The Journey Prize Stories 25 (26 page)

Name: VERNON, Joy. Case #1734512, age: 19, race: white, sex: female.

Cause of death: cerebral hypoxia

due to: asphyxiation

due to: aspiration of water into the air passages

Manner of death: drowning

In the autopsy photo, her eyes are open. Brown irises. Eyes like wood like warm like walnut. Report says sclerae clear. Report says ears pierced once each lobe and nose unremarkable.

She sang back-up for Fiona Apple, says the newspaper. And LuAnne de Lesseps. She also released a single of her own, which you can purchase on iTunes for $1.29.

My sister sang before she married. Christian pop, which her manager sold as gospel. We weren’t religious – our car wore a Darwin fish. But her manager said there was a market. He said, Praise radio will eat her up with double catsup and a side of fries.

I never liked him. He wore T-shirts with milk stained down the front. Cheerios, he’d say. Sometimes it’s so hard to get them in the mouth.

The new linguist started today. She’ll analyze the resonant frequencies of vocal tracts. F-values, she calls them. How we form words from the lips and the teeth and the tongue and the lungs. She combs her hair very smooth. I think she must use a bun-setter.

I brought a coffee to her computer station to introduce myself. I said, “Well if it doesn’t work out here, I think the CIA is hiring.”

She typed the rest of her sentence, then pointed to the small ceramic pig on her desk. It wore a Post-it. The Post-it said,
Cunning linguist jokes: $1
.

She’s bright. But she knows she’s bright, which makes it less attractive. Still.

We work in the basement where you don’t see the sun. You see: two computer monitors with equalizer waves; desks made from
highly recyclable aluminum; ergonomic chairs, whirly. Our lab is fragrance-free and climate-controlled, volume-controlled, light-controlled. Plants cannot grow here. We keep a synthetic lemon tree by the vending machine.

To isolate the voices on a CVR tape, you have to clear the extraneous noise in layers. The engine roar, the static. Like filing sand off a fossil, stratum by stratum. Blowing off the dust. Audio archaeology, let’s say. Let’s say Indiana Jones.

I like to listen to routine take-offs and landings. The pilots sound like performance poets. I picture them crinkled over the control board in black berets, anemic fingers snapping, clasping espressos, eyes cast to the far corner, too cool for contact, for the stewardess with the pretzels and the can of V8.

Flaps five.

Flaps five.

Flaps one.

Flaps one.

Flaps up.

Say what?

Flaps up.

Flaps up.

My sister toured once, ten years ago, after her junior year of high school. She hit the major towns on the Praise radio circuit. Lubbock, Texas, to Lynchburg, Virginia. Lynchburg, I had said when she showed me her itinerary. Lynchburg? She shrugged. They have the world’s largest evangelical university.

The tour was eight weeks, to private Christian schools and rodeos. Her merch team sold chastity rings. She brought me home a mug that said
TEAM JESUS
and filled it with prayer jellybeans. Red for the blood you shed. Black for my sinful heart. Yellow for the Heaven above, and so on. I still have them. I think she meant it as a joke.

She died in childbirth. A C-section that led to a blood clot that led to a stroke. We talked on the phone the night before. She told me they had painted the nursery yellow, which the decorator described as “String.” She said that yellow can be shrill; it’s hard to get yellow right. She said she got it right. She said, you know the colour of a wheel of lemon when you hold it to the sun? I said, perfect. Have you settled on a name? She said yes. Jaime. Because on paper it reads like
j’aime
.

Jaime turned four last month. I talked to her on Skype. When she grins she thrusts her chin out like a goat. I can picture her in a garden this way, neck craned to the sun, as daylilies do, and sunflowers. Heliotropism, I think it’s called.

After lunch, I found Joy Vernon’s single on YouTube. The song is called
Delilah
, the video shot at her father’s bee farm. She sings against a barn wall in a breezy shirtdress, and she picks her banjo. A low, pinging banjo, against that wall, and her voice is blue and dusky.

Halfway through the video, I felt a brush at my elbow, and I
turned to find April, the new linguist, behind me in her chair. She had wheeled it from her desk across the aisle. I shifted, and she rolled nearer.

“She’s lovely, isn’t she?” she said when the video ended.

“Yes,” I said.

“Could you play the song again?”

I dragged back the play bar. We watched the video from the start. Bees in the wisteria. Joy’s hair in her eyes as she bows to see the strings.

“Carrot slice?” said April. She had packed her lunch in a Japanese bento box. Everything compartmentalized. A slot for the chopsticks.

“Thank you.” She passed a carrot into my palm. It looked carefully cut. On a diagonal, the edge serrated.

“I used to work in Homicide,” she said. “Voice ID from emergency phone calls, and so on.” We still faced the computer screen – Joy at the barn again, strumming the banjo between verses. “This one case, the vic was an opera singer.” She paused to snap her lunchbox. “I never liked opera. But after a week on the case, I ordered her recording of
Evita
online. I listened to the tracks over and over.”

I nodded. The YouTube video had ended. April turned to me. Her cheeks looked worn somehow, smooth and unsunned, but as if the skin were pulled too tightly to her ears.

She continued, “When you replay a voice in evidence for eight hours a day, you can almost know them. And when you catch a glimpse of their life before, you get immersed. I get immersed. In the knowing of them.”

I stared at her.

She looked down. “Unprofessional, I know.”

When she raised her eyes, I was still staring. She held the eye contact. In that moment, I understood that she understood that I understood everything she said.