"I know," Jane said. "It's better if you're not here. "
"But you can't be trusted, Jane," Charlie said, as if that was as obvious as the fact that Jane was irritating. "You'll throw out all the pieces of Rachel, and you'll steal my clothes. " Jane had been swiping Charlie's suits pretty regularly since he'd started dressing more upscale. She was wearing a tailored, double-breasted jacket that he'd just gotten back from Three Fingered Hu a few days ago. Charlie hadn't even worn it yet. "Why are you still wearing suits, anyway? Isn't your new girlfriend a yoga instructor? Shouldn't you be wearing those baggy pants made out of hemp and tofu fibers like she does? You look like David Bowie, Jane. There, I've said it. I'm sorry, but it had to be said. "
Jane put her arm around his shoulder and kissed him on the cheek. "You are so sweet. Bowie is the only man I've ever found attractive. Let me clean out your apartment. I'll watch Sophie that day - give the widows a day to do battle down at the Everything for a Dollar Store. "
"Okay, but just clothes and stuff, no pictures. And just put it in the basement in boxes, no throwing anything away. "
"Even food items? Chuck, the lasagna, I mean - "
"Okay, food items can go. But don't let Sophie know what you're doing. And leave Rachel's perfume, and her hairbrush. I want Sophie to know what her mother smelled like. "
That night, when he finished at the shop, he went down to the basement to the little gated storage area for his apartment
and visited the boxes of all of the things that Jane had packed up. When that didn't work, he opened them and said good-bye to every single item - pieces of Rachel. Seemed like he was always saying good-bye to pieces of Rachel.
On his way home from the pet shop he had stopped at A Clean, Well-Lighted Place for Books because it, too, was a piece of Rachel and he needed a touchstone, but also because he needed to research what he was doing. He'd scoured the Internet for information on death, and while he'd found that there were a lot of people who wanted to dress like death, get naked with the dead, look at pictures of the naked and the dead, or sell pills to give erections to the dead, there just wasn't anything on how to go about being dead, or Death. No one had ever heard of Death Merchants or sewer harpies or anything of the sort. He left the store with a two-foot-high stack of books on Death and Dying, figuring, as a Beta Male typically does, that before he tried to take the battle to the enemy again, he'd better find out something about what he was dealing with.
That evening he settled in on the couch next to his baby daughter and read while the new turtles, Bruiser and Jeep (so named in hope of instilling durability in them), ate freeze-dried bugs and watched CSI Safari-land on cable.
"Well, honey, according to this K??bler-Ross lady, the five stages of death are anger, denial, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Well, we went through all of those stages when we lost Mommy, didn't we?"
"Mama," Sophie said.
The first time she had said "Mama" had brought Charlie to tears. He had been looking over her little shoulder at a picture of Rachel. The second time she said it, it was less emotional. She was in her high chair at the breakfast bar and was talking to the toaster.
"That's not Mommy, Soph, that's the toaster. "
"Mama," Sophie insisted, reaching out for the toaster.
"You're just trying to fuck with me, aren't you?" Charlie said.
"Mama," Sophie said to the fridge.
"Swell," Charlie said.
He read on, realizing that Dr. K??bler-Ross had been exactly right. Every morning when he woke up to find another name and number in the day planner at his bedside, he went through the entire five-step process before he finished breakfast. But now that the steps had a name - he started to recognize the stages as experienced by the family members of his clients. That's how he referred to the people whose souls he retrieved: clients.
Then he read a book, called The Last Sack, about how to kill yourself with a plastic bag, but it must not have been a very effective book, because he saw on the back cover that there had been two sequels. He imagined the fan mail:
Dear Last Sack Author:
I was almost dead, but then my sack got all steamed up and I couldn't see the TV, so I poked an eyehole. I hope to try again with your next book.
The book really didn't help Charlie much, except to instill in him a new paranoia about plastic bags.
Over the next few months he read: The Egyptian Book of the Dead, from which he learned how to pull someone's brain out through his nostril with a buttonhook, which he was sure would come in handy someday; a dozen books on dealing with death, grief, burial rituals, and myths of the Underworld, from which he learned that there had been personifications of Death since the dawn of time, and none of them looked like him; and the Tibetan Book of the Dead, from which he learned that bardo, the transition between this life and the next, was forty-nine days long, and that during the process you would be met by about thirty thousand demons, all of which were described in intricate detail, none of which looked like the sewer harpies, and all of which you were supposed to ignore and not be afraid of because they weren't real because they were of the material world.
"Strange," Charlie said to Sophie, "how all of these books talk about how the material world isn't significant, yet I have to retrieve people's souls, which are attached to material objects. It would appear that death, if nothing else, is ironic, don't you think?"
"No," Sophie said.
At eighteen months Sophie answered all questions either "No," "Cookie," or "like Bear" - the last Charlie attributed to leaving his daughter too often in the care of Mrs. Korjev. After the turtles, two more hamsters, a hermit crab, an iguana, and two widemouthed frogs passed on to the great wok in the sky (or, more accurately, on the third floor), Charlie finally acquiesced and brought home a three-inch-long Madagascar hissing cockroach that he named Bear, just so his daughter wouldn't go through life talking total nonsense.
"Like Bear," Sophie said.
"She's talking about the bug," Charlie said, one night when Jane stopped by.
"She's not talking about the bug," Jane said. "What kind of father buys a cockroach for a little girl anyway? That's disgusting. "