Charlie said, “He promised me he would look handsome.”
Sam wrapped her arm around Charlie’s waist.
“When we talked about it, I told him I didn’t want an open casket, and he promised me that he would look handsome. That I would want to see how good he looked.” She told Sam, “He doesn’t look good.”
“No,” Sam said. “He doesn’t look like himself.”
They stared down at their father. Sam could not remember a time that she had not seen Rusty in motion. Lighting a cigarette. Throwing out a dramatic hand. Tapping his toes. Snapping his fingers. Nodding his head as he hummed or clicked his tongue or whistled a tune that she did not recognize, yet could not get out of her brain.
Charlie said, “I don’t want anyone to see him like this.” She reached up to close the lid.
Sam gave a hushed, “Charlie!”
She pulled on the lid. The lid did not move. “Help me close it.”
“We can get—”
“I don’t want that creepy asshole back in here.” Charlie pulled with both hands. The lid moved perhaps five degrees before it stopped. “Help me.”
“I’m not going to help you.”
“What was your list? You can’t see, you can’t run, you can’t process? I don’t recall you saying your useless body couldn’t help close the fucking lid on your own father’s coffin.”
“It’s a casket. Coffins are tapered at the head and foot.”
“For fucksake.” Charlie dropped her purse on the floor. She kicked off her shoes. She used both hands to pull down on the lid, practically hanging from it.
There was a creak of protest, but the casket remained open.
Sam said, “It won’t simply close. That would be a safety hazard.”
“You mean, it could kill him if the lid slammed shut?”
“I mean it could hit you in the head or break your fingers.” She leaned over Rusty to examine the brass barrel hinges. A cloth-covered strap and loop assembly kept the lid from over-opening, but no apparent mechanism controlled the closing. “There must be some kind of release.”
“Jesus Christ.” Charlie hung from the lid again. “Can’t you just help me?”
“I am trying—”
“I’ll do it myself.” Charlie walked around to the back of the casket. She pushed from behind. The table moved. One of the front wheels was unlocked. Charlie pushed harder. The table moved again.
“Hold on.” Sam checked the exterior of the casket for some kind of lever or button. “You’re going to—”
Charlie jumped up, pushing down on the lid with all of her weight.
Sam said, “You’re going to knock it off the table.”
“Good.” Charlie pushed again. Nothing moved. She banged her palm against the lid. “Fuck!” She banged it again, this time with her closed fist. “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”
Sam ran her fingers inside the edge of the silk liner. She found a button.
There was a loud click.
The pneumatic pump hissed as the lid slowly closed.
“Shit.” Charlie was breathless. She leaned her hands on the closed casket. She closed her eyes. She shook her head. “He leaves us with a metaphor.”
Sam sat down in the chair.
“You’re not going to say anything?”
“I’m reflecting.”
Charlie’s laugh was cut off by a sob. Her shoulders trembled as she cried. Her tears fell onto the top of the casket. Sam watched them roll down the side, bend around the stainless steel table, then drop onto the floor.
“Shit,” Charlie said, using the back of her hand to wipe her nose. She found a box of tissues behind the handle display. She blew her nose. She dried her eyes. She sat down heavily in the chair beside Sam.
They both looked at the casket. The gaudy, gold handles and filigree corner guards. The bright white paint had a sparkling finish, as if glitter had been mixed into the clear-coat.
Charlie said, “I can’t believe how ugly that thing is.” She threw away the used tissue. She snagged another from the box. “It looks like something Elvis was buried in.”
“Do you remember when we went to Graceland?”
“That white Cadillac.”
Rusty had charmed the attendant into letting him sit behind the wheel. The paint on the Fleetwood had been the same bright white as the casket. Diamond dust had brought out the sparkle.
“Dad could talk anybody into letting him do anything.” Charlie wiped her nose again. She sat back in the chair. Her arms were crossed.
Sam could hear a clock ticking somewhere, a kind of metronome that synched with the beating of her heart. Her fingers still held the memory of the tap-tap-tap of Rusty’s blood rushing through his veins. She had spent two days begging Charlie to unburden herself, but her own sins weighed far heavier.
Sam said, “I couldn’t let him die. My husband. I couldn’t let him go.”
Charlie silently worked the tissue in her fingers.
“He had a DNR, but I didn’t give it to the hospital.” Sam tried to take a deep breath. She felt the weight of Anton’s death restricting her chest. “He couldn’t speak for himself. He couldn’t move. He could only see and hear, and what he saw and heard was his wife refusing to let the doctors turn off the machines that were extending his suffering.” Sam felt the shame boiling in her stomach like oil. “The tumors had spread to his brain. There’s only so much volume inside the skull. The pressure was pushing his brain down into his spine. The pain was excruciating. They had him on morphine, then Fentanyl, and I would sit there by his bed and watch the tears roll from his eyes and I could not let him go.”
Charlie kept working the tissue, wrapping it around her finger.
“I would’ve done the same thing here. I could’ve told you that from New York. I was the wrong person to ask. I couldn’t put my own needs, my desperation, aside for the only man I have ever loved. I certainly could not have done the right thing by Dad.”
Charlie started to pull apart the layers of tissue.
The clock kept ticking.
Time kept moving forward.
Charlie said, “I wanted you here because I wanted you here.”
Sam had not meant to stir up Charlie’s guilt. “Please don’t try to make me feel better.”
“I’m not,” Charlie said. “I hate that I made you come here. That I’ve put you through this.”
“You didn’t force me to do anything.”
“I knew that you would come if I asked. I’ve known that for the last twenty years, and I used Dad as an excuse because I couldn’t take it anymore.”
“Couldn’t take what?”
Charlie wadded the tissue into a ball. She held it tight in her hands. “I had a miscarriage in college.”
Sam remembered the hostile phone call from all those years ago, Charlie’s angry demand for money.
Charlie said, “I was so relieved when it happened. You don’t realize when you’re that young that you’re going to get older. That there’s going to come a time when you’re not relieved.”
Sam felt her eyes start to water at the piercing undertone of anguish in her sister’s words.
Charlie said, “The second miscarriage was worse. Ben thinks it was the first, but it was the second.” She shrugged off the deception. “I was at the end of my first trimester. I was in court, and I felt this pain, like cramps. I had to wait another hour for the judge to call a recess. I ran to the bathroom, and I sat down, and I had this feeling of blood rushing out of my body.” She stopped to swallow. “I looked in the toilet and it was—it was nothing. It didn’t look like anything. A really bad period, a glob of something. But it didn’t feel right to flush it. I couldn’t leave it. I crawled out from under the stall so I could leave the door locked. I called Ben. I was crying so hard he couldn’t understand what I was saying.”
“Charlie,” Sam whispered.
Charlie shook her head, because there was more. “The third time, which Ben thinks was the second time, was worse
. I was at eighteen weeks. We were outside, raking leaves in the yard. We had already started to put together the nursery, you know? Painted the walls. Looked at cribs. I felt the same kind of cramping. I told Ben I was going to get some water, but I barely made it to the bathroom. It just came out of me, like my body couldn’t wait to get rid of it.” She used the tips of her fingers to brush away tears. “I told myself it was never going to happen again, that I wasn’t going to risk it, but then it happened again.”
Sam reached over. She held tight to her sister’s hand.
“This was three years ago. I stopped taking my birth control. It was stupid. I didn’t tell Ben, which made it worse because I was tricking him. I was pregnant in a month. And then another month passed, and then I hit the three-month mark, and then it was six months, seven, and we were so fucking excited. Dad was walking on air. Lenore kept giving hints about names.”
Charlie pressed her fingers to her eyelids. Tears streamed down. “There’s this thing called Dandy-Walker syndrome. It sounds so stupid, like an old timey dance, but basically, it’s a group of congenital brain malformations.”
Sam felt an ache inside her heart.
“They told us late on a Friday. Ben and I spent the whole weekend reading about it on the Internet. There’d be this one great story about a kid who was smiling, living his life, blowing out the candles on his birthday cake, and we’d say, ‘Okay, well, that’s—that’s fantastic, that’s a gift, we can do that,’ and then there’d be another story about a baby who was blind and deaf and had open-heart surgery and brain surgery and died before his first birthday, and we’d just hold each other and cry.”