My Second Death (4 page)

I look at my watch. I am usually running at this time.

I silence my phone and open the book. Flip through a few pages.

The pages are stiff, the binding crusty with disuse, and there is a broken part of the spine that the book wants to open to. When I separate the book at the broken place, I see that a page is missing.

My breath seizes.

When I trace my fingers over the faded script, sounding out the words, the words sound familiar.
Und wir — wir müssen auch noch seinen Schatten besiegen!

And then the faint ruff of a ripped-out page. But I know what that missing page says. I just don’t know how it got from the book to a dead man’s teeth.

I close the book. The tips of my fingers are dusty and itch. I almost slide the book back onto the shelf where its OCLC number belongs. But instead I take it back to my study carrel and put it under a stack of books on old English land reform laws.

The book was misshelved for a while and no one noticed. The shelvers here at the library are mostly undergraduate students on work study. No one cares if a volume is missing.

When I come out from the carrel and lock it behind me, the buzzing fluorescent lights give my skin the yellowed cast of ageing paper.

And we — we must throw off his shadow
.

But I don’t know whose shadow to throw off. I don’t know whether I’m being hounded by gods or demons, or how to find my way out from their shadow.

I can’t go home yet. Not with the smell of book glue and burnt paper on me. Not with my mind caught like a stuck needle on German phrases. I grab my duffel bag out of the trunk of the Chevelle and go into the campus gymnasium to change into running gear.

After my run, I return home, shower in scalding water, and watch my skin flare red. Steam billows up and chokes the bathroom with the scent of apple blossom shampoo. Outside the bathroom window the rain comes and goes in waves, applause dimming to a gentle hush.

Everything is wet and clean. I towel off and dress and take a breath. Then I go downstairs, twisting my wet hair into a rope and draping it over my shoulder. The kitchen is full of smells, sweet basil and olive oil sizzling on the stove, rosemary bread baking in the oven. My mother stands over a simmering pot, stirring, droplets of condensation beading her upper lip. She startles when I come in, but she turns toward me. “Oh, honey, hi! I didn’t see you come in. I didn’t know if you were — I’m glad you decided to come.”

Her hands are clasped under her breasts. She pauses, smiling, watching me. Her life is punctuated with strange pauses and verbal ellipses. I have always felt that in her head she plays an edited footage of her own life and in these moments she is blocking in a scene of familial warmth. A kiss to my cheek, perhaps, or a brief maternal embrace.

“Where’s the birthday boy?” I say.

“In the living room. We haven’t had this in a while, have we? The whole family together for a birthday.”

“The whole family?” I realize this is the first family birthday since Dave moved back to Ohio a couple months ago. “He’s coming?”

She’s smiling but the tendons under her translucent skin are tight, carving dark ridges down her neck. “Aren’t you going to be glad to see him?”

“Are you?” I want to know why she looks anxious.

She says, “Of course I am. I’m always glad to see him — to see my whole family. I love all of you.”

I raise my eyebrows a little but don’t say anything to that.

I go into the living room, a wide wood-floored room with brown leather couches and a white shag rug. Separated from the living room by an empty foyer is the solarium, a flagstone room with vast windows and a jungle of green plants, lush sun-house for the mirror-shiny grand piano which sits like a black goddess in the center of the otherwise empty room. I want to go into the solarium where it smells like eucalyptus and orange-scented wood polish. I hate the smell of human bodies, the clammy sweat, and the way human eyes and voices crawl all over me, sticky, brutish,
bruising
.

The TV is on, mumbling to itself. Flashes of blue light reflect off an evening-dark windowpane. Stephen lies on the rug in front of the TV, a game controller in his hand, eyes fixed on his screen avatar. The human-shaped cartoon lurches across rooftops with the graceful stop-motion of a praying mantis.

I sit on the far end of the couch and clear my throat.

“Happy birthday.”

His thumb joints move but the pupils of his eyes remain fixed. “Yeah. I got your message on the bathroom mirror. Classy.”

“Sniper,” I say.

“Yeah, I see it.”

Graphic gunfire rattles the screen with flares of yellow and orange. Red blood like a paint can flung in a slow-motion arc. I think of Stephen’s blood spooling from the sliced umbilical cord.

“I dreamed about your afterbirth last night.”

Without looking around he wrinkles his nose. “Gross.”

I sit forward, my elbows on my knees. “Yeah. You were pretty gross too. When you were born.”

“Some would say,” he says without looking around, “that I still am.”

I smile.

The front doorknob rattles and opens and along with a swirl of ozone-scented air a silvery voice calls, “I’m home! Hello! I’m
hee-eere
!”

Stephen drops his controller and twists around.

Dave comes into the living room, unwinding a red knit scarf. A man comes in after him, turning to shut the door after them. Dave advances into the wood-floored foyer, pausing under the halo of the glass-shaded lamp with an almost-unconscious theatricality. His hair is untrimmed but he is clean-shaven. Faint red veins splay across the shadowed hollow under his cheekbones.

He holds his arms wide. Stephen goes to him and they hug, Dave cupping Stephen’s face and kissing his forehead loudly before releasing him. Mom comes out wiping her hands on a towel and he kisses her as well, his lyrical voice in cadenced ecstasies over how beautiful she looks. Her eyes catch his fevered sparkle, and her tired lines disappear into a haze of pure happiness.

“Sweetie,” she says, “you’re
thin
.”

“Sweetie,” Dave says, “you’ll feed me.” They both laugh. Stephen crosses his arms around his middle and shifts his weight.

The man behind Dave edges into the room. Mom says, “Hello!”

My elder brother is often drunk, is not morally averse to drugs, and despite his publication record and reviews, is less than normally intelligent in some ways. So it is not surprising when he walks in with random strangers, which he frequently does, of both sexes. My parents are overly polite. They think they are being open-minded, that Dave is a bisexual whose proclivities are a test for their middle-class morality. I told them once that Dave was not bisexual, that he just liked to fuck. They thought that I, in my pristine virginity, didn’t know what the hell I was talking about and they smiled kindly at me.

Dave laughs now, an affected yet oddly addictive giggle.

“Oh, God, I’m an asshole, I
totally
forgot. Mom, Stephen, this is Aidan. Aidan, this is my family.” He raises his eyes to mine. They are bright with laughter and he’s holding his mouth tight, like he’s sharing a secret joke with me. Like he’s about to say something that will send us both into peals of helpless mirth like stock characters in a Jane Austen novel. But he just says, “Oh, and that one is my sister. Michaela.”

The stranger moves around Dave’s side for the first time.

A dark buzz of hair covers his skull like moss. His eyes are wet-dark, bright, almost feral. One iris holds steady and the other zigzags like an unmoored boat in a storm. He looks right at me, as if I’m the only one of interest. I wonder if Dave has told him about me.

“Hey.” He speaks so softly I have trouble hearing him.

Mom says, “Welcome, Aidan. Come in. Dinner’s ready in five minutes.”

“Thank you for your hospitality, Mrs. Brandis.” The words are small and compact and appropriate, like a child reciting from a politeness grammar. He even looks at my mother when he talks, his solitary good eye moving reluctantly to her face. But as soon as he finishes talking he looks back at me, his singular eye focusing like a compass needle honing in on north. The wild iris swivels sideways, a shivering dark disc in a milk sea.

Dave comes into the living room, one arm around Stephen’s shoulders. “What are you playing? Oh, excellent. What’s the high score?”

I stand by the couch, palms pressed against my thighs, watching Dave fold his limbs as gracefully as a crane and Stephen throw himself down on the couch like a beanbag. Dave rests one hand on the back of Stephen’s head and with his other hand grabs a second game controller from the coffee table.

The stranger takes a step into the living room and hesitates. He is wearing a brown plaid shirt faded to translucence over a green T-shirt. Crusty patches of white and blue paint speckle the worn fabric.

He looks at the television. Then he looks up at me, the force of his stare reaching across the space between us. He holds out a hand to me. I notice Band-Aids on two of his fingers. He says, “Hi again. I know you.”

I look up at his face. We watch each other in silence.

Finally his fingers fold in on themselves and he pulls the hand back.

“You don’t,” I say.

Aidan’s eyelids open wide, startled, apparently, that I speak. “I’m sorry. I meant, we met before. I don’t know if you remember?”

“Are you a cutter?” I ask.

“What?”

I nod at his fingers. “I asked if you’re a cutter.”

There is a short silence. Stephen twists his head away from Dave’s hand, where it rests against his neck. He says, “Dave, stop it!
Geez
.”

Aidan says, “What do you mean?”

I smile a little. “No need to sound so anxious, dear stranger. I’ve got no problem with cutters.”

“Yeah, you really
like
cutters, babe, don’t you? Like your roommate when you moved into that dorm, she was a cutter, right?”

I didn’t know Dave was listening.

“Shut up.”

“I already told him about you, babe. Had to, you know? Had to warn the poor kid before he met you. I just told him about whatsername, your first roommate.” He snorts, as if the person in question were somehow barely relevant, scarcely worth the breath to speak her name. “First
and
last roommate.” The person whose name he doesn’t speak is the reason I moved into my parents’ garage ten years ago.

Stephen doesn’t say anything. He pretends he can’t hear a lot of the time.

There’s a short silence. Then Aidan says, “If you mean, do I cut myself on purpose, then no. I don’t.”

“Guess you’re just clumsy then.”

He frowns and looks down at his fingers. He folds them under his thumb and looks back up. “Guess so.”

I look at the TV screen.

After a while Aidan perches carefully on the edge of the couch. He leans forward, hands clasped between his knees. Dave, transfixed by the television screen, ignores him and shrieks in glee when his avatar shoots Stephen’s.

Aidan rubs his fingers over his knees, making a soft scratching sound. Then he says, “Stephen — you’re Stephen, right? Um, there’s one of those cop guys, behind the trashcan.”

“Yeah, I saw it,” Stephen says, surly. Then, more mellow, “Thanks.”

Mom comes back into the living room. She looks at us, at the walleyed stranger stiff on the couch, at Dave and Stephen entranced in vicarious bloodshed, at me standing like a sentry by the fireplace.

“Honey, have you met Aidan yet?”

“I might not enjoy the presence of others, Mother, but I do at least
notice
them. I am neither blind nor mentally deficient.”

“I’m sorry, honey. Aidan, can I get you anything? A drink? I’m making a spaghetti Bolognese for dinner.”

“I’m fine, Mrs. Brandis. Thank you.”

Mom goes back into the kitchen. From the kitchen, the clink of metal pot lids, the spicy tang of a simmering tomato sauce, a sweet cinnamon smell, maybe a pie baking. My stomach growls.

Dave says, “Shit! I almost had that one.”

Another quiet.

The air feels thick with human pores oozing urethra and my throat convulses like I’m going to gag. I get up and walk out of the living room.

The piano lid slips like satin under my sweaty fingers. I run my hands over the oil-slick keys and start to play. I never got very good at piano because I can’t sit on a bench with another person. I can, however, make my way through some easier Beethoven and Mendelssohn and Mozart. I like the way notes are precise and clean, the purity of sound produced by metal cables stretched so taut they are on the brink of snapping.

“Dinner’s ready! Honey, dinner’s ready.”

I keep playing, washing out the clinks of silverware and scrapes of chairs and shuffle of bodies. My mom comes into the doorway to tell me dinner’s ready but I let a staccato run erase her voice.

A hot hand claps down on my shoulder. I jump and the piano clangs atonally. I slam the lid shut and shove back the stool and lurch to my feet, spinning to face Dave who grins, sloppy-mouthed, like an idiot. His eyeteeth are crooked and yellowish.

“You’re such a fucking
ass
hole!”

“Dinner’s ready,” he says.

He’s still chuckling when I yank my chair back and sit down at the end of the table. Mom carries in a wooden bowl of salad. She sets it down and says, “Dave, wait till we’re all sitting,” because he’s reaching into a basket of buttered rosemary rolls. He pulls his hand back and sits down.

The front door swings open with a clatter. My father is nothing if not endowed with the innate capacity to make an entrance. He comes in balancing a briefcase, stacks of free papers, a few heavy tomes, and rain-fogged glasses. He nods at everyone, his eyes catching on Aidan, and says, “Pardon my tardiness. Cynthia.”

This last to my mother.

She smiles at him, but her eyes move away from his face before the smile reaches them.

He goes into his office, unloads his briefcase and books, and then his feet tread upstairs, each step firm, irrevocable. The crank of a spigot. Water thrumming in the old pipes. He comes down a few minutes later, buttoning a beige cardigan. He hitches his trouser legs and sits, leaning for the basket of rolls.

Dave claps his hands once and then cups them around his mouth like a trumpet. “Birthday present time!”

Dad frowns but withdraws his hand.

Dave pushes his chair back and goes over to the sideboard where a small collection of gifts in shiny silver and blue wrapping paper sits. He picks up the largest box and turns it, finds a card by the large bow. His eyebrows go up and his face creases into glee. He lifts his eyes to us and says, solemnly, “For my baby boy.”

Stephen’s ears turn pink.

“Oh shush,” Mom says. “Just give it to him.”

In my head I play through a Chopin nocturne. My fingers move across my thighs, picking out chords. This is taking too long. I snap my fingers to get Dave’s attention and point to a card lying on top of the other presents. “That green card is mine. Give him that one next.”

Dave pushes out his lower lip. “Patience, grasshopper. You can’t rush me. I have a
meth
od.”

I roll my eyes. “The silver present is Dad’s. It’s a watch. The other card is yours. God knows what you wrote in it. It’s cash or a gift card, but my bet is cash. Now give him the green card, okay?”

Dad clears his throat. “Michaela.”

“It’s okay,” Stephen says. He shrugs and reaches for Mom’s present. “It’s not like I didn’t know. No offense, but none of you are, like, creative geniuses when it comes to gift giving.”

Mom says, “You don’t know what mine is.”

Dave snorts like he’s going to laugh, but swallows the sound.

Stephen bends his head to open Mom’s present. He slits the tape, unfolds the paper without tearing it, and sets the ribbon neatly by his elbow. He is careful and slow.