The Cleaner

CHAPTER TWO

The sun is heading toward the horizon with only a few hours of life left today, it’s blinding her, making beads of sweat run down the inside of her dress and dampening the material. It glints off the polished granite gravestone, making her squint, but she refuses to look away from the letters that have been scripted across it for the last five years. The bright light is making her eyes water-not that it matters; her eyes always water when she comes here.

She should have worn sunglasses. She should have worn a lighter dress. She should have done more to prevent him from dying.

Sally clutches the crucifix hanging around her neck, the four ends of it digging hard into her palm. She can’t remember the last time she took it off, and she fears that if she did she would roll up into a small ball and just cry forever, spending the rest of her days unable to function.

She had it when the doctors at the hospital gave her family the news. She held it tightly as they sat her down, and with their somber faces told her what they had told countless other families who knew their loved ones were dying but who still held out hope. It was hanging over her heart when she drove her parents to the funeral home, sat down with the funeral director, and, over tea and coffee that nobody touched, shopped through coffin brochures, turning the glossy pages and trying to pick out something her dead brother would look good in. They had to do the same for the suit. Even death was fashion conscious. The suits in the catalogs were photographed hanging on mannequins; it would have been in bad taste to have had them on happy-go-lucky people smiling and trying to look sexy.

She has had the crucifix every day since, using it for guidance, using it to remind herself that Martin is in a better place now, that life isn’t as bad as it seems.

She has been staring at the grave for the last forty minutes, unable to move. Fifty feet away a set of oak trees form a partial barrier between her and a small lake which she guesses must almost be right in the middle of the cemetery. A few months ago some bodies were found in that lake. Every now and then the nor’wester will snap one of the growing acorns from the branches and throw it onto a gravestone, the clicking sound like that of a breaking finger. The cemetery is an expanse of lush lawn broken up with cement markers and, at the moment, mostly deserted, except for a handful of people standing in front of gravestones, all of them with tragedies of their own. She wonders whether more show up during the day, whether the graveyard has peak-hour traffic. She hopes it does. She doesn’t like the idea of people dying and other people forgetting. The grass is longer than usual, and messy around the gravestones and trees. Even the gardens are overgrown. There used to be a caretaker out here who would regularly steer his riding lawn mower like a racing car through the rows of graves, but then he retired or died, she can’t quite remember which, and in the following months nature has been reclaiming the land.

She doesn’t even know why she’s thinking such things. Caretakers dying, peak-hour traffic, people forgetting the dead. She’s always like this when she comes here. Morbid, all messed up, as if somebody has put her thoughts into a cocktail shaker and shaken the hell out of it. She likes to come here at least once a month, if likes is an appropriate word. She always, absolutely always, makes it here on the anniversary of Martin’s death, which is what today is. Tomorrow would have been his birthday. Or still is. She isn’t sure whether it counts once you’re in the ground. For some reason she can’t explain, she never comes here on his birthday. She’s sure it would induce the same result as if she were to take off her crucifix. Her parents made it out here earlier in the afternoon, she can tell by the fresh flowers next to her own. She never comes here with them. That is something else she can’t explain, not even to herself.

She briefly closes her eyes. Whenever she comes here, she always ends up dwelling on what she can’t figure out. The moment she leaves, things will be better again. She crouches down, caresses the flowers sitting in front of the gravestone, then runs her fingers over the lettering. Her brother was fifteen when he died. One day away from sixteen. One day’s difference between a birthday and a death-day. Probably not even that. Probably only a matter of half a day. How can it make sense that he should die at fifteen, almost sixteen? The other people planted in this location average sixty-two years old. She knows that because she added them all up. She walked from grave to grave, plotting in the numbers on a calculator and then dividing them up. She was curious. Curious as to how many years Martin was cheated of. His fifteen-sixteen years on this earth were special, and the fact he was mentally handicapped actually was a blessing. He enriched her life, and her parents’ lives. He knew he was different, he knew he was challenged, but he never understood what the problem was. For him, life was all about having fun. What could possibly be wrong with that?

She has never found any answers to her questions, not here, not even once she has walked away. In that, nothing will ever change.

After an hour, she turns away from the grave. She wants to tell her dead brother about the man she works with, who in many ways reminds her of Martin. He has a pure heart and a childlike innocence that is identical to Martin’s. She wants to tell her brother about this, but leaves without saying a word.

She heads out of the graveyard thinking of Martin. Even before she reaches her car, the crucifix starts to take away her pain.