Cause of Death

1

Isit in a small room in the medical examiner’s office.

I am here to identify a body.

It’s a sterile place made no less sterile by plastic flowers in a plastic vase. Pink and white—the flowers. The vase is a form of gray.

The boxy chamber might have been a waiting room for a doctor with an obscure specialty and few patients. Four chairs, three of them matching.

I pick the odd one. It creaks as I sit.

I’m wearing what I wear most days, a plaid sport coat—today navy blue—and tan slacks. I place my hands on my knees.

A woman enters. She blinks. Perhaps she doesn’t see many people here who’re my age: thirty-three. I stare at her the way one might at an apparition, if one believed in apparitions, though she bears no resemblance to Pax. She is not with the medical staff but a grief counselor. The kindly woman sits and bends toward me, at just the right angle. She’s practiced this. She says many things, in a soft voice, eyes locked onto mine, whether I glance toward her or not. She gives me a card.

A man steps inside. He has gray hair, jowls. Plaid jacket too, though his is brown. His slacks are blue. One nail needs trimming and his watch, an OMEGA, is five minutes fast. He exudes staunch sympathy. He and the counselor share a nod. After giving me a firm handshake, the woman leaves.

The man identifies himself as the county medical examiner. After we sit, he assumes the same forward-leaning angle as the counselor. He withdraws two photographs from a file folder, asking me if they are of my wife, Patience Susan Addison. Here, in Martinsville County, Massachusetts, one doesn’t identify the corpse itself by looking at the body in a file cabinet tray, the way it works in TV crime shows and perhaps other jurisdictions.

The pictures are color printouts, four-by-fives. Maybe they’ve discovered that larger pictures are more likely to ignite hysteria.

I look at the heart-shaped face, her eyes closed, complexion understandably paler than when she was among the living. There are no scars or bruises. She died of a broken neck. A different camera angle would have revealed that, I know.

I regard a second photograph. The tattoo of a ginkgo leaf on her ankle.

“Yes. That’s her.”

And it’s completed. I ask if there are forms to fill out.

“No.”

“Am I supposed to take them?”

After a brief pause the ME says, “No, but if you want photos, I think the mortician can do something for you.”

I’d been referring to the plastic flowers.

I walk out into the fierce June sun. I climb into my white SUV and return home. In the kitchen I see two mugs in the dish drainer on the cluttered counter. One mine, one Pax’s. I take mine and make a cup of coffee with the Keurig machine. The flavor is hazelnut.

I sit at the table and see before me the pad of foolscap on which I’d been writing the afterword to a book I’ve nearly completed about the process of historical research. It will not be a Times bestseller, but quite a few professors and grad students can be counted on to buy the slim volume.

I read the words I was composing when the deputy called me, the sentences in careful script, blue ink on jaundiced paper.

We hear that history is written by the victors, but this isn’t the case. History is written by a vast population, honest and deceitful, enlightened and confused, informed and ignorant, who leave behind the whole cluttered bucket for others—historians, for instance—to pick through, select from and eventually assemble . . .

I look up from the passage and gaze out the window at the red-blooming camellias hugging the stained panes. I tuck the pad into a manila folder and lean back in the chair, eyes on the ceiling.

I have plans to make.

2

The funeral unfolds as funerals will. Somber, awkward and predictable.

Pax’s parents arrived from North Carolina, her sister from St. Louis. An only child, I have no close family in the area. My own mother and father died some years ago. An uncle—my father’s brother—and his wife and their sons flew in from California. I appreciate this. The service is well attended: friends, fellow professors of mine, colleagues from Pax’s endowment office—we worked for the same college. Seventy or eighty are present.

At the appointed time, a gentle, studiously solemn man closes the chapel’s double doors, shutting out the brilliant day. He nods the family to the front. We take our seats.

Reverend Phil does a fine job, considering that Pax and I were Christmas and Easter parishioners, and only then when Bob and Martha, her parents, were in town.

Then the eulogies. Janet and I planned the choreography. Her sister, three years younger, would offer anecdotes about Pax’s early days. I would deliver the more recent material.

Janet is clever and thoughtful and in control. And it’s just as well she took over Pax’s childhood and teens since what husband of five years retains—or ever knew—all the facts of the pre-spouse days? In Pax’s case, that was twenty-five years of details: thirty minus those that we were together.

There was much Pax hadn’t shared with me. She was quite an athlete, apparently. She fenced, competed in triathlons. She followed the Warren Miller approach to extreme skiing. “My sister told me you should never jump off a sixty-foot cliff, until you’ve mastered jumping off a forty-foot one.”

Drawing mild laughter and some tears.

And though I knew she had backpacked overseas after college, I learn only now that she’d been there for three whole years, making her living at the good deeds that became her profession and passion. When working for Food for Humanity on a stint in Central Africa, she’d faced down a warlord who was demanding rice for his soldiers. The man had regarded her stony gaze and retreated.

Pax Addison had quite the stony gaze.

Janet concluded with, “Charity work was her soul.”

Then my turn: How Patience became Pax (she had always liked the Latin for “peace”). Her boldly painting her office walls at home with comic book superheroes. The found dog we spent a month trying to return to its owner, a successful mission ultimately. Our sporadic hobby of refinishing antiques. Some disasters in the kitchen. A ski trip that ended in my visit to the ER, because I didn’t know there was a left ski and a right ski. Her unstoppable efforts to tap wealthy benefactors like trees at sap season and replenish the college’s bank account. Her volunteering for Heart-in-Hand, which provided assistance for the disabled and elderly.

It was upon returning from an assignment for this organization that she plunged off Route 420 on Palmer Mountain and died. A fact I do not, of course, share.

Janet wins the Toastmaster award, it appears, which I am pleased with. It’s fitting. And the attendees surely want to give me a participation prize, grateful for my not breaking down in uncomfortable sobs.

Neither Martha nor Bob, far more dazed than I, rise to speak. Friends and a coworker offer accounts.

A typical service.

Somber, awkward and predictable . . .

At Dover Hills Memorial Garden the reverend offers a few more words, and there’s a harpist that Martha arranged, though I have no idea why. Pax listened to classic oldies: Dylan and Joni Mitchell and Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix. If she had made her own funeral arrangements, she might have picked “Both Sides Now.” Or “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands”; she herself had eyes whose outer corners descended charmingly. And it would have been played on an electric hollow-body guitar.

But harpist it is. Pachelbel’s Canon, though? Couldn’t the frothy slip of a woman, obscured by the massive instrument, throw in at least a Mariah Carey or Lady Gaga, if she wasn’t inclined toward the sixties?

I feel a hand on my shoulder. It’s my graduate assistant, Brooke Hartford. The woman—a hunting, horse-riding cowgirl on the weekends—is in a stylish dress, not black but deep purple. I’ve never seen her in anything but embroidered jeans and Western shirts with pointed pockets, pearl buttons, bric-a-brac. She owns a number of cowboy hats. Today her mass of blond hair is crowned with a modest, respectful pillbox, similar to Pax’s mother’s. I press her hand in return. In a whisper she asks, “I’ll cancel your classes?”

“No. The distraction, you know.”

“Sure.”

She steps back.

And then it happens.

During a rendition of “Because All Men Are Brothers,” I glance over the heads of the mourners and see him.

A man in the woods.

He wears dark clothing, though not a suit. Black slacks, close fitting—they might have been jeans—and a charcoal-gray windbreaker-style jacket, the collar turned up. Aviator sunglasses shield his eyes—unnecessarily because the pine and oak cast him in dense shadow. His hair is light, probably blond, maybe salted with some gray. He is tall, over six feet, I estimate. Age? Forties, maybe. He isn’t exactly crouching but it’s clear he doesn’t want to be seen.

And he’s staring directly at me.

I am in sunglasses too, Ray-Bans, and can keep my face pointed at the harpist while watching him.

Then the funeral home director’s younger brother hands out roses to the family.

The casket lowers into the ground. In no particular order those of us with flowers step forward and release them onto the shiny mahogany.

I look again for the Man in Gray. I scan the grounds and spot him through the foliage. He is walking to a black sedan.

I nod at several mourners and thank them for coming, then walk up to Brooke.

“Changed my mind. Cancel classes for two days.”

I watch the Man in Gray pilot his car over the winding drives toward the graveyard’s exit.

“No, make it three.”