually Jasmine’s part.

Her fingers flipped through the biology textbook and revealed multicolored notes on every page. Anatomy and chemistry had been her sanctuaries since high school, and textbooks were the bibles that she studied religiously. They’re what made sense to her; there was no inane fiction or fantasy—only fact. Hearts pumped blood, brains managed information, lungs circulated air. Organs had functions, not feelings.

She flipped past chapters
thirteen
and
fourteen
to the section on chemiluminescence. There were a few formulas scrawled at the bottom, along with the words “BLOOD—PRESUM” capitalized underneath the drawing of a dead stick figure in a pool of red ink. She snickered, remembering the time her mother had found her doodling stick figures on the wall of their trailer and pulled up a chair beside her, joining in.

Mom
. A pang hit Camilla’s heart.

She hadn’t told her mother that she was moving until earlier that morning.
Six days
.
Six days I kept it a secret, and good thing too. Any more than a few hours might have given her enough time to come up with a convincing argument to stay
.

But now that she’d had a chance to think about it, Camilla realized that her refusal to stay had in fact been
the
single biggest factor for accepting this particular position. The Vincent Funeral Home had made her a good offer out of college, yes, but why wouldn’t she have waited to see if something else came along? And why accept something in the Middle of Bloody Nowhere Yukon if she didn’t want to get away, and get away good?

The ferry let out a metallic belch.

The boat nudged against a sandbank and stopped moving. A smattering of footsteps thundered around outside, and the hearse started up again, crawling down a ramp onto solid ground.

Camilla’s heart dropped into her stomach. The clarity of her decision was suddenly overshadowed by the thought that she had made a horrible, horrible mistake. Crossing the river meant it was final: there was no going back now—no return ticket hidden at the bottom of her suitcase—and no home behind her. She was suddenly in a very strange land where she was more alone than ever before.

But this is what I want
, she reassured herself.
This is it
.

The car pulled away, leaving the fog on the water for a long stretch of pavement ahead.

The hearse drove northwest for forty minutes along the Top of the World Highway. It was an aptly named narrow dirt road with an open view in every direction. Expansive valleys dipped below on either side and the treetops stretched on and on into raw, uncharted wilderness.

Just as Camilla flipped another page in her textbook, the vehicle took a hard right off the main highway. She was thrown onto her side, and her textbook went spinning across the floor.

Shadows flickered in the windows and the drapes danced side to side. She couldn’t tell what direction they were going, but it felt like the hearse was barrelling downhill, bucking her in every direction while the needle of her inner compass spiraled out of control. Quickly, the sunlight vanished as the forest swallowed the car in its dark, wooden teeth.

Then the hill flattened out, and the hearse returned to its even crawl. As Camilla straightened up, something caught her eye past the velvet curtains.

They were passing a sign that read: “Welcome to Nolan: Town of the Turning Sun.”

Except someone had x-ed out the word “Turning” and spray-painted “Midnight” on top.

There are strange things done in the midnight sun
, Camilla thought, reciting the opening of Robert Service’s famous “Cremation of Sam McGee” to herself. Silently she wondered what strange things the sign alluded to.

Cabins and cottages began popping up between the trees. The people who were on their porches stopped talking as the hearse approached, watching it, guarded, as it rolled past. From what Camilla could see, their eyes weren’t filled with the same hate as the people in Dawson. These onlookers were much more detached. Stone-faced, even. They seemed content keeping their distance.

The road merged onto Main Street and the hearse crawled past a butcher shop, a jewelry store, and a three-story hospice, then turned down another road and headed toward a school yard.

It was getting dark, and the playground was abandoned. The equipment was old and rusted, and the grass was infested with dandelions. Camilla wondered what child would want to play there—