A Master Plan for Rescue by Janis Cooke Newman Page A

curled a rosary made out of wooden beads inside the coffin, placing it on the purple satin in the place where my father’s hands would have been if the coffin hadn’t been empty, if he’d been inside it. Then she told me to go put on my Mass pants and a shirt with sleeves.
    It was too hot for the Mass pants and too hot for a shirt with sleeves, but I put them on. Before I left my room, I slipped the code-o-graph into my pants pocket.
    In the two days since the transit cop brought me home, I hadn’t been without the code-o-graph. I slept with it in the chest pocket of my pajamas, dropped it into the pocket of whatever pants I decided to wear each day—which was never the shorts I’d been wearing the afternoon my father took me to Paradise. My hand was always in my pocket, feeling for the thin metal edge of the code-o-graph, spinning the propeller that would turn the letters of a secret code into something comprehensible.
    When I came into the kitchen, I saw that Aunt May had made my mother put on something that was black and too hot, too. She was sitting at the table in a black dress with long sleeves, holding a coffee cup with both hands as if she believed it was about to shatter into pieces. Aunt May was leaning into the oven, poking a fork into a casserole filled with something bubbling and orange.
    My mother said my name, which was more or less all she’d had to say to me in the past two days. But I didn’t need her to say many words in a row to hear the broken sound under them. A sound that let me know all her colorful organs had turned as black as mine.
    She set down her coffee cup and got to her feet. She was wearing the black shoes she only wore to Mass and she walked over to me like she was unfamiliar with the floor. She came near enough to turn blurry and unfamiliar—my mother in that black dress I’d never seen before. With no warning, she wrapped her black-sleeved arms around my shoulders and pulled me against her angular chest.
    My mother did not hug in this way. More often she surprised me with an arm flung across my collarbone from behind, a quick brush of her lips on the top of my head. Now I felt her breathing, her lungs—once blue—rising and falling against the side of my face. I smelled her cigarette, the cedar from the closet where she kept this awful dress, and beneath it, the improbable cut-grass scent of her skin.
    I wanted to tell her it was my fault there was a coffin in our living room, that it was I who had changed our luck. But the many consonants of that confession, which out of my mouth would have been sharp and clear and not the least bit blurry, were caught in my throat.
    I opened my mouth, tried to push the words into the space between my mother and me.
    The oven door slammed shut. My mother flinched and let me go.
    •   •   •
    Our apartment filled up with people who had come to talk about my father and drink whiskey and stand in our living room with an empty coffin.
    Harry Jupiter was there, his fat face sagging with sorrow. He walked in wide circles around the cherrywood coffin, clutching a glass of rye as if it were the one thing keeping him upright. Father Barry was there as well. Father Barry who belonged at Good Shepherd now standing in our living room with all his bright white hair and his black suit that smelled of Mass incense. Father Barry making me think about the Body of Christ disappearing from the tomb on Easter morning, leaving it as empty as the coffin balanced in front of our radio.
    “We drove up,” somebody said. “We couldn’t face the subway,” making
subway
sound like polio.
    So many of these people I’d seen only in the portraits my father had shot of them, seen only in black and white. Now they stood in our living room sweating and drinking, looking in color much too lifelike.
    I do not know if the Keener was invited, or if perhaps she was so old and close to dying herself, she knew when someone had passed and turned up on her own. She