Lydia Cooper - My Second Death

Her tongue darts out and sticks tackily to her dry lips. “What are you, what are you saying?”

“I’m saying it was murder,” I say. “Or, if you prefer, assisted suicide. From a legal standpoint, there’s not much difference. Is there?”

She says, “She was a saint . She was a beautiful soul.”

“She wanted to die.”

“ Yes .”

I look at her. She looks down at her small doughy hands clasped against her pendulous breasts held aloft by soft folds of belly fat.

“Van Gogh killed himself,” I say.

She raises her head. Her eyes are glassy. She looks vague, unfocused.

“Artists are tortured souls, too pure for this world.”

She seems to hear that. She nods. “She belonged with the angels. She was so beautiful. She wanted to fall asleep. I was her best friend. Her best. The only one she told about everything, about how she, how she felt . And when Alan left her, and his new, his new wife. She said her children didn’t need her anymore.” When she inhales her breasts press against me.

I prop my hand against the stone wall behind her. To passersby we must look like lovers, my form bending over hers and her soft shape yielding under mine.

“Tell me what it felt like.”

She doesn’t say anything for a long time. Then she says, “I miss her all the time. She hurt too much. I did it for her. Not for me. I was the only one who really knew how much she hurt.”

“Tell me how you did it. The pill thing confuses me. That’s a lot of pills to swallow. Did she take them herself or did you give them to her?”

“It was — she didn’t want to know. I make my tea so sweet that she just — it was just like our normal afternoon tea. Just the two of us. I thought it was just the two of us.”

I stare down at her. I don’t know what she means. Then I realize that she means she only wanted to kill the woman. She didn’t intend to frame the autistic daughter.

I imagine the scene, the small fat lonely cat lady watching the suicidal friend of her pathetic youthful fantasies fall asleep on her couch while drinking tea. Then she starts the fires and goes home. Later, when the paramedics come and the daughter is found terrified and catatonic in the basement, it’s easy to watch from the front porch and cry and say nothing.

“You really fucked up,” I say.

“What are you — why would you say that to me?”

The stone is wet and prints itself against my palms like Braille. I think about what Aidan said, that people feel shitty and learn to bear it. “You think you did what you had to, but it wasn’t your choice to make. Maybe she wanted to die, but he didn’t. Her kid, the one who asked me to find out what happened to his mom. He thinks his sister did it. He used to love his mom. He wants to love his sister. And now he’s all fucked up, not sure what to do or how to feel, getting plastered all the time. His sister’s afraid he’s going to kill himself.”

Her breasts jerk and she gives a wet sob. “Why are you saying this to me? I didn’t, didn’t hurt anyone, I loved her! I had to — I miss her every day .”

She sobs, wrenching noises like metal being ripped apart.

I remember Aidan describing his mother, laughing, crying, wiping her nose on her sleeve. And I imagine this shabby woman in her cluttered house singing Handel and sobbing. As if she crawled into the dead skin of the woman she loved enough to kill.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake. Grow up.”

I push myself away from the wall and wipe my hand on my sodden jacket.

“Are you — are you going to — are you going to call someone?”

She watches me, quivering slightly in the chill. A half-assed murderer too mundane to realize that she had held the lives of five human beings in her pudgy fingers, and she’d squeezed. She’s a dimpled, fat Faust who sold her soul to the devil and already hears his cloak rustling in the wings.

I should tell the cops, but the thing is, I’m not sure she’d confess again. Without her confession there really isn’t any new evidence to hold her on. She would walk. I don’t care about that. What I care about is that if I tell Aidan that she killed his mother and then she walks, well, Aidan would still live in a world where his mother’s killer breathed and ate breakfast cereal and drank crappy tea. Aidan with his fingers wrapped in frayed Band-Aids, his arms yellowed with bruises from a grown woman’s childishly frenzied grip.

A sudden tiredness sinks over me. I knew from the beginning, I told him right at the beginning this wouldn’t do him any good. The weird thing is, somewhere along the way I started to want it to do something, to matter to him. To make something better.

I lean my head toward Judith Greene. Her eyes slide away, her chin lowers. Classic defensive posture. I can almost hear the British narrator’s voice in the background. The prey freezes as the predator approaches .

My breath stirs the stiff curls by her ear. “It would be pointless,” I say, “for me to call anyone. They’ve already reopened the case. It’s only a matter of time.”

Her eyes widen and swerve back to my face.

I could tell her that the Akron police department is not really reinvestigating. They are only wasting taxpayer dollars trying to interview a mute autistic woman who they believe was witness to a suicide. But I don’t.

Overhead the church bells peal out a Christmas hymn instead of the usual tolling of the hours. Spatters of rain flare white against the halogen lamp. And it occurs to me that maybe the answer to Aidan’s sadness isn’t telling him the truth. Aidan thinks that he wants to know the truth, but in reality he just wants to feel something.

I lift my chin, closing my eyes against pin-sharp beads of rain. Aidan is not the sort of person who is starving for revenge. All he wants is to sit hunkered down in one of those bright-colored plastic chairs, lining up crayons with his sister, finally able to feel a pure emotion, pity unadulterated by guilt, maybe, or love without grief. What if I could give him that?

When I open my eyes Judith Greene is watching me with wide eyes, her teeth sunk into her lower lip.

I grin at her. “Well, this has been nice. You have a Merry Christmas, okay?”

I turn and take the steps two at a time. My shoes squeak on the slick wet stone.

Aidan is lying on the couch with his head tipped to the side, his mouth slack, snoring.

I bend over him. My hair falls into his face and its touch wakes Aidan and his eyelids unfurl.

The skin around his eyes is swollen and the whites are pinkish, bloodshot.

“You want to know who killed your mother? For real, you want to know?”

He just gazes up at me with that one eye swiveling lazily, like a petal floating in a jar of water.

My lips are near his. My words are moist and print themselves on his skin, slide into his open mouth.

“She was my therapist,” I say. “I didn’t like her. But I like fires. Your retarded sister wears a diaper. She was playing with Lego in the basement. She can’t wipe her own ass, far less drug a woman and start two fires with accelerant.”

His one good eye watches me. Then, slowly, he raises his hand and wipes the drool off the side of his face. He blinks.

I straighten up and snap my fingers in his face.

“Hey. Wake up. You putting the pieces together? Huh?”

He swallows and then coughs.

“I was asleep.”

“Yeah, no kidding. Do I need to go through it again, or you think you got enough to Miss Marple your way to your answer?”

He doesn’t say anything.

“I killed her. Okay? I killed your mother because she was my shrink. It wasn’t personal. I hated everyone, and I was on medications. You know. Loopy. So I killed her and started the fire. And that’s the truth.”