Lydia Cooper - My Second Death

“If you feel like shit, it’s your own stupid fault and you know it.”

He wipes the back of his wrist under his eyes and then yelps when the bleach cleanser stings his mucus membranes. His head swivels to the side. His eyelashes are wet and his walleye wavers without purpose.

I pick up my car keys and my backpack from where I dropped it earlier. I put the keys in my pocket.

He leans over the sink like he’s going to vomit. He doesn’t say anything. A string of mucus slides from his left nostril. He sniffs.

I want to leave. I don’t know why I haven’t left already. I balance on one foot, scratch the toe of my sneaker against the opposite calf. “Look, if I go — are you going to do that shit again?”

He puts his fists against his forehead and presses hard.

And then he says, “Go away. Leave.”

I stare at him.

“What?” I say. “You’re mad at me ? Why? You wanted to know about your mom. So I’m a shitty liar. So what? I just said it because I thought it would, I don’t know, help .”

“It would help if you didn’t fucking lie to me!” He’s screaming now.

I back up a step, almost lose my balance.

“Okay.” My backpack slides off my shoulder. I snatch it back up. “But the point is, your sister didn’t do it. Okay?”

“Fine,” he says. His voice cracks in the middle. “Whatever.”

He turns his face to me. Powdery kitchen cleanser dusts his face in ghost-pale patches, sliced through with tear-tracks.

“I don’t understand. What’s your problem?”

I wait for him to say something but he doesn’t, so after a while I walk out and lock the door behind me.

There’s nothing I can do anyway. A normal person would know what went wrong, whether it’s me he’s mad at, or himself, or if it’s something else entirely. A normal person would know the right thing to say or the right gesture to make that would calm him down. But that’s always been my problem. I create problems that I can’t fix because of my flawed neurons. I wouldn’t mind so much if it was just me that my mind tormented.

My skin feels so tight I want to run, or cut it, or bang my foot against the wall until the sharp sting cracks the pressure and lets me breathe again. But I owe Aidan more than my own release.

I drive north to Hudson. The rain turns to ice and plinks like chimes against the windshield.

The reception desk at Harvest Home overlooks an entry way filled with white wicker rocking chairs and low bench seats with mint-green cushions. The walls are painted mint-green with a border of stenciled white scallop shells. All the healthy people who move behind the desk or hustle down linoleum hallways in rubber-soled canvas shoes wear pastel scrubs. I stand in the reception room and press my sweaty palms against my thighs.

“Hi there! Who are you here to see?”

She smiles widely at me. A woman with bright red lipstick. I stare at her lips. Harvest Home management has clearly read books about the psychologically soothing effects of mint green. Shouldn’t her lips be green? Isn’t red the color of hookers and sex? I am clenching a folder in my arms, the yellow legal pad and print-outs with details on Ambien and Prozac and arson. My skin is gooseflesh. I wore a short-sleeved shirt and left my coat in the car, but it’s cold enough that even I feel it. The thermostat is below freezing outside and inside is barely warmer.

The woman comes around the desk to greet me and I turn the notebook toward her so that she can read the neat black letters that spell out Stella’s name.

A few minutes later she trots beside me, smelling like hand soap and fabric softener. She’s talking about the progress Stella has made recently. Aidan’s sister is in a community recreation room. A big-screen TV and low tables covered in modeling clay, crayons, colorful wooden abacuses, and banks of computer monitors. Two of the inmates are hunched at computers, typing quickly. I recognize Stella even before a hand that smells of soft soap fingers my arm.

“There she is.”

Stella’s smooth dark hair is short and caps her skull. Her features are long and sharp and she looks like a raven. The skin around her eyes is pink and swollen. She’s wearing a T-shirt and gray sweatpants and is lining up a row of crayons side by side. The color gradation is immaculate, a red-ochre next to a red-sienna next to a persimmon red and then orange, tangerine, yellow, pastel yellow, and white.

I watch from the doorway. The woman by me fingers my shoulder again, her nails light as spider legs on my skin. “Do you want to go in and see her?”

I shake my head. As I watch Stella, a thick strand of mucus eases down over her upper lip. I clear my throat. “You said she’s doing better. She’s still not talking, right?”

“Right,” the woman says. “But she’s drawing. Her therapist says she’s drawing her emotions and memories.”

“About the fire.”

The woman doesn’t answer for a minute.

I turn away from the door and walk down the hall.

“Excuse me, aren’t you here to see her?” Her shoes flap down the hall after me. “Excuse me!”

I stop and turn around. “Who comes to visit her most, besides her brother?”

The woman hesitates. Her red lips purse. They are candy-apple red. Her skin is burnt sienna-brown. “The Akron city detective, you mean? I have her name on file.”

“It doesn’t matter. Just tell her, the next time she comes in, that Stella didn’t start the fires.”

The woman looks at me.

“She sure as fuck didn’t give her mother twenty Ambiens and Prozacs. She isn’t guilty.”

“I thought she was just a witness.”

I blink. It occurs to me that the police detective can’t possibly be as naive as Aidan. The Akron city police department probably sees Stella only as a material witness. But their interest in her reinforces Aidan’s fears. The strange child is the dangerous one. Normal people are so stupid sometimes. They don’t understand that evil requires premeditation, silence, and complicity. No one creates evil ex nihilo . Truly bad people take others’ suffering or doubt or temptation and shape it like clay. Innocent people don’t have intentions, even if their unthinking actions wreak havoc. I like clean lines, clean smells. Innocence makes me feel sick. I don’t know how to judge it. It is neither good nor evil.

“Okay, then.” I feel my fingers trembling against the folder I hold over my stomach. “You can still tell her, though. Just to make sure she knows.”

“She’s a detective. I’m pretty sure that’s her job. To know.”

I smile. She smiles back at me. I don’t know why she’s smiling.

A few flakes of snow drift aimlessly in the gray air. My breath fogs the windshield. I turn up the heat and sit in the car, shivering while I wait for warmth to creep out and thaw my bones.

My cell phone vibrates.

I wipe my hand over my forehead. My skin feels waxy and stiff, like a half-formed mask. At first I can’t focus and then I realize it’s Dave’s number. I wonder why he’s calling. And then I remember. That message I left, hours ago. God, how long? It feels like weeks but I realize that it’s only been about six hours. I don’t even remember what I said. Only that it felt like a broken kaleidoscope, all the fragments of colored glass cascading down around me and nothing to hold them back or sort them into shapes.

I open the phone and hold it next to my ear. The panic is gone now but I feel — muzzy. Like I’ve taken too many antihistamines.

He’s jabbering, talking so quickly that at first I can’t understand him. I’m too tired to deal with his mania.

And then I realize that what he is saying has nothing to do with Aidan, or with whatever feeling choked me earlier.