Free The Girl in the Wall by Alison Preston Page B

there in the last moments. If they stepped out briefly and missed that last good-for-nothing breath, they never forgave themselves. Mrs. Mortimer worked around them, inside them, through them.
    She always felt a little disappointed when she heard, “She died just a few minutes ago.” Like her customers, she wanted to “be there for it.”
    Families called her to wards at the hospitals: the St. Boniface, the Grace, the Victoria, the Misericordia, the General, the Children’s, the Women’s Pavilion. They called her to emergency rooms and intensive care units and to the Princess Elizabeth long-term care facility. They called her to their own homes and to funeral parlours, to lakeside cottages, farmers’ fields, city parks and community centres — wherever the dead landed. And they landed everywhere.
    Mrs. Mortimer didn’t own a car, so someone would usually come and pick her up. She would be at the curb, at a moment’s notice, with her camera in hand. She didn’t pay a lot of attention to getting ready like some women do, just a dab of lavender behind each ear.
    It was a mystery to her at first why so many people had a need to capture their loved ones in this way, but she didn’t argue with their desires. What she did do was save up her earnings. Some people paid her handsomely and she never argued with that. She saved with an eye to purchasing the only thing she ever wanted: a long, low, ranch-style house on Wellington Crescent.
    When she was a very young child, when her mother was still operating at partial capacity, her parents had made a yearly production of taking a drive to see the Christmas lights along the crescent. Her mother oohed and aahed and breathed out her fiery fumes. Her father pointed and exclaimed and organized his neck inside his tight white collar. George made snide comments and said “phony” a lot.
    Mrs. Mortimer stayed quiet on the drives, as was her way. No one knew what she was thinking; they never did back then. But she was thinking something. It wasn’t the festive Christmas decorations she saw on those long ago winter nights, but the light inside the houses, that ran sideways on and on, room after room, the impossible length of the homes.
    Sometimes she saw a movement within the light and she imagined that it was a lady wearing high heels and lipstick and oven mitts. She pictured herself floating next to the woman, toward the bright kitchen with its fancy oven that warmed a chicken pot pie from Eaton’s third floor. Mrs. Mortimer was sure that the glow in those long low homes differed from the colourless air at her own house. It was made from different stuff and existed only for the likes of the high-heeled lady and her lively friends and relatives. She would find her way inside that light one day. For now, she kept it in the back of her mind.
    She didn’t mention her dream-house plan to anyone, not even George. It would be discouraged, she knew, like most things were. The sheen would be removed from it if she put it out there to be batted around like an old softball. It would fall apart at the seams and its insides would tumble out and litter the hard earth, be ground to dust under mean feet. No. It was best to keep this dream inside.
    As time passed and she had more and more photographs under her belt, she came to understand the need some people had to capture their loved ones in death. The need was the mystery itself: the mystery of death. Death as a lifeless face was something to peer into, to study and try to understand: to solve.
    To herself, Mrs. Mortimer called her little operation “Capturing Death,” but only to herself. She had run it by George and he’d said no, it was no good.
    Actually, he’d said, “Aye yi yi, Mrs. Mortimer. You can’t call it that. You’ll frighten away all your prospective customers.”
    So she didn’t call it anything.

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    Even before it happened, in April 1970,