My Second Death (5 page)

Dave picks at his fingernail and shifts his weight and finally says, “
God
, boy. I’m evolving.”

Stephen smiles a little. “Don’t rush me. I have a method.” He says it softly, almost absently, and Dave makes a face. But I am impressed with my little brother. It’s not easy to upstage a man who steals the spotlight in a family of actors.

Mom’s gift is sweaters.

Stephen looks surprised and lifts out the one on top. “This is awesome, Mom. Thanks!”

Mom always gives clothes. It’s the only gift she gives. For all the years that Dave lived in New York, she sent him a box of ties and button-down shirts on his birthday and sweaters for Christmas.

“I’m glad you like them,” she says.

Dave brings over the other present and the cards.

I say, “I got you iTunes.”

“And
I
,” Dave says, “gave you
cash
.”

Stephen reaches for the card on top of the pile Dave hands him. It’s Dave’s card. He pulls out a twenty. “Hey, great! Thanks!”

“He’s so easy to please.” Dave looks at Aidan. “It’s
cute
.”

“Dave, honey,” Mom says.

Stephen’s mouth tightens but then he relaxes and smiles at Dave.

Dad clears his throat. “If the gift-giving is done, may I suggest we eat?”

Stephen pushes his cards to the side and puts the clothes and watch on the floor near his chair. “Thanks, everyone.”

Mom gets up to bring in a bottle of wine.

Dave turns to our younger brother with eyes shining like a saint who has seen God. To anyone else his glittering teeth and eyes would mean genuine interest, but I recognize the latent cunning in his wide smile, his elegant, joy-pitched voice.

“Well,
this
is nice. The family, together at last. Why, the last time I was home for your birthday, you were so little! And all you wanted — what was it you wanted?”

Dad clears his throat. “David.”

Dave sighs and sits back in his seat, linking his fingers over his chest. “I remember now. It was a puppy. Remember that? You wanted a new dog so bad, you cried for
weeks
.”

Stephen’s eyes flick from Dad to Mom and then to me. Mom says, “Well, look how fast those rolls went. There are more warming in the oven.”

Aidan watches her leave and then turns an inquiring eye on Dave. And that as much as anything makes me decide to play along.

I smile at Dave and say to Stephen, “What’s the matter, kid? Still pissed off I ate your dog’s liver?”

A sudden silence hovers over the table.

Mom comes into the room. I turn and reach into the basket to get a roll. Her fingers brush mine and I jerk my hand away. She catches the roll and sets it on the edge of my dish.

Aidan’s eyes are fastened on my hand as if mesmerized by that violent instinctive reaction to my mother’s accidental touch, as if the gesture has startled him into recognizing some darkness lurking behind the awkward conversational gambits.

Dave turns to Aidan. “She ate the family dog,” he says. “This was when she was, like, twelve. We come into the kitchen because we smell something burning, and there’s Mickey frying a piece of meat at the stove. We go, What’s that, Mickey? And she says, Buster’s liver.”

“Buster,” I explain, “was the dog.”

Aidan looks down at the red sauce swirled across the dinner plate that Mom hands him.

She says, “Did everyone get pasta?” She smiles like a deaf mute.

“Mother, for God’s sake. You’re throwing us off. We’re performing for our guest, you see.” To Aidan, I say, “I’ve got APD, not Down syndrome. They act like I’m a moron.”

Aidan lifts his head.

“APD is antisocial personality disorder,” Dave says.

“Right. Anyway, that’s the final diagnosis. All those shrinks, and that’s what they end up with. It’s supposed to be better than schizophrenia, which is what they first thought I had. But the way I look at it, Joan of Arc was a schizophrenic and she managed to get canonized. Whereas APD is what most serial killers have. So go figure, right? Not much of an improvement as a diagnosis.”

Aidan’s eyes flick to my mom, then to my dad, who is picking industriously at his pasta. Aidan’s mouth looks strained.

I smile. And relent to social pressures, the shade of Emily Post whispering in my ear. “But I’m not a serial killer. I just dislike people.” I incline my head in Dave’s direction. “The dog thing wasn’t that bad. He can explain the difference.”

Dave says, “Hundreds of people have APD and most of them grow up to be perfectly ordinary citizens. Accountants and janitors and doctoral students studying medieval literature, just for example.” He winks at me. “Serial killers have other traits in addition to being antisocial. For example, a lot of serial killers start off killing animals, you know, like gutting cats or killing a dog and eating its liver.”

I rip off a flaky bit and blow on it, then put it in my mouth. “This is terrific, Mom.”

She smiles a little. The muscles by her mouth contract, at least. “I’m glad you like it, honey.”

“But Mickey,” Dave says, “as far as we know, didn’t kill Buster.”

I tear off another piece of croissant. “Bingo. I didn’t kill Buster. He was already dead. Died of old age. He was stiff as a board when I cut him open. See the difference? The fine distinction?”

My father’s lips are pale. He has surrendered his fork and knife on his dish and sits with his hands balled beside his plate, skin bleached white in patches around his nose.

“But that’s old history.” I look away from him. “I don’t mutilate animals any more, living or dead. And I don’t even like meat that much. I mean, I might have a hot dog for lunch, but that’s it.” I don’t explain that hot dogs are made of spleens and gristle and tendons mashed up by huge metal teeth, churned into a lumpy pinkish mash of semi-liquid ooze. Normal people eat hot dogs. Normal people don’t
think
about hot dogs. As far as I can tell, that’s the difference between normal people and me. Normal people also do not particularly like other people. Take the way Dad’s eyes are burning into the table right now. But normal people don’t admit to themselves how violent their fantasies of murdering their fellow humans can be. This is why I don’t consider myself the victim of a disorder, the carrier of a genetic disease. No. Me, I’m just radically honest. Someday they will erect statues in my honor.

“So. No serial killing for me.” I smile at Aidan. “Now tell us something about yourself. Do you enjoy birthdays? Attend every one you can?”

His eyelids flicker. He looks over at Dave.

Dave says, “Mickey doesn’t go for the small-talk thing. She’s not good at it. But she doesn’t lie. She hasn’t killed any animals — ” He looks at me. “ — that we know of. And if she asks a question, she’s interested in the answer.”

“Right,” I say. “He’s right.”

Aidan’s lips part. They are dry and a waxy seam splits when he opens his mouth. He doesn’t look distressed, though. Most of Dave’s dates would have gagged by now, or would be showing the whites of their eyes. He says, “I enjoy birthdays.”

I grin at him. “Like what part? The cake and ice cream? Those poky party hats? Scotch tape?”

“Scotch — ? Oh, you mean, like on presents? Well, I guess I’d have to say I like the cake and ice cream.”

I look at him for a while. He looks back. He smiles, a faint tuck of the lips at the corners. I clear my throat and look away. “Good choice. That’s my favorite part too.”

After a brief silence, my father asks Aidan a question in a formal voice. Dinner conversation returns to its melodic pitch. They talk about the sort of banal shit most families discuss at dinner tables — subjects one is studying at university (fine arts), whether or not one enjoys those studies (he guesses so, yes), and what one intends to do after graduation (he doesn’t know, thinks he might run an art studio).

My parents are experts in facilitating normalcy, just like Dave is the family Puck, stirring his delicate fingers in the waters to disturb the strange creatures lurking below. Dave can control the monsters, and at my advanced age I have become a well-trained, well-behaved, barely monstrous monster. But the whole charade strikes me as supremely stupid. Things can change in an instant. They should know that.

I want to raise my head and scream at them,
I touched a dead body today
.
I pressed my fingertips into the ripped dead skin of a man handcuffed to an iron bedpost
.

My father comments on an exhibit at the art museum that he saw while at a banquet for a visiting speaker. My mother apparently was there as well — this event must have fallen serendipitously during a thawed moment of détente in the polar ice cap of their relationship. My mother gets up to open a new bottle of wine and for a minute there is silence while my father and Dave sip their glasses of wine, their mouths pursed in identical moues of qualified approbation.

Stephen is frowning at his dish. I think about asking him a question but can’t think of anything to say.

I swirl my fork through the pasta. The spaghetti sauce is leaching into a half-eaten roll resting on the side of the plate. Red creeps slowly up the soft white underbelly of the roll.

My mother says, “Aidan, did you get enough to eat? Do you want more of anything?”

When I was six years old, my mother left Dave to babysit while she went to the store. Dave turned on the TV. An old film was showing on one channel, a movie about a vampire with long white teeth and a shiny black cape. Dave got me a plastic sippy cup of grape juice. I told him I didn’t use sippy cups any more but he said to shut up or he wouldn’t let me watch the movie.

We watched the movie in silence. An old man in a tweed jacket stabbed a silver spike into Dracula’s chest.

“Why did he do that?”

“You have to stab their hearts or they won’t die,” Dave said.

“Why not?”

“Because the heart is what keeps you alive.”

“What’s the heart?”

Dave put his fingers against his chest and said, “It’s a muscle that beats — you can feel it.”

I put my fingers against my ribcage. Silence. Bone.

“Move your hand. To the left.”

And then I felt it. Tha-thump. Tha-thump.

“That’s your heart.”

I smiled.

Dave said, “If you spill that juice, I’ll kill you.”

It was summer. A brief, sudden rain came hard while Mom was out shopping. When the clouds shifted, steam spiraled up from the driveway blacktop. A heady scent of lilacs and dogwood hung thick in the damp. At night, Mom put me to bed with a window fan blustering moist air across the moon-slatted room. I lay on my sheets in red panties and a white eyelet nightie. I could hear the house breathing and I felt the patterned thump of my heart against my ribs, against the mattress.

They woke up in a blued room with the shadows silver against the kitchen knife.

I saw the whites of their eyes flare in the dark. The glisten of lips.

My father made a hissing sound.

Neither of them moved.

“Is she awake?” my father whispered.

I squatted on the sheets between them, my nightie ruched around my waist, the kitchen knife in my sweaty grip. My hair hung in my face.

My mother said, “I don’t know.”

“Jesus Christ,” he whispered.

“Don’t,” my mother said. She put her hands on my arms. Her skin was sticky with heat. I gripped the knife and put the point on her sternum. My mother gasped. Her fingers, bony, strong, squeezed my wrist and my childish flesh, soft and yielding, weakened in her grasp. She took the knife away from me. My father reached over and clicked on the bedside lamp. Sweat stained the hair by his temples. His sagging cheeks were dark with prickles of beard. He took the knife in his fingertips and got up. The bed creaked when he left. His bare feet made pat-pats on the linoleum of the bathroom. A cupboard door closed. The tap turned on. He came back into the bedroom with a glass of water.

My mother pulled me into her lap. Through the fabric of her nightgown I could feel the hard lumps of her nipples, the soft pouch of her belly. She smelled faintly of red wine and fabric softener. She combed my hair away from my forehead with her fingernails.

I put my hand against the side of my mother’s breast. Through the skin, I could feel the solid thud of a spasming muscle.

“Tha-thump,” I said. “Tha-thump.”

My mother’s arms tightened around me.

“What?” she said against my hair.

“That’s your heart.”

“Yes.” She put her palm against my back and rubbed in slow circles. The nightie bunched under her hand. “Yes.”

“What was she doing?”

“Shh. I don’t know. A nightmare, maybe.”

I pushed my mother’s hand away and leaned out from the damp heat of her body. When she tried to gather me against her chest again I got off the bed and scampered back to my room. I lay down in front of the fan and the wind fluttered across my face and neck.

They came into my room and my mother stayed there until I fell asleep. I woke up with a pillow under my head and a sheet over my body.

The next afternoon I went into the kitchen but the knife drawer was latched. I rattled the drawer but it wouldn’t budge. Dave was sitting at the island eating a bowl of Lucky Charms and reading a Punisher comic book. He put the book down and watched me trying to claw the knife drawer open. He said, “Did you seriously try to stake Mom and Dad?”

I turned around and ducked my head.

He said, “Well, you can’t do that. Okay?”

He got down from his stool and fixed a bowl of Lucky Charms for me. I dragged a stool over to the island and climbed up, put a spoon in the cereal and began stirring the milk into a pinkish-brown saliva-thick swirl. He leaned his elbows against the countertop next to me. Then he said, “Listen, Mick. You can’t do crap like that. You’ll get put in prison if you do. In prison bad stuff happens and I swear you wouldn’t like it.”

I sucked on a marshmallow and looked up at him.

“That guy who staked Dracula was old, remember?” he said. “
Way
old. Because when you’re old, you’re smart about stuff and you don’t get caught.”

“Okay.” I took a bite of cereal.

“Promise?”