Lydia Cooper - My Second Death

I had meant to head for the garage and wait out the party but I decide to wait and see Dave. I don’t have to go back into the living room to find him, though, because he always manages to find me. I ease a cheese and pimento triangle from the corner of an etched glass platter and slide onto a barstool by the island.

The woman by the sink looks over at me but doesn’t say anything. When she finishes decorating the platter I say, “That looks really great.” She looks at me and the skin across her forehead smoothes out. She starts to smile. I worry that she might take my compliment for an invitation to tell me about her grandchildren’s tonsillitis. So I say, “I mean, for predigested subcutaneous fat deposits from hormone-injected animals.”

The smile is eclipsed by tensed muscles. Her eyelids fall. She takes the platter into the other room.

In the living room, Dave’s voice rises above the hubbub, followed by a tide of laughter. He says something else, and there is a sudden hush. My mother’s voice steps into the silence, soft, gentle. Soothing the waters troubled by whatever verbal mischief Dave’s restless brain has come up with. I reach across the island to the abandoned stacks of mini-sandwiches.

I am eating my third mini-sandwich when Dave comes in. He enters from the doorway behind the stool and I see his reflection emerging from the evening-shadowed windowpane over the sink.

“My adoring public kept me. I apologize.”

I brush crumbs off my thighs. “I regret to be the one to inform you, but your public are maudlin fools and senile collectors of plaster shepherdesses. You may want to reconsider boasting about their approbation.”

He laughs. When he leans on the counter his skin smells strange, cloves and chlorine and rotting potatoes. A sweet and rancid reek. I want to ask him where he went after I left him by the train tracks. I wonder if he’s been skulking around the homeless under their bridges all day, because he smells faintly sour, as if he’s been sweating or hasn’t showered recently. But for some reason the question, which is the sort of banal shit we usually natter about, seems laden with something darker. I don’t want to answer any questions about what I was doing down there, who Desiree is, or why I am bringing her sandwiches in the early morning.

“It may interest you to know that your opinion is in the minority. Your humble servant was recently featured in The New Yorker .” His shirt is gray silk, and sweat patches darken under his arms.

A glimmer of movement in the windowpane. I watch another form materialize in the rose-tinted murk, an indistinct shape with diffident shoulders, chin sunk toward a concaved chest. Strange that I recognize him immediately — a man identifiable by his lack of definition.

“No, no,” I say. “You are premature. Bring forth your accolades when the time ripens.”

“What?”

I swivel on the stool. “Papa,” I say. “Was he glorious? Has his fame shed light upon the noble name we share?”

“Your brother is an artist,” our shared paternal member says from the doorway. His hands in his pockets. Rolled shirtsleeves, the knot of his burgundy tie loosened. A faint sparkle of light refracted by sweat at his temples. “There’s no need to mock.”

Dave looks from me to our father. He smiles and his tongue traces his lower lip. “You misunderstood us, Dad. Mickey is my big gest fan.”

“Oh God,” I say. “That’s defamation of fucking character. You write like Gertrude Stein on Nyquil.”

Dave laughs hysterically. Tears well up under his eyelids and he puts his palms over his mouth, gasping. Dad shakes his head and turns back to the living room.

Dave blows out and leans close to me. His breath stirs strands of hair fallen across my face.

“We’ve lost him. Alone again. You and me, against the world.”

When I don’t answer, Dave says, “But not anymore. Is that it? But, where is your most faithful paramour? I saw him out there. He seems happy. You seem very happy together.”

“I really don’t know what’s wrong with you today.”

“Poor baby.” His fingertips brush the ends of my hair. I move my head away but he grabs my wrist. His fingernails are long and I can feel the pressure of their half-moon shapes against the tender skin on the inside of my wrist.

Then he loosens his grip, as if he’s just realized how tightly he’s been holding on. He turns up my palms and we watch white crescent marks in the thin underarm skin darken with suffusions of blood. The nail bites cross fainter ruffled pink strands, healing scars from when Desiree scratched me in the throes of her fainting fit about a week ago. He frowns slightly, turning my wrist toward the kitchen light.

“He drinks,” I say.

Dave looks at me.

The pain bores hot and sharp behind my right eye.

I smile. “He’s so tragic. It turns out to be a story by Tolstoy, not Dickens.”

“But living with you would drive anyone to drink,” he says. His voice is very soft. He is interested. His hands slacken their grip as he leans forward.

I pull away, drawing my shirtsleeves down over my palms. “I didn’t drive you to drink.”

“No. But my soul is made of tungsten, my heart of carbide.”

He reaches for me again, and I catch his wrist and bend the fingers back. “Don’t.”

He smiles at me and I pull away from him. Through the kitchen window the sky flares vermillion behind a fringe of fir trees. Our shades pass like gossamer across the sunset-tinted windowpane as if we are nothingness, or are pure essence.

The house finally settles on its haunches after the exuberance of human laughter fades to silence. Aidan gets up off the living room couch when he sees me. He looks from me to the empty door behind me.

“Where’s Dave?”

Stephen, on the couch still, is holding a bag of Lay’s potato chips. “He left a while ago. While you were still holed up in the garage.” He points a potato chip at me.

“Nicely done.” I nod in genuine appreciation. “Our paterfamilias still hasn’t found the cojones to mention my failed attempt at socializing.”

Stephen sucks his bottom lip but doesn’t respond. My father, who can hear me from his liminal position in the dining room doorway, says nothing.

Aidan and I leave. He gets in his car and I get in mine.

I beat him home.

Strobe lights, red and blue, lance through the darkness. Behind me I hear Aidan’s brakes squeal as he double-stomps them. Our house is under siege.

My heart seizes up like a fist. Blue and red whirling lights dazzle across my skin. Paramedics hurry from the lit ambulances and cop cars through the doors of the first-floor apartment. The house is broken open like a shredded tulip, a windowpane shattered and glass glittering under the glaring white light anchored to the roof of a police car. The neighbors, our dark familiars, line the sidewalks and stand hesitant in front doors, eyes like boiled onions and teeth set whitely between moist slack lips. People all over the front lawn.

The air is cold. I am already out of the Chevelle — the driver’s door hanging open — and running through the gridiron of cop cars. Voices screaming. Aidan’s voice behind me, high-pitched and frantic.

Yellow tape strung from the mailbox post to the front porch clings to my skin as I break through it. I fling it off.

The front door to the downstairs apartment stands ajar. Dark silhouettes move around inside the lit apartment, passing around a single still shape. Halfway across the yard to the front door a weight hits me. I slam into the ground. Something cold and heavy pins my face down and the dirt smells like metal and rotting fruit. I grunt and arch back, lashing my elbow up into the body on top of me.