Free The Divide by Nicholas Evans Page A

given for the death certificate and forms to complete for the shipping of the body to New York. The only airline able to ship bodies out of Missoula was Northwest, which meant connecting through Minneapolis. Jim Pickering had made the necessary arrangements. Abbie’s casket, he explained, would be placed in something called an “air tray,” a box with a plywood bottom and a cardboard top.
    At dinner last night, Sarah had casually announced that her father would be meeting them at La Guardia and that it might be better if Ben flew back to New Mexico from Minneapolis.
    “I was thinking I’d stay over in New York until the funeral,” he said. “You know, help arrange things, spend some time with Joshie.”
    “We can handle it.”
    “I know you can. I’d just like to be involved.”
    “Please don’t make an issue of this.”
    “I’m not. I—”
    “There’s nothing that can’t be sorted out by phone. Come if you want, I just can’t face a scene between you and Daddy at the airport.”
    “I suppose it’s okay if I come to the funeral?”
    “Why do you have to be so hostile?”
    Ben narrowly avoided saying something he would regret. But he was getting tired of being bullied and excluded and on this issue he wasn’t going to give in. There was a job to be done. And he wanted to see Josh; he had to see him. Any father would feel the same.
    “Listen,” he said as steadily as he could. “She’s my daughter too. And there won’t be a scene. I can handle your parents. I’ve done it for years. I want to come with you. Please.”
    She sighed and raised her eyebrows but that was the end of it.
    The paperwork was done now, but Sarah still hadn’t emerged from the viewing room, so Ben walked along to the room where a selection of urns and caskets stood on display. As he wandered around inspecting them, it occurred to him that perhaps he should have opted for something more lavish than the plain wood casket. Even now, Sarah was probably thinking, yet again, that he had been cheap. The more splendid ones cost around four thousand dollars. But they looked so pretentious and too grown-up. No doubt somewhere, he mused darkly, they had a special range for the younger deceased. The only thing he liked was an ornate bronze urn sculpted like a mountain, with pine trees and three deer—an antlered male, a female, and a cute little fawn. It was kind of Disney, but much more like Abbie. But, of course, they weren’t cremating her.
    “Shall we go?”
    Sarah stood framed in the doorway, Jim Pickering hovering discreetly behind her. She was wearing sunglasses, her face as pale as her raincoat. Ben stepped toward her. He wanted to put his arms around her. It seemed the most natural thing in the world. But she read his intention and with the smallest gesture of her hand signaled that he shouldn’t.
    “Are you okay?” he asked stupidly.
    “Fine.”
    “I was just having a look here and wondering if we should get a better casket,” he blundered on. “I mean, I like the plain one, but . . .”
    From behind her shades, she gave the room a quick, derisive scan.
    “There’s nothing here. I’ll get one at home.”
     
     
     
    The plane took off on schedule into a clear blue sky. The rain had stopped just as they arrived at the airport as though it had been laid on only for their visit. From the windows of the departure lounge they had seen the wagon trundle Abbie out across the damp asphalt to the plane where four young men, chatting all the while, lifted and stowed it.
    Now, as the plane banked and headed east, the forest skidding in vivid shades of sunlit green across the port-holes, Sarah thought of the body tilting coldly in its narrow case below her in the dark of the hold. The fact of her daughter’s death remained too vast to grasp and perhaps that was why her mind kept flitting strangely to these lesser facts, the circumstantial detail of the girl’s unliving presence.
    Standing alone by the open casket at the