“I would help you bury a body” I’d always say to Lyla since we were just kids. I mean isn’t that the type of shit best friends said to each other all the time?
“Oh yeah? where would we do it?” she’d ask with a playful, carefree air to it. The where changed over the years as we grew older, getting more and more sophisticated with time.
Back when we weren’t old enough to drive, we’d ponder the where to be Lyla’s backyard. After 16 it was dumping it in a ditch at the side of the road somewhere in the middle of the empty stretch of off-roads on the way to Muskoka, Ontario.
Then we played around with horror movie ideas for some time, sparing feasibility like letting a body soak in acid or chopping it up in little pieces to burn in the fireplace on cold winter nights, “yum BBQ” Lyla had joked. Of course these ideas were impractical and eccentric at best, as if burning flesh could smell like roses and lavender.
Until I got an internship at an Engineering firm employed by the City of Toronto to manage the massive underground infrastructure of the city’s storm and sewage pipelines. Part of the deal was locating lost manhole sites buried under shrubs or thick, unmaintained grass fields. My coworker and I would spend our work days driving out to these addresses where the manhole should be and flying drones over the patch of land in hopes the thermal radiation from sewage underneath will give its location away. Half of these we would find and mark “unaccessible”. Unaccessible perhaps for the City’s maintenance crew who could potentially consider the site unsafe for men and equipment to get through and risk an OSHA violation but certainly not unaccessible to go in the dead of night to say… dispose of a body. One of these manholes happened to be just a 50 minute drive from Lyla’s house, and within its two mile radius there was nothing but an abandoned paper mill. Bingo! So, that’s the where Lyla and I have stuck with ever since; over a decade now to be exact.
Then 2 days ago, Lyla calls to ask for the exact address of our manhole. I laugh, “why? you finally got a body to bury?”. “Just send it over”, she snaps. So, I do.
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“I would help you bury a body” I’d always say to Lyla since we were just kids. I mean isn’t that the type of shit best friends said to each other all the time?
You just never expect to actually be doing it. Accomplice to a murder, I couldn’t stop thinking to myself as I follow Lyla out of her car to watch her pop the trunk that revealed what looked like a body wrapped in black tarp.
“Lyla what…” I whisper with my eyes trailing back and forth from the body to her face, while hers remain fixated on the body. She looks grim, giving nothing away. The silence rings my ears so loud that I feel a headache coming on.
A moment too long we stand there until she makes an attempt to move the body out of the trunk. I think the goal was to carry it, 200 ft or so off the road, to where the manhole was, hardly visible under the frosty blanket of grass. But I think I understand the meaning behind the idiom “dead weight” a little too literally now as I watch the body clumsily roll off the trunk and onto the ground with a soft thud. And for some reason the derision and disbelief of the night makes me laugh.
Lyla looks at me, unimpressed. She might as well have looked through me because she simply turns around, picks up the body by its feet and starts dragging it through the snow. I nudge again, “Lyla can you explain whats going on? Who is this? What did you do?? Are you okay?!”
She keeps walking, saying nothing. I guess now wasn’t the time. We reach the manhole cover and I kneel by her to help lift it while studying her moonlit face. The night is cold, and yet she is sweating. She is clearly anxious and again, I can’t help but chuckle in amusement seeing Lyla like this. She is usually the one taking pressure off any given situation. She possessed a light, airy ease to her that brought comfort to whoever was around her and yet, here we were. The deafening quiet of this moment was making me uncomfortable, and my headache was getting worse. I wish she’d tell me what was going through her mind.
I watch her as she’s positioning the body to push down into the manhole opening. This was my best friend. We went through first loves and many heartbreaks together, experienced loss of a parent together. At restaurants we shared meals, at coffeeshops we fought over the cup of coffee with more whip cream. We volunteered at food drives together and we shoplifted at Target together. I knew Lyla. I had known her all my life.
So, what had caused her to do this? I ask again, “Lyla, what happened? Who is this?” My soft voice echoes in the dead silence turning my headache into a migraine. I catch a glimpse of her teary eyes before she turns her back to me again to return to the car.
I look down at the body falling into the sewage line, soon to be lost under the city, the black tarp ripping off as it scrapes against the manhole opening. Revealing a bloody, bashed in head with a face, frozen in disbelief, belonging to me…
