Lydia Cooper - My Second Death

“Okay.” I took a bite of cereal.

“Promise?”

“I said yeah.”

“Okay.” He sat down and opened his comic book.

I push my plate away and pinch the skin of my forehead between my two clenched fists. I need to get out of here, go somewhere I can breathe. Time for Elvis to leave the building.

I put my napkin on the table and go into the kitchen. I rinse my hands at the kitchen sink, scrubbing them in water so hot that curtains of steam waft upwards.

In the dining room, Dad says, “Thank you for a wonderful meal, Cynthia. If you’ll excuse me, I need to go over that FIDC report. Aidan, a pleasure.”

A chair scrapes. The rustle of wrapping paper.

Mom says, “Stephen, honey, did you want more dessert?”

He mumbles a reply, apparently committed to collecting his stash and retreating again to his lair, which is equipped with headphones and an Internet connection to the world beyond his home. I figure he’s earned his retreat.

Mom calls after him. “Don’t forget that you’re taking the PSAT on Saturday. Are you still planning to ride with the Rosenbergs?”

Stephen’s voice fades as he moves up the stairs.

Mom comes back into the kitchen with a stack of used plates, her lower lip pinched between her teeth. Then Aidan comes in carrying his own and Dave’s used bowls to the sink. I back away and lean against the counter, watching him.

He turns on the faucet.

Mom says, “You don’t have to, Aidan.”

“It’s okay. I kind of like doing dishes.”

Mom scrapes marinara sauce into a glass bowl. “So you two go to school together,” she says. “Have you been in any classes together?”

“Oh yes,” I say. “All of them. At recess we plait flowers into each other’s hair.”

Aidan gives a small cough. “It’s a pretty big place,” he says. “But actually I did meet Michaela—”

“Mickey.”

His eyes flick up at me. “—Mickey. We met at Dave’s poetry reading, the one on campus a couple weeks ago. You came in at the end.”

I frown. Because I do remember the night in question. About a week, maybe a week and a half ago, my much-vaunted (in certain select, poetry-reading circles) brother gave a reading at the university. Being my brother, he’s lost his license due to a third DUI. He required the services of a pro bono chauffeur, which inevitably ends up being me. I waited two hours in the parking lot but there were still people clustered around him when I went in to fetch him. He was leaning an elbow on the podium, his hair falling in his eyes, laughing. He may have pointed this wall-eyed stranger out to me. He could have pointed Elijah reincarnated out to me. I was too busy concentrating on dragging him away from his personal paradise of wattle-chinned geriatric poetry fans to notice.

“Oh, that’s nice,” Mom says. “Michaela, you didn’t tell me you knew him.”

“How odd,” I say. “He made such a lasting impression.”

But Aidan is watching me. He doesn’t blink, doesn’t look away. He’s holding a half-rinsed dish, and soap suds plink into the sink basin.

I shrug, but it feels more like a squirm. “Sorry.” I don’t even know why I’m apologizing

He blinks then, and turns back to the sink. “No problem.” He starts rinsing again. Slots the bowl in the dish drainer.

“I asked your brother about you,” he says. “Earlier. After we met.”

“Oh, Jesus. You’re not obsessed with me, are you? Do you want to have sex with me or something?”

“Honey,” Mom says.

“What? It’s a legitimate question.” To Aidan, I say, “ Are you?”

“No.”

“Michaela, sweetie, that’s not—”

“He doesn’t mind,” I say.

“I don’t mind,” Aidan says. “It’s just part of your condition. Right? Saying things that are offensive?”

There’s a brief silence.

Mom says, “Oh, well, that’s not—”

“Mom,” I say, “Go away. You’re doing that thing, that gooey thing. Everything’s fine.”

She tosses the towel on the counter and walks out of the kitchen. She makes a wide path around me and she doesn’t look back. Her mouth is so thin it looks like a pink thread stitched across her face and the skin around her eyes is flushed like an overripe peach.

Aidan says, “Did we offend your mom?”

I sigh and rub my hand over my mouth. I pick up the towel and wipe off the counter. “I don’t understand why people take offense. If something’s only going to upset them, they could just not care.”

“Unless their feelings got hurt,” he says. There’s a short pause. He rinses off another dish and puts it on the rack. “Dave said that you don’t really — you don’t really do feelings.”

For a second I don’t know what to say. “I have them. Feelings.” But that seems inadequate, somehow. Untruthful. So I add, “Sometimes.”

Aidan looks over his shoulder. The left side of his face is toward me and his bad eye dances crazily.

I’m uncomfortable with his staring but it doesn’t feel as awful as other people’s. He looks like he’s waiting, like he’s a chess player watching for my next move, not like he’s trying to peel my skin back and break open the plates of my skull. For some reason, I find myself talking, the words pouring out like I’ve unstoppered a drain. “People don’t feel the right things. That’s the problem. They get — you know, everyone feels all this, all this junk, just messy, squabbly emotions over the smallest things. Like if someone says a political word at dinner, or forgets someone’s name. Those are stupid fucking things to care about. No one cares about the bigger things. You can — people just, you know, they watch all this shit on TV every night, bombings, and drone attacks, and disease, and no one melts down over that. But that’s — at least that’s real .”

My voice fades.

Aidan doesn’t say anything for a while. He turns back to the sink and starts washing spoons.

“So you’re getting a PhD?”

It surprises me, the question. Like some art major is more interested in the higher echelons of my intellectual ability than in my sordid, dog-mutilating psychoses. People are usually more morbid. I nod. But his back is to me now. So I say, “Yes.”

“Dave said you were the smartest person he knows. He said you could’ve joined Mensa.”

I laugh.

Aidan looks up.

“I’m not that smart.”

He looks at me like he’s trying to figure something out. “Are you being modest?”

“No. I don’t do modest. I’m smart. I’m really smart. Just not, you know, Mensa-smart. I’m not a genius.”

“Dave said you were.”

Dave has always had an inflated sense of my capacities. I think it’s just part of his love of cheap melodrama. “Well then. I must be.”

He nods once and goes back to washing off the spoons.

“Seriously.” I put my hands in my jeans pockets and lean against the counter. “What’s your deal? Why the twenty questions? They’re not — you’re not like most people.”

For one, he didn’t run out shrieking and crying in the middle of dinner.

“I told you,” he says. “I remembered you. From the reading.”

“Bullshit.” I’ve had this happen a few times. People noticing how I look. Then they talk to me. That’s usually when the interest wanes, and it wanes like that Roadrunner cartoon where the Coyote runs off the edge of the cliff and then notices there is nothing but air beneath him. “You shouldn’t still be interested, not after Dave told you about me.”

Aidan shuts off the water and shakes his fingers over the sink. He comes over to the refrigerator to grab a hand towel. I step away from him. He looks at me, one eye straight and fierce, the other a dark aimless orb. “You want the truth?” he says. He’s standing so close I can feel his body heat, smell garlic and wine on his breath. I want to back up but I can’t. My ass is already pressed up against the counter. “I want you to solve a murder.”