Lydia Cooper - My Second Death

“Like slicing an aloe leaf,” I say. “That’s what it looked like. Have you ever seen aloe sap?”

Aidan doesn’t say anything.

“Anyway, the point is, I remember the whole thing and I didn’t feel — anything, except maybe curious — when I saw a dead body. And I’m not ‘blocking’ or whatever. The shrinks, everyone tried to come up with reasons for why I am the way I am. There’s no reason. The guy was dead and I felt curious, that’s all. I wanted to touch a dead eye. It was sort of—” I try to think of the right word. Electric . “It was a buzz.”

His eyes shift. He’s looking at me strangely. I don’t know what the look means.

“You think you know me. You think I’m a broken person who can be fixed, or, or the result of some terrible tragedy. But that’s not me. You don’t know shit about me.”

His lips part but he doesn’t say anything. And then his eyelashes tremble and sweep shut. When he looks up again his eyes are glistening. He roughly brushes the back of his hand across his cheeks.

I stand up and go into the bathroom and slam the door.

I rinse my mouth out in the bathroom and splash cold water on my face until I feel less like throwing up. When I come back out, he’s gone.

I flop down on my bed. Lie still for a while watching headlights sweep over the ceiling. The fire trucks and ambulances and cop cars have long ago cleared out. Normal city sounds, rap music and tinny TV squawks and car horns, drift up. When I rest my palm across my left breast I feel the solid kick of my heart and it is slow and rhythmic. My heartbeat is not accelerated.

After a few hours of lying still staring at the ceiling I get up and walk out of my bedroom. Aidan’s bedroom door is shut but lemon yellow light haloes the inside of the doorframe. The cat is in the kitchen, lying on the counter. He gets up and arches his back and grunts when he sees me. I open the silverware drawer. There is a fruit paring knife. I feel the matte handle, the faint glisten of steel in the shadows. I put my left hand on the cat’s head. The cat bucks its skull against my palm, its purr humming like machinery. I set the blade of the knife delicately against the underside of the cat’s jaw, where the soft down fur meets in a Vshape.

The cat squeaks and licks its lips and tries to pull its head away, but my left hand cups its skull in a strong grip. The cat struggles. The knife doesn’t waver.

And then I scoop up the cat and go outside. The night air is biting cold. White flakes drift, uncertain, from the pink-tinged sky. Frozen tree limbs creak. The cat struggles and I let him go. He jumps out of my arms. His paws thump softly on the wooden slats. He bounds down the stairs and disappears into darkness.

I drive the knife blade into the soft pulpwood. When I cup my cold hand around my neck my pulse is slow and steady. Nothing has changed.

I am still sitting on the steps in the cold when my phone rings. I sit with my thumb over the delete button. The number looks strange to me, even after all these months. For more than ten years my older brother has had a 212 area code, and now the number has the familiar 330 Akron area code. I wonder why he moved back to Ohio. It occurs to me that it’s odd I never asked him. We talk on the phone all the time, we always have, but we never seem to talk about things normal siblings would. I grin a little, imagining the two of us trying to hold an ordinary conversation. How was your day? Oh, it was fabulous — I got my hair done! How was yours?

I pick up the phone. “What?”

“Hey, babe. Come meet me.”

“Where?”

“My place,” he says. “Come over. I want to show you something.”

I close my eyes and rest forehead on my knees. “Why?”

“Because I said ,” he hisses. And then he stops talking. For a second there is silence. And he laughs, the sound of wind chimes in summer. “My darling, we live, like, ten minutes away from each other now and it’s like we’re strangers. We never see each other.” His voice softens. “Did you ever think that would happen? I mean, in a million years. The two of us. We used to be in sep arable.”

“We haven’t seen a whole lot of each other for a long time,” I say. “You moved away. I grew up.”

“Grew up.” He sighs. I hear him suck on air. The static sound of an exhalation. I imagine the smell of his cigarette smoke. “Do you think it’s inevitable? The inevitable encroachment of adulthood?”

His voice sounds like smoke and chocolate. Older and raspier and exactly the same.

The basement. The first cigarette Dave ever smoked was in the basement. This was when I was ten, when the man was still living with us. He was at work that afternoon. I found Dave in the basement looking through the man’s things. Dave found a crushed red and white Marlboro pack in the inside pocket of a corduroy jacket. He spun around when I came to the doorway.

When he saw it was me he smiled and held up the carton. “Did you know he smokes?”

I didn’t really know what cigarettes were. Neither of our parents are smokers.

We sat on the couch and he struggled with the lighter. His forehead contacted in a frown as he rasped his thumb across the spin-wheel again and again trying for a spark. When he got the struggling flame he held it out to me. Wanted me to put the cigarette in my mouth first.

“Why?”

“Because,” he said. “It looks fun in the movies. I think you’ll like it.”

I put the cigarette in my mouth. It tasted like bitter paper. He held the flame to the end and said, “Breathe in.”

I did and felt the hot smoke coiling in my mouth and pressing down on my lungs like a child’s fist. I coughed. Handed him the cigarette.

“You don’t like it?”

I shook my head.

“Well, you will.”

“Why?”

He smiled and took the cigarette from me. Held it in two fingers and put the butt to his pursed lips like a socialite. He inhaled delicately, swallowed a cough. His cheeks and the edges of his nostrils turned pink. “Smoking,” he said, “is addictive. It means that you are a smoker now. That you like to smoke. When you grow up you’ll smoke.”

“Really?”

He took another drag, rolled the smoke in his mouth, breathed it out and coughed. Nodded.

I held out my hand for the cigarette. But he held it away from me. “No, no, no. Now I want it. I’m a smoker now.”

“Because of me?”

“Yes,” he said. He sat down on the couch next to me and sucked again at the cigarette. He breathed out, slowly. “They cause cancer, you know. I suppose I’ll die of this.”

I sat next to him and watched him. I didn’t know what cancer looked like.

He held out the cigarette. “Okay. You can try again. Just a little breath, all right?” And when I did, watching me blink and try to swallow the smoke, he said, “Mom always said she didn’t want us to smoke. Because smoking kills. But it’s okay. I want to do the things you do. We’ll always be partners. Right?”

A few months later I would kill a man. But he didn’t know that then. I did like that cigarette, the first one that we smoked. I have never smoked again but I like the scorch smell. It’s just that I’m a runner and so I worry about things like lung capacity and VO2.

And I worry about things like whether he was telling the truth. I know now that Dave was lying about the nature of nicotine addiction, but I have never been sure whether he was telling the truth about his smoking because I’d done it first. I do know that our whole lives, neither one of us has ever gotten in trouble alone. Not even when I killed that man. Oh, he didn’t have all the medications or the psych unit stay, but he saw his share of shrinks. At first, our parents took him to their therapist for family talks. Dave said it helped him, so he started going once a week. After each visit, he smiled, cried a bit, told our parents he felt safer, saner, healed. In private he raged, spittle collecting in the corners of his mouth. Never at me. Just in general. He hated those visits so much. But he went so I wouldn’t be the only one with the weekly visits, the medication, the strained silences.