My Second Death (24 page)

Overhead the church bells peal out a Christmas hymn instead of the usual tolling of the hours. Spatters of rain flare white against the halogen lamp. And it occurs to me that maybe the answer to Aidan’s sadness isn’t telling him the truth. Aidan thinks that he wants to know the truth, but in reality he just wants to
feel
something.

I lift my chin, closing my eyes against pin-sharp beads of rain. Aidan is not the sort of person who is starving for revenge. All he wants is to sit hunkered down in one of those bright-colored plastic chairs, lining up crayons with his sister, finally able to feel a pure emotion, pity unadulterated by guilt, maybe, or love without grief. What if I could give him that?

When I open my eyes Judith Greene is watching me with wide eyes, her teeth sunk into her lower lip.

I grin at her. “Well, this has been nice. You have a Merry Christmas, okay?”

I turn and take the steps two at a time. My shoes squeak on the slick wet stone.

Aidan is lying on the couch with his head tipped to the side, his mouth slack, snoring.

I bend over him. My hair falls into his face and its touch wakes Aidan and his eyelids unfurl.

The skin around his eyes is swollen and the whites are pinkish, bloodshot.

“You want to know who killed your mother? For real, you want to know?”

He just gazes up at me with that one eye swiveling lazily, like a petal floating in a jar of water.

My lips are near his. My words are moist and print themselves on his skin, slide into his open mouth.

“She was my therapist,” I say. “I didn’t like her. But I like fires. Your retarded sister wears a diaper. She was playing with Lego in the basement. She can’t wipe her own ass, far less drug a woman and start two fires with accelerant.”

His one good eye watches me. Then, slowly, he raises his hand and wipes the drool off the side of his face. He blinks.

I straighten up and snap my fingers in his face.

“Hey. Wake up. You putting the pieces together? Huh?”

He swallows and then coughs.

“I was asleep.”

“Yeah, no kidding. Do I need to go through it again, or you think you got enough to Miss Marple your way to your answer?”

He doesn’t say anything.

“I killed her. Okay? I killed your mother because she was my shrink. It wasn’t personal. I hated everyone, and I was on medications. You know. Loopy. So I killed her and started the fire. And that’s the truth.”

He licks his lip and then he nestles his head back against the cushion and closes his eyes again.

I put my hands on my hips.

“Do you not even care? All this — you’re telling me you don’t even
care
?”

His eyes remain closed, his face motionless. He inhales and exhales.

“Well,” I say. “You are very fucking welcome.”

I go back outside and down the stairs into great sheets of rain.

Pulling up my collar against the rain, I hike across campus to the library. I climb up to the third floor and sit in silence among the stacks smelling mildew and carpet cleaner. Books printed in primordial dialects of English rise like buttresses around me.

What did I think would happen? Did I imagine a scene of tent revival healing? Or perhaps the meticulous denouement of a Sherlock Holmes mystery, filled with modest expressions of gratitude and some spurious violin music?

Well, fuck him. Just … fuck him.

For one of the chapters in my dissertation, I am writing about medieval morality plays, popular stage plays performed by traveling thespians during the time when the English language was being wrought from the bitter struggle between Anglo-Saxon and Norman French. In these plays characters named Everyman, Vice, and Virtue act out simple stories in simple words in order to pare down human behavior to its most basic elements. In these plays God and the devil lurk in the wings while Everyman wanders the stage boards, trapped between redemption and damnation and armed only with a vocabulary limited to two syllables. Illiterate audiences learned their own language and the nature of civilized behavior in two hours.

Dr. Telushkin worries that my interest in morality plays stems from my belief that human ethics is not complicated, that morality can be codified in a series of rote gestures and that all moral judgment can be expressed using juvenile vocabulary words like
good
and
bad
. Dr. Telushkin is right. I crouch in the library and my fingers trace faded typescript in search of the knowledge of good. Or evil.

Dark brands of light lance across the evening sky as I walk home. The rain has cleared and the clotted clouds glow russet from the setting sun, a rim of fire opal around a mud-thickened globe.

I go inside and see Aidan kneeling by the couch, his head resting in a crack between the cushions. He looks like the fraudulent mimic of a faithful churchgoer and laughter bubbles up inside me, but then the laugh catches in my throat. Something about the laxness of his limbs. I go over and put my palms against the side of his neck. The skin moist and cool.

I hook my fingers in the neckline of his T-shirt and yank back and he falls, slithers through my hands and thuds on the floor. Runny vomit stains the couch cushions.

He coughs and burrows his head into the floorboards.

I go into the kitchen.

A trash bag full of warped glass bottles, amber liquid still sloshing across the bottoms. An empty bottle of ibuprofen.

I pull out an orange cardboard box of baking soda and a plastic cup. I mix baking soda and water with a teaspoon and carry it into the living room. I put the cup on the carpet. Then I kneel over him and haul him up, his head lolling back against the couch.

His jaw is slack. He exhales. His breath smells like piss.

“I’m
drunk
.”

His voice is a shredded whisper.

I tip his head back and pinch his nose, and his mouth opens. He puts feeble cold fingers against my wrist. I pour the cupful of soda water down his throat and force his jaw shut. One hand on the top of his skull, the other on his chin, I put my face in front of his.

“Swallow.”

He does, his eyes widening slightly. Milky liquid bubbles out the sides of his mouth. He struggles.

I release him, and he chokes and gags and strings of saliva and water dribble down his front. I slap his face.

The crack of sound startles both of us.

He gasps. And then his throat clicks, and he curls over and coughs and then pukes hard. He throws up, his diaphragm sending him into spasms of vomiting. He chokes and retches for almost three minutes. I look at my watch while he throws up. His vomit is runny, frothing with bubbles and the occasional white, decaying disc of a pill.

When he’s lying on his side making gagging noises but not spitting up anything else, I stand and go into the kitchen and rinse out the cup. I bring him a fresh cup of water and make him drink it. Then I carry the empty cup back and refill it. He lies on the floor with a cup of water by his head while I get out a spray bottle of Febreze. He groans and coughs and drinks water and lies on his side with his legs drawn up against his stomach while I carry the couch cushions outside to the trashcan.

When I come back in he gets up on one knee, a hand on the floor in front of him. He is struggling to his feet. His shoulders shift, strain. He stands as if growing from the earth one limb at a time.

“Mick — Mickey. I’m — I’m
sorry
.”

I look at him. He is leaking fluids and smells rancid.

Something strange twists in my stomach. A feeling — I don’t know what it is. I only know that I don’t want to cut him. He is a sloppy reeking mess and I don’t want anything or anyone to hurt him. The thought is so bizarre that I don’t know what to do with it.

He puts his arms out. His fingers reach for me. I turn on my heel and his fingers snag at my shirt, but the years of running have made me fast and I am out the door so quickly that his fingers close on nothing.

A tattered plastic bag slaps wetly against the side of the industrial garbage bin in the gusty wind. I wipe the back of my wrist against my mouth. I figured it would help him if I told him a psychotic kid killed his mother. Take his mom off the hook, and his autistic sister. Give him someone he could hate without feeling guilty afterwards. But I was wrong. I’m always wrong.

I fuck everything up.

I put my hands around my skull and press. My head hurts.

I pull out my cell phone and dial my brother’s number. This time I leave a message. I don’t know what I want to say but I start talking anyway. “Okay,” I say. “I did something bad and I don’t know how to — I just, I can’t do this anymore. I fucked it all up and I can’t — I want you to tell me what to do so that I, or if I can just — ”

My voice stops. I can hardly breathe. I stand in silence with the phone pressed against my jaw. I don’t know what this is. Something hot and hard lodged in my chest, pressing against my esophagus. A shock of heat, like sudden fear, but what am I afraid of?

I hang up the phone.

Rain coalesces from a pellucid sky.

I don’t know how long I sit on the steps. When I lean forward my hair falls like a shank of half-frozen seaweed across my hands. Ice has formed around the tips like pearl building up around sand.

I don’t know where to go or what to do.

I want to run but it’s so cold. The only thing I have is my car. The keys are back inside. I don’t want to go back in there. But I need my car. I need the escape. I push myself to my feet.

When I open the apartment door I see Aidan standing at the kitchen sink with a can of Clorox and a scrub brush. Empty glass bottles in a kitchen trash bag heaved into the center of the floor, carpet cleaner white and foaming on the worn living room carpet.

He pauses when the door opens, then starts scrubbing again. I watch the shift of oblique muscle along his ribcage. He doesn’t lift his head.

The faintest plink of water droplets in the sink. But the faucet is turned off.

I don’t intend to say anything and am startled when I hear myself talking. My voice is low and vicious.

“If you feel like shit, it’s your own stupid fault and you know it.”

He wipes the back of his wrist under his eyes and then yelps when the bleach cleanser stings his mucus membranes. His head swivels to the side. His eyelashes are wet and his walleye wavers without purpose.

I pick up my car keys and my backpack from where I dropped it earlier. I put the keys in my pocket.

He leans over the sink like he’s going to vomit. He doesn’t say anything. A string of mucus slides from his left nostril. He sniffs.

I want to leave. I don’t know why I haven’t left already. I balance on one foot, scratch the toe of my sneaker against the opposite calf. “Look, if I go — are you going to do that shit again?”

He puts his fists against his forehead and presses hard.

And then he says, “Go away. Leave.”

I stare at him.

“What?” I say. “You’re mad at
me
? Why? You wanted to know about your mom. So I’m a shitty liar. So what? I just said it because I thought it would, I don’t know,
help
.”

“It would help if you didn’t fucking
lie
to me!” He’s screaming now.

I back up a step, almost lose my balance.

“Okay.” My backpack slides off my shoulder. I snatch it back up. “But the point is, your sister didn’t do it. Okay?”

“Fine,” he says. His voice cracks in the middle. “Whatever.”

He turns his face to me. Powdery kitchen cleanser dusts his face in ghost-pale patches, sliced through with tear-tracks.

“I don’t understand. What’s your problem?”

I wait for him to say something but he doesn’t, so after a while I walk out and lock the door behind me.

There’s nothing I can do anyway. A normal person would know what went wrong, whether it’s me he’s mad at, or himself, or if it’s something else entirely. A normal person would know the right thing to say or the right gesture to make that would calm him down. But that’s always been my problem. I create problems that I can’t fix because of my flawed neurons. I wouldn’t mind so much if it was just me that my mind tormented.

My skin feels so tight I want to run, or cut it, or bang my foot against the wall until the sharp sting cracks the pressure and lets me breathe again. But I owe Aidan more than my own release.

I drive north to Hudson. The rain turns to ice and plinks like chimes against the windshield.

The reception desk at Harvest Home overlooks an entry way filled with white wicker rocking chairs and low bench seats with mint-green cushions. The walls are painted mint-green with a border of stenciled white scallop shells. All the healthy people who move behind the desk or hustle down linoleum hallways in rubber-soled canvas shoes wear pastel scrubs. I stand in the reception room and press my sweaty palms against my thighs.

“Hi there! Who are you here to see?”

She smiles widely at me. A woman with bright red lipstick. I stare at her lips. Harvest Home management has clearly read books about the psychologically soothing effects of mint green. Shouldn’t her lips be green? Isn’t red the color of hookers and sex? I am clenching a folder in my arms, the yellow legal pad and print-outs with details on Ambien and Prozac and arson. My skin is gooseflesh. I wore a short-sleeved shirt and left my coat in the car, but it’s cold enough that even I feel it. The thermostat is below freezing outside and inside is barely warmer.

The woman comes around the desk to greet me and I turn the notebook toward her so that she can read the neat black letters that spell out Stella’s name.

A few minutes later she trots beside me, smelling like hand soap and fabric softener. She’s talking about the progress Stella has made recently. Aidan’s sister is in a community recreation room. A big-screen TV and low tables covered in modeling clay, crayons, colorful wooden abacuses, and banks of computer monitors. Two of the inmates are hunched at computers, typing quickly. I recognize Stella even before a hand that smells of soft soap fingers my arm.

“There she is.”

Stella’s smooth dark hair is short and caps her skull. Her features are long and sharp and she looks like a raven. The skin around her eyes is pink and swollen. She’s wearing a T-shirt and gray sweatpants and is lining up a row of crayons side by side. The color gradation is immaculate, a red-ochre next to a red-sienna next to a persimmon red and then orange, tangerine, yellow, pastel yellow, and white.

I watch from the doorway. The woman by me fingers my shoulder again, her nails light as spider legs on my skin. “Do you want to go in and see her?”

I shake my head. As I watch Stella, a thick strand of mucus eases down over her upper lip. I clear my throat. “You said she’s doing better. She’s still not talking, right?”

“Right,” the woman says. “But she’s drawing. Her therapist says she’s drawing her emotions and memories.”

“About the fire.”

The woman doesn’t answer for a minute.

I turn away from the door and walk down the hall.

“Excuse me, aren’t you here to see her?” Her shoes flap down the hall after me. “Excuse me!”

I stop and turn around. “Who comes to visit her most, besides her brother?”

The woman hesitates. Her red lips purse. They are candy-apple red. Her skin is burnt sienna-brown. “The Akron city detective, you mean? I have her name on file.”

“It doesn’t matter. Just tell her, the next time she comes in, that Stella didn’t start the fires.”

The woman looks at me.

“She sure as fuck didn’t give her mother twenty Ambiens and Prozacs. She isn’t guilty.”

“I thought she was just a witness.”

I blink. It occurs to me that the police detective can’t possibly be as naive as Aidan. The Akron city police department probably sees Stella only as a material witness. But their interest in her reinforces Aidan’s fears. The strange child is the dangerous one. Normal people are so stupid sometimes. They don’t understand that evil requires premeditation, silence, and complicity. No one creates evil
ex nihilo
. Truly bad people take others’ suffering or doubt or temptation and shape it like clay. Innocent people don’t have intentions, even if their unthinking actions wreak havoc. I like clean lines, clean smells. Innocence makes me feel sick. I don’t know how to judge it. It is neither good nor evil.

“Okay, then.” I feel my fingers trembling against the folder I hold over my stomach. “You can still tell her, though. Just to make sure she knows.”

“She’s a detective. I’m pretty sure that’s her job. To know.”

I smile. She smiles back at me. I don’t know why she’s smiling.

A few flakes of snow drift aimlessly in the gray air. My breath fogs the windshield. I turn up the heat and sit in the car, shivering while I wait for warmth to creep out and thaw my bones.

My cell phone vibrates.

I wipe my hand over my forehead. My skin feels waxy and stiff, like a half-formed mask. At first I can’t focus and then I realize it’s Dave’s number. I wonder why he’s calling. And then I remember. That message I left, hours ago. God, how long? It feels like weeks but I realize that it’s only been about six hours. I don’t even remember what I said. Only that it felt like a broken kaleidoscope, all the fragments of colored glass cascading down around me and nothing to hold them back or sort them into shapes.

I open the phone and hold it next to my ear. The panic is gone now but I feel — muzzy. Like I’ve taken too many antihistamines.

He’s jabbering, talking so quickly that at first I can’t understand him. I’m too tired to deal with his mania.

And then I realize that what he is saying has nothing to do with Aidan, or with whatever feeling choked me earlier.

I sit up straighter. “Wait, can you — shit, slow
down
— you need what?”

Dave says, “I need you to kill someone for me.”