“Of course it’s me,” I said. “The parking lot. You and me.”
“Okay,” he said. “You and me.”
“I need to ask you some reference questions.”
In our small town Jack had been in charge of death of all sorts: homicide, suicide, double homicide, death by misadventure and by accidents, death by natural causes. When folks saw him walk into the old-age home, the residents crossed themselves, turned to look in the other direction, knew one of them was gone for sure. When he went to talk to the elementary-school kids about safety — no sticking fingers into electrical outlets, no grabbing pots off the stove — some of the children got hysterical and had to be taken to the nurse’s office. All that time Jack had been calling me with reference questions, he could have looked up the answers himself. I’d come to understand that. He knew it all already, so maybe he simply liked my pronunciation of asphyxiation, nightshade, West Nile virus.
Or maybe he just wanted to speak to me in my own language.
“Where are you?” Jack asked. “You disappeared. I wrote you a note, but you never wrote back.”
“I moved to Florida. Better weather.” What a joke. It was about a hundred and five degrees and so humid my usually straight-as-sticks hair had curled. The night smelled like poison.
“I know you moved. You think I didn’t take it upon myself to find out what had happened to you? I mean, where are you right now? I hear traffic.”
I thought about the way he used to look at me. He had wanted something from me and he never got it. I thought I’d been humiliating myself, but maybe I’d been doing the very same thing to him. “I’m sorry, Jack.”
“You’re sorry that you disappeared and never bothered to write? Or you’re sorry that you never gave a shit about me and how I felt?”
“I didn’t know what I wanted.”
“As opposed to now.”
I laughed. Maybe he did know me.
“So, what is it you want to talk about?” Jack went on. “Or let me guess. What did we always have in common? Oh, yeah. Death.”
He sounded different, or maybe I’d never listened to him before. Maybe those times in his car and in the parking lot weren’t exactly what I’d thought they were. Maybe he’d noticed the ice, the stones, the way I believed I deserved to be hurt.
“Are you making fun of me?” I wasn’t used to feeling this way when I talked to him. It had been a long time, after all.
“Hey, baby, I am Mr. Death. Ask me your questions.”
I’d called to ask him about Lazarus, about how I could help him if he was accused of murder. Should I help him flee, or tell him to stand up to everyone? But as it turned out, that’s not what I really wanted to know.
I hesitated. That wasn’t like me, I was overwhelmed with feeling.
“Go on. Shoot,” Jack said. “Make it a good one. Give me a what-if.”
So I did. I made it the only one.
“What if your brother is dying and you can’t stop it. What do you do?”
All I could hear were the trucks. The gears grinding. So many people going somewhere. I was standing in a gas station in the middle of the night in Florida. It was as though I’d never talked to anyone before. I could hear Jack breathing. I wanted to cry. I’d never even really given him a chance. Dealing with so much death had given him the ability to find logic in an irrational world.
“You help him find something that makes him feel that he still wants to be alive. Only thing to do.”
“Maybe you should have been the one at the reference desk.”
I could have been anywhere on earth. I was that lost.
“Not me,” Jack said. “It was always you.”
When I got home, I knew someone was there. Giselle was on the lawn and I had left her inside. There was a spare key under my mailbox. Not very hard to find; when I slid my hand under the metal, it was no longer there. I crouched down beside the cat and rubbed under her chin and left her out a while longer. She didn’t hate me as much, or maybe she’d grown used to me. Lazarus was asleep on the couch, one foot planted on the floor. He looked young, and tired, like a man who’d hitchhiked and walked all night. I locked all the doors, unplugged the phone. He had a duffel bag with him, which I took into the kitchen. You shouldn’t do these things, I know, but I did it anyway. I unzipped the bag, looked through it. I suppose I was just making sure he was who I thought he was. There were some clothes, a wallet with a few hundred in cash, a plane ticket to Italy, a passport with Seth Jones’s name and Lazarus’s photo; at the very bottom I found the wooden box filled with ashes.