Lydia Cooper - My Second Death

“So. No serial killing for me.” I smile at Aidan. “Now tell us something about yourself. Do you enjoy birthdays? Attend every one you can?”

His eyelids flicker. He looks over at Dave.

Dave says, “Mickey doesn’t go for the small-talk thing. She’s not good at it. But she doesn’t lie. She hasn’t killed any animals—” He looks at me. “—that we know of. And if she asks a question, she’s interested in the answer.”

“Right,” I say. “He’s right.”

Aidan’s lips part. They are dry and a waxy seam splits when he opens his mouth. He doesn’t look distressed, though. Most of Dave’s dates would have gagged by now, or would be showing the whites of their eyes. He says, “I enjoy birthdays.”

I grin at him. “Like what part? The cake and ice cream? Those poky party hats? Scotch tape?”

“Scotch—? Oh, you mean, like on presents? Well, I guess I’d have to say I like the cake and ice cream.”

I look at him for a while. He looks back. He smiles, a faint tuck of the lips at the corners. I clear my throat and look away. “Good choice. That’s my favorite part too.”

After a brief silence, my father asks Aidan a question in a formal voice. Dinner conversation returns to its melodic pitch. They talk about the sort of banal shit most families discuss at dinner tables — subjects one is studying at university (fine arts), whether or not one enjoys those studies (he guesses so, yes), and what one intends to do after graduation (he doesn’t know, thinks he might run an art studio).

My parents are experts in facilitating normalcy, just like Dave is the family Puck, stirring his delicate fingers in the waters to disturb the strange creatures lurking below. Dave can control the monsters, and at my advanced age I have become a well-trained, well-behaved, barely monstrous monster. But the whole charade strikes me as supremely stupid. Things can change in an instant. They should know that.

I want to raise my head and scream at them, I touched a dead body today . I pressed my fingertips into the ripped dead skin of a man handcuffed to an iron bedpost .

My father comments on an exhibit at the art museum that he saw while at a banquet for a visiting speaker. My mother apparently was there as well — this event must have fallen serendipitously during a thawed moment of détente in the polar ice cap of their relationship. My mother gets up to open a new bottle of wine and for a minute there is silence while my father and Dave sip their glasses of wine, their mouths pursed in identical moues of qualified approbation.

Stephen is frowning at his dish. I think about asking him a question but can’t think of anything to say.

I swirl my fork through the pasta. The spaghetti sauce is leaching into a half-eaten roll resting on the side of the plate. Red creeps slowly up the soft white underbelly of the roll.

My mother says, “Aidan, did you get enough to eat? Do you want more of anything?”

When I was six years old, my mother left Dave to babysit while she went to the store. Dave turned on the TV. An old film was showing on one channel, a movie about a vampire with long white teeth and a shiny black cape. Dave got me a plastic sippy cup of grape juice. I told him I didn’t use sippy cups any more but he said to shut up or he wouldn’t let me watch the movie.

We watched the movie in silence. An old man in a tweed jacket stabbed a silver spike into Dracula’s chest.

“Why did he do that?”

“You have to stab their hearts or they won’t die,” Dave said.

“Why not?”

“Because the heart is what keeps you alive.”

“What’s the heart?”

Dave put his fingers against his chest and said, “It’s a muscle that beats — you can feel it.”

I put my fingers against my ribcage. Silence. Bone.

“Move your hand. To the left.”

And then I felt it. Tha-thump. Tha-thump.

“That’s your heart.”

I smiled.

Dave said, “If you spill that juice, I’ll kill you.”

It was summer. A brief, sudden rain came hard while Mom was out shopping. When the clouds shifted, steam spiraled up from the driveway blacktop. A heady scent of lilacs and dogwood hung thick in the damp. At night, Mom put me to bed with a window fan blustering moist air across the moon-slatted room. I lay on my sheets in red panties and a white eyelet nightie. I could hear the house breathing and I felt the patterned thump of my heart against my ribs, against the mattress.

They woke up in a blued room with the shadows silver against the kitchen knife.

I saw the whites of their eyes flare in the dark. The glisten of lips.

My father made a hissing sound.

Neither of them moved.

“Is she awake?” my father whispered.

I squatted on the sheets between them, my nightie ruched around my waist, the kitchen knife in my sweaty grip. My hair hung in my face.

My mother said, “I don’t know.”

“Jesus Christ,” he whispered.

“Don’t,” my mother said. She put her hands on my arms. Her skin was sticky with heat. I gripped the knife and put the point on her sternum. My mother gasped. Her fingers, bony, strong, squeezed my wrist and my childish flesh, soft and yielding, weakened in her grasp. She took the knife away from me. My father reached over and clicked on the bedside lamp. Sweat stained the hair by his temples. His sagging cheeks were dark with prickles of beard. He took the knife in his fingertips and got up. The bed creaked when he left. His bare feet made pat-pats on the linoleum of the bathroom. A cupboard door closed. The tap turned on. He came back into the bedroom with a glass of water.

My mother pulled me into her lap. Through the fabric of her nightgown I could feel the hard lumps of her nipples, the soft pouch of her belly. She smelled faintly of red wine and fabric softener. She combed my hair away from my forehead with her fingernails.

I put my hand against the side of my mother’s breast. Through the skin, I could feel the solid thud of a spasming muscle.

“Tha-thump,” I said. “Tha-thump.”

My mother’s arms tightened around me.

“What?” she said against my hair.

“That’s your heart.”

“Yes.” She put her palm against my back and rubbed in slow circles. The nightie bunched under her hand. “Yes.”

“What was she doing?”

“Shh. I don’t know. A nightmare, maybe.”

I pushed my mother’s hand away and leaned out from the damp heat of her body. When she tried to gather me against her chest again I got off the bed and scampered back to my room. I lay down in front of the fan and the wind fluttered across my face and neck.

They came into my room and my mother stayed there until I fell asleep. I woke up with a pillow under my head and a sheet over my body.

The next afternoon I went into the kitchen but the knife drawer was latched. I rattled the drawer but it wouldn’t budge. Dave was sitting at the island eating a bowl of Lucky Charms and reading a Punisher comic book. He put the book down and watched me trying to claw the knife drawer open. He said, “Did you seriously try to stake Mom and Dad?”

I turned around and ducked my head.

He said, “Well, you can’t do that. Okay?”

He got down from his stool and fixed a bowl of Lucky Charms for me. I dragged a stool over to the island and climbed up, put a spoon in the cereal and began stirring the milk into a pinkish-brown saliva-thick swirl. He leaned his elbows against the countertop next to me. Then he said, “Listen, Mick. You can’t do crap like that. You’ll get put in prison if you do. In prison bad stuff happens and I swear you wouldn’t like it.”

I sucked on a marshmallow and looked up at him.

“That guy who staked Dracula was old, remember?” he said. “ Way old. Because when you’re old, you’re smart about stuff and you don’t get caught.”