Eileen exhaled, sorry gripping her heart as she asked, “Don’t these things haunt you?”
“It’s not the dead who haunt you; it’s the living with their tears and worries and problems. You’d be surprised what people confess when their minds are heavy with grief. I’m both a mortician and a counsellor. Someone who relieves their pain, but also easily aggravates it. It’s a difficult thing to straddle this line between the living and the dead.”
“How do you do it?”
His smile was benign, his eyes patient. “By listening, but not absorbing. Sympathizing, but not empathizing. There’s a lot of freedom in this job if you let it be so.”
She eyed him warily. He snickered at the look on her face.
“Yes: freedom. Death is the point at which the living reconcile everything. It’s the finale; no longer is hindsight 20/20 because there are no other options to exhaust. So…” he clasped his hands. “…instead of focusing on how sad a family is, I learn from them. What did the deceased do right in life? What financial mistakes did they make that I can avoid? Are marriages of convenience worth it? Did particular circumstances cost them their life?”
Eileen bit her lip and considered his words. She couldn’t deny the wisdom behind it. She had assumed he would revel in the macabre given his line of work, but Holden's optimistic outlook surprised her.
“Yes, I see what you mean,” she conceded. “But how do you get past the emotion to arrive at the lessons?”
“This business makes me boil everything down to one question: who and what would I need to sustain myself if I were stranded on a desert island? When I think of it like that, life isn’t so hard anymore.”
* * *
THAT NIGHT, Eileen gazed out the window at the bushy pasture next to her apartment. Sandflies buzzed against the dusty mosquito screen, fluttering in the light winds that blew in from the northeast. Downstairs, the baby awakened his mother at 1 a.m. to feed and the bus driver who lived next door entered his house with a weary yawn an hour later. Eileen had grown accustomed to this new monotony of the night, a dark reality that she resented having to embrace. She had poured a glass of brown rum as she watched the news, a recent addition to her nightly routine. Each night she grew more jittery about turning on the TV. The headlines could go either way: another woman could have been found, or the killer might have been apprehended. Tonight, neither option materialized. The only assurance that the commissioner offered to the public was that the police force had stepped up neighbourhood patrols and they were was still investigating the serial murders.
After she had turned off the TV, her nerves were still on edge as she thought about her day. Many parts of it stood out, but more than anything else, her mind replayed Holden’s words: “Who and what would I need?” It was a statement so childishly parabolic, that at first, Eileen didn’t think much of it. But as the day went on, the universe conspired to illustrate his point.
Earlier that evening, as Eileen walked out of the funeral parlour, a little girl toddled away from her mother and stepped into the path of an oncoming bus. The wheels turned, the gears shifted, and the bus picked up speed as that little person kept moving further into the driver’s blind spot while she blew spit bubbles with her mouth. Inertia gripped Eileen. Her chest grew tight and her stomach flipped. And then everything happened in slow motion. The mother flung her handbag and a crate of eggs on the sidewalk and scooped up the child, instincts kicking in long before the tears did. The woman’s emotions came out as a scolding garble of words and tears that competed with the startled child’s red-faced sobbing.
The mother retrieved her handbag and went on her way, the broken eggs abandoned and laid waste on the sidewalk. Still in shock, Eileen watched the eggs go from floating balls of sunshine to a muddled mess that mixed with two fat wads of pink chewing gum before they slid down the rain gutter.
How many times did people say they’d grab a treasured photo or memento if the house was burning? When forced to pare down our possessions, how many things does one have to leave behind for the good of a healthy future?
Her past felt like that crate of eggs. Theoretically healthy, but Eileen didn’t even like eggs, nor was she proud of the choices she had made if it came down to it.
She looked around the apartment and cringed at the state of her existence. She saw it in the pile of unread books, the unhung art on the floor, the junky closet with the previous tenant’s belongings. Her thoughts drifted to Holden. As much as she poked fun at him, she found him to be fascinating. Eileen was impressed by his wisdom, and his diplomacy was enviable: he didn’t sugar-coat things and his habit of weighing his words was one that Eileen wanted desperately to learn from. If only she’d exercised that caution with her words, her life might have been very different today. She got up and dug around in her bag, extracting a cloth and a length of wire that she pulled taut. Now was the time to surround herself with the things that she wanted her life to manifest.
Chapter 7
Mouth Open, Story Jump Out
In the six weeks that Eileen had been at the funeral home, Holden noticed that she sat outside on the picnic bench with Clifford every Friday evening to drink beer. More than once Holden had stayed behind to peer at them through the bathroom window, feeling like a churlish schoolboy whenever he did. He’d considered
