Lydia Cooper - My Second Death

The front of the rag paper has an old man’s face on it. The old man is looking to the side as if something has caught his attention. Soft bags under his eyes, tiredness in the lines dripping down his face, but there is still a faint spark in his eyes, a brittle, clear light. I bend forward and see that the face emerges through small dashes of lines, plum-colored shadows that sculpt the wrinkles and hollows in the face. The light in the eyes, the face itself, are only white paper.

“You’re really good.”

“Yeah,” Aidan says. “I’m awesome.” The muscles by his mouth contract into a smile. His eyebrows slant up, a laughing devil.

He takes the sheet over to a corkboard and pins it up with two yellow thumbtacks. Then he splashes kerosene over the copper plate and scrubs it into the fine lines with a small toothbrush from a Folgers coffee can. Swirls of paint mix with the kerosene and run off onto the metal countertop, an oily pinkish liquid that looks like grease and blood. When he finishes, he throws the rag into a bin full of other smelly, paint-smeared rags.

“That’s a fire hazard, you know.”

“In French,” he says, “ hasard means luck.”

I look at him. At his crazy eye dancing sideways while the other one remains steady. “No. It means chance. Not luck.”

“Well. Chance, then. Maybe God gives you chance and you make your own luck.”

I stare at him.

Someone comes by and says, “Hey, Devorecek, get moving. You’ve got twenty minutes to get another print out.”

Aidan looks over his shoulder at the person and lifts a hand. He turns to me. “Can whatever you have to ask me wait?”

“It already has.”

He hesitates. Then he says, “Okay. Talk to you later. Now get out of here. Can’t you see I’m busy?” He winks.

Outside the icy wind smells of pine leaves and dry soil, but I can still taste kerosene. It tastes like rotting sunlight.

He comes in that night smelling like pine sap, kicks off his shoes against the baseboard and shucks off his gloves. He goes over to the fridge and catches sight of me. I am sitting cross-legged on the floor in the living room grading a set of midterms.

“So what was it?”

“What was what?”

“Your question.”

I set down the exam and the red pen. “I wanted to know if your mom took sleeping pills or antidepressants.”

Aidan leans into the fridge and emerges with a carton of orange juice. He pours himself a glass and leans against the kitchen counter. He holds the glass in both hands, thumbs touching. His lower lip pushes out as he studies his thumbs.

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t? You don’t remember if your mom was on antidepressants?”

He looks up. “Miranda would know. My older sister. You could ask her.”

I just watch him for a while. Then I pick up the exam.

He says, “What?”

“I thought you were the one who wanted to know.”

He takes a breath. Sets the cup down on the counter. He comes toward the living room and stops in the doorway. “I do.”

“Okay then.”

He shoves his hands into his pockets. “She had those orange prescription bottles in the medicine cabinet. And she took pills with her coffee in the morning. I don’t know about sleeping pills at night. Miranda would know.”

“All right.”

He stands watching me grade. Then he says, “What is it? Did she — did she take sleeping pills before the, um, the fire?”

I set the exam down and look up. “Yeah. A hell of a lot, apparently. Ambien and Prozac.”

He pulls his hand out of his pocket and wipes it over his mouth. Turns his head to the side. Then he lowers his hand and inhales, slowly.

“So what else have you found out?”

I don’t know what he expects me to say. “Just what you already know. The fire looks intentional. Your mom had lots of partially metabolized meds in her system. Don’t know if she set the fire or if someone else took advantage of her sleeping like Rip Van Winkle.”

The skin near his mouth tightens but he doesn’t say anything for a while. Then he nods. “Okay. Well, thanks for letting me know.” He hesitates. “I think I’m going to — I’ve got this project I’m working on. I’ll be back late.”

I raise my eyebrows. “Yeah? Well, ah, parting is such sweet sorrow.”

He laughs a little. He collects his shoes and pulls a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket as he walks out the door.

I don’t hear him come back until two or three in the morning. The apartment door creaks and wakes me up. I lie there listening as he stumbles and catches himself on the counter. A few minutes later I hear him vomiting in the bathroom. A faint tinge of something sour seeps into the air.

The intake manifold for the car has come in and I stop to pick it up on my way back to the apartment. It’s more expensive than I thought, and I realize I won’t have much money left to make rent. For a second, I think about asking my parents. But I can’t. Because this is about being an adult. I figure I’ll see if Aidan will be okay with buying all the toilet paper for the month. I’ll get it next month.

When I get back to the apartment I try to explain this to Aidan but it is hard to talk to him. He didn’t say anything in the morning and now he’s in the throes of some artistic frenzy. He crouches on his hands and knees over a flat board laid out on the kitchen floor. The board is covered in a thick red gel. He plunges his hands into a can of yellow paint and splatters the yellow across the board in a descending arc. When I wave my hand in front of his face, he blinks and wipes his chin on his shoulder. A dab of yellow paint sticks to the corner of his mouth.

I point at the paint mark on his face. “Did you hear what I said?”

He rubs his knuckle over the corner of his mouth. “Yeah. Don’t sweat it. You can just give me rides sometimes.”

I freeze and stare at him.

He grins up at me.

“ Fuck you,” I say.

I go into my room and slam the door on his voice pitching in consternation. He tries to follow me.

I open the door in his face, a check in my clenched fist. His paint-covered fingers leave red and yellow half-moon marks on the walls.

“I didn’t mean anything, I swear. I’m sorry. It was just some random, some stupid comment, okay? I’m really sorry .”

I throw the check at him and shut the door again, leaning against it. It takes me a long time listening to his frantic jabber and his knuckles on the thin plywood door before I understand that he is under the impression that I took offense at the crude sexual innuendo in his comment.

I open my bedroom door. His eyebrows are slanted in tragedy. “Seriously, Mickey, I’m a shit. I am and I’m sorry .”

“I’m not pissed,” I say. “Forget the whole thing. Misunderstanding.”

His eyelashes descend and he stands with his hands at his sides, the bony joints of his shoulders pushing through the fabric of his stained T-shirt.

“I said it’s okay.”

He bends and picks up the check where it has fallen. Paint smears the paper. He smoothes the creases in the check, and folds it and puts it in his back pocket. “Well. Okay, then.”

I don’t tell him that I thought the pun on “rides” was funny. It’s the idea of having another human being sitting in my car that terrifies me.

I watch him turn back and go into the kitchen, and kneel by the paint-splashed board. It occurs to me that, regardless of his relationship to the corpse across the street, at the very least Aidan is telling the truth about how he feels about me. He is genuinely not afraid of me and, for reasons I can’t begin to understand, he does not believe that I am a latent killer. I feel a flicker of curiosity and realize that I want to solve his mother’s murder. I want to find out what forces wrought that mind.