The Sniper's Wife(5)
He’d finally concluded at the diner that he would therefore cut his ties to Vermont and to Joe Gunther, Sammie Martens, and the hope they represented. That way, if he didn’t survive this trip down memory lane, if he slipped and was dragged under as was already beginning to happen, at least he’d have gone down alone, leaving behind only the memory of the world’s most irascible colleague, friend, and lover.
And there was a hardheaded correctness to this that he willed himself to believe: He’d be goddamned if he was going to be the kind of excess emotional baggage for others that he’d always claimed others were for him.
However, as he crossed the Harlem River on the Henry Hudson Bridge with his pager off, and passed the very neighborhood he grew up in and where his mother still lived, he knew in his gut there would be enough baggage to go around for everybody.
And it wouldn’t be long in coming.
The visit to Bellevue only aggravated the roiling anxieties Willy was trying so hard to tamp down. Even with a recent and extensive remodeling, the huge hospital and the familiar journey to the morgue reached up like a stifling fog to constrict his throat. As a rookie New York cop so many years before, he’d made this trip a half dozen times, collecting paperwork or dropping things off to help in some busy detective’s investigation. He’d enjoyed being part of something outside a patrolman’s routine and had found the morgue’s forensics aspects interesting and stimulating: all those racked bodies offering entire biographies to those clever and motivated enough to decipher them. These visits had helped him to believe that although at the bottom of the ladder police work left something to be desired, the promises it held justified sticking it out for the long run.
Of course, that was before he’d drowned all such thinking in the bottom of a bottle.
The white-coated attendant greeted him at the reception area with little more than a grunt, and he followed him down a long, windowless, antiseptically white hallway, through a pair of double doors. There they entered a huge enhancement of Willy Kunkle’s memory of the place: a tall room, shimmering with fluorescence and equipped with two opposing walls of square, shiny floorto-ceiling steel doors. The sight of it made him stop in his tracks, struck by the image of a storage room full of highend dormitory refrigerators, stacked and ready for shipment, gleaming and new.
The attendant glanced over his shoulder. “You are all right?” he asked in broken English.
Willy sensed the man’s concern was purely self-interested. He didn’t want to deal with a hysterical next-of-kin and miss more than he already had of the television program he’d been enjoying out front.
“Yeah.” Kunkle joined him almost halfway down the row of cold cubicles.
The attendant consulted the clipboard in his hand one last time and pulled open the drawer directly before him with one powerful, practiced gesture.
Like a ghost appearing through a solid barrier, the white-draped shape of a supine woman suddenly materialized between them, hovering as if suspended in midair.
The attendant flipped back the sheet from the body’s face. “This is her?”
Willy watched the other man’s face for a moment, looking for anything besides boredom. He thought he might be Indian, but in truth, he had no idea. He’d recently heard that forty percent of New York’s population was foreign-born, now as in 1910.
The man scowled at him, suspicious of Willy’s expression. “You see?”
Willy dropped his eyes to the woman floating by his waist, looking down at her as if she were asleep on the berth of a spaceship and they were about to share a voyage to eternity.
He studied her features, feeling as cold as she seemed, his heart as still as hers. A numbness filled him from his feet to his head, as if he were a vessel into which ice water had been poured.
Romantics would have the dead appear as marble or snow sculptures. The reality was far less remote and pleasant. Whatever blemishes the deceased once had were enhanced by death’s yellow cast, and the tiny amount of shapeliness the musculature had maintained even in sleep was lacking, allowing the cheeks to pull back the smallest bit and the entire face to strain against the boniness of the skull beneath. This was truly a corpse, and little else.
He reached out slowly, but stopped short of touching her, struck by the vitality of his large, powerful right hand next to her drained, thin, mottled face, the same face he’d reduced to tears a dozen times over. She looked tired, as if the sleep she was engaged in now were of no use to her whatsoever. For some reason, that made him saddest of all. Surely she’d wished for some peace and quiet when she’d opted for this state. It almost broke his heart to think she hadn’t been successful.