My Second Death (12 page)

“I
am
fucking crazy,” I say. “That’s not news. I mean I’m not out of control, I didn’t
do
those things. I didn’t
try
to kill her.” I pull my hair out of my shirt and loop it into a loose knot at the back of my neck. I come back and stand in front of him.

“I know,” he says. “Dave told me. I know she let you cut her. You went too far. You called the cops. You saved her life. You weren’t trying to kill her.”

“No.” I look up at the ceiling. “Shit.” I don’t understand why I’m so angry.

I say, “She knew I liked it. The blood. I liked watching her cut. She was in the bathroom with her leg up on the sink and she had the razor snicking through her skin and I came in and she saw my face. She saw I liked it.”

“Mickey — ”

“She held out the razor and said, here, you can try it.”

He makes a noise like he’s going to say something else.

I put my hand over my mouth and then pull it down. “I didn’t cut her. I never touched her. I stood there and watched, but I didn’t touch her. I didn’t lick her blood. I didn’t do any of those
psycho
things she said I did. I just — I just fucking
watched
. But she was bleeding a lot and I thought she might — you know, be in trouble. So I called the EMTs.”

I lower my head and look at Aidan. He’s staring at me.

“The guy I killed when I was ten — ”

“My God, shut up, Mickey. You push a pervert wannabe rapist down the stairs and he breaks his neck. Jesus. That was the sanest thing any ten-year-old could do. No one blames you for that.
No
one.”

I come to the doorway and crouch down. “I was going to say the guy I killed when I was ten was the only crazy thing I’ve ever done.”

I don’t know if he’s noticed that he sat up straighter and leaned his shoulders forward when I crouched down. The skin between his eyebrows wrinkles. “No,” he says.

“Yeah. Yes. That was pretty crazy. You know what I did when he fell down the stairs?”

He’s watching my mouth move, frowning at the shapes it makes like he’s trying to read a foreign language.

“I went down the stairs after him.”

I remember what really happened. I dream about the stairs a lot, but the dreams are always different than what happened. In reality there was no blood. Just the guy in his shabby pants and yellow polo shirt lying there with his head toward the basement floor and his feet halfway up the stairs. I noticed the smell when I was edging my feet around his hips. The dark wet spot spreading on the front of his beige pants. And then I climbed down to where his sagging fat face lolled to the side, his eyes half-open. I was only ten. I didn’t know that eyes stay open when you die. No one had told me that. In the movies, people die with their eyes closed. I was fascinated by the shiny white gleam under his half-closed eyelids. I put my hand out. I pushed my fingertip against an eyeball. It was moist and pulpy like a skinned grape. I pressed my fingernail into the eye and watched the pinkish viscous liquid well up.

“Like slicing an aloe leaf,” I say. “That’s what it looked like. Have you ever seen aloe sap?”

Aidan doesn’t say anything.

“Anyway, the point is, I remember the whole thing and I didn’t feel — anything, except maybe curious — when I saw a dead body. And I’m not ‘blocking’ or whatever. The shrinks, everyone tried to come up with reasons for why I am the way I am. There’s no reason. The guy was dead and I felt curious, that’s all. I wanted to touch a dead eye. It was sort of — ” I try to think of the right word.
Electric
. “It was a buzz.”

His eyes shift. He’s looking at me strangely. I don’t know what the look means.

“You think you know me. You think I’m a broken person who can be fixed, or, or the result of some terrible tragedy. But that’s not me. You don’t know
shit
about me.”

His lips part but he doesn’t say anything. And then his eyelashes tremble and sweep shut. When he looks up again his eyes are glistening. He roughly brushes the back of his hand across his cheeks.

I stand up and go into the bathroom and slam the door.

I rinse my mouth out in the bathroom and splash cold water on my face until I feel less like throwing up. When I come back out, he’s gone.

I flop down on my bed. Lie still for a while watching headlights sweep over the ceiling. The fire trucks and ambulances and cop cars have long ago cleared out. Normal city sounds, rap music and tinny TV squawks and car horns, drift up. When I rest my palm across my left breast I feel the solid kick of my heart and it is slow and rhythmic. My heartbeat is not accelerated.

After a few hours of lying still staring at the ceiling I get up and walk out of my bedroom. Aidan’s bedroom door is shut but lemon yellow light haloes the inside of the doorframe. The cat is in the kitchen, lying on the counter. He gets up and arches his back and grunts when he sees me. I open the silverware drawer. There is a fruit paring knife. I feel the matte handle, the faint glisten of steel in the shadows. I put my left hand on the cat’s head. The cat bucks its skull against my palm, its purr humming like machinery. I set the blade of the knife delicately against the underside of the cat’s jaw, where the soft down fur meets in a Vshape.

The cat squeaks and licks its lips and tries to pull its head away, but my left hand cups its skull in a strong grip. The cat struggles. The knife doesn’t waver.

And then I scoop up the cat and go outside. The night air is biting cold. White flakes drift, uncertain, from the pink-tinged sky. Frozen tree limbs creak. The cat struggles and I let him go. He jumps out of my arms. His paws thump softly on the wooden slats. He bounds down the stairs and disappears into darkness.

I drive the knife blade into the soft pulpwood. When I cup my cold hand around my neck my pulse is slow and steady. Nothing has changed.

I am still sitting on the steps in the cold when my phone rings. I sit with my thumb over the delete button. The number looks strange to me, even after all these months. For more than ten years my older brother has had a 212 area code, and now the number has the familiar 330 Akron area code. I wonder why he moved back to Ohio. It occurs to me that it’s odd I never asked him. We talk on the phone all the time, we always have, but we never seem to talk about things normal siblings would. I grin a little, imagining the two of us trying to hold an ordinary conversation.
How was your day? Oh, it was fabulous — I got my hair done! How was yours?

I pick up the phone. “What?”

“Hey, babe. Come meet me.”

“Where?”

“My place,” he says. “Come over. I want to show you something.”

I close my eyes and rest forehead on my knees. “Why?”

“Because I
said
,” he hisses. And then he stops talking. For a second there is silence. And he laughs, the sound of wind chimes in summer. “My darling, we live, like,
ten
minutes away from each other now and it’s like we’re strangers. We never see each other.” His voice softens. “Did you ever think that would happen? I mean, in a million years. The two of us. We used to be in
sep
arable.”

“We haven’t seen a whole lot of each other for a long time,” I say. “You moved away. I grew up.”

“Grew up.” He sighs. I hear him suck on air. The static sound of an exhalation. I imagine the smell of his cigarette smoke. “Do you think it’s inevitable? The inevitable encroachment of adulthood?”

His voice sounds like smoke and chocolate. Older and raspier and exactly the same.

The basement. The first cigarette Dave ever smoked was in the basement. This was when I was ten, when the man was still living with us. He was at work that afternoon. I found Dave in the basement looking through the man’s things. Dave found a crushed red and white Marlboro pack in the inside pocket of a corduroy jacket. He spun around when I came to the doorway.

When he saw it was me he smiled and held up the carton. “Did you know he smokes?”

I didn’t really know what cigarettes were. Neither of our parents are smokers.

We sat on the couch and he struggled with the lighter. His forehead contacted in a frown as he rasped his thumb across the spin-wheel again and again trying for a spark. When he got the struggling flame he held it out to me. Wanted me to put the cigarette in my mouth first.

“Why?”

“Because,” he said. “It looks fun in the movies. I think you’ll like it.”

I put the cigarette in my mouth. It tasted like bitter paper. He held the flame to the end and said, “Breathe in.”

I did and felt the hot smoke coiling in my mouth and pressing down on my lungs like a child’s fist. I coughed. Handed him the cigarette.

“You don’t like it?”

I shook my head.

“Well, you will.”

“Why?”

He smiled and took the cigarette from me. Held it in two fingers and put the butt to his pursed lips like a socialite. He inhaled delicately, swallowed a cough. His cheeks and the edges of his nostrils turned pink. “Smoking,” he said, “is addictive. It means that you are a smoker now. That you like to smoke. When you grow up you’ll smoke.”

“Really?”

He took another drag, rolled the smoke in his mouth, breathed it out and coughed. Nodded.

I held out my hand for the cigarette. But he held it away from me. “No, no, no. Now I want it. I’m a smoker now.”

“Because of me?”

“Yes,” he said. He sat down on the couch next to me and sucked again at the cigarette. He breathed out, slowly. “They cause cancer, you know. I suppose I’ll die of this.”

I sat next to him and watched him. I didn’t know what cancer looked like.

He held out the cigarette. “Okay. You can try again. Just a little breath, all right?” And when I did, watching me blink and try to swallow the smoke, he said, “Mom always said she didn’t want us to smoke. Because smoking kills. But it’s okay. I want to do the things you do. We’ll always be partners. Right?”

A few months later I would kill a man. But he didn’t know that then. I did like that cigarette, the first one that we smoked. I have never smoked again but I like the scorch smell. It’s just that I’m a runner and so I worry about things like lung capacity and VO2.

And I worry about things like whether he was telling the truth. I know now that Dave was lying about the nature of nicotine addiction, but I have never been sure whether he was telling the truth about his smoking because I’d done it first. I do know that our whole lives, neither one of us has ever gotten in trouble alone. Not even when I killed that man. Oh, he didn’t have all the medications or the psych unit stay, but he saw his share of shrinks. At first, our parents took him to their therapist for family talks. Dave said it helped him, so he started going once a week. After each visit, he smiled, cried a bit, told our parents he felt safer, saner, healed. In private he raged, spittle collecting in the corners of his mouth. Never at me. Just in general. He hated those visits so much. But he went so I wouldn’t be the only one with the weekly visits, the medication, the strained silences.

“Look,” I say, “I’m not coming over. Today was kind of a — a long day.”

“But everything is — look, babe, I need you. I’ve got something to talk to you about.”

“No,” I say. “Not tonight.”

He sighs. I imagine him stubbing out the cigarette, the black and red scorch mark it leaves like an exhausted eye.

I don’t want to hear him try to convince me to come over. I don’t want to hear what he has to tell me. I hang up the phone and wonder where the cat has got to, if it will die of exposure or get hit by a car, and if either of those deaths is better than the quick clean slash of a knife blade.

When I wake up in the morning my hair smells like smoke, and the cotton pillowcase is gritty with fine ash.

I get up and trip on the yellow legal pad lying on my bedroom floor. Aidan’s notes. Because I don’t want to think about the smell of smoke or the house across the street, I sit down on the edge of the bed and read through them. His handwriting is as neat and evenly spaced as if he wrote in time to a metronome. I’ve noticed also that while he’s not particularly clean, he is often tidy, the sole exceptions being during moments of intense artistic creation when he will strew a room with paint and turpentine and the accoutrements of his art.

His mother’s name is at the top of the yellow paper:
Barb Devorecek, 53, d. 06-23
. Below he has listed the names of his father and two sisters, and three additional names with the notation “former clients of B.D.” by them.

I stand up and go to the window. The burnt house is a ragged shell with black scorch marks on the sagging roof. Yellow crime tape is wrapped around the house like some Tim Burtonesque nightmare Christmas present. I don’t know what to do now. The county medical examiners have the charred remains of the body. Any evidence of handwriting is gone and after yesterday, after my first physical confrontation with Akron’s finest since I was ten years old, the last thing in the world that I want to do is draw more attention to myself by asking too many questions. They will investigate. And I will just watch the story unfold on CNN like every other American with a TV tray and a microwaved dinner.

My hands feel empty. I put my palms lightly on the cold glass and tell myself that the mystery is still there, that I still have a puzzle to solve. But I don’t. It’s been wrested from me by the same invisible hands that shoved me face first into it last week.

I hear the creak of the shower faucet and steady thrum of water against the fiberglass hull of the shower stall.

And realize I still have one more lead. I have my relentlessly disinterested roommate. It would be tidy if he were the killer. But he never looked at the house or brought up the subject of corpses without any hint that he enjoyed making them. He acted genuinely freaked out after the fire. And while he’s not stupid, he doesn’t seem as book-clever as I would expect a German-speaking Shakespeare-loving sadist to be. But what do I know. Solving people is not my forte.

The cold case.

I turn away from the window and grab my laptop, pull over the yellow legal pad, and hunt under my bed for a pen. I
can
solve Aidan, of course.

I get online and look up Aidan’s mother’s name and read through the initial news story — a local woman found dead in a house fire — and the obituary. According to the obit, Mrs. Devorecek worked part-time as a child therapist, often working from her home. A credit to the community, a loving wife and mother, she was survived by her former husband, her two daughters, and her son. A close friend of hers started a scholarship in her name for poor inner-city children to study music.

Grabbing a pen, I scan Aidan’s notes for the friend’s name but it doesn’t appear on the list. I jot it down:
Judith Greene
. Then I go back to the reports. A few months ago, the city reopened the case. It had been classified a homicide but no one was ever arrested. One of the children was present at the scene, an adult daughter named Stella. Unavailable for questioning — found in catatonic state — institutionalized. No viable leads.

… After a potential lead regarding the investigation into the unsolved death of Barbara Devorecek, a local woman found dead in a house fire ten years ago, Akron city police have re-opened the case
.

But after the news update, there is no more information.

I chew on the end of my pen and think for a while.

Then I close my laptop, slide it and the legal pad into my backpack, and leave for work.

Because I taught yesterday, my schedule today is open. I have office hours and I need to research, but I have some time before I have to go to campus. I drive around for a bit, circling through the streets that carve dark gouges through the snow heaps and the grim cement and brick towers. Gusts of smoke from sewer grates pass like wraiths through the maze of downtown.

I pull over finally near one of the old churches, St. Bernard’s. An elegant gray stone building with soot-blackened saints keeping watch from the ornamental buttresses. A plastic laminated sign affixed to the front doors reads “Soup Kitchen Mondays Wednesdays Fridays at 11
A.M
.”

I have driven by this church before and noticed the sign, but without much interest. Until now. I have to park on a steep sloping alley and I yank on the parking brake. I check my watch as I go up the steps of the church. It’s ten-thirty.

A few volunteers inside are setting up folding tables. I can tell they are volunteers because they wear nametags that read Volunteer.

“Hi, can I help you?”

A woman comes hustling over, her ponderous chest swaying under a thin beige sweater. She’s tying an apron around her waist as she comes.

I do intend to look into Aidan’s mother’s death, but it seems pointless not to at least try to find the homeless woman, my last shred of potential information about the corpse and his killer. Not that I expect much.

“I’m looking for someone,” I say. “A — ” Shit, what’s the politically correct word for a homeless drug addict with mental problems? “A woman with a — ah, a Dora the Explorer backpack.”

“A what now?”

Her brows bunch over her eyes, gray hedges against the light in her irises. She is wearing tan slacks and a beige sweater, both wrinkled and faded, and threads of gray hairs cluster around her temples. But she has a piercing in one nostril and I think that at one point in her life she thought of herself as beautiful.

I know I need to explain what I need better, so I take a breath and start again.

“I ran into a woman — she wasn’t, she doesn’t have a home. It was pretty obvious.”

“You’re saying she was homeless.”

Oh, that one is easy. “Right. She’s homeless. She carries a Dora the Explorer backpack and she has symptoms of tardive dyskinesia.”

“Tardy what?”

“Not — look, she’s been on schizo meds. Lithium, Thorazine, you know, the stuff that makes you twitch like you’ve got St. Vitus’s Dance.”

“Saint Who? What are you talking about?”

“Come on,” I say. This is bullshit. She works with homeless people, she has to know what I’m talking about. I blink and pluck at my nose and move my tongue around my mouth, feeling my teeth, my lips.

The woman moves her head back, her eyebrows going up.

“Like that,” I say. “Do you know who I’m talking about?”

“Okay,” she says. “Yeah, that could be a lot of people. Is she a regular here?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “I’m looking for her. I think she saw something — ”

“Whoa now, are you talking about, a crime? She’s wanted for questioning?”

“No, nothing like that,” I say. But I can’t think of another story to fill in the blank. “Not like that. I just want to — talk to her.”

The woman rubs the back of her neck and shakes her head. “It really could be a lot of people. With a backpack?”

“A cartoon character — it’s bright and shiny. Pink.”

“Oh, pink.” The woman thinks for a minute. “That kind of sounds like Desiree.”

“Desiree.”

“Hold on a sec.” She yells toward the back. “Carmen! Hey, Carmen, get over here.”

A woman comes over, thin, hobbled by a long straight jean skirt and a baggy brown turtleneck. She’s wearing thick wire-frame glasses and she pulls them off when she comes up and rubs twin kidney-shaped reddish spots on the bridge of her nose.

“What?”

“Do you know Desiree?”

“Yeah, she comes in sometimes. Why?”

“She have a pink — what kind of backpack now?”

“Dora,” I say. “The Explorer. I think.”

“Yeah, that’s Desiree,” glasses-girl says. She puts her glasses back on, tucks her hair behind her ears. The lenses magnify her eyes like a grasshopper’s. Oversized and childish, they stare out at me.

I pull out my backpack and scribble my name and phone number on a card. “Can you call me if she comes in?”

“Why?”

But she takes the card.

“Just please, call me. It’s important.”

“I’m not sure that’s — ” She looks up at the larger woman. “I mean — ”

The larger woman shrugs. “I don’t think there’s a rule against it. Just to tell you if she stops by?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll give her your card. How about that. Then she can contact you.”

“She can’t,” I say. “Are you an idiot? You work with these people. God, it’s not like they’ve got a cell phone charger in one hand and the latest iPhone model in the other.”

The larger woman blinks a couple of times. But she doesn’t cuss me out or raise her voice. In the same flat tone, she says, “I’ll have Carmen give her your card, but I’ll give you a call too. Fair?”

“Thanks,” I say. “That’s good.”

When I leave the wind is shrill, singing atonally like some old-world seer calling down doom on the mortal sphere. The air smells like encroaching winter, old smoke and dead earth, and I wonder how the fire was started, and who started it, and why Aidan’s mother died in a house fire that must have burnt like a Viking pyre and lit the neighborhood with aureoles of gilded ash.

The fourth floor hallway of the humanities building with its buzzing runner-lights and speckled linoleum seems unusually festive. Someone tacked a paper chain made of orange and brown construction paper links along the blank wall in front of the stairwell and shreds of cotton now adorn the bulletin board. I push into the graduate student office to collect my books for class and see equally cheap decorations have exploded across our office space as well.

I drop a note in Telushkin’s mailbox informing him that my next chapter will be late, and rip up a pink slip informing me to phone the dean at his earliest convenience. Then I head to the library. In my study carrel, I open my laptop and get online. The medical examiner’s office is downtown, about a block away from the university campus. I write down the address, realizing I’ve driven by the unprepossessing concrete block and glass building a hundred times. It’s crammed between parking decks, the marble-faced courthouse, and high brick buildings with fluted windows and lawyer’s names on brass plaques.

I wonder if the autopsies are performed at the actual office or if the medical examiner has to go down to the hospital’s morgue with a briefcase full of surgical knives in one hand and a Starbucks in the other. I imagine some young resident doctor who barely passed her exams trotting in expensive heels toward a steel table on which rests the burned and flayed husk of my corpse.

I blink and shake my head and go back to researching, draft notes for my dissertation chapter. I study for hours and close up the laptop when my eyelids start to feel gritty. I rub my fists against my eyes and crack my neck. Then I swing my backpack over my shoulder, lock up the carrel, and walk downtown to the banks of lawyer offices and courthouses.

The medical examiner’s office smells like polyurethane and Calvin Klein perfume. It’s clearly just an office. What little solid flesh remains of James A. Sims resides elsewhere.

I take a breath and walk toward the front desk. A large woman wearing chunky gold jewelry and a papery smock blouse sits behind it, flipping through
Dog Fancy
magazine. She hands me a form without looking up when I ask for an information release.

I print “Barbara Devorecek” in the slot labeled
Name of the Deceased
. When I finish filling out the form I pay three dollars and the woman puts the form into a manila folder and tells me the information packet will be mailed to my address within the week.

I have reached the lobby door when she says, “Hey, hon? Ah, Miss Brandis?”

I turn around.

Her hooked, lacquered fingernails hover over her keyboard. “This case is an unsolved homicide. We don’t mail out information on current cases, okay?”

I go back to the desk and lean my elbows on it. She smells musky, a scent like chalky clay. “Unsolved?” I remember reading about this in a newspaper story.

Her computer screen is tilted up and I see a name followed by a list of vital statistics. Stella Devorecek. Height, weight, current residence. The current residence is an assisted living facility. At the top of the screen it says “material witness.”

I keep my eyes unfocused, traveling the wall behind her desk with its mundane calendar featuring Ohio’s covered bridges and a small crayon drawing done by a juvenile hand.

“It just means the investigation was never completed. It happens more than you’d think. It could be any reason. Sometimes they know what’s happened but a material witness can’t be located or interviewed. Or sometimes it’s something else. It can be anything.”

I touch my thumbs together and look at the child’s scrawl behind her. “Can I ask something?”

The woman’s chair creaks as she sits back, turning away from her computer monitor. “What would that be, hon?”

“I know about the two fire sources but that could be coincidence, right? Or an accident. I mean, why is it an unsolved homicide instead of, like, just involuntary manslaughter?”

The woman’s tongue touches her lower lip. She lifts a hand and jiggles the thick gold ring in one earlobe. “I don’t know where you’re getting your information from, honey. I can’t tell you any of that stuff.”

“Just, can you please tell me why it’s been classified a homicide, and not just a, a tragic accident?” I pitch my voice low and work a tremulous quaver into it. My eyes flicker to her computer screen, to the tiny print, and catch on the word “asphyxiation.”
Cause of death, asphyxiation. Secondary causes of death, 48 milligrams of zolpidem tartrate, partially metabolized, and 30 milligrams of fluoxetine hydrochloride
.

The woman looks back at her computer screen. “I can’t print off the coroner’s report. It’s the rules, okay?”

I lean against the countertop and put my fist under my nose. “Okay.” I hiccup. I want to look like I’m crying but really I’m trying to block my nasal passages. The office has a bitter lye stench from printer toner and air freshener.