Under a Mountain
September, 2019
My Sweet Paul,
You’d laugh, because when they called and told me about you, I couldn’t even find my clothes.
I’d just showered, and I wandered around, cellphone in hand, unable to remember where I’d put my clean blouse and skirt.
The policeman on the phone asked if I was Agnes Geraghty. That shook me. I haven’t been Agnes Geraghty for almost forty years. I married Gus Williams and took his name, although he’s long since dead.
He said they found you last week and you had a piece of paper with my maiden name and an old address on it. That was enough to track me down.
I told him I hadn’t seen you since the Seventies.
He wanted me to come and identify you. I didn’t understand what he was talking about, not at first.
They sent a police car to pick me up. I wish they’d sent a taxi: you know how neighbors talk. We drove to the university medical school. They have a mortuary with a special section that’s sealed off.
A professor met me. A fussy man, but kind. I think he saw a career opportunity in you. A police woman was there, too: a detective. She wanted to ask some questions after I’d identified you.
The professor explained what to expect.
“Plastination.” That’s the word he used: “partial plastination.” I made him write it down later. He said they found you in the sludge, while cleaning the waste pond next to the shuttered chemical plant. The chemicals preserved you, he said.
I couldn’t imagine such a thing, until I saw you.
They took me into a cold, brightly lit room, with a single metal table in the center — and there you were. They’d sealed you in a giant transparent bag because of the smell, I suppose. It reeked of chemicals in there, or maybe that’s how all mortuaries smell.
That detective was quick on her feet. I’d have collapsed if she hadn’t pushed a chair under me.
Oh, my dear, you were perfect: eyes closed as if asleep, and skin white like wax. You weren’t shriveled like those bodies on TV. And you still had those ridiculous sideburns that were all the rage back then. Only the gash in the side of your head looked out of place.
I stared at you so long, so very long.
Afterwards, the detective bought me tea in the cafeteria, and then questioned me in the professor’s office. She already knew you’d disappeared back in ’75, and we’d had lunch that day. It was all in the records from the original inquiry.
She wanted to know what we’d discussed, and when I learned about your disappearance. I said we’d talked about my departure for university, which was true, and I gave you my new address on a slip of paper. I told her your mother had called me that weekend, and said you hadn’t returned home, and the police were looking for you. But they didn’t find you, did they, my sweet, until now?
She laid a transparent baggie on the table. It contained a note that had survived in a plastic folder in your satchel, along with your other papers. I remembered that silly leather satchel you carried everywhere.
The writing was fuzzy, but legible. “My Sweet A,” it began, “how I long to be with you. How I want us to be together forever.”
She asked me if we were going to be married. What could I say? I sat there and stared at the table.
Of course, you never called me “A”, or even Agnes. You knew I hated that name. You called me Cat because of the way I’d curl up on the sofa and sleep.
Were you going to deliver the note to her that day after I left, when you thought I’d gone home? On the day you took the shortcut along the edge of that stinking pond. I remember the rain. That place must have been a sea of slippery mud.
Is that where your skull was smashed, and you careened down the steep, muddy bank?
Did you struggle in that filthy mess until the mud and rocks collapsed and pushed you under?
Is that what happened?
The professor stopped me on the way out of the building. He asked if I needed any help. It must be a terrible trauma for you after all these years, he said. Write a letter to your dear Paul, he said, and tell him what you feel. Tell him what you really feel. Get it out of your system.
I’d already written that letter, years ago, when I came back from the clinic after you died. I call it a clinic, but it was a seedy little establishment. That’s where those procedures were conducted, discreetly, back then.
I wrote that letter in the darkness, day after day, thinking about our lunch, about what I told you, what you didn’t want to hear. I wrote it with a fine-tipped fountain pen that lay cold in my hand. The nib gouged the paper, ink blossoming like blood seeping from a wound. I wrote it all down.
Then I sealed that letter in a casket, and buried it under a mountain.
— C
