Good Mourning (18 page)

“You know, Elizabeth, this funeral thing, it's not that I haven't supported you,” she finally said after a few seconds of awkward silence. “I just don't want you to become . . . so . . . so . . .
morbid
. You deserve to have a happy life. I
want
you to have a happy life.”

“I am happy,” I said. For the pittance I was making, my job was less a job and more charity work for the Upper East Side. There was no way I would do it—or even could do it—if it weren't gratifying in its own warped way. My mom must have known that, somewhere deep down.

We said good night, even though it was technically morning. I hung around Crawford until we got the call that the body had landed in Africa, one hour before the funeral. By that point, I was technically supposed to be back at work in two hours, but instead Tony sent me home—maybe because he felt bad for me, but maybe also to save a little overtime money. I had unexpectedly worked two back-to-back shifts, my adrenaline rushing for hours on end. Instead of feeling burned out, I was completely wired. And so I found myself walking past my apartment and farther downtown until I was standing outside of Gaby's building. I texted her:
ANY CHANCE YOU'RE UP?

Gaby texted back:
JUST LEAVING BUNGALOW! SHOULD BE HOME IN 10.

Of course you are
, I thought, smiling. My life had changed so much. This
job
had changed me so much. For so many years, I was right there with her, coming home as the sun came up and sleeping off whatever I'd been drinking until half the day was gone. Part of me missed how carefree it had all once felt—nights filled with champagne and club music instead of chaotic phone calls to locate missing bodies.

Gaby eventually pulled up in a cab, stepping out onto the
sidewalk in a short purple dress, red lipstick, and big glasses that looked clunky and yet adorable on her narrow face.

“Lizzieeeee!” she said, giving me a hug. She smelled like perfume and smoke—it was a scent I remembered too well, and just having my nose near her hair brought me back to all of the crazy nights we'd spent together. “I was just thinking about you. This must be a sign, we are supposed to be together right now.” Then she gave me the once-over, taking in my grandma-esque flats, black pants, black blazer, and what I'm
sure
was hair and makeup that looked like I'd just had a rager of my own.

“Long night?” she said.

I put my arm around her. “Not as long as yours, apparently.”

We went inside, made a pot of green tea and a pan of organic scrambled eggs, and collapsed on her bed. “Tonight was crazy,” she said. “We miss you! When are you going to start coming out again?”

I kicked my shoes off and pulled a blanket up over my legs. I didn't actually know how it would all end or what my next step would be. But what would have happened if I hadn't been there to talk to the airline staff, UN representatives, and airport security? Would the body still be missing? Would Monica
still
be trying to figure how to dial out of the country? Nobody on the outside knew what a mess Crawford could be under the surface—but I did. I was the one person who could see both sides.

“When people stop dying, I guess,” I said, smushing my face into a pillow. Now that I had eaten something, the exhaustion was starting to kick in. Pretty soon, it would be a full ache.

“Well, that's not very optimistic,” said Gaby, who was now also under the covers. “Hey, want to watch
Breakfast at Tiffany's
for the millionth time?”

“That sounds perfect,” I said. Before Audrey Hepburn finished her pastry, I was fast asleep.

ELEVEN

One Last Hit

M
ost of the time, it was a major plus that I had so many connections in Manhattan. Nobody else at Crawford knew the clients the way I did, and it was a major career booster that I had heard of—or partied with—many of the clients who walked through our door. But there were moments when I wished I weren't quite so close to them, like the morning my phone rang at five a.m., my friend Tom's name flashing on the screen.

Let me say this:
Nobody
calls at five a.m. because something awesome happened. There's no, “I got engaged!” or “I got promoted!” five a.m. phone call. No no. This particular hour is reserved only for news so horrible, it can't wait another hour until the sun comes up. Seriously, I will give you a dollar if anyone has ever called you at five in the morning to tell you something that didn't make you cry.

So when my phone buzzed, I immediately knew it was bad. Tom owned one of the hottest clubs in Vegas, and I had partied with him on many random weekends that called for a last-minute trip across the country to do nothing but sip comped bottles of champagne and dance poolside. (I never actually went in the pool, which was usually filled with so many beautiful people hooking up, you'd pretty much be
asking
to get herpes just sticking your toe in.) He was a ­businessman, and he was successful—but he also knew how to get into trouble.

“Who died?” I said, not even bothering to say hello.

“Lizzie,” he said, his voice shaking.

“Tom? Tell me. What happened? Who is it?”

All I could hear was Tom crying into the other end of the phone. There I was, in the dark, sitting up against a mountain of pillows and waiting to hear.

“Tom,” I said, my voice a flat whisper. “Say it.” My mind started to race through our shared friends.
Was Gaby in Vegas this weekend?
I thought, starting to panic.
Please don't be Gaby. Oh my God, please
,
I thought.

Tom cried into the phone, making muffled sniffling sounds. “Sam,” he said, pain seeping through his voice. Then, even louder, “Fuck! It's Sam. We're thinking overdose. They found him loaded up with painkillers.”

Sam was a famous musician, not just in Vegas, but around the world. You've heard Sam's music. You've danced to Sam's music. You may have even rolled to Sam's music
(no judgment). I had heard through mutual friends that he had been struggling with painkillers, but with so many drugs being passed around clubs and parties, it was hard to say who was using and who was just . . . there. Plus Sam wasn't like all the trust-fund babies I had partied with over the years—he had worked his way up and made it to the top of his business all on his own. There was no platinum card that Daddy was paying off every month, no sense of entitlement. Sam actually worked for a living, and while he might have taken pills here and there, it seemed like he wouldn't risk more than a hangover maybe, or a bad headache. Certainly not
death
. I clutched the phone in my hand, replaying Tom's words in my head, feeling more and more disbelief as they sunk in.

“What?” I said, almost in a whisper. I tried to block the images flooding my mind—Sam alone on the floor, Sam going numb, Sam closing his eyes. I didn't know what had happened, but I could envision it. Some of the younger faces I'd seen at Crawford, exposed in open caskets, came rushing at me, and I fought to push them out.

“I don't know what to do,” said Tom, still crying. “What the fuck do I do?”

I thought back to all the crazy nights I'd spent in Vegas. They were like scenes out of a Todd Phillips movie—like the time Tom flew in strippers from LA, because he claimed the ones in Vegas weren't “hot enough.” Tom always set us up with the penthouse apartment at the Encore, with unlimited
Cristal, catered meals, and a personal butler to fetch anything we wanted. It was all-out excess, all the time, and after three days I was usually ready to plop my body into a first-class seat on the plane and sleep off the booze and steaks and dance music still playing—
thud, thud, thud
—in my head. It was completely lost on me how Tom could
live
there.

“I'm booking a flight,” I told Tom.

“No, that's the thing,” Tom said. “Sam was in New York. He had some meeting on Thursday and decided to stay for a few days.”

“In that case, all you have to do is give me the address,” I said.

THE SERVICE
would be in California. It was where Sam had been living the past few years, and most of his family and friends were on the West Coast. But since you can't just cover a dead body up in bubble wrap and ship it across the country—it would be a rotting mess by the time it arrived—I arranged to have Sam taken to Crawford to be embalmed. Just as with the ambassador, it was common for some of our wealthiest clients to request a body to be shipped. Many had family plots in Europe or Asia where they wanted loved ones to be buried after a service in New York.

I made sure I was at Crawford at seven a.m. so I would be there when Sam's body arrived. Even though there was
nothing I could really do, I wanted to know firsthand that everything was under control. Shortly after I got there, Sam's publicist released a statement about his death. I knew it couldn't be too long until the paparazzi were lined up outside with their cameras, hoping to get a shot of Sam in a body bag or a coffin. I did what we always did when a famous person was brought into Crawford: I reminded the receptionists not to give out any information, not even to confirm he was here. I asked two of the part-time staffers to put barricades out front so that other clients wouldn't be disturbed when the media showed up, and I told one of the receptionists to approach
anyone
who came into the foyer, just in case a reporter was trying to pose as a family member or a lost tourist.

Sam's body was delivered without incident, thank God, and brought right into the prep room, where Bill was waiting in his apron and gloves. I watched as Bill unzipped the body bag and moved Sam to a table. He was still in the jeans and T-shirt he had been wearing when he died, and had his usual facial stubble. I had seen over a hundred dead bodies, but I couldn't shake the sadness that had come over me seeing him there. Sam wasn't one of those wild guys who couldn't get his act together—he had been passionate about his career and was a huge success.
Shouldn't that be enough?
I thought, thinking about how much time I'd spent within Crawford's walls, throwing myself into every service.
Isn't that supposed to be enough?
It
scared me to think that we could spend so much time engrossed in our work, we might forget to ask ourselves, “Is this really making me happy?”

I didn't go to Sam's funeral. I said good-bye there, in the prep room, where Bill had combed Sam's hair and made his cheeks pink again. Once Sam was dressed in the white suit his family sent over and placed in the casket, all that was left for me to do was double-check that Sam's clothing, hair, and makeup were just as they were supposed to be—no mistakes. And so I gave the guys the go-ahead to get the shipping container, load it into the back of a hearse, and drive it to the airport, where it was marked as cargo. In California, staffers from another funeral home picked it up, and later on, photos of the service were all over the Internet. The photographers found a way to focus in on Sam's famous friends, as well as his gorgeous girlfriend, who stood crying as she watched his casket lowered into the ground. It was a tragedy, and I couldn't help but think that there was something very unnatural about a young person dying.

What I didn't know then was that Sam wouldn't be the last good-bye to come too soon.

BILL CALLED
ME
on my day off, and while Crawford could be crazy, it was highly unusual for anyone on staff to call my cell when I wasn't working. (Clients were a whole other story, although I didn't mind those calls.) At first, I wasn't
going to answer it; I was about to meet up with a big group of high school friends, and work drama was the last thing I felt like dealing with. These dinners only happened a few times a year when people were in town, either moving back for good after “taking a year off to travel,” or visiting from London or Los Angeles, two cities that Manhattan-raised “kids” liked to dabble in. (They always returned saying how it had been fun and all, but the city—whichever city it was—well,
it was no New York
.) But on the fifth ring, my curiosity got the better of me, and I picked up.

“Hello?” I said, looking in the mirror at my outfit. I had picked out a pair of black jeans and a leather Herve Leger jacket.
Now for the shoes
, I thought absentmindedly.

“Liz, it's Bill. Look, I know you're not on tonight, but do you think you could come in for an hour? A body just came in, and Monica and Tony are already gone, and I can't be upstairs
and
in the prep room at once.”

I looked at my watch. It was already a quarter to eight and I was scheduled to meet my friends for dinner at nine all the way downtown at Locanda Verde. “This really isn't a good time,” I said. Then I paused. Bill
never
called me outside of work. I don't even think I had given him my cell phone number—he must have gotten it from Tony's office. “Bill, is everything okay?”

Bill sighed into the phone. “Yeah, yeah, it's fine. I could just use a little help, and you're the only person who could get here quickly.”

Technically, I wasn't allowed to work extra hours. With money being so tight, Crawford had cut back on overtime; they didn't even want us in the building after we had done our forty hours for the week. But Bill sounded exhausted, and he was right in that I was the only person who wasn't an hour's subway ride away. Plus, nobody else would be there to keep tabs on my hours—not like I was looking to collect.

If I wear flats, I can run over there and still have time to cab it downtown
, I thought. “I'll be there in five minutes,” I said.

When I got to Crawford, it felt darker and quieter than usual—much different than during the day, when staffers, florists, priests, rabbis, grieving widows, happy widows, men in Hermès loafers, women carrying fluffy dogs in their purses, and about a gazillion other people roamed through the halls. I could hear the Ramones coming from the prep room where Bill was working, probably on the new body that had been brought in. It was mostly covered in a white sheet. The only parts that were exposed were the face (which Bill was hunched over, trying to find a vein near the collarbone), and the hands, which were outside of the blanket at his sides, almost like in the yoga pose
Shavasana
. (“
Shavasana
” actually comes from two Sanskrit words meaning “corpse” and “posture.” It's
literally
the death pose in yoga—something my Bikram instructor loved ­reminding me of.)

That's when his hands caught my eyes. Young hands. I stared at the fingertips. His nails were perfect—almost manicured. My gaze then went immediately up his arms to his head. My heart started to race.
Who was this person?
Somehow, for the first time, it dawned on me that I might know the guy on Bill's table.

And then Bill stood up, revealing the body's face.

I covered my mouth with my fingers, in shock. My legs became weak, and I felt a tingle in my jaw—a familiar sensation, something I usually felt when I was about to pass out. The next thing I knew I was on the floor, with Bill holding up my torso like I was a dead body.

“Liz?” he said, sounding genuinely worried.

My whole body shook against the cold tiles; my skin was cold and clammy. For another couple of minutes, I couldn't say anything. I had seen so many corpses at Crawford, but this time, the person on the table was someone I was supposed to be having dinner with in just a few minutes.