Suzanne and Marcel Keres were young when they met and had their first child. Young enough that they really shouldn't have gotten married as the fix to the problem of an unplanned pregnancy, but they did. They were idealistic and thought they could make it work. Two years after the birth of their son, on the cusp of talking divorce, Suzanne turned up pregnant yet again. This time, hoping a new baby would breathe new life into the marriage, the couple put all talk of divorce on hold. Born in the late spring of 1990, Elena was just what the family needed. A beacon of sunshine, in an otherwise, tense and dark situation. For seven years, the small family managed to make it work. Suzanne finished college, Marcel opened up a business, and the children started school. Their nanny taught them stories of New Orleans, their home. Of people who used to live in the Quarter, and how life once was. Elena was inthralled with all of it, with the idea of spirits wandering the streets. She loved LaFayette Cemetary almost as much as her own backyard.

When Elena was eight, her parents finally filed for divorce, something that had been coming for years. With no discussion for the children, Elena and her brother were packed up and moved to Boston where Suzanne was originally from. At eight, Elena didn't understand really why she didn't get to see her daddy everynight. When summer rolled around and she was put on a plane with her brother to go see him, she was beside herself with joy and cried when she was sent back to Boston in the fall. This would repeate, every summer until Elena was eighteen years old.

Every few years, a new baby would join the family. Eventually there would be three from Suzanne and two from Marcel. Both parents had remarried while Elena was in middle school. Always closest to her big brother, Elena never really felt the connection with her siblings who were all at least twelve years younger than her. The summer between freshman and sophomore year found Elena spending a lot of time at the nearby funeral home, where she wiggled her way into working the front desk area. She had a sweet and calming presence, that the owner felt helped those in mourning. By the second summer, she had pestered the morticians enough to let her help them out as much as she was allowed. Generally this meant doing hair and makeup for the deceased and nothing else. Sometimes she helped dress the departed. Her father promised not to tell her mother, knowing the woman would have a fit about her daughter working with the dead. Her father just saw it as how New Orleans came through her. She was one with the city.

Elena didn't tell her mother that she'd applied to college in New Orleans. She'd always felt bitter toward her mother for how the divorce was handled, like she'd been taken from her father. So when she got into Lousiana State University in New Orleans, she packed her things and moved in with her father, much to her mother's dismay. She resumed her job at the funeral home, now apprientacing to become a mortician herself. She studied forensics in college, lending to pre-med, and at work she studied how to embalm the dead. By her sophomore year in college she was a full fledged mortician, but wasn't allowed to cremate, as she didn't have the certification to work the crematory. She thought about studying mortuary science, but ended up with forensic and applying for med school when she realized as a coroner she could merge the two jobs.

After college graduation, Elena stuck to working at the funeral home. She was good at it, and it gave her an income while she put herself through med school. After finishing med school she moved to Boston where she got a residency with the Suffolk County Coroner's office. She excelled at her job, and after knowing far more than a recently graduated med student should, her boss asked what she had done before. When he found out she was a mortician he said it all made sense, and stopped trying to teach her the basics. She learned in three years what should have taken seven because she could pass up a lot of the program.

Living this close to her mother has been a struggle, but she does like being back near her brother. She still visits her father every summer and often during the holidays. Until recently when she woke up in San Francisco, rather than Back Bay Boston.