Christopher Moore: A Dirty Job

“That seems soon.”

“It’s standard.”

“Should I bring more propane for the camp stove?”

“We’ll try to make it last.”

“But—”

Rachel held up the buzzer, as if her demands were not met, the consequences could be dire. “Love you,” she said.

“Love you, too,” Charlie said. “Both of you.”

“Bye, Daddy.” Rachel puppeted Sophie’s little hand in a wave.

Charlie felt a lump rising in his throat. No one had ever called him Daddy before, not even a puppet. (He had once asked Rachel, “Who’s your daddy?” during sex, to which she had replied, “Saul Goldstein,” thus rendering him impotent for a week and raising all kinds of issues that he didn’t really like to think about.)

He backed out of the room, palming the door shut as he went, then headed down the hall and past the desk where the neonatal nurse with the snake tattoo gave him a sideways smile as he went by.

Charlie drove a six-year-old minivan that he’d inherited from his father, along with the thrift store and the building that housed it. The minivan always smelled faintly of dust, mothballs, and body odor, despite a forest of smell-good Christmas trees that Charlie had hung from every hook, knob, and protrusion. He opened the car door and the odor of the unwanted—the wares of the thrift-store owner—washed over him.

Before he even had the key in the ignition, he noticed the Sarah McLachlan CD lying on the passenger seat. Well, Rachel was going to miss that. It was her favorite CD and there she was, recovering without it, and he could not have that. Charlie grabbed the CD, locked the van, and headed back up to Rachel’s room.

To his relief, the nurse had stepped away from the desk so he didn’t have to endure her frosty stare of accusation, or what he guessed would be her frosty stare of accusation. He’d mentally prepared a short speech about how being a good husband and father included anticipating the wants and needs of his wife and that included bringing her music—well, he could use the speech on the way out if she gave him the frosty stare.

He opened the door to Rachel’s room slowly so as not to startle her—anticipating her warm smile of disapproval, but instead she appeared to be asleep and there was a very tall black man dressed in mint green standing next to her bed.

“What are you doing here?”

The man in mint green turned, startled. “You can see me?” He gestured to his chocolate-brown tie, and Charlie was reminded, just for a second, of those thin mints they put on the pillow in nicer hotels.

“Of course I can see you. What are you doing here?”

Charlie moved to Rachel’s bedside, putting himself between the stranger and his family. Baby Sophie seemed fascinated by the tall black man.

“This is not good,” said Mint Green.

“You’re in the wrong room,” Charlie said. “You get out of here.” Charlie reached behind and patted Rachel’s hand.

“This is really, really not good.”

“Sir, my wife is trying to sleep and you’re in the wrong room. Now please go before—”

“She’s not sleeping,” said Mint Green. His voice was soft, and a little Southern. “I’m sorry.”

Charlie turned to look down at Rachel, expecting to see her smile, hear her tell him to calm down, but her eyes were closed and her head had lolled off the pillow.

“Honey?” Charlie dropped the CD he was carrying and shook her gently. “Honey?”

Baby Sophie began to cry. Charlie felt Rachel’s forehead, took her by the shoulders, and shook her. “Honey, wake up. Rachel.” He put his ear to her heart and heard nothing. “Nurse!”

Charlie scrambled across the bed to grab the buzzer that had slipped from Rachel’s hand and lay on the blanket. “Nurse!” He pounded the button and turned to look at the man in mint green. “What happened…”

He was gone.

Charlie ran into the hall, but no one was out there. “Nurse!”

Twenty seconds later the nurse with the snake tattoo arrived, followed in another thirty seconds by a resuscitation team with a crash cart.

There was nothing they could do.

There’s a fine edge to new grief, it severs nerves, disconnects reality—there’s mercy in a sharp blade. Only with time, as the edge wears, does the real ache begin.

So Charlie was barely even aware of his own shrieks in Rachel’s hospital room, of being sedated, of the filmy electric hysteria that netted everything he did for that first day. After that, it was a memory out of a sleepwalk, scenes filmed from a zombie’s eye socket, as he ambled undead through explanations, accusations, preparations, and ceremony.

“It’s called a cerebral thromboembolism,” the doctor had said. “A blood clot forms in the legs or pelvis during labor, then moves to the brain, cutting off the blood supply. It’s very rare, but it happens. There was nothing we could do. Even if the crash team had been able to revive her, she’d have had massive brain damage. There was no pain. She probably just felt sleepy and passed.”

Charlie whispered to keep from screaming, “The man in mint green! He did something to her. He injected her with something. He was there and he knew that she was dying. I saw him when I brought her CD back.”

They showed him the security tapes—the nurse, the doctor, the hospital’s administrators and lawyers—they all watched the black-and-white images of him leaving Rachel’s room, of the empty hallway, of his returning to her room. No tall black man dressed in mint green. They didn’t even find the CD.

Sleep deprivation, they said. Hallucination brought on by exhaustion. Trauma. They gave him drugs to sleep, drugs for anxiety, drugs for depression, and they sent him home with his baby daughter.

Charlie’s older sister, Jane, held baby Sophie as they spoke over Rachel and buried her on the second day. He didn’t remember picking out a casket or making arrangements. It was more of the somnambulant dream: his in-laws moving to and fro in black, like tottering specters, spouting the inadequate clichés of condolence: We’re so sorry. She was so young. What a tragedy. If there’s anything we can do …

Rachel’s father and mother held him, their heads pressed together in the apex of a tripod. The slate floor in the funeral-home foyer spotted with their tears. Every time Charlie felt the shoulders of the older man heave with a sob, he felt his own heart break again. Saul took Charlie’s face in his hands and said, “You can’t imagine, because I can’t imagine.” But Charlie could imagine, because he was a Beta Male, and imagination was his curse; and he could imagine because he had lost Rachel and now he had a daughter, that tiny stranger sleeping in his sister’s arms. He could imagine the man in mint green taking her.

Charlie looked at the tear-spotted floor and said, “That’s why most funeral homes are carpeted. Someone could slip.”

“Poor boy,” said Rachel’s mother. “We’ll sit shivah with you, of course.”

Charlie made his way across the room to his sister, Jane, who wore a man’s double-breasted suit in charcoal pinstripe gabardine, that along with her severe eighties pop-star hairstyle and the infant in the pink blanket that she held, made her appear not so much androgynous as confused. Charlie thought the suit actually looked better on her than it did on him, but she should have asked him for permission to wear it nonetheless.

“I can’t do this,” he said. He let himself fall forward until the receded peninsula of dark hair touched her gelled Flock of Seagulls platinum flip. It seemed like the best posture for sharing grief, this forehead lean, and it reminded him of standing drunkenly at a urinal and falling forward until his head hit the wall. Despair.