The Vision (3 page)

chapter 5

They arrived at the funeral home together, his wife, two daughters, one son, each clutching a little pack of tissues. I could tell from their faces that the Killiams had gone through plenty already.

His portrait was at the chapel entrance, James Killiam smiling broadly at his grieving family. He didn't quite look like that anymore. I wondered if they'd puzzle over the weirdness of it throughout the wake, like Mr. Ludwig said the family always did. After we've sewn the lips shut, plumped up the sunken face with cotton, and lathered industrial makeup on skin now naturally gray, the dead person looked like a strange replica of himself. Maybe it was better. Not quite real might be easier to let go.

James Killiam had been a cardiac doctor at a local hospital, married for twenty-eight years, devoted father, weekends at the food bank. Mr. Nice Guy. I learned it all from his funeral program, filled with the photos and highlights of his life.

The lowlights never made it in there, of course. I learned
that
from Number Four, the woman who'd done three years for drug possession. We'd dressed her in long sleeves to hide the track marks. Her program only talked about how she'd loved her daughter, always remembered her parents' birthdays. I'd found all the other stuff online, researching her just as I had each of the others I'd worked on.

If James Killiam had secrets, they weren't newsworthy.

“Spying on the party again?”

I spun around, startled. Ryan had a way of sneaking up on you. Actually, everyone here did, their mannerisms muted from years of being unobtrusive. He smiled down at me, his deep-set green eyes creasing at the corners. Nan would have called them bedroom eyes. And they would have been on someone less wholesome. Like Zander Dasios.

I closed the supply-room door, reluctantly leaving the Killiams. Ryan had caught me peeking too often already.

“Just trying to get a read on how many are here,” I said. “So I can figure clean-up time and all, you know?”

“Uh-huh.” He smirked. Ryan thought I was nosy, which was true, though he couldn't possibly guess the reason why.

“Shouldn't you be out there?” I asked. His dad was the other owner, so in addition to helping with the bodies like I did, Ryan also worked in the chapel and the office. Presumably he'd take over the business someday, since Mr. Ludwig's kids had decided to work among the living.

He shook his head. “My dad and Mr. Ludwig are doing this one.”

“Then why are you here?”

“Didn't have any other plans,” Ryan said with a shrug. “I thought maybe they could use a hand behind the scenes. Or you could, you know, on cleanup.”

Deliberately, he bent, opening a cardboard box and stacking glove packets on a shelf. It wasn't the first time Ryan had showed up for no reason during my shift. He was friendly but never chatty, and I couldn't figure out if he liked me or didn't trust me.

“I'm sure I'll be fine, but thanks.” For
nothing
. I bit back frustration. He couldn't know that he was interrupting my research.

I went back to restocking gowns, tissues, tubing, needles—the supplies of managing death.

I spent most Saturdays at Ludwig & Wilton. For my actual job, cleanup, I didn't need to be there until the wake was over. But it only took one Saturday to realize I wouldn't see any mourners that way. So I'd told Mr. Ludwig that Petra had weekend book club meetings at the apartment, making it impossible to study. Did he mind if I came early, maybe helped with the phone or restocking or setup, then studied in the break room before my shift? Of course he didn't.

My school books usually sat on the faux-wood table by the fridge, unopened. Unless Ryan was on.

“I guess I'll go in the back to study,” I told him after emptying the last box of eye caps.

Ryan nodded, continuing to work with just a glance up at me.

On my way to the break room, I saw mourners being escorted to the chapel by Mr. Wilton, Ryan's dad. There were four different ways to access the chapel, the large room where wakes were held. It was something Mr. Ludwig was especially proud of. He'd overseen the conversion of this turn-of-the-century mansion to a state-of-the-art funeral home and had soundproof walls, soft-close doors, propping mechanisms, and multiple access points built in to eliminate distraction, his pet peeve. He'd shown me everything on my first-day tour.

“It's like being a magician,” Ryan said when Mr. Ludwig stepped away to take a call. He'd been working in the office, its door open to the front hall. “No one wants to see the mechanics behind the tricks.”

The break room, however, does not open to the chapel. It's stuffy and windowless with a beat-up table, six plastic chairs, and magazines like
Undertaking Today
and
Next Steps, The Funeral Journey
. I forced myself to sit there for fifteen minutes, looking at my school books without absorbing a thing, fidgety to get back to the action. When I was sure Ryan wasn't coming to check on me, I peeked out the opposite-side door. The back hallway was empty.

I crossed quickly and slipped into the prep room, cringing. You never knew what you'd find there. It's where all the gruesome work was done, and bodies stayed on the steel table for at least a day after embalming to be sure everything went right. Wouldn't want to dress them and
then
find out something leaked. Thankfully, there was no one—dead or alive—in the prep room now and any bodies picked up today wouldn't be brought in until we were ready to embalm. There was a refrigerated area downstairs where they could chill out. Mr. Ludwig's joke, not mine.

My sneakers
squee-squeed
across the waxed linoleum to the hallway that connected the prep room and chapel, the path bodies took for their final farewell. I walked it quickly, stopping by the door, which was propped slightly open by a clip at the top. Another of Mr. Ludwig's illusions, preventing it from “clicking” closed if he needed to come in or out.

I leaned in close, hoping he was nowhere around. He'd freak if he found me eavesdropping like this.

“… right in the middle of a luncheon. They called an ambulance, but I guess it was too late.”

“How awful,” a woman murmured.

Not family members. They don't discuss details at the wake. I stifled a sigh, knowing “he's in a better place now” or “at least he didn't suffer” would come next. I kept hoping for something meaningful, but had started to wonder if wake talk ever progressed beyond platitudes. They were part of the ritual, I supposed, like washing the body or saying prayers or old ladies wearing veils, things that happened at just about every viewing we'd done at Ludwig & Wilton, all of them so similar.

I'd thought working here could help me piece together some cohesive understanding of what people believe about death, but it turned out almost all our clients were Catholic and Christian. Hindus cremate, Jews bury the body first, visit afterward, and so on. Those who don't embalm rarely come to places like Ludwig & Wilton, so I only saw one small slice of belief and practice.

Thankfully, Mr. Ludwig knew a ton about religion and mortuary history and liked to talk while he worked. Over body Number Two, he told me that families used to prep the deceased and hold the wake at home. They'd open a window so the soul could leave the room, then close it after two hours in case the soul changed its mind. Clocks would be stopped, mirrors covered, but the rituals of washing and dressing the body done today aren't much different than a century ago. Except instead of laying out your dead grandma on the dining room table, it's done here, at the mortuary.

Religion came up first over Number Three, Mary Margaret Hanley, Catholic, a rosary wrapped around her folded hands. Mr. Ludwig was wrestling with her dress collar and the two-sided tape, but my eyes kept wandering back to those beads wound through her stiff fingers.

“How bad do you have to be to go to hell?” I'd asked him.

“You have to commit a mortal sin,” he said.

“Like …?”

Mr. Ludwig waved blindly for the scissors, answering as I handed them over. “Killing someone. Or stealing. Or committing adultery.”

I frowned. “Stealing and murder are hardly the same. You really go to hell for stealing? Forever?”

“Well.” Mr. Ludwig glanced up at me. “The
outcome
may be different, but not necessarily the
intent
. Catholics believe a sin is something done deliberately and with full understanding that it's wrong. That could apply equally to each crime.”

“But everyone's stolen
something
,” I said. “Snuck into a movie, done dine-and-dash, taken candy on a dare. The Catholics can't really believe
all
those people are going to hell. Who would ever get to heaven?”

“Everyone who goes to confession,” he said. “That absolves them of sin.”

“Even the really bad ones? Like killing someone?”

He smiled at my disbelief. “As long as they are sincere in their repentance, yes.”

“That's like the mother of all Get Out of Jail Free cards!” I was amazed. “Why would anyone
not
sin?”

Mr. Ludwig stopped working, resting his hands just short of Mary Margaret on the table, and looked at me. “Would you kill someone if you could get away with it?”

“No.”

“Steal?”

“I don't know. Maybe?” I thought about the time Tasha and I were in eighth grade and each stole a pair of socks from the mall. Mine were argyle—black, green, and white. Really cute. I'd never worn them. I don't think Tasha had either. “No,” I said. “I don't think I would, actually. I'd feel too guilty.”

“Exactly. If you
had
ever stolen”—he raised an eyebrow like he knew what I'd been thinking—“you'd probably still feel bad about it. That's repentance. You can't fake it. You actually have to feel it in your heart, and Catholics believe God knows the difference.”

That conversation rolled around in my head the rest of the day, collecting mass like a downhill snowball. People who died with an unconfessed mortal sin were damned to hell, Mr. Ludwig said. If that were true, and I knew they were going to die, I
had
to tell them, regardless of whether they ended up living or not. I couldn't let them burn for eternity just because they hadn't gotten to say they were sorry. I rushed home, madly searching online, elated that the answer was so simple all this time.

It wasn't.

Of course.

Confession and mortal sins and hell were what the
Catholics
believed. The Muslims, on the other hand, thought the Catholics were going to hell because they weren't Muslim. And the Buddhists didn't believe in hell at all.

Back to square one.

But it was the start of our own ritual—Mr. Ludwig's and mine—discussions about religious beliefs interspersed with draining fluids or wiring a jaw so it wouldn't hang open like a broken mailbox.

“Carmen, Betty, thank you so much for coming,” I heard from the other side of the chapel door. A family member. I perked up, leaning closer, my hand against the wall for balance.

“Oh, Joshua, I'm so sorry about your father. We'd just seen him at the symposium. He looked so healthy … happy …”

“I know,” Joshua answered. I could picture him, dark and stocky like his father had been, nodding sadly. “It was very sudden.”

“How's your mom?”

“A little better. Managing.”

I heard a sympathetic sigh, the cluck of a tongue. “He'd told me about the project he'd just started. His research sounded so promising …”

What research?
If I leaned much closer I'd fall through the door, but I was on high alert.
This
is what I needed to know. Robert Killiam had been a doctor. Might he have done something valuable if he'd lived? Critical? I couldn't change anything for him. But maybe I could for the next one.

“You know you're dead meat if my father or Mr. Ludwig finds you here.”

I almost screamed I was so startled by Ryan's whisper, soft against my ear, but he'd anticipated that, slipping a hand gently over my mouth. He was close behind me, his chest against my back, and I could feel his warmth, smell fresh soap on his skin.

“I'm going to let go of you,” he whispered, “and we're going to walk to the prep room. Be quiet.”

I nodded and he released me. My heart was thudding with the fear of having been caught and, strangely, something else. I hadn't been so close to anyone, touched like that, since Jack. Ryan looked nothing like him, but the way his arms felt wrapped around me was too much of a reminder. It hurt.

Ryan took my hand, his grip firm and gentle at the same time. He studied my eyes for a second as we stood less than a foot apart, then he turned and led me silently down the hall. Neither of us spoke until the prep room door closed behind us.

“What's up with you?” Ryan leaned against the steel table in the center of the room, facing me, his arms crossed. I stood by the door, absently rubbing my hand, still warm from being in his.

I'd been trying to think of an explanation, but the hall is only about twenty feet long—way too short to come up with something good. I shrugged, moved to a nearby counter. It occurred to me that Ryan would probably tell his dad and I'd probably get fired. That would suck because, aside from hoping to learn something, I actually liked working there.

“Really, Cassie,” he said. “I've been watching you and something's off. It's like you've got some kind of … I don't know … sick fascination with death.”

“No, it's not that.”

“It's not? What is it, then?”

“It's … I'm …” I wasn't sure how to answer, but fired or not, I didn't want him to think I was a freak. “I'm just trying to learn about it,” I said.