Lydia Cooper - My Second Death

My chest feels empty and then my heart starts to beat, each convulsion burning. My mouth goes dry.

“Jesus,” I whisper. “ Christ .”

He looks a little surprised. His eyebrows rise and he takes a half step back.

“Not an open case.” He starts talking quickly. “It’s not illegal. It was a while ago, like a cold case. The cops already closed it. But—”

I shake my head. “Wait. Stop.”

He stops talking.

“The cops know about it?”

For a second he looks even more confused. His forehead wrinkles slightly. “Sure. It was a long time ago. It — my mother. It was when I was a kid. My mother died. The cops say — well, it’s technically unsolved, they thought it might be homicide but they didn’t have evidence to—”

“No.”

He backs up another step. “What?”

I push myself off the counter. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. There’s no — there’s no dead woman.”

“What?”

We just stare at each other. I try to figure out what’s going on. Who he is, this frail, pale-skinned art student with a broken eye. And the incalculable odds that his fascination with me and his mysterious murder have nothing to do with the pink message slip, with 411 Allyn Street.

I take a breath. “You’re talking about — about someone who died a long time ago?”

“Yes,” he says. “My mother. She died ten years ago.”

I look down at the floor, then back at him. “You’re mentally fucking challenged. Dave told you about me. Why the fuck would you think it’s a good idea to come to me, to try to — to get me involved with a dead body? With fucking murder, or suicide, or whatever it is? This is — you’re playing with, not fire, God, you’re playing with unstable isotopes in a nuclear reactor. Do you understand that? Do you get it?”

“I get it.” He doesn’t even blink. “I didn’t really buy most of what Dave said. And now I’ve met you, I think it was mostly just crap. I think you’re more normal than he said. You’ve got emotions. You just don’t… you know. Coddle people.”

“I don’t — what the fuck are you talking about?”

He says, “I want someone who’s not afraid of truth. Of hurting people.”

I take a step toward him. My heart is pounding and my head feels weightless, my skull like crepe paper. “This isn’t a joke. You should be afraid of me.”

And his face cracks into a smile. He gives a snort that turns into a laugh, a cough-like bark of happiness surprised out of him.

“Are you kidding?” He grins. “Why would I be afraid of you?”

I can’t breathe. And then I reach out and shove my hands against his chest. He stumbles back a step, his eyes opening wide with shock.

I go around and him fling open the door.

It’s cold, the air snatching at my skin. My sneakers hit the gravel drive with a crunch.

I’m halfway down the drive when I realize I didn’t even shut the door behind me. When I look back over my shoulder he’s standing there in the door, looking after me, hugging his arms around his chest like some penitent cenobite. The kitchen light limns his silhouette in gold.

I startle awake. A milky glaze of moonlight across the ravaged sheet. My shirt is soaked through. Even my hair is damp. His skin felt rubbery, moisture seeping through the dead pores. I can feel crusted spinal fluid and coagulated blood under my fingernails. I showered and washed my hands three times and they still have that salt and damp soil smell.

I jerk upright and kick off the sheet. Wipe my hands on my T-shirt. My neck and chest itch. I scratch at my skin. It feels gritty. I’m still in my clothes. After I ran out of the house, I just kept running until the cold made me turn back.

And then I must have fallen asleep without undressing.

I bury my face in the pillow and try to calm down from the dream. But with my eyes closed the only thing I can see is the raw pink-gray sheet of veined skin, the only thing I can smell is that syrupy sweet rot of dried blood.

I scramble up and change into running shorts and a warm sweatshirt and I run through the darkest hour, the hour when humans’ circadian rhythms ebb lowest, when the world is asleep and I am alive. I run beneath a piebald predawn sky. I run until my lungs are burning, until the inside of my head is finally calm, swept clean in a breathless gray haze of oxygen deprivation and glycogen depletion.

My calf muscles twitch. Sunlight turns the insides of my eyelids a pulpy reddish-orange. I open my eyes. I’m lying on my mattress, my sports bra and running shorts crisp. My arms powdered with a white salty residue from dried sweat. I sit up. My left calf spasms. I rub my knuckles into the muscle and remember going for a run at, what was it? Five in the morning? And I remember suddenly what woke me up before. The smell. Viscous fluid, my fingernail peeling the — no, the eye belonged to the man I killed when I was ten.

I lie back on the mattress and rest my forearm over my eyes. Dried sweat crystals burn the mucus membranes around my eyes. Fluid collects in the corners of my eyes and leaks down my nose. I’m too tired to run anymore. My legs hurt. Christ.

It doesn’t matter how much I run. How much I follow rules and teach my classes and write my dissertation. How much I show up for family dinners and make conversation. The dreams come back.

I used to think that every year that passed, every year that I lived like an ordinary person, I was like a snake growing larger than its skin. Like I could walk out of one life and into the body of a different person, like a snake sloughing off its papery shell.

But the dreams always come back. And I always wake up the same.

When I was eleven, I died and came back to life.

My life the previous year, after I got out of the psych unit, had been a series of frantic visits to psychiatrists who laid tattered stuffed bunny rabbits on my lap and told me to talk to them, then prescribed medications. Long hours in gray offices spent staring at primary-colored Lego and Fisher Price toys. I asked for my brother but he was in school, dear, he can’t come play with you now. What do you play, when you are with your brother? Does your brother touch you when you play?

Assholes.

The visits faded in intensity. Days between shrinks grew longer. My parents’ voices regained a measure of lucidity. My brother’s laughter grew less manic, his eyes less wary and white-rimmed.

At the end of the year the baby was born. Grandparents in the house. Fat happy women from Mom’s Pilates class and gourd-dry academics from Dad’s department. I stayed in my room. Only Dave ventured inside. He budged out the rocking chair I’d shoved in front of the door to bring me white cake with chocolate frosting and to laugh at the decapitated stuffed animals under my pillow.

Months passed. And then in June, a year, more than a year since my first murder, we packed a lunch of pastrami and cheddar sandwiches, baked chips, apple slices. We drove north to Lake Erie to have a picnic on the dirty sand of Mentor Headlands, a cigarette-strewn beach flocked with squabbling seagulls. The water greenblack and vast under a serried gray sky. Cold and endless. Icy yellow foam raced along the sand and we ran through it, my brother and I, our bare feet aching in the cold water. Cloud-shadows skittered like animate inkstains over the crinkled skin of the water.

When they called us in from the water we came flushed, seaweed lacing our toes and our fingers pruned and smelling like rancid fish and old cheese. My mother sat with her knees tilted to the side, a nubby cotton sundress tucked between her thighs, a soft blanket draped over her shoulder. The baby underneath. My father with his pants rolled to his calves, bulbous blue veins prominent on his thin legs. He was reading a book on analytic geometry, his glasses lying in the sand at his side. They looked at us, lips stretching, pushing skin into shapes and angles that were unfamiliar to me. I thought it was happiness.