Tonio by Jonathan Reeder

Author:Jonathan Reeder
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO026000, FAM014000
Publisher: Scribe Publications Pty Ltd.
Published: 2015-08-26T04:00:00+00:00

11

I took advantage of Miriam’s absence to ask Dennis if he had gone to Tonio’s viewing at the funeral home last week. (What a question! — and I just … asked it.)

‘Yeah, sure I did.’ He nodded with his entire upper body. ‘There were four or five of us. We biked over. There was a girl, too. She didn’t want to join us at first, but then she did. Cool.’

‘Not that girl he’d been photographing?’

‘No, not her,’ Dennis answered. ‘She wasn’t part of our group of friends. At least, I never met her.’

‘I’ll be up front,’ I said. ‘Miriam and I didn’t go see him. When we said our goodbyes at the AMC … just after they unplugged the life support, and he was in fact already dead … he still had his own face. The face we always knew. Just before that, it had been alive. That’s how we want to remember him. We were afraid he’d look totally different once they’d laid him out for viewing.’

‘It was still totally him,’ Dennis reassured me. ‘Totally Tonio. Just like we knew him.’

I knew he wasn’t criticising our decision, but still a pang of guilt ripped through my heart. If what Dennis said was true, then we had let Tonio’s body, entirely recognisable as his own, lie in that open coffin for days on end, alone and unseen. Only four or five friends had had the courage to cast one last glance on him. Maybe the betrayal I’d felt the whole week wasn’t unjustified after all. Maybe I should have held a constant vigil, right up until the last moment, coping with his gradually drooping face — that sweet, beautiful face that was now shut off to the world by lid and earth, and could only be pieced together from photo-album snippets.

‘Dennis, tell me’ — I tried to make my voice sound as natural as possible — ‘was Tonio wearing a red-and-white striped shirt in the coffin?’

‘Sure was,’ he smiled, as though he were happy to please me. ‘His favourite shirt. His macho shirt. He was wearing it.’

‘Oh, so it fitted after all,’ Miriam said as she came into the room with a tray. ‘We were wondering, because … he was so swollen from the internal bleeding.’

I considered — but kept it to myself — that they might have had to cut the shirt open at the back to get it to fit. I recall the woman from the funeral home asking if we wanted Tonio shaved. Yes, he should be clean-shaven, we’d said.

‘Should we have had them shave off his stubble, actually?’ I asked, primarily to bring the discussion of the open coffin to a close. ‘I mean, it was his style.’

‘In the coffin, he had a heck of a five o’clock shadow,’ Dennis insisted. ‘Like always.’

‘Maybe it was too difficult,’ Miriam suggested, ‘because of the wound … they might not have wanted to tear it open.’

I closed my eyes, and saw the double-dotted line of clotted blood — almost geometrically parallel — that ran from his neck up over his chin and upper lip.

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