The Escape Artist

Jim “Zig” Zigarowski knew the pain was coming. It didn’t stop him. He was good with pain. Used to it. Still, he knew this one would sting. Since the day Zig arrived at this remote building at the back of Dover Air Force Base, every case was wrenching. Especially this one. Hence the pain.

“I thought Lou was on call today?” asked Dr. Womack, a short Hispanic man with a weak beard and baggy medical scrubs.

“We switched,” Zig said, wheeling the gurney a bit faster up the hallway, hoping to leave Womack behind. “Lou had a dinner date.”

“Really? I just saw Lou at dinner. All alone.”

Zig stopped. This was the moment where it could all implode. Zig shouldn’t be here. Shouldn’t have taken this gurney, or what was hidden below the light blue sheet that covered it. Would Womack stop him? Only if he realized what was going on.

“Huh. Guess I heard it wrong,” Zig said, flashing the same charming grin that made those first years after his divorce so eventful. With mossy green eyes, a hairline scar on his jaw, and silver-and-black hair cut like Cary Grant’s, Zig didn’t look fifty-two. But as he swiped his ID and the metal double doors popped open, leading to the heart of the military installation, he was feeling it.

A sign above the door read:

Womack paused, turning away. Zig grinned, picked up speed, and gave a hard push to the gurney that was draped with a light blue sheet, covering the corpse underneath. In between the corpse’s legs, pinning the sheet down, was a one-pound silver bucket. The gut bucket, they called it, because after the autopsy, it held all the internal organs. As Zig would tell new cadets: No matter how fat, thin, tall, or short you are—for every single one of us—all our organs fit in a one-pound bucket. For Zig, it was usually reassuring to know we all have that in common. Though right now, it wasn’t bringing the reassurance he needed.

Automatic lights blinked on, lighting the medical suite. With a pneumatic hiss, the double doors bit shut behind him. For well over a decade, Zig had spent his days working in this high-tech surgical room, which served as a mortuary for the US government’s most top secret and high-profile cases. On 9/11, the victims of the Pentagon attack were brought here. So were the victims of the attack on the USS Cole, the astronauts from the space shuttle Columbia, and the remains of well over fifty thousand soldiers and CIA operatives who fought in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and every secret location in between. Here, in Delaware of all places, at Dover Air Force Base, was America’s most important funeral home.

Be quick, Zig told himself, though when it came to preparing our fallen heroes for burial, Zig was never quick. Not until the job was done.

Readjusting his own blue medical scrubs, Zig could feel the pain inching even closer. On the head of the gurney, he reread the name scrawled on a jagged strip of masking tape:

“Welcome home, Nola,” he whispered.

The corpse swayed slightly as he locked the wheels on the gurney.

Sometimes at Dover, an incoming dead soldier would have your same birthday, or even your same name. Last year, a young Marine with the last name Zigarowski died of smoke inhalation at a base in Kosovo. Naturally, Zig grabbed that case.

Nola, named for New Orleans, Louisiana, was different.

“It’s been a while, hasn’t it?” Zig asked the shrouded body.

Lowering his head, he said a quick prayer—the same prayer he said in every case. Please give me strength to take care of the fallen so their family can begin healing. Zig knew too well how grieving families would need that strength.

On his left, on a medical rolling cart, were his tools in size order, from largest forceps to smallest scalpel. Zig reached for the blue plastic eye caps, which looked like contact lenses with small spikes on them. Zig generally was not a superstitious man, but he was superstitious about the eyes of the dead, which never close as easily as the movies would have you believe. When you look at a corpse, the corpse looks back. The eye caps were a mortician’s trick for keeping a client’s eyes shut.

How could he possibly have let another mortician work this case? Nola Brown wasn’t a stranger. He knew this girl, even if she wasn’t a girl anymore. She was twenty-six. Even from her outline under the sheet, he could see it: strong and built like a soldier. Zig knew her from Pennsylvania, back when she was twelve. She was friends—a fellow Girl Scout—with Zig’s daughter, Maggie.

Magpie. His Little Star, Zig thought, reliving those easy days before everything went so bad. There it was, the pain that now made his bones feel like they were hollowed out, simple to snap.

Had Zig known Nola well? He remembered that night, back at the Girl Scout campout. Zig was a chaperone, Nola the new girl. Adopted. Naturally, the other girls seized on that. But it was more than that. Some girls are quiet. Nola was silent. Silent Nola. A few of the girls thought that made Nola tough. But Zig knew better. Sometimes silence is beaten into people.

When you looked Nola’s way, her black eyes with flecks of gold would beg you not to engage. Zig had been warned: Silent Nola was already on her fourth school. Expelled from the other three for fighting, one girl said. Knocked out someone’s front teeth with the blunt end of a Yoo-hoo bottle. Another of Magpie’s friends said she was caught stealing too, but c’mon, ever since the Salem witch trials, groups of twelve-year-old girls couldn’t be trusted.

“You really took a beating that night, didn’t you?” Zig asked Nola’s corpse as he grabbed the outdated iPod that sat in a SoundDock on a nearby shelf. With a few clicks, Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell was playing from the cheap speaker. Even morticians needed working music.

“I owe you forever for what you did that night,” Zig sighed.

To this day, Zig still didn’t know who threw the can of orange soda into the campfire, or how long it was there. He could still see the campfire’s smoke blowing sideways. For a moment, there was a high-pitched whistle, like a shrieking teapot. Then, out of nowhere, a loud pop like a cherry bomb. Hunks of aluminum exploded in every direction. Most of the girls screamed, then laughed.

Maggie’s instinct was to freeze. Silent Nola’s instinct was to jump sideways. Nola slammed into Maggie, who was standing there, frozen in fear as shards of razor-sharp metal flew at Zig’s daughter’s face.

At the impact, Maggie crashed to the dirt, completely safe. Still in mid-fall, Silent Nola let out a yelp, a screech, like an injured dog, then held the side of her head, blood everywhere.

The metal can had sliced away a chunk of her ear. The smoke was still blowing sideways. To this day, Zig didn’t know if Nola did it purposefully, tackling his daughter to protect her—or if it was just dumb luck, the fortunate result of Nola’s flight reflex. All he knew for sure was, without Nola, his daughter would’ve taken that metal bomb in the face. Everyone agreed. On that night, Nola had saved Zig’s daughter.

Before anyone could react, Zig had scooped Nola up and drove her to the nearest emergency room. Maggie sat next to Nola in the backseat, thanking her for what she did, and also looking at her dad in a whole new way. For those few moments, on the way to the hospital, Nola—and Zig for scooping her up—were heroes.

“Thank you!” his daughter kept saying to Nola. “Thank you for what y— You okay?”

Nola never answered. She sat there, knees to her chest, eyes down as she gripped her ear. No doubt, she was in pain. The top of her ear was gone. Tears ran down her cheeks. But she never made a sound. Silent Nola had learned to take it in quiet.

At the hospital, as the doctor got ready to stitch her up, a nurse told Nola to hold tight to Zig’s hand. Nola shook her head.

Three hours and forty stitches later, Nola’s adoptive father stormed into the emergency room, smelling of bourbon and the breath mints to cover it. The first words out of his mouth were, “The Girl Scouts better be paying for this!”

As Nola left the hospital that night, head down and shuffling her feet as she trailed meekly behind her dad, Zig wanted to say something. Wanted to thank this girl, but more than that— Wanted to help this girl. He never did.

Of course, Zig and Maggie brought a huge gift basket to Nola’s house. Nola’s adoptive dad opened the door, grabbed it from Maggie’s hands, and grunted a thanks. Zig kept at it, making calls to see how Nola was doing. One night, he even stopped by to check in on her. He never got a response. Undeterred, Zig nominated her for one of the big Girl Scout honors. Nola missed the ceremony.

A year later, Zig had the very worst night of his life. It took his marriage, his life, and most important, it took his daughter, his Magpie. Nola had saved her on the night of the campfire, but all Maggie got was another eleven months. Zig would forever blame himself for all of it.

Though Zig didn’t know it at the time, Nola had moved on to her fifth school. Zig never saw her again. Until tonight.

“Don’t you worry, Nola, you’re in good hands now,” Zig promised as he gripped the surgical sheet in one hand and the eye caps in the other. “And thank you again for what you did.”

In the Mortuary at Dover, some say they do the job because they see their own children in the lives of these dead soldiers. Zig shook his head at maudlin explanations like that. He did this job for one reason: He was good at it. This was the gift God gave him. He saw every dead body as a puzzle, and no matter how bad the wounds, he could put each body back together so the family could say a proper goodbye. He did it day after day, soldier after soldier—over two thousand of them by now—and none of them had made him see those darkest days with his own daughter. Until tonight, when he saw the woman who saved her.

As he rolled the sheet down to Nola’s neck and slid the eye caps into place, shutting her eyes, his throat tightened like it was gripped by a fist. This was the pain he was dreading. Even when you’re ready for it, nothing sneaks up on you like grief.

Nola’s head was turned sideways, her left cheek flash-burned from the plane crash that killed her. Fallen #2,356.