Lydia Cooper - My Second Death

Hudson’s downtown area is a preserved historic site with gabled roofs and quaint cupolas. A few blocks over I find a subdivision of large, generically prestigious houses, the plasticized grass and neat hedges an unnerving green beneath a fish-colored sky. I park on the side of the road near a No Parking at Any Time sign and get out, clutching the zippered edges of my hooded sweatshirt across my chest. I walk up a wide driveway toward a house with more windows than siding. I can see into the front hall through a floor-to-ceiling window beside an oversized polished-walnut door. The foyer has a sixteen-foot ceiling, a crystal chandelier, an antique hat stand, and a pristine bowl of fruit on a tiny polished maple table.

I press the doorbell.

After a long time I see a pair of feet descending a long staircase. A woman emerges. She is wearing ironed slacks and a black cardigan. She comes to the door, arms folded under her breasts, head tilted to the side, squinting. Her wrinkled expression tells me that she is annoyed to be answering the door to a stranger.

The door creaks open.

“Yes?”

“Miranda Devorecek?”

“Yes?”

“I’m a volunteer with Harvest Home.”

Miranda’s thin fingers end in tapered, French-manicured nails.

“Yes,” she says.

“We’re raising money for a Christmas party. Would you like to—?”

“We already paid,” Miranda says. “I mean, we sent in our — I donated already. Don’t you keep records of this?”

“Yes,” I say. “But this party, we’re collecting extra .”

“I don’t understand. You have a party every year and you’ve never collected extra before.” Her lips are thin. When she pinches them together, her dark eyes seem to widen, heightening the shadowed contrast between cheekbone and jawbone. Her face is delicate, china pale, the eyes fierce and direct and identical to Aidan’s, except that both of hers look straight at me. Her plucked eyebrows and elegant fingernails tell me that she is aware of the fact that she is beautiful. I wonder if she is equally aware that she is the only perfect product of her mother’s womb, if she feels something due to the fact that her siblings are marred, broken replicas of her flawless form. If she feels guilty because of her unbrokenness, because she is better than her genetic inheritance.

“So, you’re complaining about paying extra so your sister can have a happy Christmas? While you, what, drink four-hundred-dollar champagne at your Chase bank Christmas party?”

She draws her head back slightly. “Who told you I work at Chase?”

“You’re a branch manager . And you’re telling me you don’t make enough to—”

“What the hell—” She shuts her mouth again. Her tiny seed-pearl teeth click together. She shuts the door in my face. I watch through the windowpane as she goes back into the kitchen. She reappears a minute later folding a slip of paper in a razor-sharp crease.

She opens the door and, pinching the paper between thumb and forefinger, holds it out to me. “Here. And Merry Christmas.”

I unfold the check and look at it, licking my lower lip with exaggerated care. “This is — wow. Your brother just shut the door in my face.”

“My — you approached my brother ?”

I look up at her, widening my eyes in what I hope looks like innocence. It’s not an expression that comes naturally to me.

“He’s a goddamn art student,” she says. “He’s one of you . He’s there practically every — he practically lives there. With her. Why would you chase him down for money? There’s no way adult diapers and animal crackers cost what you people gouge us for every year. Me, I know what you’re doing. The guilt card. I get it, okay? And, yes, I work seventy hours a week at a high-powered corporate office. I live in a big, sterile house. I never visit my — my sister. Okay? I know that. That’s why I let you — why I pay the — why I pay what I do. Okay? Someone has to. But at the very least you could leave the family members who care out of your money-grubbing. All right? I’ve got cash and no heart, right? Well, my brother is — he’s going to feel guilty now. You know what he’ll be doing? He’ll be sitting with her and feeling guilty . What is the matter with you people? What is enough? It’s not money, it’s clearly not actually giving a shit. So what do you want from us? What? ”

She is breathing hard. Each inhalation draws thin lines in her throat. I watch the hollows between her collarbones. She stares at me.

“Thank you for your generous donation.” I refold the check, put it in my jeans pocket, and turn to leave.

With my foot on the edge of the step, I look back. “Do you miss her?”

Miranda’s thin lips part. Her eyes flare wide.

“I meant your mother. Do you miss her?”

There is a brief silence. Then she says, “Who the fuck are you?”

I don’t say anything.

She says, “Wait — are you the roommate? Is that it? Are you my brother’s mentally sick roommate? Is that who you are?”

I smile.

She says, “My God, I’m going to kill him.”

“He wants to know what happened. He wants to know the truth. If you like him so much, why don’t you want him to know?”

Miranda holds onto the door. Her knuckles are white as bone.

“My brother,” she says, “has my mother’s weaknesses. He has my mother’s capacity for a naive innocence that borders on simple-mindedness. He adopts strays and perverts and broken people compulsively — you, of course, being a case in point. He has an obsessive personality. I don’t think his desire to know exactly what happened to our mother is healthy or helpful. It just feeds his neurosis. He can’t accept that some people are too broken to be saved. She was one of them. It’s not like the last time was her first attempt.”

I am startled and for the first time, I really look at Miranda. She just stares back, fierce and unblinking.

“So you don’t think your retarded sister set the fire. You think your mom did.”

For a second I think she’s going to start screaming. Her mouth is pinched shut but she inhales, tendons standing out like bridge buttresses on her throat.

Then she slams the door.

When I get back to the apartment, Aidan lies on the couch with a sketchbook propped on his stomach. The TV hums softly with the lulling monotone of a BBC narrator. When I come in, his head comes up and he points a stick of charcoal at me.

“What did you say to Miranda?”

I am startled. My quiet little sparrow of a roommate has never looked so intently alive. The brunt of Miranda’s rage is printed all over his thin skin, in the wrinkle between his eyebrows, the tight lines by his mouth. “Nothing,” I say. “I mean, I was just asking questions. I apologize if I offended her, but I’m not exactly known for my finesse.”

His mouth relaxes a little. “Well, in the future why don’t you just ask me.” He raises the remote and turns up the TV. “Hey, it’s your favorite nature program.”

“I don’t have a favorite — what do you mean, why don’t I just ask you? You never give me straight answers. You haven’t been exactly champing at the bit to find out how my investigation’s been going, either. The last I checked, your sum total response to my investigation is your dedicated attempt to ruin your liver.”

The frown settles back between his eyebrows. He wipes the back of his wrist across his mouth.

“Okay,” he says. “What do you want to know?”

His fingertips, pressed against the charcoal stick, are white in patches.

“Forget it.”

“What?”