The Coroner
The body will be shipped back to its family. A shame, the coroner thinks; the body belonged to a person who had been young—relatively young—and beautiful.
So much life left to live,people might say.Taken too soon.
Most of the time, the coroner deals with elderly bodies: skin lined with wrinkles, marked by scars from surgeries and injuries and the bumps and bruises accumulated over a lifetime, the sort that never entirely fade.
Despite its relative youth,thisbody is mangled nearly as badly as those older ones, its skin scattered with remnants of the aches and pains it endured in life. The coroner surveys each blemish carefully, noting which are recent and which are from months, even years ago. Every line on the body is a clue. The family will want an explanation; when someone dies like this—unexpectedly, needlessly—there are so many questions.
Over the years, the coroner has told himself that his is an honorable job, that giving a family answers helps them accept the loss of their loved one. But now, for the first time in his long career, he wonders how much the answer itself matters. After all, he need only give the familysomereason. Just last week, he prepared the body of a seventy-four-year-old woman for burial. She’d had metastatic breast cancer, though the true cause of her death may have been any number of contributing factors: According to her family, she’d been on high doses of painkillers for weeks and had all but stopped eating months ago, barely taking even sips of water. Still, he’d recorded her cause of death ascancer.
Would it have given the family more peace if he’d discovered that the true cause was dehydration? If he’d told them that the painkillers their beloved had taken for relief in fact hurried her demise? Or would it have been a burden to know that if only they’d forced more water down her throat, curbed her pain pills, their mother, or wife, or grandmother (depending onwho’d been managing her care; the coroner doesn’t know) might have lived a little bit longer?
Absently, he fingers his phone in his jacket pocket, wondering when it might ring again. It’s cool inside the morgue, but his palms are sweating. It’s hard work, conducting an autopsy: sawing open a body, lifting the organs one by one.
He finds it easier to think of his subjects asbodiesthan people. Some might consider him insensitive or cold, but he thinks it’s simply fair this way. He treats each patient exactly the same, no matter their background. After all, they say death is the great equalizer, coming to the rich and poor alike.
He brushes the body’s hair away from its face. He cleans beneath its fingernails, bitten to the quick. Perhaps this may begin happening more often, given the goings-on at the nearby recovery center.Thisbeing finding younger bodies on his table, troubled people meeting an untimely end. People don’t go to a place like that because they’rehealthy. They don’t go there because the rest of the world has been a safe place.
The center, the coronor knows, promises its guests the utmost discretion, but he and his neighbors will certainly be able to find out which Wall Street scion or Hollywood celebrity is taking up residence at any given time. His daughter works on the ferry, saving for her college fund, so he knows the island’s arrivals and departures better than most.
He thinks it’s fitting that the center is on Shelter Island, where his family has lived for multiple generations. He’s always found the island’s name comforting, conjuring images of a port against the storm, barricades against invaders, safety when the earth tilts off its axis, isolation from the noise and madness of the outside world. He understands why so many millionaires have chosen this small stretch of land for their lavish vacation homes. Many locals resent the summer people who take over the island each year, but as far as the coroner is concerned, the occasional crowds are a small price to pay for living in paradise.
He eyes the bluish cast around the body’s fingertips. All the money in the world can’t protect the wealthy from their own bodies, as vulnerable to the elements as anyone else’s.
The coroner estimates the time of death to a narrow window—one hour, perhaps two. It will be a week before he receives the results of the tox screen, but he can suggest a cause of death without it. There are so many ways for even a young, healthy body to die: blunt force trauma, overdose, accident, hypothermia. There’s even such a thing as death by misadventure. He looks at the body’s blue knuckles and writes one word on his form:exposure.
Now, he must prepare the body for its journey home, shut tight in a casket for the flight. The family might hire another examiner—some expensive city type, no doubt—to verify his findings. Should someone else come to a different conclusion, the coroner might be questioned, but he won’t be blamed. He’s small-town, after all, accustomed to preparing bodies for burial, not investigation. No elite practitioner, charging, he imagines, more for one examination than the coroner makes in a year, would question his incompetence. It would merely confirm the wealthy’s confidence in their wealth. Someone else might get into trouble, but not him.
The coroner is not a religious man, but he finds himself offering up a small prayer, wishing the body more comfort in death than it, apparently, found in life.
1Amelia Blue
Let me tell you what I know.
I know how many calories are in a serving of fat-free Greek yogurt (eighty) and how many are in the three frozen strawberries I chop and mix into it (six each; eighteen total). I know precisely how many miles there are between our house in Laurel Canyon and LAX (17.9), and approximately how many minutes it will take to get there (never under an hour, unless I’m taking a very early morning flight). I know the date of my father’s death (December 8, 2001) and the time (4:17 in the morning), but I didn’t know it before the general public. (I was only five at the time, and my mother waited days to tell me. By then I’d seen Dad’s face plastered on the cover of magazines beneath headlines I couldn’t read but could tell were nothing good.)
I know my grandmother’s old landline by heart (914-555-0654) even though she hasn’t lived in her East Coast apartment since January 30, 2002, when it became apparent that my mother was ill-equipped to raise me by herself. I know that my grandmother has never arrived at an airport less than two hours before her flight was scheduled to take off and that my mother has never arrived more than twenty minutes before her scheduled departure, not even if we lied to her about the time, hoping to get her there earlier. I know my mother’s Social Security number and that my father’s suicide note was dated two days before he went through with taking the drugs that ended his life. I know that particular fact not because anyone told me but because my mother posted the letter to her Myspace account two years after my father died for the whole world to see (Myspace being all the rage at the time), and eventually the whole world included me. There are, by my count, approximately seventy-seven conspiracy theories suggesting that my mother murdered my father, and that the date on thenote somehow proves it. Personally I think my dad was so out of it by then that he didn’t know what day of the week it was, let alone the actual date. I suppose it’s strange that he dated his suicide note at all, but apparently Dad dated everything. Here’s another number I know: In 2021, some billionaire bought a page of Dad’s lyrics dated March 3, 1993, for five hundred thousand dollars from a fan who’d swiped Dad’s notepad from his dressing room after a concert.
Right now, I know that my flight (American 29) is scheduled for takeoff at 6:11 a.m. from LAX for a 3:02 p.m. arrival at JFK. Which means it is precisely 4:11 a.m. when my grandmother (Naomi) drops me off at the airport. Traffic is light, and the drive takes fifty-nine minutes; it’s hard to say whether the other drivers on the road are early risers or still awake from the night before.
“You sure you don’t want me to walk you to the gate?” Naomi asks. “I could park the car.”
“You’re not allowed past security.”
“I could get permission.”
They let her walk me to the gate when I was small, flying to meet my mother while she crisscrossed the country, ostensibly to work, though it looked to me like a prolonged party, stretching from sea to shining sea. Back then, I was an unaccompanied minor, often the first person to board. Naomi would hug me tight, and I’d walk up the Jetway alone.
When it was time to send me back home, my mother and I would arrive at the gate panting, winded, having begged someone or other to hold the plane for me, always certain they’d make an exception for her, forGeorgia Blue, whose face they’d seen on magazine covers and posters and late-night talk shows. There was never time for hugs or kisses goodbye. Sometimes I wondered whether she made us late on purpose so she had an excuse not to hug me, like I was a child made of spikes, like she already knew I would become all bones and angles, not at all pleasant for a parent to hold.
All of this to say, another thing I know is how to navigate an airport. “I’ll be fine,” I tell my grandmother now.
I merely have to get from the curb to the gate in a timely manner. Then, sit in my assigned seat, where someone will tell me when it’s time to fastenmy seat belt, time to drink, when it’s safe to stand, when it’s safe to leave. If there’s a delay, it’s not my fault, and if we’re early, it isn’t because I did something right.
“And it has to bethisplace?” Naomi asks for the hundredth time. “There are dozens of other places that specialize—”
“I’ve been to those places,” I interrupt, also for the hundredth time. “They haven’t helped.”
