Craving

Craving

By

Kristina Meister

JournalStone

San Francisco

Copyright ©2012 by Kristina Meister

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

JournalStone books may be ordered through booksellers or by contacting:

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The views expressed in this work are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

ISBN:  978-1-936564-51-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-936564-56-9 (ebook)

Library of Congress Control Number:  2012941728

Printed in the United States of America

JournalStone rev. date: October 12, 2012

Cover Design: Denise Daniel

Cover Art: Philip Renne

Edited By: Elizabeth Reuter

Dedication

For my sister, Carla

Who asks all the right questions

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Chapter 1

I looked at the two-way mirror and suspected someone was in the adjoining room staring back at me just as critically. That was their purpose, after all, to unsettle. But there was nothing more unsettling than what the man behind me was saying. I looked into my own bloodshot eyes set in my sallow face, and pushed away stringy, dark hair. Since the telephone call, nothing had seemed important, not makeup, not first impressions, not even a toothbrush.

“I’m sorry for your loss.”

Thus far that day, I’d heard those words more than all the other times in my life put together, which was saying a lot. Was it my face? Did it welcome sympathy? Even if it had, who were they to assume they could make me feel any better? I wished they would just shut the hell up and stop trying to empathize.

Papers were shuffled behind me, and the detective cleared his throat. I had gotten the impression he wanted to be compassionate, but had a job to do, and when finished here, he had even more horrible details to be organizing. “The Medical Examiner hasn’t given us his findings yet. It’ll be a day or two, as homicides are given priority. However, there were a few things that seemed out of place and I wanted to run them by you, if you’re alright to go on.”

I nodded, though I wasn’t really listening.
Eva is dead
, I kept thinking over and over, just to feel the emptiness of my foot dangling over the cliff’s edge and know the fall was real.

It made sense that I was left. After all, she was the sensitive one, while I was older, more responsible. I was the sister that got things done. I wasn’t allowed to feel afraid or alone. If they had questions, then I had to suck it up and answer them, because Eva expected it from me.

“You’re going to ask me if she was suicidal,” I said, sitting down. He seemed surprised at how calm I sounded.

He had a weathered, thin face with eyes that looked as if they spent a great deal of time reading tiny letters or staring at grainy photos. They narrowed into slits as he frowned. “Did she have a history of depression?”

“My sister,” I began, cutting across his familiar and comfortable groove, “was in love with the idea of wasting away.”

I had tried to keep the disdain from my voice, but he was trained to hear those subtle inflections. “What does that mean?”

I shook my head and tried to think of how to explain it to an outsider. My chest felt so tight I couldn’t breathe, which made the hollow of my stomach seem cavernous.

“You have to understand, we lost our parents when I was just graduating from high school. It was the year she started junior high. She was vulnerable and . . . she just turned inward.” I pushed my hair behind my ears and massaged my face. “I don’t know why. She just became a different person. I took her to people, my aunt took her to people, and over time, she improved, but it was always there, just beneath the surface.”

“Was she ever on any medication?” he asked while scribbling notes.

“No. She wouldn’t have taken it if it had been prescribed.”

He blinked his droopy eyes, his graying brows drawn together. “Did you two have a falling out?”

“When I got married, she moved away.” But that wasn’t true, because I had pushed her away and would never get her back. “We sort of . . . grew apart.” But that wasn’t true, either, because I had wanted an escape to a normal life where I wasn’t yet a mother.

“When was the last time you spoke to her?”

It hit me then: the vivid memory of her voice, a sound I’d never hear again. My sleeve was soaking wet. He pushed a box of Kleenex toward me.

“Take your time,” he allowed, though it was obvious that the more time he spent with me, the less time he had.

“No. I’m fine,” I declared, more to myself than him. “She called me last week.”

“How did she sound?”

I hid my face behind a tissue and squeezed my eyes shut.

“Do you remember what Dad used to say about heaven?”

“She . . . she didn’t usually make sense. She was kind of all over the place, you know?”

He nodded.

I looked at my hands, at the tan line around my ring finger. Now I had nothing. I was free from all my responsibilities. For the life of me, I wanted them all back.

“She finally had a good job and . . . I thought this time . . . I thought she’d . . .” My voice disappeared somewhere in my sob.

He comforted me with an impersonal smile and a touch to my shoulder. “What did you talk about, specifically?”

“We reminisced . . . about our parents.”

“Did she sound upset?”

“She was always upset.” My voice came back with a lurch. I was the responsible one, so why was I sitting there letting this man treat me as if I was a child? “Look, she’s dead. It would seem that things are rather simple. Didn’t she leave a note?”

He looked at me speculatively and removed his hand from me as if he felt something there, but wasn’t sure he knew what it was. “Not that we found.”

Finally
, I thought,
something I can grasp
.

“My sister always wrote things down. She had a whole set of journals. She blogged for God’s sake! You’re telling me that though she’s always transcribed every factor of her life, she didn’t detail her own death?”

“Now you understand why I wanted to speak to you,” he said, leaning back. “We searched her place and I didn’t find anything. I thought she might have called instead.”

“My sister used to send me hand-written letters with penmanship and everything. She single-handedly kept stationery stores afloat,” I persisted.

“Her neighbors said they heard voices coming from her apartment. They also said she was into some strange stuff. Do you know anything about that?”

I tried to remember her face, but the only image of her that came to mind was clipped from a different tragedy. She was standing off by herself, silent, her black dress and French braid in perfect order, like she was a doll in a box. She was staring at the wreathed picture of our parents, a look on her face that was so distant, she seemed catatonic. That was the last time I knew what she was feeling. After that, we handled our grief differently.

I braced myself. “No. Define ‘strange.’”

“Several tenants said they saw ‘colorful’-looking people coming and going from her apartment, ‘punks,’ and one said they saw her arguing with a man in the alley where the dumpster is located, two days before her death.”

It was odd, thinking of her as an adult that did adult things like hang out in alleys or have loud conversations with strange men. She was all grown up, or rather, she had been.

“Is that all?”

“There were what appeared to be needle marks on her arm.” He tried to clarify gently. “And some other marks that might have been self-inflicted.”

“Drugs?” That image didn’t make any sense. My sister was too clear-headed about wanting to be melancholic.

“We are doing a Tox Panel on her. When that comes back, we’ll know for sure.”

“What about the other marks, the self-inflicted ones?”

He closed his file folder and seemed to be debating what he should and shouldn’t say. “They circled her wrist, almost as if she had been wearing hand cuffs, but they were clean incisions, like she tried to cut off her own hand.”

I felt my face contorting into a sickened expression. “Cut off her own hand?” I repeated.

“They were antemortem, partially healed, which is why the M.E. is doing a more detailed examination.”

“So now you’re going to ask me if she was in a cult.”

He pursed his lips and stared fixedly at my pupils. “Why do you say that?”

“Masochism, needles, depression, bad poetry, plus the only detergent she buys is Woolite Dark. I don’t know anything about it, but honestly, she’s the type that could have been.”

He drew a line under something in his notebook.

“When can I see her?”

He began chewing his lip, trying to find the least hurtful way to tell me that I shouldn’t see her in whatever condition she was in.

“I don’t care what she looks like. I need to see her,” I insisted.

He closed the notebook with a sigh. “It’s probably better if you remember her the way she was.”

“That’s the problem. I can’t remember her face. I haven’t seen her . . . in a while. I need to see her, please.” However I’d seemed to him before, I tried to emphasize it.

He looked as if he might relent. “Let’s finish up here and then I can arrange it.”

I gave in with a nod.

Until I saw her and touched her cold skin, I wouldn’t believe it. And even though it wasn’t her anymore, it was important to see the shell and know that the soul had left it behind. I needed that, just like I’d needed it with our parents.

Chapter 2

There was a weird kind of separation. It was just a body, in pieces, and though I still thought of her as alive, that person that had cried in my arms was not the thing lying on the metal table. That person was gone.

I don’t know where it came from, but the sob shook me and the blinds fell shut. The detective touched me, but there was no comfort in it. In embarrassment, he opened the door and went inside the office. I heard them talking about my sister. “The deceased,” they called her. Then he came out.

“Mrs. Caldwell,” he began and something in his tone was almost ominous.

“Caldwell is my ex-husband’s name.”

“Ms. Pierce, then. It will probably be a few days until we can be certain that she… Um.”

“Threw
herself
off the roof.”

It was the moment when a door slams on angry words. It was final and could have been so easily avoided, if I’d simply reached out to her one final time. If only I had been more patient.