She’d had him first. When I met her, I knew three things: her name was Hanna, she had a husband named Nathan, and I’d need to reconstruct her nose with wax before the funeral.
Nathan was charming even in mourning. He’d loved Hanna, loved her in the way that usually only exists in the pages of a Jane Austen novel. You could see it in the red rimming his eyes, the perpetual damp coating his cheeks, the photo albums filled with her face that he’d brought for me. You could see his love in the details. Mourners usually brought a couple of photos for reference—yearbook photos, wedding photos, even the occasional modeling headshot—but Nathan was never usual.
He’d bound Hanna up in leather. There were hundreds of pages, thousands of photos of her that he’d taken while he thought she wasn’t looking, the sun shining on her face and her teeth glittering like a string of pearls. Little letters on paper napkins were slid between the photos and the plastic sleeves, written in Nathan’s firm, honest script. He’d handed me the photo album—stuffed thick with his affection—and stood waiting. His eyes had flicked over me, everything about him laid bare beneath his row of dark lashes: hope, grief, desperation, attraction mingled with guilt. He made me promise I’d try my best to get her right, to try to know her like he did.
I dreamt of Nathan that night. I dreamt that we kissed like fish out of water: gasping for air, lips parting, breathing each other in, and reaching for something that would never return. I dreamt that he whispered her secrets to me. He dragged in my scent, tobacco and rum and formaldehyde. He told me that Hanna had smelled sweet, narcotic in a Pepto-Bismol kind of way. My lipstick had turned his chin red and he whispered that she’d never worn makeup, save for a flick of mascara and chapstick that tasted like peach. Even in a dream, I didn’t bother to ask what my lips tasted like.
She had driven her flag deep into him, claiming the new world before I’d even crossed the sea. His last name was hers, his love was hers; he belonged to her down to the soles of his feet. Two images of Hanna churned in my stomach: Nathan’s perfect, infallible Hanna and the corpse missing half her face in the basement of the McClam Funeral Home. I woke up and whispered the truth to the ceiling, reminding myself that she was dead.
***
Her eyes had gone glassy and bluish, after that first night. She watched me from beneath her perfect eyelashes, the single flick of mascara long since washed away. I could see the judgment simmering inside her, the hatred, and the pride. She knew that he’d always be hers, never mine. I thought I could see her lips moving, mouthing those words over and over: he’ll always be mine. I glued them shut.
Nathan came to the mortuary three times before the funeral. Each time he’d ask how Hanna was, as if she still felt things, as if she was still more than a husk pumped full of formaldehyde. Maybe it wasn’t fair that I hated her. I know that it wasn’t. She was dead and far away and she didn’t know my name. Hanna. She took up this horrible space in my life, and she didn’t even know my name. Every comparison I made between her and me—my lashes were longer than hers, my cheekbones higher, my eyes bigger—only reinforced that she was better. She would never think of comparing herself to me, and here I was hoping that—if I slathered myself in her—I could be her better.
I told myself that soon enough it’d be over. She’d be in the ground, buried too far down for Nathan to think of her. He’d grieve—he was a good man, he’d be a good widow—and then he could be tender and mine. I repeated that word every night before I went to sleep, the binder of photos left open between my knees. Mine. Mine. Mine.
I woke to a few dozen more polaroids of Hanna leering at me from the open album, tongues tucked behind their teeth, holding back their laughter. I wanted to smash her pepto-bismol perfume, smear her mascara all over the sheets. I wanted to blot her out. Instead, I went to the funeral home.
She was waiting there, cold and still and triumphant. I opened the scrapbook he’d given me and did my best to make her look the opposite. I caked her face with creamy foundation, sculpted her nose cartoonishly sharp, glossed her eyelids and lips with varnish. I painted her like a hooker in Grand Theft Auto: my garish lipstick on her lips, false eyelashes that Hanna never would’ve worn, over-rouged cheeks like a marionette doll, dark hair shellacked into a caricature of a Dolly Parton wig, and the chemical scent of death masked with cheap perfume.
Nathan loved a girl that no longer existed. He didn’t love the girl that was gone, he loved the pieces of her she’d left behind—the heels, the dresses, the fragrance that still clung to their bed. I wore those pieces to Hanna’s funeral.
***
It was a classic American affair, just the way she would’ve wanted. Her friends from the city arrived five minutes after I’d laid out the funeral programs, raised lettering on eggshell white. Valentino heels clicked and slid against the swept-clean tile, black pencil skirts shifted against the lacquered pews. I heard one of them poke a dusty bible with her freshly manicured fingernail, masking a smirk beneath her lipstick. I’m sure they thought we were quaint. I pretended like I didn’t feel their judgment as I rearranged Hanna’s spray of calla lilies. I’m sure they saw me in the same way Hanna would have: garish, pathetic, a cheap knock-off. Nathan was the only one who would see me differently. His black turtleneck threatened to swallow him whole, his cleft chin trembling just above the Ralph Lauren logo.
The calla lilies were scentless and white. I couldn’t smell them as they moved between my hands, not over the pungent sweet of Hanna’s perfume. I didn’t wear perfume that nice, not often enough to know I didn’t need the usual six pumps. I’d sprayed it on the sides of my neck where I’d dreamed Nathan kissed me, on the pulse of my wrists that turned between the calla lilies, down the front of my cream-colored dress, a replica of the one Hanna had worn on their last date. I could smell myself and I smelled like her.
I stalked beside the pews, waiting for him to see her. Nathan hovered a few feet away from the casket, not daring to look. A gel-coated curl trailed from the casket, one I’d teased to cartoonish volume. He pinched it between his fingers, took a step closer, craned his neck to see her, and I knew he finally understood. His Hanna unraveled like a knit sweater. I’d exposed the loose threads left from her death and waited, patiently, for him to pull.
My hand found the curve of his shoulder blades and I pressed my hip to his. His nose twitched once, twice—his nostrils flared at the sweetness radiating from my skin. He recognized it. I’d made myself loveable. My eyelashes were heavy with Hanna’s mascara—I could see the clumps of black in my periphery. I rolled my bottom lip between my teeth. Nathan stood over me, his mouth parted in an unreadable expression, and I kissed him. I had to stand on my tiptoes, even in the heels Hanna was supposed to wear. He didn’t move. My lips grazed his parted mouth. I left a sheen of peach across his two front teeth. I pulled back. My legs shook.
Nathan slapped me, hard. I spun onto the casket, toppling Hanna and her calla lilies. Nathan’s handprint burned into my cheek. I felt Hanna’s cold chest against my mouth. I couldn’t hear a heartbeat. The stems of the calla lilies were snapped and splayed, leaking milky sap on our tangled hands. Hanna’s fingers were stiff under mine. I couldn’t see the crowd, but I heard their heels clicking, their eggshell funeral programs drifting to the ground. Shock echoed through the ceremony like a car alarm does in a flock of mockingbirds. I turned my eyes towards Nathan and I saw that Hanna was looking at him too.
He looked at me, everything he saw in me laid bare beneath his row of dark lashes: disgust, grief, hate mingled with pity. He looked into Hanna’s glassy eyes and I saw the love that I wanted. He pulled her from under me, my hands untangling from hers, and held her in his arms like I wanted him to hold me. I felt the floor underneath me, cold and firm and unforgiving and I finally knew. Nathan kissed her cold lips, lipstick reddening his chin. He breathed her in, huffing the drugstore perfume like teenagers high on nitrous. He pressed his forehead to hers, his cheek against her clumpy lashes. He loved her then, he loved her now. The details didn’t matter, the performance didn’t matter, he loved her. He loved her.
Lying there on the floor, I thought that something might be wrong with me.
