The face was bloated as if it were a float, pumped a little too full with air in anticipation of a big parade. Almost comical, except I recognized this young man through the distorted features. I couldn't take my eyes from him. It had been almost four months since I'd seen Steve. We'd gotten together over the summer one final time before going off hundreds of miles in opposite directions to attend college. Now, here he lay, stiffly, dressed by hands other than his own. Obviously. Steve wouldn't have been caught dead in a suit.
And he hadn't been. He had been wearing an Aerosmith concert shirt at the time, jeans that breathed easily in the seat, a dangling cross earring. I noted the hole in his left ear. No instructions his parents had given, no soap his skin had been washed down with, no make-up he had been resurrected with, could have erased that. The pinhole was the only recognizable bit remaining that was Steve. Mounted in an expensive wooden case. Combed, plastic-mannequin hair. Sculptured hands protruding from white shirt sleeves, clasped reverently. Neither the navy suit jacket nor the matching clip-on tie camouflaged the packaging creases of the shirt he'd been stuffed into. I had to turn away from this strange apparition. I couldn't identify the feeling inside me.
I looked at Terry, standing in line behind me, unaffected. Her appropriate black knit dress embraced her body in such a way as to discredit belief in the "freshman five." But perhaps that never applied to community college students. Terry had had time to make up her face perfectly, accentuating the deep blue of her eyes. I had had to come abruptly. Her salmon pink lips smiled softly at me. I nodded my head in return.
Looking through the one-way glass that exists between the living and the dead, I tried to say silent good-byes to the closed eyes, open box — and found it hopeless. I found instead laughter on my chapped lips and suppressed it, thinking Terry would have the right words, would say and mean what I couldn’t.
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