Some of the Parts (9 page)

saturday
9/27
–sunday
9/28

T
he next morning Mel picks me up and we drive to the barn.

She is wearing her taxidermy clothes: an old flannel shirt that reeks of formaldehyde and a pair of blue Dickies work pants with the cuffs rolled up. If she cut her hair short and dyed it brown, she would look like a carbon copy of her uncle Enoch (minus the deep wrinkles and soulless gaze). I have only met Enoch once, but his is not a face you forget. Mel's tool belt is curled up beside her, cradling its wire cutters, assortment of knives, and supply of glass eyes. There's a large cardboard box in the backseat.

“What's that?” I hook my thumb toward the box after putting my seat belt on.

“Forms,” Mel tells me, screeching backward out of the driveway.

We drive the rest of the way in silence, a continuation of last night's contract. After I finished my cotton candy, Chase offered me a ride home but Mel asserted her friendship rights and claimed custody of me. I had to stay until the carnival was over, but it broke up pretty fast after someone circulated word that Amy was having a party at her house. Mel's anti-Amy sentiment dovetailed nicely with my desire to absolve myself of any guilt about the scene I caused, so she drove me straight home and retrieved me again this morning before my parents had time to intervene. My strange savior.

The barn is about half an hour outside of town, on what's left of Mel's family farm. Her father grew up here, but when her parents got married, her mother wanted to live “in civilization.” And to not be a farmer's wife. And to pretend that Mel's dad's relatives weren't actually related to him. He gave in to most of her demands but he wanted Mel to know his family, so he brought her out here a lot when she was little, and Uncle Enoch started teaching her the family hobby. Which, as Mel's mother has pointed out more than once, is proof that they should have moved a lot farther away.

Taxidermy makes Mel happy in a way that nothing else does. She has other pursuits, like welding old pieces of farm equipment into dangerous sculptures. Last year she made a series of abstract paintings named after punctuation marks. But when she's working on a taxidermy project, she's different. She is utterly precise in everything she does. The entire process takes days, sometimes weeks, so I've only seen bits of it. But I've seen enough to know that it requires quiet and patience, and Mel doesn't generally have those qualities. Except when she's here.

Enoch built the workshop along the back wall of the barn and enclosed it with walls and a door. Then he added some windows because the room had become too dark to see anything and a ventilation system so he didn't gas himself with chemicals. It's almost totally silent, except for the humming of an ancient refrigerator and the occasional comment from one of the cows who live in the rest of the barn. It's cozy, and it's the same every time we come. And it's seriously creepy.

Enoch's work is installed all over the barn so that every edge and corner is inhabited by some motionless creature staring intently at you. I've gotten used to it, but the first time I came, Mel had to push me through the door. I still didn't know her very well and I half thought that she might have brought me here to murder me. Which wasn't a totally unpleasant notion, with Nate newly gone.

I wish I could bring him here.

Just as a precaution against something leaping out at me, I cough loudly as I walk in behind Mel.

She turns and her tool belt slides off the box she's carrying. I lean down to pick it up and take a deep breath, drawing in the scent of hay and animals and dusky air. Mel looks at me intently as I hand her the belt, worried (maybe) about another outburst.

“Come on,” I tell her, doing my best to sound calm. “Show me what you're working on.”

It turns out that “forms” does not mean paperwork. It means an assortment of molded shapes, bald suggestions of animals. Mel chooses one that looks like an unfinished sculpture, five smooth lumps for legs and tail, and a head shaped like a sideways egg. She sets it down on the table and opens the refrigerator. It is full of unmarked brown paper packages.

“I found the perfect cat the other day,” Mel says, selecting a bundle.

She unwraps the cat and holds it up. It hangs there like a furry handbag.

“Very handsome,” I say, even though I'm starting to feel a little sick looking at it.

“My uncle helped me skin it.”

“What happens to the rest of it?” I ask. The words stick in my throat like cotton candy that won't melt.

She shrugs. “We throw it away. Uncle Enoch has a dumping ground in the woods. You should see all the turkey vultures that show up there. It's like a buffet or something.”

I'm dizzy, thinking of the cat and so many other animals, stripped of their insides and thrown away like garbage. Is that what was left of Nate? His skin? His bones? The carcass that remained after they took what they could use?

“Jeez, are you okay?” Mel asks. She is holding the cat skin in one hand and the naked form in the other. The plaid on her shirt swirls like a lava lamp.

“I need some air.” I lurch out the workshop door, drag myself past the startled cows, and throw myself outside, gasping. It's cold for late September. The air has teeth and I let it bite me because it feels good. Anything is better than the tight noose of panic and the heavy, sickening beat of my heart.

There is very little to see from the barn. The white clapboard house where Mel's grandparents live with Uncle Enoch, the roof of a cow shelter in the distance, the thread of road that comes here from town. Everything else is clear and level, open fields and blue sky scarred with streaks of cloud, framed on three sides by trees that are too old to notice me. I walk to the nearest crowd, the edge of a forest that Mel says never scared her but I know did because she wouldn't have bothered to say it otherwise. The trees huddle together like soldiers and it is so black under their canopy that the blue sky all around me can't compete. It draws me, the darkness. The dark at the end of the tunnel.

But then I step on a dry stick and it cracks like gunfire. And in the same moment, the darkness lifts off the trees in sharp little pieces and takes to the sky. Blackbirds. Hundreds of them, and the flapping of their wings sounds like someone whispering my name.

Blackbird singing in the dead of night.
Nate's favorite Beatles song.

Mel comes running. “Oh my god, did you
see
that?”

She stops next to me, breathing hard, and we watch the birds become specks, like glitter tossed into the wind.

“Did you do that?” she asks.

I shake my head.
Nate did,
I want to tell her. I want that to be true.

“Come back inside,” Mel says. “The worst is over.”

I follow her, and hope she's right.

Come, sit down to dinner. It goes like this: We fill our chairs, we eat without enthusiasm, we make small talk until it's over. It's simple. It's reliable.

It has occurred to me that my parents might be in possession of useful information about their decision, about the organ donation agency and how to find the other people who got pieces of Nate. It has also occurred to me that my mother will start to wonder what happened if the letter she's expecting never shows up. I may not have much time. So I try something new, shake the snow globe ever so slightly.

“How was your day, Mom?”

She looks startled. “It was—well—fine. I guess.”

A few more minutes of silence, and it's my father's turn. “Dad? How was your day?”

He is very focused on cutting his steak into uniform pieces. He does this now, cuts all of his food ahead of time, and then he barely eats any of it. My dad has lost a lot of weight in the last few months. Sometimes I don't recognize him right away when he walks into a room.

“Gene? Tallie asked you a question.”

“What?” Dad looks up and seems surprised to see us.

“How was your day, Dad?”

“Oh,” he says. “Okay.”

I'm not sure if he means that his day was okay or that he's okay with being asked the question. Either way, it's another conversational dead end.

It's not that our dinners were so scintillating and exciting before my brother died. But he could at least keep a conversation going. He could look convincingly interested when my father went on and on about budgeting spreadsheets, had an arsenal of things to say when my mother brought up fabric swatches and furniture sales. A few times he helped move the heavy stuff around when Mom was on a decorating job, and they'd laugh about Susan and Michelle arguing over couch placement.

“Not
there,
” Nate would shriek in a perfect imitation of Michelle, and Mom would laugh until she got the hiccups.

Other nights, the work talk was too boring even for him and I could tell that he wasn't really listening, but they couldn't stop, and so he was like a bottomless bowl that could hold all of their chatter. I'm more like a dessert plate. Small. Fragile. Not often used.

Where to go from here? I want to know what they know, but I can't ask directly about him. We don't even say his name in the house. I've been saying it to myself, but I can't say it to them. Not yet.

Dad pushes his plate back, most of his food still on it, and stands up to announce, “I'm going for a walk.”

It is not an invitation.

Alone with Mom, who is staring out the window again, I try the only other approach I can think of. “I saw Ms. Appleton at school the other day. She said to say hello.”

Ms. Appleton, Academic Olympiad coach and my brother's biggest fan, said no such thing. Ms. Appleton cannot even make eye contact with me anymore.

“Oh,” Mom says vacantly. “That's nice.”

I follow her gaze out the window, to the stand of oak trees in the side yard. They have been so overtaken with ivy that they look like huge upright serpents, leafy green scales layered thickly from bottom to top. They were one of the reasons that my parents bought this house, she used to tell me. The trees. The front porch. The charm. My mother loves old houses—she regularly drives around town to visit her favorites, parks outside them and watches, hoping (according to her journal) to catch a glimpse of some other version of herself living another life.

And seeing her like this, as if she's the ghost who's haunting me, I wish for her sake that there
was
some parallel world in which she hadn't lost anything, in which she and my dad traded up for that Victorian on Sycamore Street and rescued a greyhound and vacationed on the Cape. If any of that was possible, I would gladly let her go. Because being here without her would be better than being here with this version of her, hollowed out and staring at trees.

It is what I knew it to be.

I am on my own.

I clear the table, to show her that I understand.

As soon as my parents leave for church the next morning, I get online. I'm supposed to be researching mollusks for my biology essay, but I have plenty of time for that. Mr. Cunningham is one of my most forgiving teachers and he's already made it clear that the assignment is fluff, something for extra credit so he can excuse me from the upcoming unit on dissection. I didn't ask him to do this, but it's possible that the look on my face when he said “fetal pig” convinced him to save us all the trouble.

Mollusks can wait. I have a more pressing research topic now.

I start with the simplest search I can think of:
organ donation.
Which, of course, is far from simple. There are pages for networks like Life Choice, pages of information from the government and
Wikipedia,
pages hoping to dispel common myths about the donation process. News stories about the sacrifices people have made to save the lives of others. All very factual and feel-good. But nothing about what to do when you find out that your parents have donated your brother's body without telling you.