Her words drifted around me like noxious gas.
“So it doesn’t bother them if Uncle Tim or Cousin Beth is autopsied in front of a bunch of cops. Most of the families can’t afford a burial anyway, and might in fact get paid something for body donations, isn’t that right, Aunt Kay?”
“No, they don’t, and bodies donated by families to science are not used for demo autopsies,” I said, appalled. “What in God’s name is wrong with you?” I lashed out at her.
Bare trees were spidery against the overcast dawn, and two Cadillacs drove past. I felt people staring at us.
“I hope you don’t plan on making this tough act a habit.” I dashed my cold words in her face. “Because it sounds stupid enough when ignorant, lobotomized people do it. And for the record, Lucy, I have let you watch three autopsies, and although police academy demos may not have been axe murders, the cases were human beings. Someone loved those three dead people you saw. Those three dead people had feelings. In love, happy, sad. They ate dinner, drove to work, went on vacations.”
“I didn’t mean . . .” Lucy started to say.
“You can be sure when those three poor people were alive they never thought they’d end up in a morgue with twenty rookies and some kid. like you staring at their naked, opened-up bodies,” I went on. “Would you want them to hear what you just said?”
Lucy’s eyes brightened with tears. She swallowed hard and looked away.
“I’m sorry, Aunt Kay,” she quietly replied.
“Because it’s always been my belief you ought to imagine the dead listening when you speak. Maybe they hear those sophomoric jokes and asides. For sure, we hear them. What does it do to you when you hear yourself say them or hear someone else say them?”
“Aunt Kay . . : ”
“I’ll tell you what it does to you,” I said with simmering fury. “You end up just like this.”
I threw my hand out as if introducing the world to her, as she looked on, stunned.
“You end up doing just what I’m doing right now,” I said. “Standing on a driveway as the sun comes up. Imagining someone you love in a fucking morgue. Imagine people making fun of him, joking, making comments about the size of his penis or how much he stinks. Maybe they banged him around a little too hard on the table. Maybe halfway into the goddamn job they threw a towel over his empty chest cavity and went to lunch. And maybe cop wandering in and out on other cases made comments about crispy critters or being burned by a snitch or FBI flambé.”
Lucy and Jo were staring at me in astonishment.
“Don’t think I haven’t heard it all;” I said, unlocking my car door and yanking it open. “A life passing through indifferent hands and cold air and water. Everything so cold, cold, cold. Even if he had died in bed, it’s all so cold in the end. So don’t you talk to me about autopsies.”
I slid behind the wheel.
“Don’t you ever wave an attitude around me, Lucy.” I couldn’t seem to stop.
My voice seemed to be coming from another room. It even occurred to me that I was losing my mind. Wasn’t this what happened when people went insane? They stood outside themselves and watched themselves do things that really weren’t them, like killing someone or walking off a window ledge.
“Mese things ring in your head like a bell forever,” I said. “Slamming their ugly clapper against the sides of your skull. It isn’t true that words will never hurt you. Because yours just hurt the hell out of me,” I said to my niece. “Go back to Miami.”
Lucy was paralyzed as I jammed my car into drive and sped off, a back tire bumping over the granite border. I caught her and Jo in my rearview mirror. They were saying something to each other, and then getting inside their rental car. My hands shook so badly I couldn’t light a cigarette until I was stopped in traffic.
I didn’t let Lucy and Jo catch up with me. I turned off on the Ninth Street exit and imagined them flying by toward I-64, heading to the airport, back to their lives of undercover crime.