I looked down, saw that his eyes were open, and tried to tell him all that was in my heart.
“I know,” he whispered.
When I was unable to stop saying what didn’t need to be said, Dad found an unexpected reserve of strength and squeezed my hand so hard that I halted in my speech.
Into my shaky silence, he said, “Remember…”
I could barely hear him. I leaned over the bed railing to put my left ear close to his lips.
Faintly, yet projecting a resolve that resonated with anger and defiance, he gave me his final words of guidance: “Fear nothing, Chris. Fear nothing.”
Then he was gone. The luminous tracery of the electrocardiogram skipped, skipped again, and went flatline.
The only moving lights were the candle flames, dancing on the black wicks.
I could not immediately let go of his slack hand. I kissed his forehead, his rough cheek.
No light any longer leaked past the edges of the blinds. The world had rotated into the darkness that welcomed me.
The door opened. Again, they had extinguished the nearest banks of fluorescent panels, and the only light in the corridor came from other rooms along its length.
Nearly as tall as the doorway, Dr. Cleveland entered the room and came gravely to the foot of the bed.
With sandpiper-quick steps, Angela Ferryman followed him, one sharp-knuckled fist held to her breast. Her shoulders were hunched, her posture defensive, as if her patient’s death were a physical blow.
The EKG machine beside the bed was equipped with a telemetry device that sent Dad’s heartbeat to a monitor at the nurses’ station down the hall. They had known the moment that he slipped away.
They didn’t come with syringes full of epinephrine or with a portable defibrillator to shock his heart back into action. As Dad had wanted, there would be no heroic measures.
Dr. Cleveland’s features were not designed for solemn occasions. He resembled a beardless Santa Claus with merry eyes and plump rosy cheeks. He strove for a dour expression of grief and sympathy, but he managed only to look puzzled.
His feelings were evident, however, in his soft voice. “Are you okay, Chris?”
“Hanging in there,” I said.
4
From the hospital room, I telephoned Sandy Kirk at Kirk’s Funeral Home, with whom my father himself had made arrangements weeks ago. In accordance with Dad’s wishes, he was to be cremated.
Two orderlies, young men with chopped hair and feeble mustaches, arrived to move the body to a cold- holding room in the basement.
They asked if I wanted to wait down there with it until the mortician’s van arrived. I said that I didn’t.
This was not my father, only his body. My father had gone elsewhere.
I opted not to pull the sheet back for one last look at Dad’s sallow face. This wasn’t how I wanted to remember him.
The orderlies moved the body onto a gurney. They seemed awkward in the conduct of their business, at which they ought to have been practiced, and they glanced at me surreptitiously while they worked, as if they felt inexplicably guilty about what they were doing.
Maybe those who transport the dead never become entirely easy with their work. How reassuring it would be to believe as much, for such awkwardness might mean that people are not as indifferent to the fate of others as they sometimes seem to be.
More likely, these two were merely curious, sneaking glances at me. I am, after all, the only citizen of Moonlight Bay to have been featured in a major article in
And I am the one who lives by night and shrinks from the sight of the sun. Vampire! Ghoul! Filthy wacko pervert! Hide your children!
To be fair, the vast majority of people are understanding and kind. A poisonous minority, however, are rumormongers who believe anything about me that they hear — and who embellish all gossip with the self- righteousness of spectators at a Salem witch trial.
If these two young men were of the latter type, they must have been disappointed to see that I looked remarkably normal. No grave-pale face. No blood-red eyes. No fangs. I wasn’t even having a snack of spiders and worms. How boring of me.
The wheels on the gurney creaked as the orderlies departed with the body. Even after the door swung shut, I could hear the receding
Alone in the room, by candlelight, I took Dad’s overnight bag from the narrow closet. It held only the clothes that he had been wearing when he’d checked into the hospital for the last time.
The top nightstand drawer contained his watch, his wallet, and four paperback books. I put them in the suitcase.
I pocketed the butane lighter but left the candles behind. I never wanted to smell bayberry again. The scent now had intolerable associations for me.
Because I gathered up Dad’s few belongings with such efficiency, I felt that I was admirably in control of myself.
In fact, the loss of him had left me numb. Snuffing the candles by pinching the flames between thumb and forefinger, I didn’t feel the heat or smell the charred wicks.
When I stepped into the corridor with the suitcase, a nurse switched off the overhead fluorescents once more. I walked directly to the stairs that I had climbed earlier.
Elevators were of no use to me because their ceiling lights couldn’t be turned off independently of their lift mechanisms. During the brief ride down from the third floor, my sunscreen lotion would be sufficient protection; however, I wasn’t prepared to risk getting stuck between floors for an extended period.
Without remembering to put on my sunglasses, I quickly descended the dimly lighted concrete stairs — and to my surprise, I didn’t stop at the ground floor. Driven by a compulsion that I didn’t immediately understand, moving faster than before, the suitcase thumping against my leg, I continued to the basement, where they had taken my father.
The numbness in my heart became a chill. Spiraling outward from that icy throb, a series of shudders worked through me.
Abruptly I was overcome by the conviction that I’d relinquished my father’s body without fulfilling some solemn duty, although I was not able to think what it was that I ought to have done.
My heart was pounding so hard that I could hear it — like the drumbeat of an approaching funeral cortege but in double time. My throat swelled half shut, and I could swallow my suddenly sour saliva only with effort.
At the bottom of the stairwell was a steel fire door under a red emergency-exit sign. In some confusion, I halted and hesitated with one hand on the push bar.
Then I remembered the obligation that I had almost failed to meet. Ever the romantic, Dad had wanted to be cremated with his favorite photograph of my mother, and he had charged me with making sure that it was sent with him to the mortuary.
The photo was in his wallet. The wallet was in the suitcase that I carried.
Impulsively I pushed open the door and stepped into a basement hallway. The concrete walls were painted glossy white. From silvery parabolic diffusers overhead, torrents of fluorescent light splashed the corridor.
I should have reeled backward across the threshold or, at least, searched for the light switch. Instead, I hurried recklessly forward, letting the heavy door sigh shut behind me, keeping my head down, counting on the sunscreen and my cap visor to protect my face.
I jammed my left hand into a jacket pocket. My right hand was clenched around the handle of the suitcase, exposed.
The amount of light bombarding me during a race along a hundred-foot corridor would not be sufficient, in itself, to trigger a raging skin cancer or tumors of the eyes. I was acutely aware, however, that the damage
