My Second Death (21 page)

I swallow. “No.”

They both look at me. The room is warm. The uniformed cop touches his neck, runs a finger around his collar. A bead rolls down his neck. The detective remains still.

“No,” I say. “Maybe. It’s not that, it isn’t. I have a, a thing, like, a condition.”

“Condition,” the detective says.

“I’m sorry,” I say because it seems the sort of thing people say in such situations.

The detective’s fingers unfold. She says, “We just have a few more questions. No one is accusing you of anything. We’re just going to ask and you can tell us the truth. Did you kill the woman?”

“No.”

“Where were you coming from, when you drove up?”

“Home. A party. My parents — ”

The cop says, “I just talked to — ”

“Thank you,” the detective says. Her tone is sharp. The cop wipes a finger over his upper lip. I realize that they have called my parents. They have heard what alibi I have.

I let my spine touch the back of my chair.

The detective asks me more questions. Her tone remains even when addressing me. After a while she says, “Thank you for your help, Miss Brandis. We may have more questions. You will have to remain in the Akron area for a while. You understand that, right?”

“Yes.”

“Okay.” She gives me her card. Says to call her if I see anyone I don’t recognize around the apartment.

The cop takes me upstairs. He doesn’t touch me but when I stand at the desk collecting my wallet, car keys, office keys, and the few coins that had been in my pocket, he clears his throat. “Do you have someone to come pick you up? You want to make a phone call? I can take you home but — ”

I look over at him.

He wipes his palm over his mouth. “You need a phone?”

“I don’t like riding in cars with people.”

“I know,” he says. “I figured. So you want to call your friend, or, or anyone else?”

“I mean, you’re being nice to me. But you don’t have to. I’m not retarded. No rule in the Boy Scout handbook about being nice to crazies.”

He looks at me and then he says, “Yeah. You doing okay? With all that in there, you okay with that?”

“Yes.”

“All right. Well. You going to make that call?”

“You can take me home.”

“Oh,” he says.

“I mean, it’s okay if you take me home. If I can sit in the back. Behind the window.”

He smiles suddenly. “Okay,” he says. “That’s okay. You just let me know if you need out or anything. The doors don’t open from the inside.”

“I know.”

He smiles. The pads of flesh over his cheekbones press his eyes into squints. He leads me down scuffed linoleum corridors to the wide industrial metal-sided doors that open into the parking deck.

He drives me back to the apartment and opens the door for me like a gentleman. “You take care. Okay?”

“Yes.” My palms are wet. My head starts to hurt. My act of innocence, my masterful performance, sweeps over me in a tide of shaking and cold sweat. “You too. Thank you.”

“Yeah,” he says. “Anytime. Be good.”

Aidan gets up from the couch when I come in. He comes quickly into the kitchen and stands in front of me.

“You okay?”

“Yes.” I go over to the kitchen sink and run the tap. Wait for the water to heat. I pour lemon-scented dish soap into my palms and scrub my hands into a froth of bubbles. I wash my arms up to the elbows. The lingering smell of ammonia and blood. My hands feel alien, as if they belong to some other body.

“What was — what did they want to know? What did they, did they ask you questions?”

I turn off the tap. Look over at him. My hands drip into the sink.

“They asked me why I ran into the apartment. If I knew her. If I killed her. I answered them. They let me go. Do you want to ask? You want my answers? What will you do then?”

He looks at me, his upper lip drawn taut against his teeth.

“What does it matter to you? Whatever I say, what does it matter? The only thing that can change is what you believe. So what do you think? Did I do it? Am I a fucking killer? Did I
do
it?”

He inhales. He looks at me for a long time. And then he shakes his head once and goes into his room. His door shuts.

The apartment is dark and cold. I feel for the light switch. The room smells of Jack Daniel’s. The thermostat is set to fifty degrees Fahrenheit.

An easel sits in the kitchen. The wet paint catches at the light, dark orange and pale yellow dabs dissolving and mingling. I can’t tell what image struggles through the rush of paint strokes on the canvas. The silence is frenetic.

I go into my room and empty my backpack of the contents, laptop, Bic pens, loose-leaf notepaper scribbled with library call numbers and notes in various archaic languages. I take the laptop into the living room. A newspaper lies on the couch. I move it to sit down, then see the date on the paper. I set the laptop on the worn carpet and open the newspaper. The mutilated body found near the university campus has been identified. The victim was an indigent woman named Desiree Morehead, fifty-two years old, of no known address and with no living relatives. Forensic evidence suggests she was killed elsewhere and brought to the house. The location of the murder is unknown but is likely to be nearby. No information is available on how she got into the house or who killed her. The apartment’s inhabitant had an alibi and did not recognize the body. The police are soliciting information from any person who may have seen someone entering the premises that day, any person who may have been in the vicinity, hanging around or acting otherwise suspicious, in the days leading up to the murder.

My parents called this morning. My mother couldn’t believe that something like that would
happen
and I wouldn’t
call
her immediately. Didn’t I know that she
worries
?

I didn’t tell her about my foray into the bowels of the Akron Police Department last night. And she never asked about the woman, if I knew her. I don’t know if she is afraid to know the answer or if it just doesn’t occur to her to wonder.

For a long time I sit on the couch and try to feel something — anger, maybe. A clean rage. Or fear. But the numbness that feels like cotton in my veins instead of blood is different from my usual disinterest in other people. It’s a colder feeling, like a sickness in my belly. I sit with my hands pressed between my knees and wonder if something broke in me when I saw her. I can’t remember how she looked when she was alive, the shapes of her face, the color of her eyes, or how she smelled.

And I refuse to think about her dead.

I fold the newspaper up and put it in the recycle bin. I work in the living room for three hours. Aidan does not come home. His painting dries unfinished.

My roommate, for the first time in our brief acquaintance, does not seek me out, does not talk, does not say anything and especially does not ask what he does not want to have answered. I come home each night to a silvery mist of non-words with absences and non-meanings between them, pulsating, breathing, a shivering fabric of nothingness.

I research online. I sit in the university library and read ancient books and trawl through less ancient databases. I read archaic lexicons and memorize morphemes.

I come home to the silence. I call my brother but he hasn’t answered his phone since my evening in police custody. I sit on my bed and read and try not to listen to Aidan’s cramped silences. I try not to think of all the decisions that have led me to this place, try not to think about the fact that there is nothing that I can do to make my brain chemicals different.

Downstairs the apartment has been cleaned and evacuated. Another red and blue RE/MAX sign sits out front, this time for the apartment below. Melting snow softens the soil and the last shards of broken glass sink deep into the earth. The temperature creeps above thirty-five degrees.

The air smells like spring but it’s a lie. Winter hovers over Lake Erie, waiting. Those of us born in this state live with the smell of freshening earth but believe only in that unseen slavering icy predator to the north.

I run in the melting snow and get a head cold.

My mother calls again. The family makes an annual pilgrimage to Michigan for the Thanksgiving holiday. I usually decline, but my mother is strangely insistent this year. She says she is worried about me, worried about how dangerous my neighborhood is. But there is something else that worries her. I can’t tell what it is, only that her voice is strung like a violin string on the point of snapping.

The Chevelle’s exhaust system breaks with a roar like a wounded dragon. In the distance between the apartment and my parents’ garage no less than three cars speed pass me with a middle finger on display in the driver’s window. I spend most of Saturday on my back on ice-crusted gravel trying to figure out if I can remove the muffler and have the crack welded, or if I need to replace the whole thing.

My mother brings me hot cocoa, and stands under the carport and asks if I’m coming with them.

I wipe at grease crusted over my chin and say, “Okay.”

She nods a few times. But she doesn’t leave. She just folds her arms under her breasts and watches me. Her breath is visible in the chill.

Because the Chevelle is still up on cinderblocks at my parents’ house, I climb into the family car for a seven-hour trip to the grandparents’ house. My family always makes it a four-day adventure, full, I am sure, of familial warmth and gastronomical delight. I stopped going a few years after I moved into my parents’ garage.

I sit on a bench seat in my mother’s minivan, trying to read history textbooks while Stephen crunches on peanut butter crackers in the seat ahead of me and my parents sit silently in their respective seats up front.

My grandparents’ Michigan housing development, built in the late seventies, is all brown siding and ugly brickwork. Snow packed around blackened trees, stunted houses on frozen lawns. Thick glassy icicles fringe my grandparents’ eaves. Stephen runs up to the front porch and jumps and knocks his red mittens against the icicles. They crack and shatter into the snow, a fine dust of ice shards puffing up like the detritus after a small explosion.

The family greets relatives in the living room. I go to the kitchen.

My grandmother bastes a glistening turkey, its skin blistering and crisp. Steam skims the carcass, vapid dancers rising to mist on the goldenrod-yellow oven hood. She notices my gaze and smiles at me. “It’s fun with all you kids here. Thank you for keeping me company here, sweetie. Our little kitchen time.”

The overhead light is dim and the room is quieter than the crowded living room.

I look at my grandma. She’s wearing a pink jogging suit and the jacket is tight across folds of soft fat around her middle. I wonder how those pounds of human fat would look if the skin was sliced with a thin blade. Pale yellowish-white curds slithering out. A flash of memory. I remember flinging my arms around her waist when I was small enough that the top of my head reached her bellybutton. I try to think what hugging my grandma would have felt like. I imagine it would feel like Jell-O trapped in catgut. But I can’t remember. I blink and decide that I fabricated the memory altogether.

I lean against the sink and try to think of something to say. We must share genetic material, although we couldn’t look more dissimilar. For some reason my mouth aches with wanting to say something.

“Your mother said David was with someone now?”

This is news to me. I rub my hand over my face. “We’ll never know if he is.”

Dave still hasn’t answered my calls, but he stopped attending our grandparents’ get-togethers years before I did, shortly after he moved to New York.

My grandmother looks worried at the brusqueness of my tone, so I make my voice sound lighter, happier. “Casanova said he couldn’t come this year. And by this time next year, whoever this someone is will be just one more broken heart on his Wall of Shame.”

“Oh, he’s not so bad.” She smiles. “He’s an attractive, successful young man.”

Sometimes I think my mom’s parents live in a world constructed entirely of 1950s musical sets in which the people they meet are as likely to burst into choreographed song as to snap their fingers and say, “Jeepers!” My grandmother, for instance, talks about Dave like she is under the impression that he is a high-powered workaholic who gives a single pink rose to his female, blonde, Anglo-Saxon dates.

And I wonder again why my mother, raised in this Technicolor Rodgers and Hammerstein set, decided to marry my father with his genetic predisposition for Shakespearean-level tragedy, stages soaked in blood and the entire cast strewn, limbless, around.

My father’s parents were Jews from Eastern Europe, curators of exquisite suffering repressed until it fused with their DNA. My grandmother came from a poor rural Jewish community in Hungary. She spoke Hungarian and German but not Yiddish, so she could never talk to the other women in her congregation. She met my grandfather in a tobacconist’s shop in Harlem, New York. He was that rare type of Jew — German-speaking and so broke he couldn’t afford shoes that weren’t held together with twine. She married him. My dad says that his only memories of his father are of a man whose wool overcoat smelled like cigar smoke and who sat and stared silently at the radiator while his wife yelled in German. My grandfather knocked up his wife, left for a year, came back, left again. Turned up two or three times in a decade, drunk and passed out on the apartment building’s front steps. My grandmother took him in, made him a spicy boiled cabbage soup, then yelled at him. The only German words my dad knows are curses liberally mixed with threats of violence.

It’s not my mother’s fault that she gave birth to reincarnations of horror condensed to its purest, most elemental form. And it’s not her siblings’ fault that they are now related by marriage to a mostly mysterious heritage of immeasurable psychological trauma. I suppose I shouldn’t blame them for finding us so incomprehensible.

My mother’s whole family is really and truly ordinary. They are rural, under-educated, white Protestant Americans. Most of them are rednecks. I mean hunting rifles and jackets and Ford pickup trucks. Fishing trips. Budweiser by the gross.

This one Thanksgiving my mom’s older brother, Uncle Randy, wanted to take us hunting. My parents tried hard to swallow the blind panic. Fluttered.
Oh, not Mickey, not a girl
, they said.
She’d far rather play with Jennifer’s Barbie dolls
. Ignoring my rapt eyes, my sunlit voice begging, pleading to go. Dave, winking at me, turned to Uncle Randy and cast down shy eyes, clasped his hands behind his back, and said, diffidently, that he wouldn’t mind going.

Uncle Randy took Dave, a scrawny fourteen-year-old, and our oversized brutish cousins. They were gone for the weekend. We drove down to Uncle Randy’s house to pick Dave up on Sunday afternoon.

The deer carcass swung from the garage beams. Huge slabs of dark meat, white ribs. The smell of blood, but the ribs so white, clean as teeth.

Later that night, he snuck into my bedroom and told me about the hunt. About the slaughter. How Uncle Randy had closed his fingers over the handle of the hunting knife, directed his boyish tendons to tighten, to slice the skin at the backs of the knees and down the jaw, to sever the tough, meaty carotid artery, to jerk the edge of the blade through the rubbery jugular veins. They sliced the skin and peeled it.

Like a thick, meaty banana
, Dave told me. Then they removed the organs. Liver and kidneys they packed in wax paper in a tray. The bowels were left with the bones and the skin. They hung the body to drain it.

As he told me, his breath hot on my face, I could picture every step of the process as perfectly as if I were watching it, doing it, in person.

After he told me about the hunting trip, Dave had leaned forward in the dark. He smelled of soap and laundry detergent.
I’m sorry they didn’t let you go
, he whispered.
Maybe next time
.

They never let me go on a hunting trip. I can’t really blame them for that, either.

“And you, young lady.”

I blink and look up at my grandmother. She points the turkey baster at me. A droplet of grease dribbles down its side.

“What about me?”

“One of these days
you’ll
be showing up with some young man. All it takes is the
right
one.”

I just look at her. “The right one to what?”

Now she looks confused. “Well, to be the right one,” she says.

We stare at each other in silence.

And then I burst out laughing.

She gives me a warped, tight smile and turns back to the turkey. Her skin is wrinkled and the light catches at its scaly patterns as she spoons broth over the bird.

The rest of the aunts and uncles and cousins come over the next day. No one says anything to me. I have always tried to play nice around the relatives. It means a lot to my parents. Mostly I just interact as little as possible. I know my way around the suburbs of Michigan pretty well from all the running I do when I’m here.

When I come downstairs after breakfast the next morning (having avoided the meal with its requisite chatter and cluttered table), the relatives are all in the living room going through their stage performances. Aunt Janine rattles on about the management position my cousin Jason got and Aunt Linda goes on about Jennifer’s boyfriend who was a roadie and traveled with Green Day or something.

I sit down on the stairs so I can look down into the living room through the railing. An uncle cradles a bowl of pistachios between his thighs and pops the shells apart with his dirty thumbnails. His belly strains against his Michigan State sweatshirt. He cites baseball scores with a male cousin while the women glance up at the stairs and lean towards each other to talk in unmoderated voices about their offspring. I can tell by the way they talk about their daughters’ dance performances and their sons’ careers that they don’t think much of me, with my eight years of college, zero work experience, and fewer than zero romantic experiences, fit for nothing but to live in a garage or the spare bedroom of an emotionally fragile art student. Their opinions of me aren’t high, but my revenge is perfect: I don’t give a shit.

Thanksgiving dinner is a cacophony. Glass casserole dishes full of green beans floating in mushroom soup mix. Scalloped potatoes with steam rising from brown-specked cheese crusts. The electric knife dipping into the turkey breast, slitting the crisp skin so that clear liquid dribbles down its sides. Laughter, arguing, and a self-righteous ESPN announcer in the background analyzing a touchdown.