I painted more makeup on dead people’s faces than I’d ever painted on my own.
At this point, I wondered if the skill was even transferable.
Just because I could make a dead person look not-so-dead anymore, didn’t mean that I’d have a steady hand putting on my own winged eyeliner.
It wasn’t like I had many places to wear it, anyway. The place I spent the most time was at work and there was no reason for me to put it on just to come in here and do this. The dead didn’t care what I looked like and neither did my dad.
The family of the deceased asked for a rosy-cheeked, bold-lip look that’d really suited her when she was alive. I examined the variety of reference pictures they gave me to work with, showing the woman in varying stages of aging through her life from her early twenties until the present.
She was in her early forties now, and died from complications of a congenital heart condition that threatened her health on and off all her life.
In each photo she had that bold lipstick, the one the family dropped off with her body, but the rest I’d have to use my best judgment to mimic.
My hands were steady, guiding the needle under her skin and shooting the formaldehyde-laced filler into the places that disease, age, and death had hollowed in her face. Sometimes, the only time people had their makeup done was when they ended up here, at the end of their life, not even able to look in the mirror to see whether they liked the results.
I scrutinized the picture of the deceased. Blown up and printed, it had lost some of its quality. I always went easy on the filler because it was easy to blow past the rejuvenated look to an over-filled pillow face disaster that completely distorted the features you were trying to preserve in the first place.
My steady hand trembled, recalling the needle Ruarc’s men had threaded through my skin, stitching the cut in my palm from when I’d run at him with a shard of glass.
No. Stop.
I withdrew the needle, gripping the shaking hand in my other one, squeezing it tight to will the trembling to end.
Was any of it real?
The thought came like a conspiratory whisper in the silence of the room.
Would I ever leave this place again? Or would I remain here, a permanent fixture, not five miles down the road from him?
I never had FOMO, not in the traditional sense. I didn’t care that I had never been to Coachella or New York City. It didn’t really move me that weekend after weekend went by and I spent all of them right here, working. If not working, then in my cabin, just letting time go by until I had to work again.
It never bothered me before. Not like it had in the days since I left Ruarc’s gothic mansion, straight past the car with the open door, walking home barefoot down the lonely backroads outside the city.
My place was here, doing this with my father. Some people had varied, interesting lives. I didn’t.
But I had, briefly.
The room suddenly felt tight. The walls seemed to list and shift, pressing in. I eyed the door like it was about to fly open. Like I could feel him there, just on the other side.
Except, I couldn’t.
I hadn’t felt his presence since I left. It was like he was a figment of my imagination. A ghost in earnest now, Ruarc would forever haunt me in memory alone.
My stomach dropped violently.
The room spun and I winced, putting my tools down on the stainless steel tray with a clatter, pressing a sterile gloved hand to my chest.
The whiplash of being back was so strong sometimes, it knocked the wind out of me, made it so hard to breathe that dark spots crowded at the edges of my vision.
The wave passed slow, dragging me back out to calmer waters where I could catch my breath.
Being back in my normal life was absurd. It felt wrong after what I’d been through with Ruarc. The familiar rooms of the mortuary, my routines, the things that used to be so normal to me felt wrong and stifling. Fake. Like my whole life I’d been living in a cardboard cutout and it took me until now to notice.
Now that I had, I couldn’t unsee it. I couldn’t unfeel the things he made me feel.
I had finally counted the days I’d spent with Ruarc.
Thirty-seven.
After flinging me into a world I couldn’t even comprehend existed, much less so close to the one I lived in now; Ruarc discarded me like trash. Wrung me dry and moved on like it was nothing.
My hands shook as I tried to rearrange the tubes and pots of mortuary makeup and tools. Just because he gave me something didn’t mean I couldn’t have it myself. I was gone for over a month and the mortuary didn’t burn to the ground. That meant I could leave if I wanted. I could do more than that. I could travel, go skydiving, find a fucking sex party and screw twenty different people in one night.
My teeth ground together as I fought against the haze that came over me thinking of him. I was free. I could do anything but when would I finally stop short-circuiting when I thought about him? My life had become foreign. I was foreign.
Going back to work, I repeated the mantra that’d gotten me out of half a dozen panic attacks since my return.
I belong here.
I belong here.
Darkening the corpse’s eyelashes, I looked at her face, examining the makeup I’d applied, but seeing more than that.
Her husband was a wreck when he came to make arrangements for her. On his face was the profound loss of someone he didn’t know how to live without. I didn’t know her or their relationship but his world shifted on its axis when she died; that was the impact she left.
Even dead, she still meant something. There was a difference between being alive and feeling alive and currently, I was only one of those things.
How could I be the one grieving if I was also the one who was also dead inside?
I hadn’t cried all day which was an improvement over the past three since I returned home but the waves of anguish still came. They were small sometimes, swooshing around me like a breeze that made me squint and stung my cheeks. Sometimes it engulfed me, suffocating until finally, mercifully, releasing me back to numbness.
There was more than the anguish though, there was rage, too. A bitter regret at having ever met him. At having ever allowed myself to feel anything for him but disgust and loathing.
Work was the only thing keeping me on my feet, out of my cabin. If I didn’t have work, I could truthfully say I’d be fucking catatonic. Letting the wave pull me under just because the effort of beating it back was so exhausting.
I finished working on the body and transferred it back into the upper-level cooling room. She wouldn’t be transported until the next day and before the family came to collect the body, I would have to do one final inspection to make sure it hadn’t continued to purge.
After cleaning up and disinfecting, I went downstairs to the basement. I found my dad doing the same thing I’d just done; disinfecting and cleaning up after an autopsy. He noticed my entrance before I said anything.
“I’m done. Just wanted to say I am heading out.”
He straightened up from the autopsy slab that he was bent over.
“Great. Thanks. Are you having an early night?” he asked, voice light, pitching higher than necessary, like he was talking to a puppy or a child. Even with his question, he carefully didn’t ask what he really wanted to know. That silence was loud.
I’d collapsed into his arms when I first dragged myself back onto the property. The overwhelm was too much to contain and it’d spilled out of me in waves of broken sobs so loud and so ragged I didn’t recognize myself in the sound of them.
Dad helped me into the house, up into the room I had when I was a little girl, where he put me to bed.
I slept for a day and a half before I woke and he never asked me what happened and I never told him. He poured me some orange juice and told me he understood if I could never forgive him but that he would do whatever he could to make it right.
The next day, I went to work. There was a backlog of requests for post-mortem makeup applications, many of which had expired, but I took every one I could, eager to drown out the buzzing in my head with anything else.
“I might,” I replied.
It wasn’t like I had anything better to do.
He waited in patient silence for me to say something more. I didn’t. “Well, ’night, Dad.”
“Any chance you’re hungry?” he asked.
No.
Thinking about food for the first time all day, I made the belated realization that I hadn’t eaten.
I wasn’t big on breakfast, and I worked through my midday break.
I felt like I was on battery-saving mode. Like all of my body functions were working at half speed to preserve energy, leaving me feeling only half-charged. Half alive.
“I don’t think so. Thanks, though,” I said.
The corners of his mouth fell, giving away his disappointment.
There was a surge of discomfort in my stomach. After being gone the way that I had been, I wasn’t the only one who was affected. So was he.
I didn’t doubt he’d worried every day whether or not I was still alive. If I was hurting or scared or hungry.
He ran this whole place alone in my absence. Had to tell people what happened to me if they asked, making up a tale that was passable enough to obscure the truth.
Really, I tried to empathize with him, but every time I did I hit a brick wall.
This was on him.
He disposed of Ruarc’s sins in the basement. He brought the monster here. He’d given in to the whims of Ruarc’s right hand man, trying to gouge more money from the monster himself.
It was his fault I’d been taken.
His fault I would never be the same.
I didn’t know how to talk to him anymore.
The tension since I returned was tenable in every conversation. In every room when both of us were inside it.
“Go and get some rest then,” he said.
I nodded, my arms crossing over my chest. “Yeah, thanks. Have a good night.”
I turned around and walked toward the door, heading up a couple of stairs before my feet stopped and I went backward instead. I couldn’t stand this anymore. We needed to get some shit out on the table. He needed to know that I wasn’t the same Emily that was taken from here forty days ago. He needed to understand that I would work alongside him to preserve this place in Mom’s memory, but that I didn’t know if it could ever be the same between us again after what happened.
“I saw him that night,” I said and my Dad lifted his head, surprised to see me returned.
His lips parted, but his brow furrowed in confusion.
“Ruarc,” I said when he didn’t respond.
I hadn’t said his name out loud in days and hearing it sent tingles over my skin and carved a fresh well in the hollow of my gut.
“What night was that?”
“Months ago. That night when Tess came over. We came out here—after midnight—and I ran into him.”
His eyebrows bunched together.
“These days it’s like I don’t even know who you are,” he said in a low tone, surprising me. “You went through the things in my office which was bad enough but now you’re telling me you’d broken my other rules before that?”
Indignance rose in my chest, forcing out a bubble of dark laughter. My dad took it like the slap to the face I’d intended it to be.
“That’s the part you want to focus on?” I asked. “Not the fact that he was here illegally disposing of a corpse, paying you for your service and silence?”
He averted his eyes and flattened his hands on the table.
“I’m not going to apologize for doing what I had to do for us to stay afloat.”
I faltered slightly, losing some of my nerve. We’d never discussed things like this openly before. Certainly not his arrangement with the crime lord, but neither did we ever speak about finances. I only knew money was tight, but not the extent of it.
Our relationship was clear; I’d always be regarded as the child and he as the adult. He didn’t expose me to the real world and until now, I never asked for access.
“Those bodies you disposed of; do you even know who they were? Do you know why they died? How they died? Do you even care?”
“That’s none of my business,” he snapped before controlling the level of his voice, his nostrils flaring as he exhaled to collect himself. “They aren’t good people, Emily. They’re pimps and drug dealers and sex traffickers. People who stepped on Ruarc’s toes. People who tried to betray him or hurt him.”
A monster killing other monsters.
Wait?
“You said, aren’t. Are you still cremating corpses for him? Has he been here?”
The edge of mania in a voice couldn’t be missed and Dad rushed to shake his head, lifting his hands in a placating gesture, not understanding that the reason I sounded so distraught wasn’t for fear, but for something far worse.
“Don’t worry, Emily. Your security has been assured. You’re safe now. He won’t take you again.
My eyes burned.
“Before all of this,” he continued. “You never knew. I’d been working with Mr. Monroe’s men for years and nothing like this ever happened before. We’ll go back to how it was. As long as you follow the rules, you won’t even know when he’s here or anything that happens in this building after midnight.”
I blinked back tears, carving half-moons into my palms.
Once, I’d felt insulated here, tucked away from the worst horrors of the world despite Ruarc and his kingdom existing practically on my doorstep.
But my eyes were open now.
There were darker things than I could imagine existing in the most unexpected places. There was a darkness within myself, too. One that my ghost awoke in me and that I would never be able to put back to bed.
Had he been here since I returned then? Was he in this very room with my father while I slept not two hundred yards away in my cabin, oblivious to him being here?
Dad sighed deeply, his eyes down.
“This place was your mother’s dream, and she is the reason why it was a success. When she died, things changed. I wasn’t her. I couldn’t do for this place what she did. I tried, but it got away from me. Year after year, the bills started piling up but our income wouldn’t cover them.”
His fists clenched on the autopsy table and it was like I was hearing him through glass, his voice muffled through the cotton stuffing in my ears.
“I wouldn’t get involved with someone like Ruarc unless I had to. The extra income insulated us. It meant that this place could keep running.”
“Is that what you told yourself? That you did this for Mom?” I spat.
His eyes cut to me sharply, their color cold and empty.
“You were never supposed to know about him or what was happening. I worked so hard to keep you out of it, you have to believe that.”
Yeah and look how that turned out.
His eyes narrowed on my face, on the tear I forbade from falling gathering on the rims of my eyes. I sniffed, looking away.
“Did he hurt you?”
“No,” I said in a strained whisper.
Not in the way you think he did, is what I didn’t say.
“He only used me to try to control you,” I said.
He didn’t care about me, is what I didn’t say.
My chest swelled with a bone-deep ache and I shuffled uncomfortably, trying to swallow a sob.
“I’m sorry you became part of this. I should have done better.”
I sniffed.
“It’s over now.”
I didn’t want to talk anymore. I just wanted to pull the covers over my head and wallow in the dark beneath them.
“That bastard won’t ever touch you again, I promise.”
I flinched, unable to meet my father’s eyes because that… that wasn’t what I wanted at all. But he wouldn’t understand. No one would. Especially if they knew the truth.
Ruarc and I weren’t wrong. Whatever fucked up thing we were, we weren’t that, because if we were, then I didn’t want to be right.
“Right,” I said, voice tight as I turned to leave, not trusting myself to stay composed for much longer. “Anyway, goodnight.”
“Wait, I have something for you.
“Hmm?”
“I don’t know whether you want it, but there’s no one else to give it to.”
He disappeared briefly and came back with an urn. The cheap, plain piece was one of the urns that we used to keep unclaimed ashes. We stored them for a number of years in case of collection but eventually disposed of them. I stared at the plain ceramic vessel until a powerful realization forced the air from my chest.
“Because of the circumstances, I couldn’t return it to his family,” he said. Tears sprang to my eyes and I gasped. My father’s face dropped.
“Emily, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you,” he said. “Ruarc said you knew about Carlos.”
I shook my head, swallowing hard.
“No… no,” I said through my sobs. Carlos. Whatever was left of his physical body; the crushed remains of his bones left over after the cremation process… he was in there.
“I can keep it if you’d rather—”
I held my hands. Not wanting to keep it but needing to. A blind sense of duty forced me to take them. He placed the urn in my hands and I mumbled a quick thanks.
Rushing out, I hugged the urn to my chest.
Tears flowed freely down my cheeks. It was my fault that it had come to this. My wild adventure with Ruarc had been like sleeping as I was awake. The things I did, felt, and saw, didn’t feel real sometimes, even now. This didn’t feel real. Ruarc telling me that he killed Carlos were just words.
Now, this, right now, this was real. A life was ended and all that remained of it were the ashes in this urn.
My world had always felt like a place where I belonged. Now, it felt tight and ill-fitting. I suffocated at the constricting pressure of it, trying to cram myself back into a box where I no longer fit. The tears came harder the farther I got from the mortuary, coupled with a bone-gnawing guilt. Because I wasn’t crying for the loss of Carlos…
I was crying because still I felt virtually nothing when I thought of never seeing him again.
I was crying because instead of grieving the dead man in my arms, I grieved the loss of the one who killed him.
