Lydia Cooper - My Second Death

“What, go see your mom?”

He nods.

Silence drags on. I let him listen to the quiet, the distant city sounds, let him realize that deep down he’s been thinking this all along. Wondering.

I say, “No.”

The skin around his eyes and mouth shifts. A dark light flaming behind his eyes. I realize that I was an idiot, that I can watch emotion unfurl, implode like a dying star, and still not know what it means. I smile. My mouth feels bruised, sore. “I’m going home today,” I say. “May be a while. Don’t wait up.”

He smiles, but lines drag at his mouth.

I drive to my parents’ house.

Archeology, the meticulous examination of sediment and bone, appeals to me. But human archeology is more complicated. How many layers of a self are there? The human capacity for self-deception is infinite.

When I walk up toward the front door I can hear a student playing the piano. I open the door and see a high school student’s skinny back swaying at the piano. Sunlight streams through the leaded glass windows and paints rays of yellow across the mirror-clear black lacquer finish on the piano. The student plays like a metronome. She chops out phrases of Chopin like a chef slicing vegetables. I stand in the monastic sterility of hardwood floors, brown leather couches with fuzzy gold pillows and a glass-and-black entertainment set. I wonder if my life feels to other people like this music feels to me. Disturbing, off-kilter. Technically perfect, but tonally wrong.

My mom is sitting on a stool on the opposite side of the piano. She sees me walk in the front door, and her eyes track my movements. I go through to the kitchen, and in the kitchen I stop facing the basement door. I put my hand on the doorknob.

I breathe in, hold the breath, and let it out, softly.

I turn the knob.

The stairs creak under my feet.

I stop halfway down but there is no sign of damage, no stain, no lingering scent of death. My imagination plays tricks on me when I sleep.

I shake my head and go more quickly the rest of the way down the stairs.

The basement apartment has a pale green carpet. The walls are goldenrod yellow. I stand and look at the countertop, the microwave, and through a small door a bedroom and a tiny bathroom. The last time I was down here was the summer of the fat college student who would become the first corpse I ever knew. He taught me to play cards. The summer he lived with us, he and Dave used to play cards together down here for hours.

I go into the bedroom. The white-painted bookshelves still hold copies of Dave’s books. He moved into this room after the college student’s death. Dave lived here till he graduated from high school. Since then, my parents haven’t rented the basement to anyone. I know that the upstairs photo albums are full of typical family pictures, and I also know that the photo Stephen found wasn’t one of them. He got it from Dave’s personal collection.

I pull a box painted with red and orange geometric shapes from the bookshelf. The box smells of cedar and candle wax. Inside are stacks of Polaroids. I sit on the end of the bed and spread out the photos like playing cards.

Dave used to collect photos like some people collect trinkets, a shot glass from every Hard Rock Café, the rookie cards of every Cleveland Indians player. The photos from the cedar wood box are mostly of him. Like pictures of him at three years old running down a shoreline, the taller figures of our parents in the background, only black silhouettes against the sun.

One of the pictures makes me pause. Dave is not in this picture, just a fat baby splashing in a kiddie pool. I look at the one-year-old me, all tubby belly and constipated expression, and wonder why Dave kept it.

Most of the rest of the photos are of Dave, or of him and me.

I sift through them and don’t know what I’m looking for. I squint at the pictures and wonder if it’s possible to read flawed DNA from a photograph, but I don’t think it is.

I don’t remember some of these pictures. Others I do remember. There is a picture of me at six years old, blowing out birthday candles. A party hat is on my messy hair, my eyes sparkling. It looks like a nice picture. I remember that birthday, but what I remember best was my mother walking in on us, on me and Dave in the kitchen, later that night.

I don’t remember consecutive events. I remember flashes. The sizzle and flare of light. Giggling. Holding a match in my fingers. Dave’s hands closing around mine. Fire blossoming in my palms. The sweet dark smell of cooking flesh. My mother said later that Dave told her I was experimenting with fire. Dave explained that he caught me and was trying to make me stop. I remember how she was crying when she smeared yellow ointment on my hands. I remember how she hugged Dave, her tears and snot dripping into his hair as she said, “You saved your sister. Thank you. Thank you.” I shuffle the photos together, tap them into a neat square, and set them back in the box. Then I go upstairs.

The piano student has left but the piano lid is open. I slide onto the bench seat, which is still faintly warm. I finger-pick, reading the sheet music still propped on the piano and sounding out the Chopin phrase by phrase. My fingers ease into the music as I play it through a second time, listening to the resonance and melody, the complex tonal variations, steel strings pitched at perfect tension and resonating at certain frequencies. I bring the student’s butchered black-and-white performance to sudden life.

When I stop, I lift my head and notice that the windows are dark, that I am playing in a shadowy room with the only light coming from the hall between the kitchen and living room. The house is quiet except for the creaks and hums of old pipes. And a faint, husky sound, like uneven human breath. I frown and slide the piano shut, and go into the kitchen. My mother sits at the island, perched on a stool. A large ledger, curling receipts, and a few slit-open envelopes lie around her. Her elbows are propped on the tile surface of the island and her hands are shielding her face. Her shoulders move in spasmodic jerks.

I stand in the doorway for a while. I don’t think she hears me. But then she gulps and sniffs and moves her elbows off the countertop, and presses the sides of her fingers against the corners of her eyes, probably so that she won’t smudge her mascara. But when she turns her head to look at me, her mascara is already smeared and caked in the fine creases by her eyes.

“Oh, hi there, honey. I didn’t hear you.”

Her voice is thick with mucus. She tries to smile.

My shoulders are hunched, my hands fisted in my jeans pockets.

We don’t say anything for a while.

Then she gets up and collects the receipts, folding them inside the ledger and snapping the ledger shut. “It’s late. I should start supper.”

“Are we, like, poor or something?”

“What?” She turns to me. Then she looks at the ledger and sniffs again and smiles brightly. “Of course not. We’re doing fine. I’m just — being stupid.”

I think she means about finances, and I think, Shit. Because I was going to ask for money. I don’t know if Dave was serious or not about needing cash, but just in case, I figured I’d hit up the endless well of parental love, expressed in twenty-dollar denominations. Usually I give him some of my stipend money if he’s running low, but I’m not the ATM I used to be now that I have to pay monthly rent and utilities.

I go over to the fridge and open it and look for something to eat.

“What are you here for?”

“I forgot something. Came to get it. Is there enough of that pasta for me to have some?”

“Of course. The marinara is in that container there. By the eggs.”