I Should Be Laughing: Renny Identifies The Body

Staring down the long hallway, first toward the front door and then at the back, he couldn’t find Renny. Panic began to rain inside him and, thinking she had left him to do this alone—after all, that was how Renny did things—Jimmy flew out of the office and ran for the parking lot, hoping she was still in her car and hadn’t gotten away. Then, nearing the ladies room, a beam of light pierced the cold linoleum, followed by a small, tired cough. Renny stepped into the corridor, her makeup fresh, her hair clipped tightly behind her ears.

“They’re ready now,” Jimmy said, his sneakers squeaking to a stop on the slick vinyl flooring. “She said…she said you can go back now.”

“I don’t know, Jimmy.” Renny wiped her hands on a thick piece of brown paper toweling. She had spent the better part of the hour pacing up and down the hallway, before finally disappearing into the bathroom, hoping to find an excuse that would keep her from looking at her mother’s body. “How am I supposed to do this? I haven’t seen her in twenty years. Not even a photograph! I don’t know what she looks like.”

“She looks like you—.” Jimmy said suddenly; so quickly in fact, that, as the words left his mouth, he tried to grab them and bring them back. It was as though he could see the letters sliding through the air at Renny and he reached for them; but they were spoken far too swiftly, hitting his sister full in the face and shattering her composure.

Renny pushed past him. Jimmy waited, and then followed.

In the office, her body iced in silence, Renny stood at the door and waited for the woman to buzz her inside; waited wand wondered what she had gotten into, and how she might free herself. That night, when she was eighteen, and riding a bus away from Beal’s Landing, she vowed never to set eyes on her mother again; it was an easy promise to keep. With each passing mile, marriage and memory, Renny distanced herself from Barbara Seaton until that damned phone call. Now, here she was, home again, and waiting for the doorbell to announce her arrival, a whiny buzz to tell her mother she had finally come—

”Miss Seaton?”

“It’s Missus Charles.” Detached from her surroundings, Renny still managed to correct the woman.

“You can go in now.” For the third time, the woman pushed the button unlocking to door. “The coroner is waiting.”

Renny knocked the door back like the stiff drink she craved and entered a sprawling, well-lit hallway, lined with doors on both sides, at the end of which she saw a windowless cubbyhole. Inside, she spotted the wheels of a gurney, a flap of pale blue sheet, the shape of a foot. Tumbling back on the closing door, she thought about all the doctor’s offices and hospitals she’d ever visited, plastic surgeons, too. Offices so barren and sterile, and yet smelling of Lysol and death; fumigated to destroy germs, but useless against odors.

Running a hand along the lavender wall, she crept without hurry toward the end of the corridor. Designers always chose such tasteless colors for medical buildings, like mint ice cream, lavender or vanilla. Was it supposed to be calming, because it wasn’t; her fingers trembled along the stucco wall and tried to grab hold. Why was everything so shining and antiseptic, clean and bare? Why was the light so cold and lifeless?

“Miss Seaton?” A man’s voice called from a numb blue room at the far end of the hallway. 

“Missus Charles.” Renny said again, sternly this time.

“I’m sorry.” Appearing in the doorway, he looked much too young for this type of work, too young to be a doctor, too handsome for a coroner. Renny envisioned a coroner like a character from Tim Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas: tall, gaunt, and terribly pale; somber, sober. This man, Dr. Lassen she would come to find out, was a black man, tall, good-looking; not at all what she had pictured.

 “Missus Charles. Could you come in here please?” The doctor smiled, and once more his youthfulness astonished her. His hair was cut close to the scalp and his skin was the color of caramel, flush with a glow from spending his free time outdoors, among the living. His deep brown eyes seemed almost liquid and he looked for all the world like a boy playing doctor; a kid whose mother dressed him in a stiff yellow shirt and paisley tie, and then, for added measure, plopped a pair of horned rim glasses on his face. In this barren room, this tasteless space that reeked of spotlessness and mortality, he was a spark. And that made her all the more uneasy.

“I know this is difficult…” he said, instantly becoming a stereotype; but what else should he say? Hey! How about those Dodgers? Are you planning on a winery tour while you’re home, Missus Charles? Let’s have a look-see at your mother, the suicide. He moved back and motioned Renny into the room. “All I need is an identification and a signature.”

“I’m not sure I can do this.”

“Really, it isn’t as bad a s people think. Your mother simply looks—.”

“I meant,” Renny snapped before he could echo Jimmy’s sentiment; “that I haven’t seen her in a long time. I doubt I would even recognize her.”

“I was going to say she looks like she’s asleep.” The doctor pressed his lips together in a smile that was at once compassionate and condescending; he followed that with a nod that was equally fawning and then wandered over to a gurney draped beneath a dark blue sheet. Picking up a corner of the rigid fabric, he waited for Renny to come closer, and then reintroduced her to her mother.