My Second Death (20 page)

Prestigious. Terrific. I cough into my hand and look around for Aidan. But I don’t see him with Stephen. I wonder if he’s gone to the dining room to collect food.

“I’d like to talk about your project, if you have time. Bob tells me wonderful things about your work.”

He’s looking at me, eyes bright and wet-looking in the worn palimpsest of his face.

I look down at the floor. Pick at my thumbnail and glance up at Telushkin. “Yeah, well, his work is in folklore, so he, um, he tells tall tales for a living so, you know. Grain of salt.”

The professor from Purdue rolls his lips together. Telushkin clears his throat.

I smile. Try a short laugh.

And their faces ease into jocularity. Telushkin puts his hand on Renfield’s shoulder and they both chortle, fake, belly-rolling chuckles as if what I’ve said is the most hilarious thing they’ve ever heard.

Then Telushkin says, “Get you something to drink, Scott? Michaela?”

I shake my head.

Renfield turns to look after Telushkin when he waddles away.

I exhale and back up a step, preparing to worm my way out of the crowded room. A woman in a sleeveless black dress is standing right behind me. Her arm brushes mine. I flinch away and swipe at my sleeve but the instinctive act makes the backs of my fingers brush her bare shoulder. I swallow hard. Her shoulder is palely freckled like a bird’s egg. I want to scratch my fingernails into its melon-cool surface. I grip my fists and turn away from her. My tongue feels dry and swollen, a ball of panic wadded into the back of my throat.

My father is standing near the piano, isolated in shirtsleeves and a loosened tie, the god at home coming faintly unraveled at the seams. Light glistens on the lenses of his glasses, turning them opaque and white. A woman in chunky turquoise jewelry comes up to him, smiling, but he doesn’t notice. His face is aimed away from her, turned in my direction, the white ovals of his lenses fixed on me.

I wonder what he is thinking. His daughter, the academic, being singled out for an introduction to a visiting scholar. His daughter, the antisocial basket case, quivering and twitching and sweating after a two-minute conversation.

My fingernails press into my palms until I feel a faint tickle, the splitting of skin. I duck my chin and head for the kitchen.

The kitchen table is laden with platters and dishes and crystal-clear scarlet Jell-O moulds and mounds of crusty bread and fruit trays and the scent of butternut squash and nutmeg. A woman at the sink turns around. She is familiar, someone who comes to help my mom throw her semiannual bashes for dad’s private-box-at-sporting-events colleagues.

“Hi there, Michaela.”

I nod and slide around the island.

Aidan comes into the kitchen. He stands with his hands in his pockets. Grins. “Having a blast? Saw that guy chatting you up. What do you think? You could pull off the whole trophy wife thing, right?”

“Fuck you.”

Mom comes into the kitchen carrying a platter of hors d’oeuvres.

“Oh Aidan, I didn’t see you. I’m so glad you — oh, honey, there you are, your father wondered where you’d — do you think you can you take the plate out when you go back to the living room? Aidan, have you met people yet?”

“My mother,” I say, folding my arms across my chest and leaning my hips against the island countertop, “is decompensating. Notice her decreasing linguistic control and scattered concentration.”

“Oh honey, not today.” Mom sets the platter down with a sharp crack. The woman at the sink starts rinsing off some green leafy garnish and clipping fronds to set along a plate of cold cuts. Congealed fat seams the pink-purple slices of beef. The salty tang of cold meat makes me swallow. I push my hands into my jeans pockets.

A voice in the living room slices through the burbling murmur. The murmur pitches headlong into hilarity. It sounds like a revel, an orgy perhaps.

Mom smiles. “Oh, that sounds like Dave.”

“I didn’t know Dave was coming,” Aidan says.

Mom heads into the main room, her treble voice reaching for her firstborn son. Aidan follows her out into the living room.

I had meant to head for the garage and wait out the party but I decide to wait and see Dave. I don’t have to go back into the living room to find him, though, because he always manages to find me. I ease a cheese and pimento triangle from the corner of an etched glass platter and slide onto a barstool by the island.

The woman by the sink looks over at me but doesn’t say anything. When she finishes decorating the platter I say, “That looks really great.” She looks at me and the skin across her forehead smoothes out. She starts to smile. I worry that she might take my compliment for an invitation to tell me about her grandchildren’s tonsillitis. So I say, “I mean, for predigested subcutaneous fat deposits from hormone-injected animals.”

The smile is eclipsed by tensed muscles. Her eyelids fall. She takes the platter into the other room.

In the living room, Dave’s voice rises above the hubbub, followed by a tide of laughter. He says something else, and there is a sudden hush. My mother’s voice steps into the silence, soft, gentle. Soothing the waters troubled by whatever verbal mischief Dave’s restless brain has come up with. I reach across the island to the abandoned stacks of mini-sandwiches.

I am eating my third mini-sandwich when Dave comes in. He enters from the doorway behind the stool and I see his reflection emerging from the evening-shadowed windowpane over the sink.

“My adoring public kept me. I apologize.”

I brush crumbs off my thighs. “I regret to be the one to inform you, but your public are maudlin fools and senile collectors of plaster shepherdesses. You may want to reconsider boasting about their approbation.”

He laughs. When he leans on the counter his skin smells strange, cloves and chlorine and rotting potatoes. A sweet and rancid reek. I want to ask him where he went after I left him by the train tracks. I wonder if he’s been skulking around the homeless under their bridges all day, because he smells faintly sour, as if he’s been sweating or hasn’t showered recently. But for some reason the question, which is the sort of banal shit we usually natter about, seems laden with something darker. I don’t want to answer any questions about what I was doing down there, who Desiree is, or why I am bringing her sandwiches in the early morning.

“It may interest you to know that your opinion is in the minority. Your humble servant was recently featured in
The New Yorker
.” His shirt is gray silk, and sweat patches darken under his arms.

A glimmer of movement in the windowpane. I watch another form materialize in the rose-tinted murk, an indistinct shape with diffident shoulders, chin sunk toward a concaved chest. Strange that I recognize him immediately — a man identifiable by his lack of definition.

“No, no,” I say. “You are premature. Bring forth your accolades when the time ripens.”

“What?”

I swivel on the stool. “Papa,” I say. “Was he glorious? Has his fame shed light upon the noble name we share?”

“Your brother is an artist,” our shared paternal member says from the doorway. His hands in his pockets. Rolled shirtsleeves, the knot of his burgundy tie loosened. A faint sparkle of light refracted by sweat at his temples. “There’s no need to mock.”

Dave looks from me to our father. He smiles and his tongue traces his lower lip. “You misunderstood us, Dad. Mickey is my
big
gest fan.”

“Oh God,” I say. “That’s defamation of fucking character. You write like Gertrude Stein on Nyquil.”

Dave laughs hysterically. Tears well up under his eyelids and he puts his palms over his mouth, gasping. Dad shakes his head and turns back to the living room.

Dave blows out and leans close to me. His breath stirs strands of hair fallen across my face.

“We’ve lost him. Alone again. You and me, against the world.”

When I don’t answer, Dave says, “But not anymore. Is that it? But, where is your most faithful paramour? I saw him out there. He seems happy. You seem very happy together.”

“I really don’t know what’s wrong with you today.”

“Poor baby.” His fingertips brush the ends of my hair. I move my head away but he grabs my wrist. His fingernails are long and I can feel the pressure of their half-moon shapes against the tender skin on the inside of my wrist.

Then he loosens his grip, as if he’s just realized how tightly he’s been holding on. He turns up my palms and we watch white crescent marks in the thin underarm skin darken with suffusions of blood. The nail bites cross fainter ruffled pink strands, healing scars from when Desiree scratched me in the throes of her fainting fit about a week ago. He frowns slightly, turning my wrist toward the kitchen light.

“He drinks,” I say.

Dave looks at me.

The pain bores hot and sharp behind my right eye.

I smile. “He’s so tragic. It turns out to be a story by Tolstoy, not Dickens.”

“But living with you would drive anyone to drink,” he says. His voice is very soft. He is interested. His hands slacken their grip as he leans forward.

I pull away, drawing my shirtsleeves down over my palms. “I didn’t drive you to drink.”

“No. But my soul is made of tungsten, my heart of carbide.”

He reaches for me again, and I catch his wrist and bend the fingers back. “Don’t.”

He smiles at me and I pull away from him. Through the kitchen window the sky flares vermillion behind a fringe of fir trees. Our shades pass like gossamer across the sunset-tinted windowpane as if we are nothingness, or are pure essence.

The house finally settles on its haunches after the exuberance of human laughter fades to silence. Aidan gets up off the living room couch when he sees me. He looks from me to the empty door behind me.

“Where’s Dave?”

Stephen, on the couch still, is holding a bag of Lay’s potato chips. “He left a while ago. While
you
were still holed up in the garage.” He points a potato chip at me.

“Nicely done.” I nod in genuine appreciation. “Our
paterfamilias
still hasn’t found the cojones to mention my failed attempt at socializing.”

Stephen sucks his bottom lip but doesn’t respond. My father, who can hear me from his liminal position in the dining room doorway, says nothing.

Aidan and I leave. He gets in his car and I get in mine.

I beat him home.

Strobe lights, red and blue, lance through the darkness. Behind me I hear Aidan’s brakes squeal as he double-stomps them. Our house is under siege.

My heart seizes up like a fist. Blue and red whirling lights dazzle across my skin. Paramedics hurry from the lit ambulances and cop cars through the doors of the first-floor apartment. The house is broken open like a shredded tulip, a windowpane shattered and glass glittering under the glaring white light anchored to the roof of a police car. The neighbors, our dark familiars, line the sidewalks and stand hesitant in front doors, eyes like boiled onions and teeth set whitely between moist slack lips. People all over the front lawn.

The air is cold. I am already out of the Chevelle — the driver’s door hanging open — and running through the gridiron of cop cars. Voices screaming. Aidan’s voice behind me, high-pitched and frantic.

Yellow tape strung from the mailbox post to the front porch clings to my skin as I break through it. I fling it off.

The front door to the downstairs apartment stands ajar. Dark silhouettes move around inside the lit apartment, passing around a single still shape. Halfway across the yard to the front door a weight hits me. I slam into the ground. Something cold and heavy pins my face down and the dirt smells like metal and rotting fruit. I grunt and arch back, lashing my elbow up into the body on top of me.

“Let her up.”

The weight lifts off.

My mouth is sticky and dirt cakes my tongue.

A cop with a face like a slice of Spam, pinked and moist. He bends over me. He is chewing gum, and his pores reek of fermented hops and latex. He grips a gun in both hands, the nose downward-angled, a professional bend in his knees. His small pupils fix on me.

He is talking but I can’t tell if it’s to me or to a woman wearing a brown creased suit who stands next to him, a city detective badge swinging from a cord around her neck. Through the open apartment door the kitchen light shines like leaking blood onto the sheet ice caked over the cement stoop. A man is crying by the doorway. The woman in the brown suit is swiveled on her hips to stare at me but from the angle of her torso I think she was questioning him a second before.

I scramble to my feet and wipe dirt from my chin. I wait. But the cop just stands there. So I brush past him and go up to the door. The man standing on the stoop wears gray sweatpants and an OSU fleece jacket. Golden licks of light on his sweat-sheened skin. He snivels. He looks vaguely familiar and I think he must be the apartment’s inhabitant, that I have passed him while taking out the trash or heading to my car.

The woman in the brown suit is demanding something from him, a sharp cadence repeated.

“No,” the crying man says and sniffs hard, wiping his palm across his chin. “I swear to
God
I don’t know who she is. I don’t recognize
anyone
.”

I climb up onto the stoop next to him but don’t break through the yellow tape across the open doorway. The wind tangles in my hair. The air fresh smell of snowy cold is tainted with an acrid stench, ammonia and bleach mixed with something sweet and salty.

The kitchen linoleum, a crackled, heat-warped skin, the twin of our floor above. Framed by quotidian kitchen appliances — an old Whirlpool dishwasher, a dented Kensington refrigerator — sits a metal folding chair. A hand armed with scalpel instead of brush has sculpted this body, this teak-skinned, ash-eyed, naked woman. Her breasts, like jam-filled silk, dangle above arms cradling an obscene mass of pinkish-gray small intestine, lumpy ridges of large intestine lying coiled in the crook under a slit of rib. Duct tape wrapped around the back frame of the chair and across her ribs, just under her breasts, holds her upright in a seated position. Her neck and head bow to gravity and her curved spine, her gently bent arms, are masterstrokes. She is a visceral Madonna, an impious pietà.

A dizzying familiarity, as if this scene has been acted out a thousand times. I knew who it was before I saw her. The minute I saw the lights, I knew who I would find.

Desiree, the woman to whom I gave a peanut butter and jelly sandwich not ten hours earlier, and who, not quite two months ago, in one brief gesture of humanity, signed her fate.

A hot sour taste and a sharp pain in my gut. The importance of paying attention this time. I feel the cops around me, watching me. My heart is pounding. I want to stare at her but I can’t afford it. I hold some terrible noise shut in the back of my throat, some yell or scream.

I make myself study the room, the position of the body. I notice odd aspects of this human artwork: the duct tape around her throat. A slit throat, maybe. The bruised darkening around the skull. Body hung upside-down to drain. That would explain the bloodless intestines

But not here. No blood pool around the chair.

Where, then? The railroad tracks? Or —

I feel like I’m going to fall down. I hold very still, breathe, and think.

And I know how she was hung. I see those butchering sites from the web flashing behind my eyelids. How do I remember them so clearly? I feel as if I have seen them somewhere else.

I turn away from the doorway, stumble off the cracked cement stoop. The ground under my feet is uncertain.

The pink-faced cop face asks questions. Do I know her. Did I kill her. Where was I. I don’t know what to say so I don’t say anything. I want to ignore them but the cops surround me. One puts a hand out when I try to slide past and get back to the car. Then the meaty cop comes up behind me. His palm slides over my wrists as he cuffs me. Mucus-thick sweat coats my skin.

The backseat of the cop car smells like cigarette smoke and vomit and piss. A nub of stubbed plastic where the interior handles were removed. I always wondered if cop cars were modified or created fully formed, a vehicular Athena emerging from the cranium of Crown Victoria. Enlightenment comes at the oddest times.

My heartbeat is unsteady. Sometimes it feels as if it has stopped altogether and I wait in silence for the knowledge that I am still alive.

Streetlights striate the darkness, swiping yellow across my legs, sliding up my body and disappearing into darkness.

In daylight, I have run and driven past the sand-colored edifice with pale stacked steps and shining plaques of fallen public servants. Tonight the car takes me underneath the glimmering edifice. The cop car burrows into a cement parking deck, gnome-globe lights casting sickly prickles across chipped plaster walls. A steel door. The smell of industrial bleach.

A small room with a metal-framed table, a chair. He uncuffs me and leaves me alone in the room. A while later the woman in a brown suit comes in. A young cop in uniform behind her carries a Styrofoam cup of coffee. He puts it down on the table.

The woman slaps a buff-colored folder down on the table. The folder is stenciled with the letters C.A.P.U. and the seal of the city of Akron.

The woman leans across the metal table. In the strange naked light her extended palm looks like uncooked chicken flesh.

“Detective Sandra Smith,” she says. “Crimes Against Persons.”

When I don’t offer my own hand she draws back and folds her hands in front of her. She puts her lips together neatly, but other than that small motion her facial expression does not change. She stands with one leg slack, a confident posture. Standing is unnecessary. Her confidence is unnecessary. I already know that — Jesus, the clichés are endless. The other shoe has dropped. The straw has broken the camel’s back. The fat lady has wound up her high notes. I am metaphorically fucked.

“Why don’t we start off with your name. Would you state your full name, please?”

The words
start off
ripple, seeming to undulate through the mote-strewn air.
When you’re old, you’re smart about stuff and you don’t get caught
.

The smell of bleach. Bleach and ammonia.

I swallow. My fingernails press against my palms. The smell of — the smell in the kitchen, Desiree’s body, but the smell lying thick in the kitchen was not blood but bleach. Her death was quick but her after-death, the arrangement of her mortal coil, took longer, a meticulous marriage of aesthetics and pragmatics. I realize that her corpse is forensically mute. No evidence, if any existed, of my proximity to her, my hands on hers, my fingerprints on the plastic baggie of her sandwich, wherever it is. She was killed far from her lair, far from our contact, her body purged of my spore. But she was killed underneath my home. Or, underneath mine, and that of my strange-eyed, innocent-faced roommate.

“For what?” My voice surprises me, a hoarse whisper. I swallow.

“You’re a person of interest right now, not a suspect. You don’t need a lawyer, though you have a right to one. If you want one we can get a lawyer down here. But we’re just going to ask you a few questions, figure out how you fit into the equation. All right? Let’s start with your name.”

She is staring at me so intently that her gaze feels like fingers pressing against the skin over my cheekbones. I want to look away. I want to jump up and smash her head into the stainless steel table edge. I squint slightly to force my gaze to hold hers, to hold steady, to appear sane and ordinary. “My, my wallet with my ID got taken at the desk when I came in. I’m, I mean, that’s me.”

The detective’s fingernails are squared off, blunt and lacquered shellfish pink. She taps the nails of her first two fingers and her thumb together. She comes over to the table and takes the cup.

“You want tea? I can get you some.”

“No. No, thank you.”

She nods and takes the cup. Sips. She presses her lips together to dry them. She sits down. “You know why we brought you in?”

“Because I ran — I mean, I contaminated — ”

She smiles and shakes her head once. “That doesn’t matter. You didn’t go into the crime scene itself. But you seemed pretty upset. Did you know her?”

“Know — ?”

“The woman. Do you know the victim? The woman on the chair?”

It occurs to me that it would be entirely helpful at this point to be able to roll names off my tongue with the ease with which I can parse Old English syntax.

But names don’t mean anything, except as methods of psychological control. I read a study that said we call people names — and you can see this in nicknames, but it’s true in general, too — so that we have a handle for them. So that we can own them.

What, besides a name, do we ever really know about a person? About a family member or a friend you could say something, maybe, some personality trait or great deed that belonged to them alone and that defined them.

But all I know of Desiree are the things she carried with her. And that she was a person underneath it all, and that she respects the dismembered dead.

“She is someone’s mother.”

The detective sets the tea down. “What was that? Whose mother?”

“I don’t know. But she could be. She could be anyone’s mother.”

The detective reaches for the cup again. She sips her coffee and watches me above the Styrofoam rim. “Theoretically, I suppose so. Do you know for a fact that she is a mother?”

“No.”

“How do you know her? Is she an acquaintance? Someone you’ve seen her around?”

“Around where?”

“Anywhere.”

“I didn’t look at her face for very long.”

“Mm. But you started yelling before you saw her. You got out of your car and came running across the lawn yelling. Were you worried about her?”

“I told you — I mean, I’m telling the truth. I don’t know her.”

“Did you know she was inside the apartment? You seemed very intent on getting into the building.”

“No, it was — it was because of the fire.”

“The fire?” She sets the cup down again and puts her palms on the table. She leans forward. The tops of her freckled breasts press out against a cream-colored buttoned shirt.

“The house across the street. I saw the ambulances and police cars and thought of the fire.”

“You thought there might be a fire?”

“No. No, it just, it looked like when the house across the street burned.”

“And so you went running
toward
the house?”

I look away from the detective. “There was a body in that house that burned. They brought out a body on a stretcher. And I thought someone should see — ”

The silence goes on for a while.

“Should see what?”

I pull my gaze back to her dark eyes, but her pupils are fixed, the muscles around her mouth and nose tense and I can’t read her face.

“If there was someone in the apartment, too.”

A tap at the door.

She pushes off the table and smoothes a strand of hair behind her ear as she goes to the door. She opens the door, and I smell sweat and beef. I look over my shoulder. A blue uniform shoulder. They talk in low voices. It is a man.

The detective comes back in the room and the cop follows her in.

“Miss Brandis, do you recognize this officer?”

I look up at the cop, my eyes tracing up his body. A hand gripping his belt, the knuckles dimpled, a mist of dark hair across the knuckles. His uniform is neat, but wrinkles crease next to the buttons where his belly strains at the fabric. His eyes, I notice for the first time, are fanned by fine wrinkles, and the irises are the color of hazelnuts. He scratches his cheek and his fingers rasp on bristles.

“Yes,” I say.

“You do?”

“Yes.”

“He says he recognizes you from his investigation of the fire.”

I remember his face when I stood in front of him naked. The way his eyes tried to fall, his eyelids to cover the pupils, to veil his shame, or mine. I let my own eyes drop now, my eyelids descend.

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry, could you speak up?”

“I just said yes.”

“Do you remember running toward the fire?”

The cop clears his throat.

The detective looks over at him. She links her fingers loosely and raises her eyebrows. Her facial muscles are relaxed, her shoulders are back.

“You acted like you knew who was in that fire, too,” the cop says. He clears his throat, a harsh rearrangement of phlegm. “You seemed pretty excited.”

“I didn’t,” I say. “I just — the fire — ”

“You like fires?” The detective taps her finger on the edge of the table. Acrylic ringing on metal. “And ambulances. Emergency vehicles. They’re exciting, aren’t they? You like to get involved. Pretend you’re part of it all. You like the feeling of — what is it? Risk?”