Marrow

The ambulance comes; its wail cuts through the warm Wessex day like a thunderstorm, calling people to their windows and doors. I sit on the step and wait as the paramedics pound up the stairs to my mother’s bedroom. I don’t know if she will leave the eating house alive or dead. After I leave Delaney’s, I don’t go back upstairs. The paramedics leave.

They come to see my mother’s body—two men in navy blue uniforms with stars on their chests. Policemen. I want to clean away the blood on her face and hands, but they tell me to leave it. The morgue will take care of all of that after the autopsy. They’re asking me questions, wanting to know if I’m the one to contact about the autopsy, and if I’ll be making arrangements for her funeral.

“The autopsy?” I ask in a hollow voice.

“Standard procedure. You need one to be able issue a death certificate,” one of the cops tells me.

I look at the bottles of pills next to her bed, overturned and empty.

“My mother wanted to be cremated,” I tell them. My mother wanted no such thing. Or maybe she did, but she never told me. I don’t want to deal with her body—coffins and gravestones. Give her back to me as ash in an urn, and I’ll be happy. They ask me how old I am.

“Eighteen,” I tell them. They ask to see my driver’s license, but I don’t have one. I show them my school ID, and they look almost disappointed that they can’t cart me off to a group home. They won’t be putting me in the system tonight, or any other. I’ve never been so grateful to not be a minor. They hand me a stack of papers, some brochures for funeral homes and crematoriums. There is one with a flower on the cover that is for a grief support group. I watch the police talk to the two guys from the morgue who have come for their bodies, leaning against the rotted siding of the eating house. Judah finds me there, his face drawn and concerned. “The morgue is here to pick up the bodies.”

“My mom told me,” he says. “She wants you to come spend the night at our house.”

I look past him to the bad people house. All of the bad people are outside, drinking beer and waiting for the body bag. Some of them are shirtless; a man and a woman are kissing by the back door, coming up for air every few to look toward the eating house.

“That’s the difference between the rich and poor,” Judah says, following my eyes. “The rich peek through their drapes to see the neighborhood tragedy, while the poor don’t try to hide the fact that they’re looking.”

“Thank you,” I say. “But I’d prefer to stay here.”

“I’ll stay with you,” he says quickly. “Just let me wheel home to get some of my shit.”

I think about saying no, but, in the end, the idea of sleeping in the eating house frightens me. I nod. I watch him go, the muscles in his arms pressing against his T-shirt as they work the wheels of his chair. He stops when he reaches the bad people house. A couple guys swagger up to where he’s stopped, giving him daps and offering him a beer.

Everyone likes that goddamn cripple.

I smile a little, but then my mother is wheeled out the door, and I have to use the eating house to hold myself up. There is a smaller bag for the baby. The second of the two morgue technicians carries that one out in his hands. He has gloves on, and he carries her, slightly extended from his body like an offering for some god who eats dead babies. It’s her, that little baby girl, who I’ll grieve for in the coming days. A child, wanted by her half-dead sibling, murdered by her already dead mother.

When they are gone, I go into the house to clean the mess the bodies left behind. The eating house is quiet. I wait for the grief, but it doesn’t come. I want to feel something so I know I’m still human. But, I don’t know how to grieve someone I didn’t know. I knew Nevaeh. I didn’t know my mother.

Delaney comes to help me, carrying buckets of hot water and Pine-Sol up the stairs. We work without talk, using my mother’s sheets as rags, sopping up the blood until they are stained, and the smell of pine pervades the house. We carry the buckets outside, dumping the pink water into the grass. I hug Delaney, an ungainly hug, to thank her for not making me do that alone. Her eyes are pink-rimmed when she steps back. Her lips trembling. They share the same plumpness as Judah’s lips, but hers are not sensual like his. They look almost clumsy now as she struggles to know what to say.

“No one should have to do that,” she whispers. Her hair is damp and sticking to her face. I can see Judah in her features—the broad forehead and graceful slope of her nose.

“You children suffer too much.”

As she walks up Wessex, I watch her, thinking about what she said. Children. Suffer. Yes, maybe more than adults. That’s where we become broken, in our youth. And then we wear it like a shroud for the rest of our lives.

I name the baby Sihn, because she bore the sins of her mother and died for it.

I drag the big, wooden ramp from Judah’s porch over to the eating house, and set it over the steps. When I push him up the makeshift ramp, it wobbles and bends in the middle like it’s going to crack in two. It’s Judah’s first time in the eating house. I leave the door open, letting the light stream across the living room, and I suddenly feel self-conscious of all the rubbish. Not literal rubbish, just the rubbish of my life—the old oldness. The damp dampness, the poor poorness.

The house hums around us, excited at the prospect of a new visitor. You can’t have him, I tell it silently. I know he’s special, but you can’t have Judah.

I fiddle with the buttons on my shirt. “I’ll drag down my mattress,” I say. “You can have the couch. I mean, if that’s okay?”

He nods. “Do you want me to heat you something to eat?” he asks. “My mom sent over shepherd’s pie.”

“I’m not really hungry.” I shrug. He offers up the casserole dish on his lap, and I carry it to the kitchen. I stand at the fridge, out of sight, wishing I hadn’t let him come here. This was what the kids called weird. Like taking a modern piece of furniture into an old crypt, weird; fried chicken in a vegetarian restaurant, weird.

Oh God, oh God.

“Margo?”

“Yes?”

Oh God…

“There’s a man at the door…”

The casserole dish clatters to the counter. I march past Judah to the front door, where Howard Delafonte stands, just over the threshold, slipping off his raincoat like he belongs here. It’s Tuesday, I think. His regular day to come. The eating house groans. It doesn’t like him.