3
1080 Words
3
DIDN’T IT FIGURE THAT the one time Luella could have used those sleeping pills for their intended purpose, her prescription was aggravatingly absent? She didn’t have the heart to confront Chandelle about the theft, not after the ordeal with her friend’s grandmother.
They say it’s the quiet ones you have to watch out for, but perhaps the goody two-shoes are the real troublemakers.
Chandelle had never seen a dead body. The vision shocked her, and she told Luella she felt as though she’d crossed some mysterious threshold into adulthood. Of course, that was after snivelling for hours in Meadowlark’s resident library with Eugenia draped over her shoulder—while Luella alone welcomed potluck participants into the community room.
She shouldn’t complain. She really didn’t mind too much. All told, she estimated between seventy-five and one hundred people showed. Luckily, they did manage to stagger their arrivals or they’d never have all fit in one space.
With Meadowlark staff attending to Mrs. Rankin (or, at least, to the body that had once been hers), Luella had to run around clearing plates from tables so newcomers would have a clear spot to sit down. Plenty of families attended, which was nice to see. Luella had always enjoyed being around small children. She’d sometimes daydreamed of doddling grandkids on one knee.
Now she knew that would never happen.
Tears formed at the corners of her eyes, but when she closed them, her mind went back to that small room at Meadowlark, to Mrs. Rankin’s lifeless face.
There was something brutally haunting about an empty shell with wide open eyes. Every time Luella tried to sleep, she saw the old woman’s hazy pupils, a greyish corona surrounded by milky whites—and those whites dotted by tiny red pinpricks. The combination of open eyes and an open mouth gave her the look of a caught fish gasping for breath on the floor of a cottager’s pleasure craft.
At the end of it, that’s all we amount to: a dead fish at the bottom of a boat.
Again, Luella reached for her pills before remembering they were gone.
Aside from at funerals, the only dead body she’d seen was that of her husband. When he was gone, his eyes became oil spots on a field of white. No red dots for him. She would always remember looking into those open eyes and knowing, without a doubt, that the spirit no longer inhabited the flesh.
Her husband had shuffled off this mortal coil, and now he was gone.
She’d phoned her son in the days and weeks prior to Gianni’s death. She’d left Junior a message saying it was now or never. Bury the hatchet or carry it forever and ever, Amen. She imagined her son had some way of contacting his sister—those two had always been closer with each other than with their parents.
Neither child called back after she’d left that final message saying their father had passed.
Neither attended the funeral.
Ungrateful children. Didn’t they realize she needed them? She needed to see their faces. It made no difference to her whether they mourned their father’s loss. All she wanted was to see that they were capable of offering her some support.
Gianni’s funeral wasn’t for the sake of the departed. It was intended for those left living, for the woman figuring out what life would look like without that person who’d shared her bed throughout her entire adult life.
Luella wanted to be able to show her children their father’s inert body and say, “Look! There’s nothing to be afraid of. He’s gone. He’s really gone.”
Those eyes. Those wide open eyes...
And Mrs. Rankin, grandmother of Eugenia Rankin, mother of the distraught man who’d left her room in a state of utter shock, lying dead in her perfectly pressed camel-coloured trousers and her neat purple cardigan. Eyes wide open. Cloudy greyish eyes no longer clear like Gianni’s, but rather dotted with strange spots, as if the whites had come down with a case of chicken pox.
Luella would never forget those eyes. She would see them before her for as long as she lived.
At least there was some comfort in knowing she too would soon depart this woeful world.
So many possible ways to die, and yet none she could face, aside from the pills. Ever since she’d buried Noodles, she’d been praying to go peacefully in the night, but it hadn’t happened yet. Such a shame the veterinarian couldn’t inject her with whatever magical elixir he’d inserted into her dog.
Obviously she would have to take matters into her own hands.
But not tonight.
She turned on the television for company and comfort. Gianni had always held the opinion that a television in the bedroom would interfere with the body’s electrical currents, though that’s not how he would have phrased it. Within a week of his death, Luella had bought herself a brand new TV—one of the flat-screened variety—and paid extra to have it installed directly on the bedroom wall.
It was like living in a dream.
There was little to watch at this hour but infomercials and programming too crass for her tastes. She settled for one of those forensic type shows. A little on the gritty side, but better than a loud-mouthed man and unconscionably happy woman selling non-stick skillets.
Blue light from the television reflected against the pearlescent wallpaper of Luella’s bedroom while a medical examiner—a good-looking woman who appeared to be almost as young as Chandelle—performed an autopsy on the murder victim. This sort of thing was too graphic for Luella, especially on a day when she’d been confronted so viciously by death.
She closed her eyes and listened as the coroner spouted medical jargon at a pair of well-versed cops. From what Luella understood, the teenaged victim had traces of DNA under her fingernails. She’d fought back against her attacker. There was a gash to the side of the head: blunt force trauma.
“So that’s what killed her?” the male officer asked—they’re always much more kindly and attentive on television than they are in real life.
“The trauma was generated post-mortem,” the medical examiner explained. “Check out her eyes.”
Luella opened hers.
“She’s got little red spots in the whites,” the female cop said, bending toward the victim. “What’s that all about?”
“Petechial hemorrhaging,” the medical examiner replied. “Your victim was suffocated to death.”
Those words echoed in Luella’s mind as the program cut to commercial.
Little red spots... petechial hemorrhaging... suffocated to death...
All at once, Luella sat up in bed, stiff as a board.
“Good glory,” she said to the empty room. “Grandma Rankin was murdered!”
- Writer
