Lydia Cooper - My Second Death

He licks his lower lip. Looks over at our father. “Is that okay?”

Dad nods once. He takes off his glasses, polishes a lens.

I stand up. Aidan looks up at me. “You want me to, you know, fill them in?”

“Yes.”

“Okay.”

Stephen follows me out.

The cafeteria is in another wing. It smells like old lunchmeat and stale coffee. We buy chicken sandwiches and sit down in a booth. Someone has printed in blue ink “Jason forever” on the laminate tabletop. I wonder if Jason wrote it, or if Jason was dying somewhere in the building as someone else wielded a Bic pen in defiance of the inevitable.

Stephen peels the foil wrapper off his sandwich. He lifts the top bun and pulls out slices of pickle, leaves them on the foil wrap.

He takes a breath and looks up at me. “So what happened?”

“He cut his wrists.”

“He was on something, right?”

I take the wrapper off my sandwich. It smells like chalk. I wonder how old the chicken is.

“What kind?” Stephen asks.

I look at him. “What you’re thinking. I found a needle in the bathroom. Don’t tell Mom and Dad. Or, at least, don’t tell them I’m telling you.”

Stephen raises a shoulder, frowns at his sandwich.

I wonder when Stephen will find out about the puncture wound that severed the artery in his older brother’s thigh. Or the rest of it, the whole filthy six o’clock news special. Aidan is stringing together some version for Mom and Dad. My mouth tastes bitter, like lye and rot. I can feel my pulse in my neck, in my forehead. Everything frantic under my skin.

I pick up the sandwich and take a bite. Chew. Swallow. My mouth is dry. I reach for my waxed paper cup of water. I wish I’d ordered juice. The water tastes like soap.

“Is he going to make it?”

“I don’t know.”

The silence goes on for a long time.

Stephen scrapes his fingernail along the laminate table edge. “So I’m going to apply to the University of Dallas. In Texas.”

I cough and reach for the water again. Swirl it around in my mouth and spit it back into the cup. “You mean, like, for college?”

“Yeah.”

I don’t know what to think about his conversational gambit. “Well, you won’t get free tuition if you go there, you know.”

“Yeah.”

I take another bite of sandwich.

“You should go to UT-Austin.”

He looks up at me. “Why?”

“Because it’s two hundred miles further away from here.”

He smiles a little. He picks up his sandwich and looks at it and puts it down again. “Yeah?” he says. “Maybe I’ll apply there too.”

“What are you going to major in?”

“Biochem.”

“Premed?”

“I want to be a dentist.”

I laugh.

He looks up. His pale face flushes. “What?”

“Nothing. Just, who wants to be a dentist?”

He lifts a shoulder. “Teeth are interesting.”

I shake my head. “You are weirder than you look. You know that?”

He bites his lower lip. Then he takes a breath. He says, “You have crooked incisors too.”

“What?”

“Our teeth. We inherited crooked incisors. All of us. You have them, and Dave. I don’t have them right now because of my braces. But they’ll shift again unless I get more orthodontic work.”

“Huh. I never noticed.”

He says something so softly I can’t hear him.

“What?”

“I said, I’m more like you guys than you think.”

My heartbeat stutters. An icy trickle down my spine. I put the sandwich down.

I don’t know what to say.

He looks up at me. His eyes fill with tears.

I know what I need to do. I just don’t want to.

I wipe my hands on my thighs. Reach out and put my fingers on the sleeve of his jacket. The coarse cotton-blend fabric still cool from outside air. I press my palm against his arm, lay my hand flat against the slender bones under his jacket sleeve.

He looks down at my hand. He slides his fingers over mine. The feel of his skin like cold worms. I swallow a gag.

He grips my fingers in his.

The cafeteria is choked with sour food smells. I wonder how long I can hold still. But that’s a stupid thing to wonder. I’ll hold still as long as I have to.

He lets me go and I snatch my hand back. He wipes his palm under his nose then reaches for a napkin and blows his nose into it.

“I’m not really hungry,” he says. “If you want to head back.”

When we get back to the waiting room our parents and Aidan are still sitting in the same seats, not looking at each other. A few other people sit in isolated clots, heads bent, immobile.

My father looks like a stone effigy. The profiled head is so craggy, so chiseled that I expect a pigeon to come crap on it. Fluorescent lights shine oily and yellow on his glasses lenses.

Mom sees us and reaches out a hand for Stephen. He sits down next to her. She pulls a tissue out of her pocket and puts it against her eyes and sniffs. Offers him a tissue. He shakes his head and bites his lower lip.

My skin feels clammy. I go over to the window and lean against the cool glass.

“How long do we wait here if there’s no news?”

“How long do we wait?” My father’s voice is controlled, patient. “Do you have somewhere else you need to be, Michaela? Something else to be doing now?”

Aidan clears his throat and slides his spine down in the plastic seat.

I turn around, press my shoulder blades against the window. My father removes his glasses and pinches the bridge of his nose. He presses and releases and settles the glasses on his face again, tucking the earpieces behind his ears.

“I understand why you wanted Mr. Devorecek to talk to us,” he says, “but you are far stupider than you appear if you think that we are not going to talk about this. If you think for one second that you can expect this not to — not to be discussed .”

I blink, startled. Look at Aidan. He is slouched in the seat, fists burrowed under opposite armpits.

“I guess that makes me stupid, then. What the fuck are you talking about?”

A young child kneeling on a chair across the room is digging a plastic G.I. Joe action figure’s head into his nose and then licking the snot off the plastic helmet. When I say “fuck,” his eyes widen and dart up to my face. I glare at him. He just gapes back, saliva glistening on his lower lip.

Aidan gets up. “All right. I think I’m going to the vending machine. Anything for you, Mrs. Brandis?”

“No, thank you.” Her nose is clogged and it sounds like she has said, Doe thag you .

“How about you, Stephen?”

“I just went to the caf with Mickey.”

“Go get something else.” Our father pulls out his wallet and folds a five dollar bill into Stephen’s hand.

Stephen looks at the bill and then up at me.

“Go,” our father says. “Aidan, please take him to the vending machines.”

“Okay.” Aidan nods at Stephen. Stephen gets up slowly and follows Aidan out. He looks over his shoulder at me, his brows peaked like slanted eaves.

Dad inhales and grips his hands around the armrests of his plastic chair. His knuckles stand up pale and crested, pressing through the fabric of his skin. “Start talking. I suggest you start with your lies.”

Mom puts the tissue against her nose and lifts her head and breathes in, holds her breath, and lets it out. As if to swamp incipient tears with the infected air of the waiting room.

I look at the worn toes of my sneakers.

“Michaela.”

I look up at him. For some reason my throat hurts. “You want the truth? Okay. Yes. He sometimes cut me. He burnt my fingers when I was six. Almost drowned me in that construction site. Yes to a million things we never told you about. But it was a game, it was just a game. See how bad it got before I yelled. Only I never yelled. I don’t know why. I guess it’s the crazy, some fun little trivia about antisocial personality disorder they don’t tell you. The inverted pain tolerance. Caresses kill, burns don’t register. He figured it out, that’s all.”