Craving (2 page)

“Yes, but the Tox Panel has returned and your sister was not under the influence when she died, which is a bit unusual, though not unheard of.”

I nodded. “So why does she have needle marks?”

“We don’t know for sure, but our investigation will continue until we’re certain. Her, uh, body will be released to whatever funeral home you request and her personal effects will pass to you as next of kin, after the investigation no longer requires them as evidence.”

I tried to pull myself together. “Thank you.”

His face scrunched up again and he seemed to shuffle without moving. It was obvious to me he had been doing this a long while and was slowly tiring of being the one to give miserable people bad news on the worst days of their lives. He looked worn out, and because thinking about him helped me forget her, I wondered why he did it if it tore him down. It was either dedication or hopelessness.

“Have you made arrangements?” he asked.

I smeared my face. “No, but I will.”

“Where will you be staying if I need to speak to you?”

“Uh.” Before I could think up an answer, the obvious one presented itself. “I was hoping I could stay in her apartment, unless that interferes with the investigation.”

He shook his head. “She died across town from her apartment, and as I said, we’ve already taken a look. There’s really no reason for us to keep you out. It might even help us. I’ll sign out her keys. May I visit?”

“Absolutely. I’ll cooperate in full.”

I shook his hand and caught a glimpse of the holstered weapon within his coat.

“Try and get some sleep,” he said by way of parting.

The rest was a blur. I don’t remember getting into the rental car, nor listening to the GPS leading me to what remained of my sister in its cold feminine voice, but I do recall her front door on the fourth floor of her building, how it reflected the dingy light from the grimy hallway window.

There was no color there, bad lighting, peeling paint, and traces of a life deteriorating that someone should have cared about. How many of her neighbors passed her in the hallway or laundry room and asked themselves, “Who loves her?” I was that person and I had failed.

I unlocked her door and stepped through. It felt so sweetly torturous, I thought I might faint. I thought of star-crossed lovers passing in the street and never seeing each other. I thought of a child born into the world motherless. Bittersweet, I thought, stepping foot into her life without her there to guide me, I was closest to her when we were farthest apart.

I’m sorry.

I looked around blankly. It was a tiny one-bedroom. The living room had a kitchenette in the corner and several IKEA bookshelves filled with leather-bound volumes. There was a yoga exercise ball, a yellow, happy face beanbag chair, and a cheap folding TV tray. The curtains on the window could have been there for years, untouched; they hung stiffly and blocked all but a little light creeping in at the edges. A tasteless beaded curtain from her grade school years divided her bedroom from the main room and beyond it, was a bed piled with blankets. The place had not been dusted in ages, dirty dishes were in the sink, and a pile of laundry was sitting by the door.

“Honestly! Couldn’t even leave me with an empty sink before you jumped off a fucking building,” I whispered, and it felt good to be angry.

For a few moments, I was disgusted with her miserable life. I hated that I felt obliged to help her, that I had needed her to be alive. How could I have thought I had failed her? Why hadn’t the thought she might be failing me ever crossed her ungrateful, selfish mind before she smeared it onto a sidewalk?

“God damn you.”

I dropped my suitcase and slid down the wall. I cried for myself more than her. I cried out of frustration. She had always been this way, doing these things to me, and now that it was over, I was mourning her and felt stupid for it. It wasn’t as if I had chosen to be related to her, so why did it hurt so much to no longer have her around?

Because I’m all alone now.

I cried until I had squeezed every last drop from my heart, and when I had finally reached that state of ambiguous stillness, the light had vanished from the edges of the curtains.

I ached all over. Standing made my whole body spasm, but I searched for cleaning products and went to work. I splashed my hands in septic water and scrubbed dishes with fervor. I made her bed. I dusted her bookshelves. I opened the windows and cleaned every last pane. In the absence of her self-consciousness, her ennui, I scoured her inner sanctum and left it sparkling and entirely not hers. Looking at it, I felt sick with emptiness.

The smiling face of the beanbag looked up at me and I vowed to one day find the man who had propagated that iconic image and punch him in his grinning pie hole. It was not comfortable to sit in, I noticed as I pressed my spine into an unnatural curve, but I was willing to do anything that brought the stable ground closer to me without the aid of gravity.

My fingers stroked the spines of her books and over time, I noticed a pattern. None of the volumes had titles; they were simply bound in monochromatic leather, each shelf in a separate color. I drew one out and opened it. It cracked in protest, but split in half in my lap. Every page was of a different type of paper, as if she’d scavenged all that she could and had them independently bound, but even that hadn’t been good enough. Tiny scraps were glued inside, doodles were drawn on receipts, and even a few cocktail napkins containing little phrases were stuffed in like bookmarks.

On a piece of legal paper, I found her beautiful handwriting in a purple sharpie below a scribble she had swirled into being.

“The soul is chipped, the days are hammers. They find my weak spaces and pry. They look at me with nails and sharp tools. They chisel me raw. What am I now? They say, ‘You are beautiful. You are perfect, faceted and sparkling.’ But my beauty was my filth, my roughened splendor, my mystery. They stole it from me to make themselves richer and now, thousands strong, they smile as I reflect them. But my soul is a black stone, an obsidian mirror, and when they tire of deceiving themselves, they will see the darkness of their crude refinement. They will scry and find no future. I am a gateway to nothingness.”

The book slipped from my hands. I closed my eyes and tried to block it out, but it was no use. The memory was going to fight its way out whether I liked it or not.

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

“No,”
I had said, knowing what she meant, but wanting her to just shut up about it. I was tired of her constant search for moral support and rescue. Who rescued me? No one, that’s who.

“He used to say that heaven was the greatest place you could imagine. Don’t you remember?”
She sounded hurt, but at the time, I didn’t care how badly I stung her. I didn’t want to talk of suffering eventually ending in bliss, because to me, at that time, it felt endless. Perhaps it was wrong of me, but I was tired.

I’d been sitting at my kitchen table, phone squished uncomfortably between ear and shoulder, trying to soap the wedding ring off my finger permanently, and somehow everything else had shrunk in comparison with that final, frantic task.

“You know, Ev, I don’t. I don’t remember a thing about it, and to be honest, that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard, because no matter how good your heaven is, I’m pretty fucking sure I can imagine better.”

“I know,”
she had said softly.
“It’s different for every person and it changes. That’s the point. When we were kids, it was a room full of candy and no adults, but now I wonder what it is.”

“A place where Brad Pitt tells me how beautiful I am and insists on killing Howard for me,”
I had joked, just to stifle her.

Her throat scratched in the hollows of my ear.
“I don’t think perfection or happiness are enough anymore.”

“You’ve never been happy. How would you know?”
I lashed back. I didn’t want to talk about meaning. Meaning was having your husband dump you after years because he’d impregnated a stripper. Had she asked me about my pain? No. She had just called to free-speak indie poetry at me, and I didn’t want to hear it. I had real problems she’d never understand.

“You don’t believe it,”
she whispered.

“No, I don’t. Why do you always feel it necessary to remind me that the memories I have of them are marred by ridiculous childhood stories? Why do you always have to make me feel like I’m not living up to their standards? Any faith I may have had in omniscient deities died the moment I realized that people see what they want, until they go blind.”

“Lily, I . . .”
she began.

“Can it.”

She sighed and halted what she’d been about to say. It was a moment I would never get back. Whatever she wanted to tell me, I would never know.

“It doesn’t exist, Lily, I know,”
she had said with surprising clarity,
“but that’s just it. It’s a direction. It’s meant to keep us alive. You can find hope all the time without stuff like that, but I needed it, and you always knew it. I have to say this to you, because you’re the strongest person I’ve ever met.”

I had snorted.

I thought back on it and was ashamed that I hadn’t asked what she meant, had not accepted her compliment and found something to say back. I had just been too upset.

“I’m not going to cheer you up. I’m not going to convince you to put down the knife. I just can’t handle it anymore, Ev. Do it yourself and leave me alone.”

She hadn’t responded for a long time while I twisted and pulled at that damn golden band, my fingers cramped and my skin raw. I don’t know what she was thinking, and I wasn’t even listening to the silence.

“Everything means something, you know,”
she whispered.
“Even if you don’t want to accept what it means, it means something. There is no such thing as nothing.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I know you hate me. I’ve always known.”

“I don’t hate you,”
I had growled defensively, knowing she was right and dismayed that I’d been transparent.

“You do, and it doesn’t matter, because it all means something. I’m not supposed to live. I’ll die and when I do, you’re fated to wonder why, because you don’t have faith in anything. You’re fated to always rescue me, because you’re just that tough.”

“What?”

She had laughed strangely, like it was all not quite a joke, and for a moment, in my kitchen, I had known she was crazy.

“Ev, you’re not doing something stupid, are you?”

“Demons, angels, villains . . . vampires.”
Then she laughed again and I realized something had changed.
“They don’t stand a chance.”

Then she hung up.

Had she been cutting herself when she called me, sitting in her kitchenette, carving a band around her arm while I was contemplating hacking off my left ring finger? Why had I chosen those words, “put down the knife?” Where had my strength been then? Why hadn’t she put more faith in it, if she was such a believer?

I took a shaky breath and picked the book back up. On the inside of a large sheet of drawing paper that had been bound folded in half, I found a sketch of a man. It was only lines, hatch marks that formed a shape seated in a cross-legged position, hands joined in his lap as if in meditation. It reminded me of the ghost story books she had collected as a child, eerie in its smeared, yet accurate, grotesquery. Below the drawing was a smudged charcoal paragraph.

“
It’s a wall that stretches upward, constantly tipping over me like a wave. I see far from beneath it, but it rolls over and I’m blind again. I breathe in dust and drown. I am buried in a fat, breathing, sweating animal that churns as it eats me whole. I sink into its flesh and am incorporated. When I open my eyes again, I see the horizon through the gaze of a universe.”

A piece of me wondered what had inspired her ramblings. Did she have a brain like a waterwheel constantly churning out thoughts she found lovely enough to scrawl on any handy bit of paper? For a few minutes, I flipped through the pages, watching them crack and slide against each other, wondering why she had never been diagnosed with hypergraphia.

The phone rang. The sound was so sudden I dropped the book and mistook my heartbeat for someone pounding at the door. I had to look around to find the handset, half-buried by the pile of clothing. It warned me of a low battery as I hit the button.

“Hello?”

“This is Detective Matthew Unger. I’m calling for Ms. Pierce.”

“It’s me.”

“How are you?” he asked and it sounded more perfunctory than heart-felt, which probably had something to do with how much sleep he’d gotten.

“I’d be great if my sister wasn’t dead.”

His beleaguered mind did a systems-check and I could feel him kicking himself. “Of course, that sounded bad. I’m sorry. I was just checking in to make sure you made it okay. Are you busy?” Which was cop-speak for, “Are you too fucked up to talk to me?” The answer was yes, but as Eva had said, I was curious to a fault.

“Have you learned something new? That was fast.”

The phone beeped again. Unger’s voice was withdrawn and a bit fatigued. “Your sister made a complaint a few months ago.”

“Complaint? Like a police report?”

I heard a car alarm from his side of the connection and realized he was on a cell phone. “Yes. She claimed that she had a stalker, someone who would follow her to and from work. She didn’t go into detail, and it could not be substantiated. They wrote it off as a . . . false complaint.”

Great,
I thought,
just fucking great. She had a stalker and I’m staying at her house.

“Do you know anything about who it might’ve been?”

“No, I’m sorry,” I said.

“Given her state of mind, it may have just been . . .”

I pinched the bridge of my nose and grew even more frustrated by his roughened chivalry. Fate had a sense of irony, to hand me a gentleman, now of all times, when it could have made my life a lot easier and been consistent. “Paranoia?”