My Second Death (15 page)

I just stare at her. At the knife. I wonder if she’s going to stab me.

After a long time I say, “It’s okay. You don’t have to.”

“I don’t have to?” The knife wavers. “I don’t have to love you? Do you have any idea what it feels like to hear you say that? Oh God. That’s not what I meant. I love you. I do love you.”

All of my life she’s said this to me. I used to think it was odd but then Dave told me that she didn’t know. She still doesn’t. I don’t understand how she can
not
know. She thinks that it’s possible to love me, like I’m just some ordinary person who can be saved, or changed, brought back from whatever dark place I got lost in. But I can’t be saved. No matter how much I want it.

“I wish — ”

She blinks and looks at me.

I swallow. “Never mind. Thanks for the pasta.” I put the bowl down on the counter.

She watches me as I leave. Streaks of mascara drip down her cheeks, a sad clown’s eyelashes.

I intend to write some of my dissertation but when I get home all I can think about is the knife in my mother’s hand. Tears. Human grief. I think about Judith Greene with her fat cheeks and tragic eyes. And I think about that blue tarp under the bridge.

It occurs to me that ordinary people kill other people all the time. But they don’t murder solely from rage or from a delight in the act of killing itself. The depths of sadness, which I have never felt, are deep enough to kill, to drive people to unthinkable acts because they can no longer think. They only exist in a world of feeling and that feeling is misery.

I don’t sleep much, drifting in a watery dreamscape where I am tangled in algae and reeds and when I drag my hand free of the water I see that my fingers are tangled in my younger brother’s hair and I realize that I have been trying to rescue him but forgot my purpose and now he’s drowned. The edges of my dreams leave me exhausted but hyper. My skin feels shrunken, like it hugs too tightly to my bones.

At five-thirty in the morning I get up and go into the kitchen. As quietly as I can, I slice cheese and pull out a packet of bologna. I butter two pieces of bread and stack together a sandwich, slice it lengthwise, and zip it into a baggie. I collect some carrot sticks as well. The homeless shelter and soup kitchen won’t be open this early, which means anyone who slept rough on the raised concrete buttresses under the bridges will still be there.

A hoary sun cracks the slate clouds in the east and rain flares white against it. Past the southernmost dormitory and the art building, a steep hill drops down to the tracks. I jog across the parking lot of the academic building, stop in the weeds overgrowing the verge, and look down toward the overpass. The slope ends in broken shale and the metal stitching of train tracks.

Emerald green glass bottle shards glint through the brown crust of rust, old leaves, cigarette butts, and soiled trash bags. My sneakers creak on the cold gravel. I near the overpass and see that my guess was right. There is a veritable homeless domestic scene awaiting me. Broken bricks pin the edges of the blue tarp, and two hefty trash bags of clothes lie between the bricks, along with a man in a few overcoats and a yellowish beard.

I keep hiking down the tracks. He stirs when I pass but doesn’t lift his head. His coat sleeve is empty.

I walk for a long time. I pass two people who are sitting together talking. They look up at me and raise a hand, nod their heads. I am uncertain what the protocol for greeting is, but I nod, awkwardly, and keep walking.

On one sloping concrete embankment I see a collection of trash bags, a shopping cart filled with blue plastic Walmart bags tied tight around their contents, and the object that caught my eye in the first place: a stained pink backpack, still shiny in the glittering golden dawn.

The occupant of this outdoor domicile is at home. A woman sits on the concrete by the cart, one hand on a cigarette, eyes fixed on the middle distance. She blink and turns her head toward me as I pick my way down the tracks.

She doesn’t seem to recognize me, but I recognize her. Or at least, I recognize the pink bulb of her tongue as it pushes through the gap in her front teeth, pulsing in and out like a nervous snake.

“Hey,” I say.

She mutters to herself and rocks. After a while she looks back at me. Her cheek twitches so hard her head jerks to the side slightly.

“It’s okay,” I say. “I’m not going to do anything to you. Look. I brought you a sandwich.”

Her eyes wander away from my face and I realize that she is totally disconnected, that even the sandwich isn’t reaching the lucid bit of her subconscious.

I reach out to touch her.

“No, no.” Her fingers pluck at the air. “Don’t be sweet. Don’t be no. It eats the sweet.”

“Sh. Hush. It’s okay.”

She warbles meaningless syllables to me. Spit drains from her mouth.

I say, “I won’t hurt you. I don’t lie, you can believe me.” I don’t even know what I’m doing, only that she saw the corpse, she is tied irrevocably to that world. But she pulled a sheet over him. I only want her to know — I’m not sure what. That I saw it, that I know who she is under the fracturing mind and social stigmatization.

But her eyes look everywhere except at me. So I reach out and I force my hands to touch hers, her skin the texture of old mushrooms, spongy and damp.

The heat starts in my palms. Pricks along my fingers, down my wrists, running like molten iron up the insides of my arms, burning in the hollows of my elbows. The sickness in my stomach makes my heartbeat kick faster.

She screams. Saliva slides down her chin. Her chipped and yellowed nails claw at my arm. Thin pink welts race over my skin like tunneling worms.

And then the fabric of her skin melts. Relaxes. Her eyelids close. I jump back as her body rocks forward, the joints folding, the limps collapsing. Startled, I think for a minute that I have killed her somehow. Then I realize she must be fainting or having an epileptic seizure. I grab her just before she hits the gravel. Her body is heavy and smells sour. The dampness of her armpits, her stale breath. I lay her against the cloth-sided suitcase. I check her pulse, which is butterfly faint but steady. She has fainted, not seized.

I look down at her. A shadow hangs over her lax skin and I can almost imagine the lips filled out with teeth, the wrinkles erased by reversed time. I imagine her resurrection, the eyelids lifting on clear and smiling eyes. She will get up and gather herself and her steady feet will take her to a warm lit place where some child catches sight of her, and reaching out desperate hands cries in a voice full of birthdays and bright Saturday mornings, “Mommy! Mommy!”

I stand over her in the cold morning and imagine a world in which she’s some kid’s home, and I am some mother’s pride and joy. I see two people in her, but only one will wake up. It makes me angry, for some reason.

But I don’t have time wait here for her to wake up. No time to witness her resurrection to a life more or less precisely the same as the one she’s lived thus far. I look at my watch. I need to get to campus.

Coming here makes no sense. Bringing her a sandwich makes even less sense. I knew she wouldn’t be lucid. A schizophrenic whose condition is severe enough that she was on the amount of medication necessary to leave behind those physical glitches, and who is no longer on any medication, would not by any means make a worthwhile witness.

I pull the wrapped sandwich and baggie of carrots out of my pack and set them next to her. The only thing I know about her is that, as tattered as her mind is, she still pulled a sheet over a dead body to cover his nakedness. I did not bring her a sandwich out of kindness. If anything, I think I brought it to her for the same reason that she pulled a sheet over the corpse. We are like the ancients who burnt grain at altars to gods who never answered, as if the blind obstinacy of ritual itself can inscribe some grace on the practitioner.

She is still unconscious when I climb the slope to the street above.

It is now after eight in the morning. A few cars pass by, and pedestrians with briefcases beep remote locks on their cars and enter banks and office complexes and fade into their quotidian lives. The torrid sky arches overhead and the ordinary masses pass me by like I’m invisible.

I change into a clean pair of jeans and a sweater, and I head back to campus to teach my classes. After teaching, I go up to the department offices, ignore another note from the dean, slot my finished chapter into Telushkin’s mailbox, and venture into the grad student office to print out directions to an address I’ve scrawled on the yellow legal pad. The address is in Hudson, a preppy mostly Caucasian suburb almost half an hour north of Akron.

Hudson’s downtown area is a preserved historic site with gabled roofs and quaint cupolas. A few blocks over I find a subdivision of large, generically prestigious houses, the plasticized grass and neat hedges an unnerving green beneath a fish-colored sky. I park on the side of the road near a No Parking at Any Time sign and get out, clutching the zippered edges of my hooded sweatshirt across my chest. I walk up a wide driveway toward a house with more windows than siding. I can see into the front hall through a floor-to-ceiling window beside an oversized polished-walnut door. The foyer has a sixteen-foot ceiling, a crystal chandelier, an antique hat stand, and a pristine bowl of fruit on a tiny polished maple table.

I press the doorbell.

After a long time I see a pair of feet descending a long staircase. A woman emerges. She is wearing ironed slacks and a black cardigan. She comes to the door, arms folded under her breasts, head tilted to the side, squinting. Her wrinkled expression tells me that she is annoyed to be answering the door to a stranger.

The door creaks open.

“Yes?”

“Miranda Devorecek?”

“Yes?”

“I’m a volunteer with Harvest Home.”

Miranda’s thin fingers end in tapered, French-manicured nails.

“Yes,” she says.

“We’re raising money for a Christmas party. Would you like to — ?”

“We already paid,” Miranda says. “I mean, we sent in our — I donated already. Don’t you keep records of this?”

“Yes,” I say. “But this party, we’re collecting
extra
.”

“I don’t understand. You have a party
every
year and you’ve never collected extra before.” Her lips are thin. When she pinches them together, her dark eyes seem to widen, heightening the shadowed contrast between cheekbone and jawbone. Her face is delicate, china pale, the eyes fierce and direct and identical to Aidan’s, except that both of hers look straight at me. Her plucked eyebrows and elegant fingernails tell me that she is aware of the fact that she is beautiful. I wonder if she is equally aware that she is the only perfect product of her mother’s womb, if she feels something due to the fact that her siblings are marred, broken replicas of her flawless form. If she feels guilty because of her unbrokenness, because she is better than her genetic inheritance.

“So, you’re complaining about paying extra so your sister can have a happy Christmas? While you, what, drink four-hundred-dollar champagne at your Chase bank Christmas party?”

She draws her head back slightly. “Who told you I work at Chase?”

“You’re a branch
manager
. And you’re telling me you don’t make enough to — ”

“What the hell — ” She shuts her mouth again. Her tiny seed-pearl teeth click together. She shuts the door in my face. I watch through the windowpane as she goes back into the kitchen. She reappears a minute later folding a slip of paper in a razor-sharp crease.

She opens the door and, pinching the paper between thumb and forefinger, holds it out to me. “Here. And Merry Christmas.”

I unfold the check and look at it, licking my lower lip with exaggerated care. “This is — wow. Your brother just shut the door in my face.”

“My — you approached my
brother
?”

I look up at her, widening my eyes in what I hope looks like innocence. It’s not an expression that comes naturally to me.

“He’s a goddamn
art
student,” she says. “He’s one of
you
. He’s there practically every — he practically
lives
there. With her. Why would you chase him down for money? There’s no way adult diapers and animal crackers cost what you people gouge us for every year. Me, I know what you’re doing. The guilt card. I get it, okay? And, yes, I work seventy hours a week at a high-powered corporate office. I live in a big, sterile house. I never visit my — my sister. Okay? I know that. That’s why I let you — why I pay the — why I pay what I do. Okay? Someone has to. But at the very least you could leave the family members who
care
out of your money-grubbing. All right? I’ve got cash and no heart, right? Well, my brother is — he’s going to feel guilty now. You know what he’ll be doing? He’ll be sitting with her and feeling
guilty
. What is the matter with you people? What is enough? It’s not money, it’s clearly not actually
giving
a shit. So what do you want from us?
What?
”

She is breathing hard. Each inhalation draws thin lines in her throat. I watch the hollows between her collarbones. She stares at me.

“Thank you for your generous donation.” I refold the check, put it in my jeans pocket, and turn to leave.

With my foot on the edge of the step, I look back. “Do you miss her?”

Miranda’s thin lips part. Her eyes flare wide.

“I meant your mother. Do you miss her?”

There is a brief silence. Then she says, “Who the fuck are you?”

I don’t say anything.

She says, “Wait — are you the roommate? Is that it? Are you my brother’s mentally sick roommate? Is that who you are?”

I smile.

She says, “My God, I’m going to kill him.”

“He wants to know what happened. He wants to know the truth. If you like him so much, why don’t you want him to know?”

Miranda holds onto the door. Her knuckles are white as bone.

“My brother,” she says, “has my mother’s weaknesses. He has my mother’s capacity for a naive innocence that borders on simple-mindedness. He adopts strays and perverts and broken people compulsively — you, of course, being a case in point. He has an obsessive personality. I don’t think his desire to know exactly what happened to our mother is healthy or helpful. It just feeds his neurosis. He can’t accept that some people are too broken to be saved. She was one of them. It’s not like the last time was her first attempt.”

I am startled and for the first time, I really look at Miranda. She just stares back, fierce and unblinking.

“So you don’t think your retarded sister set the fire. You think your mom did.”

For a second I think she’s going to start screaming. Her mouth is pinched shut but she inhales, tendons standing out like bridge buttresses on her throat.

Then she slams the door.