Cause of Death

1

I sit in a small room in the medical examiner’s office.

I am here to identify a body.

It’s a sterile place made no less sterile by plastic flowers in a plastic vase. Pink and white — the flowers. The vase is a form of gray.

The boxy chamber might have been a waiting room for a doctor with an obscure specialty and few patients. Four chairs, three of them matching.

I pick the odd one. It creaks as I sit.

I’m wearing what I wear most days, a plaid sport coat — today navy blue — and tan slacks. I place my hands on my knees.

A woman enters. She blinks. Perhaps she doesn’t see many people here who’re my age: thirty-three. I stare at her the way one might at an apparition, if one believed in apparitions, though she bears no resemblance to Pax. She is not with the medical staff but a grief counselor. The kindly woman sits and bends toward me, at just the right angle. She’s practiced this. She says many things, in a soft voice, eyes locked onto mine, whether I glance toward her or not. She gives me a card.

A man steps inside. He has gray hair, jowls. Plaid jacket too, though his is brown. His slacks are blue. One nail needs trimming and his watch, an OMEGA, is five minutes fast. He exudes staunch sympathy. He and the counselor share a nod. After giving me a firm handshake, the woman leaves.

The man identifies himself as the county medical examiner. After we sit, he assumes the same forward-leaning angle as the counselor. He withdraws two photographs from a file folder, asking me if they are of my wife, Patience Susan Addison. Here, in Martinsville County, Massachusetts, one doesn’t identify the corpse itself by looking at the body in a file cabinet tray, the way it works in TV crime shows and perhaps other jurisdictions.

The pictures are color printouts, four-by-fives. Maybe they’ve discovered that larger pictures are more likely to ignite hysteria.

I look at the heart-shaped face, her eyes closed, complexion understandably paler than when she was among the living. There are no scars or bruises. She died of a broken neck. A different camera angle would have revealed that, I know.

I regard a second photograph. The tattoo of a ginkgo leaf on her ankle.

“Yes. That’s her.”

And it’s completed. I ask if there are forms to fill out.

“No.”

“Am I supposed to take them?”

After a brief pause the ME says, “No, but if you want photos, I think the mortician can do something for you.”

I’d been referring to the plastic flowers.

I walk out into the fierce June sun. I climb into my white SUV and return home. In the kitchen I see two mugs in the dish drainer on the cluttered counter. One mine, one Pax’s. I take mine and make a cup of coffee with the Keurig machine. The flavor is hazelnut.

I sit at the table and see before me the pad of foolscap on which I’d been writing the afterword to a book I’ve nearly completed about the process of historical research. It will not be a Times bestseller, but quite a few professors and grad students can be counted on to buy the slim volume.

I read the words I was composing when the deputy called me, the sentences in careful script, blue ink on jaundiced paper.

I look up from the passage and gaze out the window at the red-blooming camellias hugging the stained panes. I tuck the pad into a manila folder and lean back in the chair, eyes on the ceiling.

I have plans to make.