from a hospital morgue to Boris’s living room to a dreary Italian restaurant and back to Boris’s, and on and on until it was two days later and there was my mother in her casket. I first caught sight of her face from the corner of my eye and it was like noticing someone you didn’t expect to see. Behind me, Boris and the rest of the Watsons kept their distance. The funeral home doors would remain closed for another twenty minutes; this time belonged solely to the family, and that meant me. Red carpet led me to her. She was fantastically still and her cheeks lay unnaturally flat. On those cheeks was far too much makeup—the only freckles I could see were in a patch below her throat.
A few seconds of this was enough. I craned my neck. That spider bobbing in that ceiling cobweb—there was more life there than in this expensive silver box, and I devoured its every detail, the delicate probe of the spider’s leg, the responding sink and shine of its net. It was a talent of mine, or a problem, depending on whom you asked, to obsess about trivial details during stressful situations. In fourth grade a school therapist called it an avoidance technique. My mom, who didn’t mind it so much, had dubbed it “specifying.” Once, in a doctor’s office, as the old man ran through the grim details of my impending tonsillectomy, my mom caught me specifying toward the floor. As we left, she didn’t ask me about the procedure. Instead she asked me about the doctor’s shoes, their color, the number of lace holes, and their general condition. I could not help smiling and responding—
—greenish black—
—twelve—
—ratty as hell—
The skill hadn’t come from nowhere. My friendship with Boris aside, my mother and I had lived in solitude as hermetic as it was mysterious. Fiercely dependent upon her from an early age, I was seized by anxiety when she was even a few minutes late coming home from work. To distract myself I would concentrate—on the insectile innards of lightbulbs, the landscapes of dust on the blinds, the caricatures hiding within the ceiling spackle—and when she arrived, I could recite to her every last detail. She applauded and encouraged this practice, but for me it came far too easily. There were plenty of things in life I wanted to forget. By the time I was nine or ten, I considered specifying a curse.
At the request of the Watsons, and with Claire’s recommendation to her department, I was placed with Boris’s family until other arrangements could be made. Boris stood beside me during the endless handshaking of the wake and sat next to me at the funeral. When the graveside service was over and people were filing away, Boris was the one who told me that I needed to touch the casket. “Just put your hand on it,” he said. I didn’t see why it was important. “Now, dumb-ass,” he hissed. “I did it when my grandma died. Trust me.” People were squeezing past us; it was my only chance. I leaned over and touched the casket with two fingers. The solidity of the hard surface was unexpectedly reassuring, and I pressed my entire palm flat against the beveled corner. I could feel through my hand the thunder of the exiting crowd. These vibrations were life, and for a moment my mother was part of it. I let it last for several seconds. It was the first time I had touched a casket and I presumed it would be the last. I was wrong, of course—I would touch hundreds, and soon.
Ken Harnett was out there, but it was still two weeks before Claire would find him. Two duffel bags and my beloved green backpack in tow, I moved into the Watsons’ dusty ambiance of paperback books and vinyl records, all of which quivered with thatches of dog hair. My mother and I might have never crossed state lines, but going to the Watson condo was like traversing the world. Boris’s parents, Janelle and Thaddeus, were an interracial couple—he was from Vermont, she from Kenya—and their place was decked out with bizarre and frightening artifacts they brought home from their travels only to have them dutifully demolished by one of Boris’s hysterical little sisters. I moved through the familiar museum of masks and swords and sculpture, crashed onto an army mattress on Boris’s floor, and found myself staring at a scattering of glow-in-the-dark stars that