Lydia Cooper - My Second Death

The skin on his fingers is loose, a sack around a ridge of bone.

“No.”

A long silence.

His tongue makes a sticky sound against the roof of his mouth. He says, “ — want to kill yourself?”

The water eases his blood away, drains him. My head spins, a pulse throbs in my temples. A hardness under my ribs. We’d fade together. It would be neat, bequeathing our parents a shearing grief instead of the lingering wretchedness of court cases and newspaper stories. And I could do it. I am genetically predisposed to play the devil, having no natural talent, no capacity, no emotional propensity for kindness.

My lips are dry. “No.”

“Then… what are you doing?”

His hand on my wrist. Ribbons of blood twine through our fingers. Water streams down his face like Christ’s sweat.

“I don’t know,” I say.

“Don’t leave,” he says. “Don’t — leave me — alone. Not again.”

I slide my fingers out from his. My hands slippery with blood.

“Okay,” I say. “I won’t.” I hook my hands under his armpits to budge him forward. The water pounds on my head, trickles down the back of my neck. I climb behind him and ease myself down, my back against the tile wall. His torso lying across my lap, his head against my breasts. His dead weight presses against my chest. His head lolls against my neck.

I fold my arms around his shoulders like a kid afraid of falling off a playground spinning wheel. Rest my chin on the top of his head. My hair falls down over his neck, tumbles across his chest. The water strikes the crown of my head and runs down us, turning my hair to snaking dark tendrils that blend and merge with his blood.

“Oh,” he says. “Hey. Little sis. My good little sis.”

My chest feels tight, airless. I want to run away, to shove off the weight. I hold tight.

Dave turns his face, burrowing the ridge of his nose and jaw against me. The pressure a thousand weights and tiny teeth tearing at my skin.

“You still love me?” he whispers. “After — what I did to your car. Still — love me?”

I can feel the thud of his heartbeat. One beat. Nothing. Another beat. The moments of nothingness stretch longer.

I say, “I never have.”

The shower stall is rank with the sweetness of blood and the taint of lime, a strange milky musk. It smells like amniotic fluid.

And I think of Stephen’s birth.

When I was let into the hospital room, the baby’s kidney-colored body was being manipulated in latex-covered hands. The slick rasp of plastic over mucus-shiny skin. Stephen’s first breaths were rusty. The obstetrician and a nurse moved on squeaky rubberized shoes around the room, checking the baby, measuring it, wrapping it up in blankets. The nurse came and laid the swaddled bundle of squalling infant on my mother’s soft deflated stomach.

Come over here , my mother said. But my eyes went to the umbilical cord looped around the placenta.

Dave went over, leaned his hips against the mattress, his hands burrowed into the bed sheets, and bent his face toward the baby, cooing, making baby sounds at the bundle. My father stood with his fingertips resting on my mother’s collarbone, his thumb making small circles on the back of her shoulder. My mother’s skin was reddened, her hair clinging wet to her temples.

Then the nurse tried to lead me to the bed where my family rested against each other, limbs and fingers and eyes touching each other. My hand went to the cool plastic rail on the side of the hospital bed.

Don’t you want to touch him? You can. He’s your brother , my mother said.

I put my hands behind my back and sunk my chin toward my neck. A ten-year-old turtle drawing in on itself.

A few months later at one of my scheduled shrink visits I overheard my mother telling the psychiatrist that I didn’t want to be around the family, that I withdrew from them, resented being made part of family dinners, family picnics.

But it wasn’t that. It was never that.

My mother cries because I’m strange, but I don’t understand that. As far as I can tell, she’s never actually admitted to herself that I am psychologically different from ordinary people. She never even tried to understand. When I was a kid, I balked and shrieked and ducked but she didn’t once ask how it felt when she tried to touch me. She never asked herself how scared I must have been, months after scraping a dead man’s eye out of his skull with my fingernail, to be told to touch an eight-pound baby’s face. What was I supposed to do? I can’t read emotions very well but I’m not stupid. I knew by the looks on their faces that my family felt things I would never feel. I knew what I was capable of. So I put my hands behind my back and stepped away from the hospital bed. Then I turned and bolted out of the hospital room.

The smell of placenta and amniotic fluid clung to my clothes.

Dave came to find me. He always did.

I was sitting by a planter. The windowpanes were a rain-washed pewter gray. Shadows inched across the linoleum floor. Dave walked over to the seat and leaned against it. Tipped the plastic frame. Startled, my hands flared out, grabbed at the armrests. Dave pinned the chair against the wall with his weight, trapping three of my fingers. The bones ached.

“Stop it,” I said.

He waited for a few minutes and then let the chair go. It settled onto all four legs. I rubbed at the pink welts in my hand. Then I reached up and took his hand. I dug my fingernails into the soft skin over the tendons at the base of his wrist. He bit his lip and when I let go, he gasped and laughed and rubbed his wrist against his stomach.

“Jeeeesus,” he said. “Ow.”

He rubbed my hair and went over to the window to look out into the rain-swept parking lot. I felt calm for the first time since we had come to the hospital. I felt evil. I felt honest.

Dave whispers, “Yeah, you do.”

I don’t remember what he’s talking about. The water cools, a sluggish trickle pumping out over our heads.

A slow pulsing ache throbs against the edges of my eye sockets. I close my eyes and imagine that I’m far away, in a dark airless place with no smell except emptiness and nothing hurts and nothing matters.

“Oh God. Oh God. Dave, what did you — what’s wrong with Mickey? Come on, wake up, Mickey. It’s okay, I’m here, it’s okay, just, I’m going to have to — oh, God.”

The darkness sways.

The voice moves away, jabbering frantically. “ — 911 emergency, yes, I need an ambulance, emergency paramedics, right away. I don’t — I think so, yes. Attempted suicide. Yes, probably. No, I don’t know what he took, just — yeah. Hurry.”

My eyes are shut tight. The light hurts.

But Dave shifts in my arms. His ribs press against mine as he inhales.

“ Ai dan!” he breathes. “You came !”

Even faint as mist, his voice holds its silvery chime, its mocking incantatory lilt.

I open my eyes. My lashes are gummed and sticky.

Aidan’s face hovers overhead, framed by the chipped pinkish bathroom tile. His eyebrows dark wings, a blue vein pulsing in his temple. His good eye burns, even his walleye steadied in the force of his glare. He reaches into the shower and cranks off the spigot.

Then he hunkers down in front of the stall, one hand splayed against the wall to steady himself. His solitary eye is not on Dave but on me.

“He said he took something. I came as soon as I could. He didn’t say — he didn’t say you were here.”

“You’re — a saint , a — veritable saint,” Dave whispers. His bloody fingers reach out, trembling, and close around Aidan’s wrist.

Aidan reaches across with his free hand and peels Dave’s fingers off his wrist.