Lydia Cooper - My Second Death

“Do you regret it? Killing her, I mean. Do you wish you hadn’t done it?”

She blinks. Her finely wrinkled skin sags, dragging down the corners of her mouth.

“No,” she says.

“But you miss her.”

Her forehead creases. She looks up at me. “I had to do it. Alan left her and took her babies with him. And she was so, so — she couldn’t — her soul was tortured. She couldn’t stand it anymore.”

I look around at her walls, the old sepia-tinged photographs of distant ancestors. Framed images of gay-looking singers.

“You cry a lot, don’t you?”

Her little pink mouth opens and closes and opens again. “I don’t — how — why would you say that to me?”

“No reason.” I feel strange. Dizzy. The cat is rubbing its cheek against my calf and purring. I can feel its vibrating ribcage. “It doesn’t matter. Forget it.”

I sigh.

She says, “Do you feel all right? It looks like you’re sweating.”

She doesn’t sound very sympathetic.

I raise a smile. For some reason I feel sad. I stand up. The close air in the tiny house is making me sick.

Before I leave, my hand curled around the doorknob, I turn back to her. She’s watching me with those small bright eyes.

“By the way,” I say, “I know you put Ambien in the tea. You’re a fucking moron.”

She swallows. Then after a pause, probably because I don’t seem to be coming for her with a knife, she leans forward and says, “You deserve to die. You’re not a nice person at all .”

I smile. “Now that is the gospel truth. Yes.” I lean my forehead against my knuckles. “Okay. Well. I’ll come back next week, okay? Tuesday maybe.”

Her small mouth opens. The yellowish enamel of her tiny crooked teeth. The soft hairs around the corners of her upper lip. She makes a soft noise like a grunt. Doesn’t say anything else. A cat gives a rusty meow.

I go out and shut the door behind. Then I sink down on the front stoop and wait for the dizzy specks to clear. Trees sway overhead.

As I make my way down to the shiny red V4 Ford Focus my parents bought me, I watch the houses shimmer with watery luminescence.

My brother died because I killed him and I didn’t cry, I won’t ever cry, but somehow I think that Judith Greene is still more terrible, more wicked than I am. More alone than I am. If I am capable of feeling anything at all then what I feel for Judith Greene is pity.

I pull left off Brown Street and drive.

The edges of my vision sparkle.

A car’s taillights flare red and smudged through a gray mist. A stoplight. I put my hand on the gearshift when I step on the brake, but this car is an automatic. Rain plinks against the windshield. A film of clouds shreds like crepe paper.

A car horn behind me beeps.

The light has changed.

The apartment lights glow in the darkness. I stand at the door with my keys in my hands and can’t remember climbing the stairs. I let myself in.

A chair creaks in Aidan’s room. He comes out into the kitchen with a paintbrush in his hand.

“I thought you were going to your parents’ tonight.”

I set the keys carefully on the countertop. They slither to the side, fall with a clatter. I frown at them.

“I didn’t — don’t feel well.”

He comes forward. “Are you okay?”

“Yes.”

“What were — I mean—” He stops talking.

“What?” I say. “What do you think I was doing?”

His walleye skitters sideways. Lines deepen in his throat as he inhales and holds his breath. He sets the brush down on the counter and presses his fists against his eyes. When he lowers his hands his eyes are incandescent.

“Nothing,” he says. “I wasn’t asking that.”

“Then what?”

The corners of his mouth pull down. “I just, I was just worried . I don’t know what to — how to make you feel better.”

“I don’t feel bad. I don’t feel anything. Remember? Jesus, I thought we’d been over this.” I swallow a yawn. “Sorry. I don’t mean to — I’m sorry.”

“Mickey, are you okay?”

I shrug.

He sighs. “Don’t do that. Don’t look like that, like it doesn’t matter.”

I don’t know what to answer, what he wants me to look at him like.

Something shifts in his skin, in his eyes. He takes a step toward me.

I back up and run into the counter edge. The corner cuts into my lower spine. “What are you—?”

And he grabs my skull between his hands, each hand cupped over the side of my head, his fingers tight, his palms pressing against my ears so that I hear my breath echoing inside my head. The pressure aches through my skin. His fingers digging into my scalp are strong and tensile.

His breath smells of cigarette smoke and toothpaste.

I can see the faint pinpricks of beard along his pale jaw, the waxy white of dried skin on his lower lip. My chest hurts. Hot air trapped inside, afraid to let go, to breathe.

And in surprise I see pain on his face, a sudden contraction of his eyebrows, a look of seared agony in his eyes. He makes a noise in his throat and pulls my head into the hollow between his neck and shoulder. His cold jacket smells like sweat and the spice of turpentine and tobacco.

And then his grip loosens and I scramble back, banging into the counter again, sucking frantically at the air.

He looks down at the ground. He wipes his hand over his mouth.

I imagine what it would be like to go to him, to put my arms around him and hold on. I imagine that it would feel like screaming and like dissolving, like light fracturing into myriad pieces, endlessly expanding, endlessly diminishing. My hands start to shake.

I take a breath. “Ay—”

He looks up at me in surprise.

I swallow. “Ay — Ayyyy.” Deep breath. “ Aidan .”

We are silent.

He says, “My middle name is Christopher. That’s three syllables.”

I let out my breath. “ Fuck you.”

He smiles. He looks sad and, something else. A gentleness in his eye sockets, a dark warmth in the shape of his mouth. The muscular contractions of the face that portray the human emotion of compassion. I don’t know what to do with that. I don’t know why — how — anyone could feel compassion for me.

I go into my room but when I lie down my eyelids sink. Gravity pulls at my skin and gray rushes toward me and foams like ocean crests.

I hear Aidan moving around in his room. The smell of paints, the squeak and clatter as he tidies his things. The gush of water in his bathroom as he rinses his brushes. Then his bedsprings creak.

I get up and go to his room. Tap at the lintel.

“Yeah?”

I push open the door. His room is messy, rags and strips of tissue paper strewn across the paint-speckled floorboards, canvases stacked against the walls, a dismantled easel leaning against the bureau. The wide bed with its rumpled sheets, a stray belt lying like a curled snake on the sheets.

He comes out of the bathroom, his T-shirt in his hands. He stops short when he sees me.

“I want to sleep in your bed tonight.”

He doesn’t say anything.

“Without, you know, touching. But just — as friends.”

“Mickey,” he says.

“Can I?”

He looks down at his shirt. His knuckles are pale. The material is sogged and drips slowly onto the floor. Droplets pebble his bare feet.

I go over to the bed and climb in. My eyes keep wanting to close. The sheets are smooth and cool against my skin.

He goes into the bathroom. After a bit he comes out. I close my eyes and force myself to stay awake listening. I hear his bare feet scuff. And then the bureau drawer. He drops his jeans and the zipper clinks. The rustle of cloth as he pulls on pajama pants. He turns out the light and climbs into bed. The mattress slants. He slides his legs under the sheets and lies on his back. He puts his arms behind his head.