My Second Death (13 page)

“Are you okay?”

“Yes. Thank you.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay.” I push away from the counter and walk out slowly, dragging the balls of my feet. When I push through the doors I stop and straighten, easing my spine and facial muscles out of the posture of feigned suffering. Cars hurtle past and a cop stands on a street corner smoking. Raveling threads of steam twist from sewage grates. I turn my wrist to look at my watch. I need to put in another celebrity appearance — look, look, a pose, a profile shot! — for my weekly office hours.

As I walk back to campus the name that has been eluding me snaps into my brain. Ambien. My mother used to take sleeping pills after Stephen was born.

I head east to the campus library and go inside and log online. Zolpidem tartrate is indeed the generic name for Ambien. I type quickly and discover that fluoxetine hydrochloride is the generic name for Prozac. The recommended daily dose of Ambien is about four milligrams. I tap the desktop with my fingernails, thinking about how many pills it would take to overdose, and thinking about premeditation and mental instability and the nature of good and evil.

After a bit I emerge from the library and climb down the stacked steps overlooking a dry fountain in the middle of the bricked central walkway on campus. A student coming out of a building adjacent to the library turns to his left and his movement catches my eye. It’s Aidan. He walks quickly, headed away from me, his hands in the pockets of a gray sweatshirt. His dark head bobs through clots of students like a button floating downstream.

I hesitate. Then I jog down the steps and follow him.

He cuts behind a building and steps up on a cracked cement loading ramp and goes in through a gray industrial door. I look around and see a blue sign that tells me this is the art building. I put out my hand. The metal door is cold.

Inside I go down a long, shadowy hall. The corkboard covering the walls has been chewed by tacks and staples. The hall opens into a foyer area with a faded brown couch and a few planters. A twisted metal wreck lies in the center of the room under a skylight. Speckled sunlight lies like a cancerous skin across the metal sculpture. I walk into the center of the foyer and look around. Copper statues, prints of anime cartoons and acrylic life-size paintings of crucified, full-breasted women line the walls.

Aidan is not in the foyer. I don’t know where he went.

The foyer is empty, so I go over to the drinking fountain and drink. Then I fill my hands with water and feed the crisp brown palm tree next to the drinking fountain.

I wander back into the foyer and sit on a brown couch. The stiff cushion rises and there is an unrolled condom between the cushion and the couch arm. I don’t touch the condom. I unzip my backpack and take out a textbook.

Two students come into the foyer, but they don’t come near me. They head for the elevator and stand around arguing while waiting for it to arrive.

“I’m not going out with Lindsey, it was just a movie.”

“How am I supposed to believe you? How?”

A finger pokes my scapula. I startle. My lungs airless, my skin hot.

And then I swallow a couple times. Breathe. And, calmer, twist around. He’s leaning his hip against the back of the couch, wearing a white long-sleeved thermal undershirt under a brown paint-stained smock.

“What are
you
doing here?”

The corners of his mouth pinch into a smile. His solitary good eye glitters.

I can still feel the imprint of his finger on my shoulder. I imagine the clean snap of bone if I wrench his finger out of its socket. I swallow again and clear my throat.

“I saw you leaving the library.”

He tilts his head to look at me with his right eye. Then he comes around the side of the couch and sits down at the far end, near the arm. The condom falls out and he picks it up and stretches it like a rubber band.

“The greatest lie is the lie we tell ourselves.”

“What?”

He points two condom-wrapped fingers at the book I’ve been reading. It’s a book of selected readings by Nietzsche, translated into English. I picked it up at the library, not really sure what I could hope to discover in reading it.

My roommate, who apparently knows at least his more basic Nietzsche, says, “‘The greatest lie is the lie we tell ourselves.’ He said that, right?”

For a second that seems to stretch like rubber, creaking with the pressure, I don’t say anything.

He waits, and then says, “What are you really doing here?”

I study him for a long time. But I still can’t see anything in his face. I wonder if his very innocence is the most perfect mask.

“I’m reading.” It’s the truth. He didn’t ask
why
I am here.

He flips the condom at me. I flinch and it hits my shoulder. I fling it off me.

He laughs. I flinch again.

He stops laughing. He looks at me. Then he stands up. “I’m in the middle of class. I need to get back. Follow me.”

I follow him down a narrow hall with brown tiles. He pushes through two heavy metal doors at the far end.

We walk into a long, low room that looks like a factory warehouse, full of hulking metal machines and stainless steel bench tables. Fluorescent lights buzz overhead.

“Do you know what a print is?”

I see other people standing at the counters. I can’t see what they’re doing. “No.”

He walks across the room and I follow several steps behind. In the middle of the room are two large metal presses, round steamroller wheels each with a crank handle. I put my hand against one of the smooth curved sides of the roller. “Don’t touch that,” he says sharply.

He goes to a table near the water tray, bends and opens a thin drawer, and pulls out a copper plate. He brings the plate and two plastic tubs of paint over to a counter stacked with jars of paintbrushes, rags, thin metal spatulas, paint-stained stirrers. He finds a rag and drapes it over my shoulder and pretends he doesn’t see me back up a step, startled. “Hold that,” he says.

I look at the copper sheet I am holding in my hand. It has fine lines etched into it, small scarred wedges, but I can’t tell what the picture is.

“Where do you want me to put this?”

He doesn’t say anything, just drops a glob of blue-gray paint into a pile of deep reddish-brown paint. I rest the plate on the countertop, put the point of my chin on the top edge, and watch him. He pours viscous oil onto the chalky piles of paint and then mixes the paint with a wooden spatula, folding the slippery oil and stiff peaks of paint together until it becomes a thick liquid the color of boiled sour cream and beets. He moves quickly, his hands confident. His thermal undershirt cuffs dangle threads between his fingers. He puts his right wrist to his mouth, holds the cuff between teeth, and pulls the sleeve back. He looks sideways at me.

“A little help?”

My backpack is heavy and hurts my shoulder. I look around the room for someone to help him.

He says, “I meant, can you pull my left sleeve up for me?”

I stare at him in silence. And then I reach over. His skin is cold. I realize it is cold in the drafty warehouse room. My skin feels prickly and hot. I tug his sleeve back.

“Thanks.”

He takes the print from me and lays it on the tabletop and starts smearing paint on top of it with even strokes. He works paint into every line in the copper plate, stroking smoothly. His face is tense, contracted. After he covers the plate in paint, he starts scraping it off again, using the edge of the spatula to peel off curls of sludgy paint.

When the copper plate has been stripped clean, he goes to a narrow metal tray. Sheets of rag paper float in about two inches of water in the tray. He lifts one of the water-supple papers over his arm and goes to a heavy metal press in the middle of the room. He says, “Bring the plate over.”

I pick up the plate by the edges.

He takes the print and smears paint over it, then sets it down on the press table. He sets the rag paper over the print, spreads a towel across the top of the rag paper, and winds the handle of the press until the heavy round press has rolled over the entire paper. Then he lifts back the towel, which has gotten crushed flat, and he peels up the rag paper.

The front of the rag paper has an old man’s face on it. The old man is looking to the side as if something has caught his attention. Soft bags under his eyes, tiredness in the lines dripping down his face, but there is still a faint spark in his eyes, a brittle, clear light. I bend forward and see that the face emerges through small dashes of lines, plum-colored shadows that sculpt the wrinkles and hollows in the face. The light in the eyes, the face itself, are only white paper.

“You’re really good.”

“Yeah,” Aidan says. “I’m awesome.” The muscles by his mouth contract into a smile. His eyebrows slant up, a laughing devil.

He takes the sheet over to a corkboard and pins it up with two yellow thumbtacks. Then he splashes kerosene over the copper plate and scrubs it into the fine lines with a small toothbrush from a Folgers coffee can. Swirls of paint mix with the kerosene and run off onto the metal countertop, an oily pinkish liquid that looks like grease and blood. When he finishes, he throws the rag into a bin full of other smelly, paint-smeared rags.

“That’s a fire hazard, you know.”

“In French,” he says, “
hasard
means luck.”

I look at him. At his crazy eye dancing sideways while the other one remains steady. “No. It means chance. Not luck.”

“Well. Chance, then. Maybe God gives you chance and you make your own luck.”

I stare at him.

Someone comes by and says, “Hey, Devorecek, get moving. You’ve got twenty minutes to get another print out.”

Aidan looks over his shoulder at the person and lifts a hand. He turns to me. “Can whatever you have to ask me wait?”

“It already has.”

He hesitates. Then he says, “Okay. Talk to you later. Now get out of here. Can’t you see I’m busy?” He winks.

Outside the icy wind smells of pine leaves and dry soil, but I can still taste kerosene. It tastes like rotting sunlight.

He comes in that night smelling like pine sap, kicks off his shoes against the baseboard and shucks off his gloves. He goes over to the fridge and catches sight of me. I am sitting cross-legged on the floor in the living room grading a set of midterms.

“So what was it?”

“What was what?”

“Your question.”

I set down the exam and the red pen. “I wanted to know if your mom took sleeping pills or antidepressants.”

Aidan leans into the fridge and emerges with a carton of orange juice. He pours himself a glass and leans against the kitchen counter. He holds the glass in both hands, thumbs touching. His lower lip pushes out as he studies his thumbs.

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t? You don’t remember if your mom was on antidepressants?”

He looks up. “Miranda would know. My older sister. You could ask her.”

I just watch him for a while. Then I pick up the exam.

He says, “What?”

“I thought you were the one who wanted to know.”

He takes a breath. Sets the cup down on the counter. He comes toward the living room and stops in the doorway. “I do.”

“Okay then.”

He shoves his hands into his pockets. “She had those orange prescription bottles in the medicine cabinet. And she took pills with her coffee in the morning. I don’t know about sleeping pills at night. Miranda would know.”

“All right.”

He stands watching me grade. Then he says, “What is it? Did she — did she take sleeping pills before the, um, the fire?”

I set the exam down and look up. “Yeah. A hell of a lot, apparently. Ambien
and
Prozac.”

He pulls his hand out of his pocket and wipes it over his mouth. Turns his head to the side. Then he lowers his hand and inhales, slowly.

“So what else have you found out?”

I don’t know what he expects me to say. “Just what you already know. The fire looks intentional. Your mom had lots of partially metabolized meds in her system. Don’t know if she set the fire or if someone else took advantage of her sleeping like Rip Van Winkle.”

The skin near his mouth tightens but he doesn’t say anything for a while. Then he nods. “Okay. Well, thanks for letting me know.” He hesitates. “I think I’m going to — I’ve got this project I’m working on. I’ll be back late.”

I raise my eyebrows. “Yeah? Well, ah, parting is such sweet sorrow.”

He laughs a little. He collects his shoes and pulls a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket as he walks out the door.

I don’t hear him come back until two or three in the morning. The apartment door creaks and wakes me up. I lie there listening as he stumbles and catches himself on the counter. A few minutes later I hear him vomiting in the bathroom. A faint tinge of something sour seeps into the air.

The intake manifold for the car has come in and I stop to pick it up on my way back to the apartment. It’s more expensive than I thought, and I realize I won’t have much money left to make rent. For a second, I think about asking my parents. But I can’t. Because this is about being an adult. I figure I’ll see if Aidan will be okay with buying all the toilet paper for the month. I’ll get it next month.

When I get back to the apartment I try to explain this to Aidan but it is hard to talk to him. He didn’t say anything in the morning and now he’s in the throes of some artistic frenzy. He crouches on his hands and knees over a flat board laid out on the kitchen floor. The board is covered in a thick red gel. He plunges his hands into a can of yellow paint and splatters the yellow across the board in a descending arc. When I wave my hand in front of his face, he blinks and wipes his chin on his shoulder. A dab of yellow paint sticks to the corner of his mouth.

I point at the paint mark on his face. “Did you hear what I said?”

He rubs his knuckle over the corner of his mouth. “Yeah. Don’t sweat it. You can just give me rides sometimes.”

I freeze and stare at him.

He grins up at me.

“
Fuck
you,” I say.

I go into my room and slam the door on his voice pitching in consternation. He tries to follow me.

I open the door in his face, a check in my clenched fist. His paint-covered fingers leave red and yellow half-moon marks on the walls.

“I didn’t mean anything, I swear. I’m sorry. It was just some random, some stupid comment, okay? I’m really
sorry
.”

I throw the check at him and shut the door again, leaning against it. It takes me a long time listening to his frantic jabber and his knuckles on the thin plywood door before I understand that he is under the impression that I took offense at the crude sexual innuendo in his comment.

I open my bedroom door. His eyebrows are slanted in tragedy. “Seriously, Mickey, I’m a shit. I
am
and I’m
sorry
.”

“I’m not pissed,” I say. “Forget the whole thing. Misunderstanding.”

His eyelashes descend and he stands with his hands at his sides, the bony joints of his shoulders pushing through the fabric of his stained T-shirt.

“I said it’s okay.”

He bends and picks up the check where it has fallen. Paint smears the paper. He smoothes the creases in the check, and folds it and puts it in his back pocket. “Well. Okay, then.”

I don’t tell him that I thought the pun on “rides” was funny. It’s the idea of having another human being sitting in my car that terrifies me.

I watch him turn back and go into the kitchen, and kneel by the paint-splashed board. It occurs to me that, regardless of his relationship to the corpse across the street, at the very least Aidan is telling the truth about how he feels about me. He is genuinely not afraid of me and, for reasons I can’t begin to understand, he does not believe that I am a latent killer. I feel a flicker of curiosity and realize that I
want
to solve his mother’s murder. I want to find out what forces wrought that mind.

Instead, I go running. But this time I’m not running for the purity of it, for the escape. I’m running with a destination in mind. The huntress stalking her prey.

No one from the soup kitchen has called. I didn’t really expect them to. So I need to follow up on Desiree of the Drugs and the Backpack myself.

The air tastes crystalline, gusts rattling bare branches. A freezing mist crusts my skin like a shell of cold pearls. My sneakers strike the concrete with hollow thuds, loud in the preternatural stillness. I jog through the deserted campus and head south through abandoned parking lots behind the performing arts center, down a curving road with no cars idling at the forlorn red lights.

The southern sector of campus is bifurcated from the main campus by a valley through which runs a train track. The curving road I follow loops down under an overpass, and the tracks spool out of shadow. Under the overpass a blue tarp is folded next to a black trash bag. Some homeless person’s lair.

I once heard a speaker at the university talking about the homeless population in Akron. He claimed that many of them sleep rough under the bridges in winter. And it looks as if he may actually be right. The speaker also claimed that the city of Akron is plagued by the homeless but that seemed to me a strange assertion. I doubt that most upstanding citizens have ever seen or spoken to a homeless person, except for the ones who lurk by freeway exit and entrance ramps with their cardboard signs, and the most interaction that occurs at those interchanges is a strenuous avoidance of eye contact. It seems to me that the homeless may instead be plagued by the rest of Akron’s population. I stop and look at the accoutrements of a migratory life. The thick smell of unwashed body, but a certain cleanness to the life lived pressed up against the shadow of not-being. I wonder if the person whose sole shelter is a blue tarp will die of exposure. It annoys me that normal people have already decided that this individual, this human-shaped absence, can die, but that I with my morbid fantasies should be despised. Sympathy is illogical, but if people are supposed to be sympathetic they should at least practice it consistently.

I wander for a long time, hunting down the trace of the homeless. But I don’t see any sign of Desiree. I think about how easily people die of exposure, of disease. How fundamentally not hard it is to be killed, through murder or through apathy.

After my futile search for my one link to 411 Allyn Street and the corpse inside, my witless witness, Desiree of the Dora the Explorer backpack, I head back to the apartment to shower and change and go in search of my only other puzzle piece: Aidan’s past.

When I climb into the Chevelle, I slide the key into the ignition and for a second just listen to the throaty rumble of the engine. It’s a new car with the manifold replaced. I think it even gets better gas mileage, but it’s hard to tell when a good day averages about seventeen miles to the gallon. I let the engine idle for a minute, exhaust billowing out behind the car and smudging the sky like ash. I want to know why Aidan hasn’t told me who he suspects in his mother’s death, which character on the Clue board of his past he thinks he’s protecting. There isn’t a logical reason for him to be so shy about it. As he said, it’s not like I’ll care one way or another. But for whatever reason, it doesn’t seem like he’s going to tell me.

I power my way through Akron’s salt-whitened streets, looking for a road called Brown. The house fire from which Aidan’s mother’s corpse was dragged a decade ago occurred at 2136 Brown Street. The street itself is narrow, a cracked sidewalk running jaggedly through mounds of grayed snow studded with upturned trashcans and crumpled beer cans. The houses perch on small stamps of thinning grass, porches sagging, roofs rain-buckled and sun-bleached. Because this area is crowded with low-income housing, I am surprised to find the lot without any problems. The house has not been rebuilt. Aidan’s old house was a yellow Cape Cod, and the shell of the structure is now singed and streaked with black, a gaping hole in the roof near the chimney. The plywood tacked across the door has been stamped with large pink letters that read Condemned.

There is an obvious synchronicity between Aidan’s decade-old murder and the more recent corpse, but so far I can’t see any
sense
behind the inexplicable parallels.

I pull the Chevelle over to the side of the road and park. The bitter air nips at my skin. Hugging my arms against my chest, I climb through overgrown weeds to the front door. A black-painted mailbox sits above a white doorbell. I lift the lid of the mailbox, but it’s empty. I breathe in deeply, but the house does not smell of char or death.

I step backwards off the front porch and crane my head back, studying the house. It’s a typical layout, so the floor plan probably involved two bedrooms, a kitchen, a bathroom, and a living room on the first floor, with a narrow attic above and a basement below. With three kids, two girls and one boy, the extra bedroom on the ground floor probably belonged to the girls, the attic above to the boy.

The report claimed that the fire had two points of origin. Given the singe near the chimney, it is safe to assume that one point was the attic. The other point was the master bedroom, facing the street on the left-hand side of the house. The wall here is buckled, the siding blackened, the window long ago shattered, boarded over, and taped shut.

I turn and head back to the car. My face is numb and my nose drips.

“Excuse me? Excuse me.”

I stop and turn around, wiping my sleeve under my nose.

A fat woman has come out of a tiny brick house to the left of 2136 Brown. She is wearing pink slippers and hugging a faded pink cardigan around her breasts, which bounce like melons in a sack as she waddle-runs to me.

“Excuse me!”

I wait and she arrives finally, panting. The top of her head barely comes up to my shoulder and I can see pale skin through the garishly-dyed red hairs sprouting from her scalp. When she moves her clothes give off a faint odor of cat litter.

“Hi,” she says, wheezing. “I saw you looking at that house.”

I don’t say anything. My fist, clenching the ignition key, rests on the car door’s frame.

“I’ve lived here for twenty-three years. I used to be neighbors with the family. A very sweet family. It was terrible what happened.” She stops and looks up at me as if expecting me to comment. When I don’t, she sucks in a breath and says, “If you don’t mind me saying it, I don’t think gawking is very respectful. That woman was a saint.”

A light flickers in my head. “Are you Judith Greene?”

She says, “Oh! Did you know her?”

After a slight pause, I say, “Yes. I was a — she was my therapist.”

Judith Greene tilts head. The cream-colored rolls of fat on her neck dimple. “Oh, I’m sorry I said you were disrespectful! I thought — I mean, you know how kids are these days. Every Halloween it’s the same, you know? Do you want to come in? It’s real cold out.”

“No. Thanks. How well did you know her?”

Judith Greene’s bulbous eyes stare up at me, the whites branched with veins and tinged pink, the irises the color of pale amber, yellow washed in gold. “We were like
one
soul trapped in
two
bodies,” she says.

Her whole body quivers in its pink sweater.

We stand in silence, our breath startling and dark in the clear sky.

“What about her kids?”

She says, “Yes, they were beautiful children. Miranda was so talented, and that sweet little boy. He used to watch my cats. I wish I knew what became of them. It was so terrible, what happened. I think we all needed to — you know, move
on
. And you know, with the divorce, they were already living with their father.”

“What about the other one?”

“The other one?” She licks her lips. The moisture glistens. “You mean Stella. She was — Barb loved her so much.”

I look at Judith Greene. “Loved her more than the others?”

“No, but with her —
disability
. You know how it is. We love the ones who need us in a special way.”

“Disability?”

“With her, you know, her
mental
condition.”

“Oh,” I say. A sister with a mental disability. A fire. I almost smile but it’s not particularly amusing. “Yes,” I say. “I know how it is.”

She reaches for me and before I can move, she squeezes my bare hand. Her palm is clammy and soft. “You know, I sing with a choir and we are doing a performance to raise money for a scholarship in her name — you’ve probably heard of it. The Barb Devorecek Memorial Scholarship?”

I swallow. My mouth tastes like rotten fruit.

She says, “Let me get you a card with the information on it. You should come. I think you’ll really love the performance.”

And she turns and scuttles back to her house. I stand by the car. I bend forward, resting my forehead against the cold metal frame. I wipe my sweating palms on my shirtfront. She comes back waving a bookmark-shaped flyer. I take it from her, fold it into my jeans pocket, and open my car door before she can touch me again. Shielded by the metal and glass door, I say, “Okay. Thank you. I’ll be there.”

I’m lying, of course, but she forgot to ask my name so it doesn’t matter.

When I slide in, I see her lips forming a question. I crank the ignition, slam off the parking break, and roar away from the curb.

She stands watching me until the car reaches the end of the street.

At the next stoplight, I pull the legal pad out of my pack and find the list of names Aidan wrote. I circle the name “Stella” three times in red ink. The way Aidan told the story, it sounded like this sister is in an assisted living home because she was injured in the fire, or because she was psychologically unhinged by it. Or maybe that’s just how I heard it. I wonder why my mind didn’t assume she was already a mentally sick violent criminal. And then I think about Aidan’s inexplicable friendliness, his utter lack of fear or discomfort around me. I wonder what Aidan considers acceptable in human relationships. How he defines normalcy, or innocence.

I call Aidan’s cell as I drive. He doesn’t pick up. I leave a message.

“Your psycho sister,” I say. “What exactly is wrong with her? You’ve got to give me the details. I’m kind of new at this detective business, so you’ve got to help me out. Okay?”

When I get back to the apartment, I notice a dark figure sitting hunched over on the wooden staircase outside the door. I hesitate, but then I recognize the shaggy fringe of caramel-colored hair under the knit cap. I head for the stairs. He looks up when my sneakers rattle the slats. His cheeks are chapped.

“What the hell are you doing here?”

He scrubs a knuckle under his nose and then sniffs hard. “My school had this field trip to the university’s polymer science building.”

I look at my baby brother and remember the dean’s imperative pink slip from yesterday.

“Oh. Damn.” I should have looked. I wave my hand at Stephen. “Get your ass out of the way. I have to unlock the door.”