Bag of Bones Read Free

through the crowd and grabbed one of the attendants as he got out from behind the wheel. “There’s a woman over there,” Wyzer said, pointing toward the parking lot.
    â€œGuy, we’ve got two women right here, and a man as well,” the attendant said. He tried to pull away, but Wyzer held on.
    â€œNever mind them right now,” he said. “They’re basically okay. The woman over there isn’t.”
    The woman over there was dead, and I’m pretty sure Joe Wyzer knew it . . . but he had his priorities straight. Give him that. And he was convincing enough to get both paramedics moving away from the tangle of truck and Toyota, in spite of Esther Easterling’s cries of pain and the rumbles of protest from the Greek chorus.
    When they got to my wife, one of the paramedics was quick to confirm what Joe Wyzer had already suspected. “Holy shit,” the other one said. “What happened to her?”
    â€œHeart, most likely,” the first one said. “She got excited and it just blew out on her.”
    But it wasn’t her heart. The autopsy revealed abrain aneurysm which she might have been living with, all unknown, for as long as five years. As she sprinted across the parking lot toward the accident, that weak vessel in her cerebral cortex had blown like a tire, drowning her control-centers in blood and killing her. Death had probably not been instantaneous, the assistant medical examiner told me, but it had still come swiftly enough . . . and she wouldn’t have suffered. Just one big black nova, all sensation and thought gone even before she hit the pavement.
    â€œCan I help you in any way, Mr. Noonan?” the assistant ME asked, turning me gently away from the still face and closed eyes on the video monitor. “Do you have questions? I’ll answer them if I can.”
    â€œJust one,” I said. I told him what she’d purchased in the drugstore just before she died. Then I asked my question.
    *   *   *
    The days leading up to the funeral and the funeral itself are dreamlike in my memory—the clearest memory I have is of eating Jo’s chocolate mouse and crying . . . crying mostly, I think, because I knew how soon the taste of it would be gone. I had one other crying fit a few days after we buried her, and I will tell you about that one shortly.
    I was glad for the arrival of Jo’s family, and particularly for the arrival of her oldest brother, Frank. It was Frank Arlen—fifty, red-cheeked, portly, and with a head of lush dark hair—who organized the arrangements . . . who wound up actually dickering with the funeral director.
    â€œI can’t believe you did that,” I said later, as we sat in a booth at Jack’s Pub, drinking beers.
    â€œHe was trying to stick it to you, Mikey,” he said. “I hate guys like that.” He reached into his back pocket, brought out a handkerchief, and wiped absently at his cheeks with it. He hadn’t broken down—none of the Arlens broke down, at least not when I was with them—but Frank had leaked steadily all day; he looked like a man suffering from severe conjunctivitis.
    There had been six Arlen sibs in all, Jo the youngest and the only girl. She had been the pet of her big brothers. I suspect that if I’d had anything to do with her death, the five of them would have torn me apart with their bare hands. As it was, they formed a protective shield around me instead, and that was good. I suppose I might have muddled through without them, but I don’t know how. I was thirty-six, remember. You don’t expect to have to bury your wife when you’re thirty-six and she herself is two years younger. Death was the last thing on our minds.
    â€œIf a guy gets caught taking your stereo out of your car, they call it theft and put him in jail,” Frank said. The Arlens had come from Massachusetts, and I could