Lydia Cooper - My Second Death

I said, “I don’t want to.”

“I dare you to.”

I just stared down at him.

And ice-cold fingers closed around my ankle and pulled. Or the earth heaved under me. Anyway, I went down.

Crazed darkness rushed up at me and I was plunged into a biting cold. Thrashing arms and yelling. Dirty water gushing into my mouth.

He was yelling something to me.

“Scream,” he was saying. White flecks on his lips, mud splattered across the pale dome of his forehead. “Scream, you fucking bitch, scream!”

I didn’t even have the breath to laugh.

And then Dave clambered out of the pit, slogging waves of water lapping in his wake. He bent and hauled me up after him. I emerged into bitterly cold air, drenched, shivering inside my snowsuit. I clamped my arms around my sogged stomach and sat on the muddy slide of earth sloping away from the concrete wall.

Dave looked down at me and said, “We better get you home. Before you get sick or something.”

Mom was in the foyer when we tramped inside, dripping mud and water and shedding pine needles. She grabbed me and I said, “Don’t touch me.” But she was not looking at me. She said, “How could you? How could you do this to me?”

Dave said, “Mom. I’m sorry.” His voice hiccupped. He sounded like he was maybe crying. “It’s my fault. She wanted to play outside. I shouldn’t have let her. I should’ve watched her closer.”

My teeth were chattering. I looked at Dave looking at Mom, then up at Mom looking at Dave.

She said, “You’re grounded. Don’t ever do something this stupid again.”

Mom unwrapped my scarf and sodden hat and mittens and pulled off my snowsuit like shucking a butterfly out of its cocoon. We tramped mud through the hallway to the stairs in the living room. Dad levered himself up on one arm.

“Don’t start,” Mom said. “He’s grounded.”

Dad coughed into his fist. He looked at Dave. “I told you,” he said.

“She jumped,” Dave said. “I’m sorry.” His eyelashes were clustered with droplets of water.

Dad lay back down again. “Don’t be too hard on him,” he said to Mom. “It’s not his fault. She’s unpredictable.”

Mom was looking at Dad. I looked at Dave and saw a grin split his mud-spattered face. It disappeared when Mom looked down at him. His chin quivered.

She sighed. “Take off your clothes and dry off, sweetie. I have to give Mickey a bath.”

She herded me into the bathroom and shut the door. Then she cranked on the spigots in the bathtub and pulled my shirt over my head. When my head came free from the wet material, I saw that she was looking at me with a strange expression on her face. She leaned toward me and her voice was a whisper. “Don’t ever do that again, okay?”

“Okay.”

“I’m not mad at you. I’m just mad because you could’ve gotten hurt. I don’t, I couldn’t live with, if you got hurt — Mickey, honey, you can’t hurt yourself. It hurts me . Okay?”

“Okay.”

And I climbed into the hot water that lapped over my skin in a pale imitation of the dark icewater. I imagined the mingling of the two waters, cold and hot, dark and clear. Silt floated in the bathwater like insects caught in amber. When I looked up my mom was watching me. Her eyes looked soft, charcoal-smudged, and her mouth curved sadly. She cupped her palm against the crown of my head. I realized that I didn’t know what she was thinking, that I had never known and that it was something beyond my ability to imagine. And I realized then that I would never know why people said things, never understand why people did what they did.

The worst part is that I don’t understand any of it, the motivations or the feelings, and so I don’t even know what I lost, back before I had anything to lose. When I was just an embryo, the chemicals in my brain arranged themselves in some unholy order and deprived me of any great depths of loss. In the same move, they stole my ability to fully experience anything on the other end of the spectrum of human emotions. I don’t think I will ever be truly excited or genuinely happy, so long as I remain obedient to the dictates of legal, ordinary behavior.

I lie in bed listening to the sonic quality of Aidan’s profound sadness and rest my forearm across my eyes. I wish I knew what it was like, either grief or joy. The best feeling I ever get is when I run. Sweating hard, muscles burning, it’s not really a good feeling, but it’s okay. It feels safe, like I’m strong and controlled and disciplined. Like I am not on the brink of taking a knife to the person waiting in line behind me at the grocery store. How do normal people do it? How do they feel such joy from a touch, a look?

I close my eyes and touch my opposite shoulder with my right hand. I imagine that I put my arms around another person and it feels like the serotonin release at the end of a long run, the exhausted comfort of knowing that, for right now, at least, I’m safe.

The next morning I find myself coasting to a halt in front of the familiar burnt-out shell on Brown Street. I lean my chin on the steering wheel and stare at the house.

The short red-haired woman comes to the door when I knock. I hug my chest for warmth. The mucus in my nostrils has frozen. She peers up at me and then the door opens all the way. Her house is thick with warmth and smells like microwaved pasta and tuna and flower potpourri.

“Come in, come in. You ,” she says, pointing a marshmallow-fat finger at me, “were not at the choral performance.”

I stand in the entryway. A fat black cat with jade eyes comes down the stairs one step at a time. It stands watching me, its thin tail ticking back and forth. She hustles into the kitchen and comes back with a sheaf of red and green flyers.

“Handel’s Messiah ,” she says. “Have you ever heard it?”

“Yes.”

“It’s so beautiful. You have to come. It’s the Advent Festival, we perform all the Sundays leading up to Christmas. All right? Now, come in. In here.”

I go into the living room and sit on the edge of a couch that sighs and sinks under me. It is covered in a flower-printed drop-cloth. A gray cat comes in and settles on my lap. I put my hands under its belly and feel the pulse of viscera, the rumble of a purr. I imagine sliding my fingers around its throat and strangling it quietly while she talks. She is in the kitchen calling to me but I’m not paying attention.

She comes back with a mug of hot tea.

“—so sweet,” she says.

I take the tea and sip it. It is so sweet, but I realize that she was probably talking about Aidan or one of his sisters, or possibly his dead mother.

“—every single day,” she says, and digs her clenched fist into the soft flesh above her left breast. “Just an ache . Right here . I’m sure you know what I mean.”

I nod.

“So what did you want to ask me?”

“You mentioned that they were all at their father’s house,” I say. “That night.”

She nods, watching me.

“Even the retarded one?”

She flinches at my term. Her soft jowls are the color of tapioca. “Oh,” she says.

I pinch the underside of the cat’s chin with my fingernails. It jerks its head and slides off my lap and scampers away.

I set my tea on my knees and lean forward, watching Judith Greene. Her eyes move around the room, the figurines on the mantle, the photographs of smiling children and unsmiling old people.

I clear my throat.

She puts a hand to her breast again, pressing her palm on it. I watch the rise and fall of her little fat hand. “I hadn’t — how is she? Stella, I mean. After that night, she was so, it was so — she shouldn’t have had to be there.”