My Second Death (16 page)

When I get back to the apartment, Aidan lies on the couch with a sketchbook propped on his stomach. The TV hums softly with the lulling monotone of a BBC narrator. When I come in, his head comes up and he points a stick of charcoal at me.

“What did you say to Miranda?”

I am startled. My quiet little sparrow of a roommate has never looked so intently alive. The brunt of Miranda’s rage is printed all over his thin skin, in the wrinkle between his eyebrows, the tight lines by his mouth. “Nothing,” I say. “I mean, I was just asking questions. I apologize if I offended her, but I’m not exactly known for my finesse.”

His mouth relaxes a little. “Well, in the future why don’t you just ask me.” He raises the remote and turns up the TV. “Hey, it’s your favorite nature program.”

“I don’t have a favorite — what do you mean, why don’t I just ask you? You never give me straight answers. You haven’t been exactly champing at the bit to find out how my investigation’s been going, either. The last I checked, your sum total response to my investigation is your dedicated attempt to ruin your liver.”

The frown settles back between his eyebrows. He wipes the back of his wrist across his mouth.

“Okay,” he says. “What do you want to know?”

His fingertips, pressed against the charcoal stick, are white in patches.

“Forget it.”

“What?”

“I said forget it.” I keep expecting to see that glaze of anticipation in his eyes when I talk about death, about murder and arson. I thought at first that he felt the same way I did about our cohabitational adventure, the sizzle of danger and death. But instead he just looks ignorant when I mention the house across the street or the fire, and he looks physically sick whenever I bring up his mother. Circumstantial evidence suggests that he may be a killer. A mutilator of corpses. But nothing else in his behavior seems to tally with the external coincidences of his apartment’s location and our sudden meeting.

As I lay awake listening to Aidan stumble through the living room last night, I realized that, while I don’t understand ordinary, decent human behavior, I also might not be able to understand sociopathic behavior. The realization was strangely disturbing.

I go over to the television and manually turn up the volume.

“Move over. I want to watch this.” I sit on the floor at the far end of the couch from him and open a binder full of digitalized illuminated manuscripts. The BBC announcer remarks in bland Home Counties tones about the deadly jaws of the crocodile. I laugh and when I look up Aidan is smiling too.

At night I lie awake in the dark and listen to Aidan come in, to his socked feet shuffle in the kitchen, the metallic creak of a can releasing, a hiss of air, a gurgle.

In the first amalgamation of Anglo-Saxon dialects, what we now call Old English, the word
doom
meant judgment. As if the ancient Germanic tribes had understood that fate was arbitrary, that acquittal and damnation alike fall on the unsuspecting regardless of their merit. But maybe our expression “impending doom” suggests that we understand something else, that all judgments are damnations, that there are no acquittals, no justifications, only tragedies. That once a person is a suspect they become guilty and carry their taint forever. I think Aidan wants me to tell him that his sister murdered his mother. I don’t know why. He already believes it’s true.

I fall asleep and dream that the cat has returned and is sitting on my chest looking at me with human eyes. The eyes are dark, black-lashed, luminous and tragic with hope. I realize that they are Aidan’s eyes and I startle awake. I hear him snoring in the living room, the sonorous rasp a counterpoint to the low static of the television.

Once when I was young, about eight maybe, my dad got pneumonia. He lay on the couch with his head propped up on a rolled pillow and my mom canceled her piano students and even upstairs in my bedroom — I lived in the house then — I could hear the tinny rattle of the TV punctuated by his wheezy coughs.

I was squatting on my haunches on the white shag rug in the middle of my bedroom, cutting a doll’s hair. I gripped the doll by its hair, her wide-eyed face and pinched waist spinning slowly, her tiny pointed feet dangling like bird claws. I sliced through the hair with a pair of scissors, and the doll fell. Yellow plastic hair scattered across the carpet. I picked up the doll by what was left of her hair and sheared it again. I don’t remember why I was cutting her hair that way, like some demented hangman passing the time at a cosmetology school. The door banged open and Dave came in. He was wearing a camouflage G.I. Joe thermal shirt. He grabbed the doll and wrestled the scissors out of my hand, pinching my thumb. He cut her head off with the scissors. I remember the chewy, gnawing sound the blades made in the stiff plastic. He gave me the scissors and the doll, and I grabbed hold of the cuff of his shirtsleeve and I cut his thumb. I would’ve kept sawing away at his thumb, but he screamed and Mom came running down the hall. I hid the scissors behind me. Dave tucked his thumb under his fingers and put his hand in his pocket.

“Mickey? Sweetheart? Dave, what happened, what did she do?”

Dave said, “Nothing.”

Mom looked at me and at my decapitated doll. I picked up the doll head and looked at the warped eyes. They looked startled.

“Honey? Are you okay?”

“I didn’t scream.”

“I know,” Mom said. She bent to touch me, kiss me, something. I put the fist holding the doll head between us and she stopped short.

She pursed her lips and then said, “Play nicely, please.”

When she left, Dave said, “Hey. You want to play outside?”

It was February. A brief thaw had started to melt the heavy icicles and every few hours another sheet of softened ice would slide off the roof and shatter on the wet lawn. But it was still only a few degrees above freezing. And Mom had been very particular about us staying inside once Dad got sick.

“Mom said no.”

“Don’t ask, don’t tell, that’s my policy,” Dave said.

“Why would I tell?”

“I don’t know,” Dave said. “Maybe you’re a quisling.”

“What’s a quisling?” I cut my doll’s head in half again, right through the painted blue-rimmed eyes.

“A weasel,” Dave said. “A tattle-tale.”

When I didn’t answer him right away, he said, “So yes? Or no?”

“Okay.”

“Cool. Hurry up. Before Mom gets back.”

I hadn’t realized she was leaving. Dave said she was going to the store. We went downstairs and I put the scissors in my back jeans pocket. I liked having scissors near me. When I looked at things — the photograph of our smiling faces over the stairwell doorway, the fern in the planter on the landing, the defrosting package of chicken breast on the countertop — I imagined the sounds they would make with the scissors chewing through them.

Dave pulled on sneakers without tying the laces and put his arms through a camouflage jacket that he loved because, he said, it made him “butch.” He put me into a snowsuit. It felt bulky, like I was waddling in a comforter. I didn’t like the feeling. His hands were cold and sticky.

“Don’t touch me.”

“Shut up.” He pulled a hat over my head and tied a scarf around my neck. Strands of hair got stuck in my eyes and across my mouth.

Dad said something from the living room but then started coughing so we couldn’t tell what he said. Dave turned around and put a finger to his mouth. His eyes shone like the sun refracted through prisms.

He opened the door softly and we went out. A sugary-white ice covered the yard and cracked like eggshells under our boots. I thought we were just going to play in the backyard but Dave wanted to go down the street to the cul-de-sac where a new house was under construction. We weren’t allowed down that way.

We trudged down the sidewalk, lifting our legs high to pull our boots free of the melting bog of ice and snow, robotic moonwalkers. My scarf rested against my lower lip. It was wet with mucus and saliva, slowly freezing over. I could taste the icicles forming against my mouth.

The site smelled fresh, like wet paint and sawdust. The mud in front of the house was churned up, crisscrossed with ridges from backhoe tread, the gashes filled with sloshing icewater. Coils of red plastic tubing lay across the bare dirt.

The basement had been dug and concrete poured, but the house frame hadn’t been erected yet. Rainwater had filled the basement during a heavy storm and then a shell of ice formed when the temperature dropped overnight. Pine needles and gravel sprinkled the white ice-crust. Dave ran to the low concrete base wall and screamed, “Don’t try to stop me! I’ve got nothing to live for!”

He stopped at the edge and looked over his shoulder at me.

I didn’t say anything.

He jumped in. The ice sheared apart. A wave of silty, brackish water lapped over the edge of the pit. He shrieked from the cold. I went over to the edge and looked down. Hair plastered to his skull, he rose up out of the water, pinched blued eye sockets, pink flares on his cheeks. An ancient water god rising from a dark world. He held up his arms and said to me, “I’ll catch you, Mickey. Jump.”

I said, “I don’t want to.”

“I dare you to.”

I just stared down at him.

And ice-cold fingers closed around my ankle and pulled. Or the earth heaved under me. Anyway, I went down.

Crazed darkness rushed up at me and I was plunged into a biting cold. Thrashing arms and yelling. Dirty water gushing into my mouth.

He was yelling something to me.

“Scream,” he was saying. White flecks on his lips, mud splattered across the pale dome of his forehead. “Scream, you fucking bitch, scream!”

I didn’t even have the breath to laugh.

And then Dave clambered out of the pit, slogging waves of water lapping in his wake. He bent and hauled me up after him. I emerged into bitterly cold air, drenched, shivering inside my snowsuit. I clamped my arms around my sogged stomach and sat on the muddy slide of earth sloping away from the concrete wall.

Dave looked down at me and said, “We better get you home. Before you get sick or something.”

Mom was in the foyer when we tramped inside, dripping mud and water and shedding pine needles. She grabbed me and I said, “Don’t touch me.” But she was not looking at me. She said, “How could you? How could you do this to me?”

Dave said, “Mom. I’m sorry.” His voice hiccupped. He sounded like he was maybe crying. “It’s my fault. She wanted to play outside. I shouldn’t have let her. I should’ve watched her closer.”

My teeth were chattering. I looked at Dave looking at Mom, then up at Mom looking at Dave.

She said, “You’re grounded. Don’t ever do something this stupid again.”

Mom unwrapped my scarf and sodden hat and mittens and pulled off my snowsuit like shucking a butterfly out of its cocoon. We tramped mud through the hallway to the stairs in the living room. Dad levered himself up on one arm.

“Don’t start,” Mom said. “He’s grounded.”

Dad coughed into his fist. He looked at Dave. “I told you,” he said.

“She jumped,” Dave said. “I’m sorry.” His eyelashes were clustered with droplets of water.

Dad lay back down again. “Don’t be too hard on him,” he said to Mom. “It’s not his fault. She’s unpredictable.”

Mom was looking at Dad. I looked at Dave and saw a grin split his mud-spattered face. It disappeared when Mom looked down at him. His chin quivered.

She sighed. “Take off your clothes and dry off, sweetie. I have to give Mickey a bath.”

She herded me into the bathroom and shut the door. Then she cranked on the spigots in the bathtub and pulled my shirt over my head. When my head came free from the wet material, I saw that she was looking at me with a strange expression on her face. She leaned toward me and her voice was a whisper. “Don’t ever do that again, okay?”

“Okay.”

“I’m not mad at you. I’m just mad because you could’ve gotten hurt. I don’t, I couldn’t live with, if you got hurt — Mickey, honey, you can’t hurt yourself. It hurts
me
. Okay?”

“Okay.”

And I climbed into the hot water that lapped over my skin in a pale imitation of the dark icewater. I imagined the mingling of the two waters, cold and hot, dark and clear. Silt floated in the bathwater like insects caught in amber. When I looked up my mom was watching me. Her eyes looked soft, charcoal-smudged, and her mouth curved sadly. She cupped her palm against the crown of my head. I realized that I didn’t know what she was thinking, that I had never known and that it was something beyond my ability to imagine. And I realized then that I would never know why people said things, never understand why people did what they did.

The worst part is that I don’t understand any of it, the motivations or the feelings, and so I don’t even know what I lost, back before I had anything to lose. When I was just an embryo, the chemicals in my brain arranged themselves in some unholy order and deprived me of any great depths of loss. In the same move, they stole my ability to fully experience anything on the other end of the spectrum of human emotions. I don’t think I will ever be truly excited or genuinely happy, so long as I remain obedient to the dictates of legal, ordinary behavior.

I lie in bed listening to the sonic quality of Aidan’s profound sadness and rest my forearm across my eyes. I wish I knew what it was like, either grief or joy. The best feeling I ever get is when I run. Sweating hard, muscles burning, it’s not really a
good
feeling, but it’s okay. It feels safe, like I’m strong and controlled and disciplined. Like I am not on the brink of taking a knife to the person waiting in line behind me at the grocery store. How do normal people do it? How do they feel such joy from a touch, a look?

I close my eyes and touch my opposite shoulder with my right hand. I imagine that I put my arms around another person and it feels like the serotonin release at the end of a long run, the exhausted comfort of knowing that, for right now, at least, I’m safe.

The next morning I find myself coasting to a halt in front of the familiar burnt-out shell on Brown Street. I lean my chin on the steering wheel and stare at the house.

The short red-haired woman comes to the door when I knock. I hug my chest for warmth. The mucus in my nostrils has frozen. She peers up at me and then the door opens all the way. Her house is thick with warmth and smells like microwaved pasta and tuna and flower potpourri.

“Come in, come in.
You
,” she says, pointing a marshmallow-fat finger at me, “were not at the choral performance.”

I stand in the entryway. A fat black cat with jade eyes comes down the stairs one step at a time. It stands watching me, its thin tail ticking back and forth. She hustles into the kitchen and comes back with a sheaf of red and green flyers.

“Handel’s
Messiah
,” she says. “Have you ever heard it?”

“Yes.”

“It’s so beautiful. You have to come. It’s the Advent Festival, we perform all the Sundays leading up to Christmas. All right? Now, come in. In here.”

I go into the living room and sit on the edge of a couch that sighs and sinks under me. It is covered in a flower-printed drop-cloth. A gray cat comes in and settles on my lap. I put my hands under its belly and feel the pulse of viscera, the rumble of a purr. I imagine sliding my fingers around its throat and strangling it quietly while she talks. She is in the kitchen calling to me but I’m not paying attention.

She comes back with a mug of hot tea.

“ — so sweet,” she says.

I take the tea and sip it. It is so sweet, but I realize that she was probably talking about Aidan or one of his sisters, or possibly his dead mother.

“ — every single day,” she says, and digs her clenched fist into the soft flesh above her left breast. “Just an
ache
. Right
here
. I’m sure you know what I mean.”

I nod.

“So what did you want to ask me?”

“You mentioned that they were all at their father’s house,” I say. “That night.”

She nods, watching me.

“Even the retarded one?”

She flinches at my term. Her soft jowls are the color of tapioca. “Oh,” she says.

I pinch the underside of the cat’s chin with my fingernails. It jerks its head and slides off my lap and scampers away.

I set my tea on my knees and lean forward, watching Judith Greene. Her eyes move around the room, the figurines on the mantle, the photographs of smiling children and unsmiling old people.

I clear my throat.

She puts a hand to her breast again, pressing her palm on it. I watch the rise and fall of her little fat hand. “I hadn’t — how
is
she? Stella, I mean. After that night, she was so, it was so — she shouldn’t have had to be there.”

“She’s in a home,” I say. “Assisted living for the mentally or physically disabled. It’s called Harvest Home.”

She nods as if she knows this.

“Why was she at the house when the others weren’t?”

Judith Greene shakes her head as if chasing away a mosquito. “I didn’t — I don’t know. We found her when — the paramedics came. I was the one who called the fire department, you know.” She looks at me sharply when she says this last part. I don’t tell her that I already know, thanks to the 911 call being public record.

We are quiet for a while. I think about her phrasing: She shouldn’t have had to be there.

I say, “Thank you for the tea and company.” She looks up at me and remembers her face and smiles, but it looks like putting on a mask. Her eyes are still far away.

“So, Handel’s
Messiah
? I’ll come. This time I mean it.”

Her smile carves dimples in her cheeks and forms rolls under her chin. “Oh, good. It’s so beautiful.”

She follows me to the door. I escape into the cold and hurry to the car. Her scent seems to linger in my clothes and on my skin.

As I drive away from Judith Greene’s cat litter-scented hovel, I think about the pristine cleanliness of Aidan’s sister’s house. So when I pull into the gravel lot behind our apartment building, I’m surprised to see Miranda’s silver Audi bumper-kissing our dented industrial-sized trash bin. It’s like I’ve conjured her with the force of my imagination.

I grab my backpack out of the car and trot up the stairs. Inside, their voices tangle together, viola and violin in a sudden crescendo.

“ — so fucking immature!” Miranda’s voice careening into soprano range.

“
Me
immature! You’re the one who won’t talk about anything, oh, like it’s really mature to just completely rewrite history, pretend nothing ever happened. You can pretend you never had a mother but you can’t pretend
she
doesn’t exist, because she does and she
misses
— ”

“And, what, my moral shortcomings give you permission to give my name and address to every psychopath in the greater Akron area? Do you have any idea what — ”

I slide off my shoes and rest my backpack near the coat rack, and walk into the kitchen.

They are standing in the living room. Miranda is dressed in a charcoal gray pinstripe pantsuit. The tucked waist on the suit jacket, cream-colored silk shirt underneath. Her smooth dark hair, her perfect dark eyes.

Aidan is standing close to her, his back to the window. An opened sketchpad lies at his feet, his charcoal sticks scattered on the carpet. His eyes move when he sees me. Some expression crosses his face, some tightening across the forehead, the eyebrows slanting down at the sides as if he’s sad or anxious.

Miranda twists around to see what has disturbed him. Her coral-pink lips, twisted in mid-sentence, freeze.

We just stare at each other for a second.

Then I say, “Hey. What’s up.”

Miranda pushes her brother aside and strides across the living room. Her thin heels make hollow clunks through the balding carpet. She puts her finger in my face. The fingernail is glossy and rose pink.

“
You
,” she says, “need to back off. Get out of my family’s business and
stay
out. Do you understand?”

“Miranda,” Aidan says. He reaches for her arm. He grabs her wrist but instead of digging his fingers into the tendons to get her attention, he slides his hand down and wraps his fingers around the fleshy part of her palm. His face is a stark contrast to the tenderness of the gesture, angry ridges across his forehead, between his eyebrows. “Settle down. Okay? She’s a friend. Come on.”

“A friend? A
friend
.” Miranda lets out a laugh. She inhales and her shoulders relax. She takes a step back. She does not pull her left hand out of Aidan’s grip. “When will you understand that the pervert who hangs out by the used games store is not a
friend
, Aidan. These people need treatment. They need to be kept — ”

Aidan says, “Shut up.”

She shuts her mouth. She takes her hand out of his and turns to look at him. Her mouth is pinched so tight that fine wrinkles radiate from the edges of her lips. She straightens the collar on his faded shirt.

“I have to go back to work. You get this — this
friend
— to stay away. You understand? You need to get away from these, these needy people. And do not entangle me in your quixotic stupidity any more. You hear?”

She looks over at me, and then she bends over and takes her purse from beside the couch. She walks out. Her heels echo all the way down the stairs. Aidan stands in the living room. His face is flushed. He puts his hands in his pockets and goes over to the window, watches her pull out of the driveway.

He says, “Sorry about that.”

“Quixotic.”

“What?” He looks over his shoulder at me.

I smile at him. “Quixotic. That was a nice expression. Your sister’s kind of all right.”

He wipes the back of his hand over his mouth and then stretches his shoulders. “Kind of all right. Come on. She’s
terrifying
.” But he grins while he says it.

I don’t know what to say.

He goes into the kitchen. I watch him pull the last orange out of the fruit basket and peel it. He drops the rinds in the sink and I open my mouth to tell him we don’t have a disposal. But I can get rid of them later easily enough. And I’ve already been enough of a shithead to him today.

I hear myself saying, “Look, I’m sorry about your sister. I really am. I won’t do that again.”

He carries the plate of sliced oranges into the living room and sits down in front of his opened sketch pad. He glances up at me. “Don’t worry about it.” He watches me for a second and then he smiles.

I go over to the couch and sit down.

He reaches over and turns on music. R.E.M. at the height of their late-nineties glory.

“Oh God,” I say.

He grins at me and cranks up the volume. Michael Stipe is singing something about losing his religion. Aidan squints like he’s thinking about some impromptu karaoke. I have heard him attempt this before in the shower and he is not exactly vocally gifted.

I grab his plate of oranges and pick up a slice.

“I’ll kill you.”

He laughs. “With an orange and your ninja skills?”

“You shouldn’t underestimate the strength of my desire not to hear you singing,” I say. But I don’t pitch the orange slice at him. I just stick it in my mouth and suck the juice from the bitter white pith.

He grins and bends his head to his drawing pad. Under his breath he starts whispering, “ — me in the cor-ner.”

I turn my head to watch what he’s drawing. And as his hand sweeps over the page I notice his arm. His sleeves are pushed up past his wrists. Four yellowed bruises with dark red half-moon crescents carved into the center of each bruise stagger across the pale inside of his arm. I remember his bandaged fingers when he came over to the house for Stephen’s birthday.

“Hey,” I say. “Tell me about your sister. The fucked up one.”

He stops sketching and reaches over to turn down the music. “Why?”

Because he walks around with battered arms and fingers like most people wear a well-worn T-shirt. Because I can’t tell if he accepts damaged minds or is dangerously drawn to them.

“Because I want to know about her,” I say. “Because of that.” I point to his arm.

He looks at me with that blank dark eye and then bends his head again.

“Because she’s retarded,” I say.

“Listen,” he says, and flips a page on the sketchpad. He’s not yelling, like Miranda, but his voice is taut, trembling at the edges. “She has autism. So quit saying ‘retarded.’ And there’s nothing to tell. You want to know when her birthday is? She’s turning thirty on Tuesday. She wears a diaper. She hits people. If she gets her hands on a sharp object she jams it into whoever touches her. She’s a fan of eighties hit bands like Queen. Oh, and she
loves
the color yellow.”

“You don’t hate her.”

“I adore her.”

He flips the pad up and pulls a clean page down.

“Okay. Your
other
sister isn’t your mother’s biggest fan ever,” I say. “We did discuss that, in between her telling me to get the fuck out of her house.”

His pencil tip hovers over the page. Then he digs it down and draws a strange geometric shape. He wiggles the pencil, sketching, shading. “Yeah. I heard.”

I rock a little on the couch and wonder if there is another orange in the refrigerator. “What about you? You a big fan of your mother?”

“She was hard to live with,” he says. “I didn’t hate her, though.”

“Hard to live with how?”

He’s drawing a foot. I watch the arch, the tendons, the protruding anklebone, emerge.

I realize my bare feet are resting on the carpet. I pull them up onto the couch and tuck them under me. He erases part of the toes and with a few clear lines he transforms the foot into a cloven hoof. He doesn’t look up at me, but I can see his lips curl up in a smile.

“
Ass
hole,” I say. And grin.

He puts his pencil down and rolls onto his side, propping his head on one hand. “What?” he says.

“Your sister said you were kind of like her. So, what made her hard to live with? She was a sucky artist? Or she liked nineties hits?”

“Hey, I’m a terrific artist and the nineties
ruled
.”

“Har har.”

Aidan rolls his pencil across the devil hoof drawing. “She was really emotional. You’d have hated it. Crying, laughing, wiping her nose on her sleeve. That sort of thing.”

I open my mouth but Aidan says, “And no, I’m not like
that
. But the sad thing. I get down sometimes. Miranda thinks I’m — ”

He doesn’t finish his sentence.

“Going to off yourself like your mom tried to do?”

He looks over at me.

“Your sister spilled the beans about your mom’s psychiatric history. Said she tried to kill herself a couple times.”

Aidan rubs his fingers in the nubby carpet pile and studies the balls of lint he collects. Neither one of us likes to vacuum. “Mom was bipolar. When she was down she talked like she wished she was dead. It wasn’t her fault, but it really bothered Miranda. You know, to think Mom
wanted
to die. She didn’t like that.”

“She hates your mom.”

“Hate’s part of love,” he says. “Hate is what happens to love when it gets sick.”

I raise my eyebrows and sit back on the couch. “Geez. It’s raining outside, but it’s a lovely day in here with Mr. Sunshine.”

He shakes his head, straightens up and reaches for his pencil. He glances up at me and smiles. Then pretends to pick his nose with the pencil. I laugh.

“So now your turn. Tell me about your house. What was it like growing up with you?”

“Oh, it was marvelous,” I say. “Being as I’m such a delightful person — a saint, really. My family members have often told me they feel they should have
paid
for the privilege of living with me.” I lick tacky, drying orange juice off my fingertips. “To be honest, I’m not the right person to ask. I’m a fucking lunatic, so the rest of the world looks crazy to me.”

“
And
you cooked the dog.”

“Right. I cooked the dog.” I think. “I also stockpiled matches and tried to start the house on fire. It was raining, though. Go figure.” I still don’t know why my mother thought I would like a surprise party. They all screamed
Surprise!
a dozen of them, little eight-year-old girls in sparkly dresses, shrieking, giggling, eating cake and ice cream and party mints. Mom wouldn’t let me leave, kept telling me to smile and have a good time. And yes, stealing the matches from the kitchen and trying to burn the house down was an overreaction. But like I said, I didn’t know what I was doing and the rain put out the matches that I tossed under the front porch as soon as I’d lit them. “And I stapled my fingers. And this one time I put my mother’s bras in the freezer and all the frozen meat in her underwear drawer.”