My Second Death (30 page)

A chair creaks in Aidan’s room. He comes out into the kitchen with a paintbrush in his hand.

“I thought you were going to your parents’ tonight.”

I set the keys carefully on the countertop. They slither to the side, fall with a clatter. I frown at them.

“I didn’t — don’t feel well.”

He comes forward. “Are you okay?”

“Yes.”

“What were — I mean — ” He stops talking.

“What?” I say. “What do you
think
I was doing?”

His walleye skitters sideways. Lines deepen in his throat as he inhales and holds his breath. He sets the brush down on the counter and presses his fists against his eyes. When he lowers his hands his eyes are incandescent.

“Nothing,” he says. “I wasn’t asking that.”

“Then what?”

The corners of his mouth pull down. “I just, I was just
worried
. I don’t know what to — how to make you feel better.”

“I don’t feel bad. I don’t feel anything. Remember? Jesus, I thought we’d been over this.” I swallow a yawn. “Sorry. I don’t mean to — I’m sorry.”

“Mickey, are you okay?”

I shrug.

He sighs. “Don’t do that. Don’t look like that, like it doesn’t matter.”

I don’t know what to answer, what he wants me to look at him like.

Something shifts in his skin, in his eyes. He takes a step toward me.

I back up and run into the counter edge. The corner cuts into my lower spine. “What are you — ?”

And he grabs my skull between his hands, each hand cupped over the side of my head, his fingers tight, his palms pressing against my ears so that I hear my breath echoing inside my head. The pressure aches through my skin. His fingers digging into my scalp are strong and tensile.

His breath smells of cigarette smoke and toothpaste.

I can see the faint pinpricks of beard along his pale jaw, the waxy white of dried skin on his lower lip. My chest hurts. Hot air trapped inside, afraid to let go, to breathe.

And in surprise I see pain on his face, a sudden contraction of his eyebrows, a look of seared agony in his eyes. He makes a noise in his throat and pulls my head into the hollow between his neck and shoulder. His cold jacket smells like sweat and the spice of turpentine and tobacco.

And then his grip loosens and I scramble back, banging into the counter again, sucking frantically at the air.

He looks down at the ground. He wipes his hand over his mouth.

I imagine what it would be like to go to him, to put my arms around him and hold on. I imagine that it would feel like screaming and like dissolving, like light fracturing into myriad pieces, endlessly expanding, endlessly diminishing. My hands start to shake.

I take a breath. “Ay — ”

He looks up at me in surprise.

I swallow. “Ay — Ayyyy.” Deep breath. “
Aidan
.”

We are silent.

He says, “My middle name is Christopher. That’s three syllables.”

I let out my breath. “
Fuck
you.”

He smiles. He looks sad and, something else. A gentleness in his eye sockets, a dark warmth in the shape of his mouth. The muscular contractions of the face that portray the human emotion of compassion. I don’t know what to do with that. I don’t know why — how — anyone could feel compassion for me.

I go into my room but when I lie down my eyelids sink. Gravity pulls at my skin and gray rushes toward me and foams like ocean crests.

I hear Aidan moving around in his room. The smell of paints, the squeak and clatter as he tidies his things. The gush of water in his bathroom as he rinses his brushes. Then his bedsprings creak.

I get up and go to his room. Tap at the lintel.

“Yeah?”

I push open the door. His room is messy, rags and strips of tissue paper strewn across the paint-speckled floorboards, canvases stacked against the walls, a dismantled easel leaning against the bureau. The wide bed with its rumpled sheets, a stray belt lying like a curled snake on the sheets.

He comes out of the bathroom, his T-shirt in his hands. He stops short when he sees me.

“I want to sleep in your bed tonight.”

He doesn’t say anything.

“Without, you know, touching. But just — as friends.”

“Mickey,” he says.

“Can I?”

He looks down at his shirt. His knuckles are pale. The material is sogged and drips slowly onto the floor. Droplets pebble his bare feet.

I go over to the bed and climb in. My eyes keep wanting to close. The sheets are smooth and cool against my skin.

He goes into the bathroom. After a bit he comes out. I close my eyes and force myself to stay awake listening. I hear his bare feet scuff. And then the bureau drawer. He drops his jeans and the zipper clinks. The rustle of cloth as he pulls on pajama pants. He turns out the light and climbs into bed. The mattress slants. He slides his legs under the sheets and lies on his back. He puts his arms behind his head.

I force my eyelids open.

Moonlight grays the walls. Flashes of blue static electricity flare when he turns over to face me, the sheets rushing together, separating, crackling, decrepitating.

Pale light glazes his bare skin.

“I don’t know what you’re doing,” he whispers.

“Me either.”

“Okay.” He puts his hand out. I see the darkness of it.

“No.”

“Hold still. I won’t touch you.”

He tugs a strand of hair clinging to my sticky lip. Smoothes it across the pillow.

“Okay?”

“Yeah. Okay.”

There is a long silence.

“So tomorrow’s your late day, right?” He coughs a little. Swallows. “So since you don’t have to go in early do you — maybe you want to go get coffee in the morning? Like at Starbucks or something?”

“Maybe.”

He lets out his breath and turns onto his back.

“Okay,” he says. “Well. Good night.”

“Good night.”

I lie in the quiet listening to his breath as it evens and deepens, the nasal roughness of a snore creeping into the lower notes.

In the dark I strain to stay awake and think about falling asleep. If I fall asleep I don’t know if I will wake up again. And I drift into the waking dream, the ritual fantasy that is my private religion.

I lie in the dark and imagine that I sink into a well of drugged sleep, that my heartbeat slows, perhaps falters and ceases altogether. In the morning as pale sunlight creeps through the dusty windowpanes I will wake up. Some new breath will fill my lungs with a suspicion of joy and I will go get coffee with Aidan, where, grabbing for the sugar, I will spill some. And reaching across the table to brush the grains from my palm, his skin will touch mine and crackle like static electricity, like pollen in the air. Sunlight and air and skin, nothing more. And I will know that the sickness is gone.

I will laugh and get up and run out of Starbucks and I will drive home where I will come into the kitchen, flinging open the door, and my mother will startle, turning away from a pot of simmering oatmeal, her eyes flaring wide.

I stretch my eyelids and stare sightlessly into the dark in order to picture this scene, every detail of it immaculate and rehearsed. This is what happens: I stride into the kitchen and go to her and put my hands on her arms, feel the soft flesh give under my strong fingers. The warm squash of her breasts pressed against my chest. As I hug her, I put my mouth to her cheek that feels like velveteen and I whisper, “I love you. Mom, I love you.” I whisper until the words infect her wrinkled skin, sink through blood and muscle and fuse to her marrow. She leans away from me to stare, her eyes dazzling in the morning sun. And the pale light touches our skin and turns it to fractured crystals and our sweat, our sweat smells of burnt sugar, beautiful in the ambered light as if every pore every cell is perfected and maybe it is.

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Copyright © 2013 by Lydia Cooper.
All rights reserved.
This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher; exceptions are made for brief excerpts used in published reviews.

Published by
TYRUS BOOKS, an imprint of F+W Media, Inc.
10151 Carver Road, Suite 200, Blue Ash, Ohio 45242
www.tyrusbooks.com

Hardcover ISBN 10: 1-4405-6126-5
Hardcover ISBN 13: 978-1-4405-6126-9
Trade Paperback ISBN 10: 1-4405-6129-X
Trade Paperback ISBN 13: 978-1-4405-6129-0
eISBN 10: 1-4405-6127-3
eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-6127-6

Cover art © istockphoto.com/Mikulas Jaros