Authors: Lydia Cooper
He stands up, dragging his heavy backpack with him, squeezing himself back against the railing. I edge past him to unlock the door and push it open. The kitchen feels warm after the frigid outside air. I put my backpack in my room and when I come out he is standing in the middle of the kitchen floor like an island of teenage angst.
Since he hasn’t been to the apartment yet, I say, “Hey, why don’t you go check out my room. It’s in the style of early modern rustic, the college years.”
He nods once and shuffles obediently down the hall. I check the fridge and pull out two sodas, a bar of cheese, and a carton of eggs. I fry scrambled eggs and melt cheese on top, scrape the eggs onto two dishes, and set one of the dishes and one of the sodas in front of the couch.
“Hey, scrawny. You hungry?”
He comes out and slouches on the couch and looks at the food. Then he picks up the soda.
I lean against the kitchen sink. “So.”
He pulls off his hat and holds it balled in his hands. His straw-stiff hair crackles. “So what?”
I pick up the dish of eggs and start eating. Around a mouthful, I say, “So you must have a real reason for coming over. Spit it out.”
He squeezes the hat and looks down at the eggs. Then he takes a breath and shrugs his shoulders, and picks up the dish.
“That tour was frigging boring. We did it when I was in
middle
school.”
“God,” I say. “The appalling
nerve
of some people. But seriously. What’s the deal?”
He doesn’t say anything for a while. From the street below someone screams an obscenity and a car horn blares. He bends down and unzips his bag. He roots around and then pulls out a textbook, which he opens. Slotted in the textbook is what looks like an old Polaroid.
“I found this a while ago. I was looking for a baby picture for this stupid school project we have to do. I was going through some of Dave’s old pics, like, in the basement.”
I can’t see the picture from the kitchen, and I don’t feel like going into the living room where I’ll be able to smell his teenage body odor and deodorant and the cafeteria and perfume scents lingering on his school clothes.
“You know, my telepathy just isn’t what it used to be.”
He looks down at the picture like he doesn’t quite know how to explain it. Then he stands up and holds it to me. I don’t move, so he takes another step, still holding it out.
“At first,” he says, not looking at me, “I thought it was, like, a picture of Dave.”
I can see the photo from here. It’s a baby picture, your normal sort. Fat kid with crazy black hair, the hippy-looking mother squeezing the hell out of the kid, who’s laughing up at her. I can’t for the life of me think why he’d guess Dave, except that Dave and I are the only other kids in the family.
“Well,” I say, “if that
was
Dave wearing a ruffled pink onesie, it would sure explain a lot.”
Stephen pulls the picture back and studies it. Then he glances up at me from under his eyelashes. A little smile twitches up the corner of his mouth. “Yeah,” he says. “I guess it would.”
He slumps back on the couch. I finish eating the eggs and rinse the dish in the sink.
“Do you remember that?”
I shut off the water. Shake my hands and then wipe them on my jeans. I don’t know what to say. I understand what he’s asking. He’s asking the same thing all those years of shrinks asked. Stephen was born late in the year that I was ten. He doesn’t remember before that, just like all the shrinks I had to visit didn’t know the pre-killer Mickey, either. So of course they want to know, Was she always like that? Is there a genetic flaw in this child? Or are we witnessing some psychotic reaction to a traumatic event?
I raise my arms slightly. “What you see,” I say, “is what you get.”
He frowns down at the photo.
“No, you stupid ass,” I say. “
Here
. Me. Right now. Who I am now. I don’t give a fuck about people, about
any
one. It so happens I was born this way, but it wouldn’t matter anyway, if, you know, something made me this way. Point is, this is the way I am. So whatever is weighing on your young mind? You should probably take it somewhere else.”
He looks up at me. “Does Dave ever ask you for money?”
There is a silence. I notice cracks in the plaster wall behind Stephen.
“I don’t know,” Stephen says. He’s talking quickly now. “It was sort of weird. He called my cell phone which is, like, weird on its own, and then he starts talking about this really strange stuff, like, he kept asking if I understood the heart of
God
or some bullshit like that. Then all of a sudden he asked if I still had the birthday money Grandma and Grandpa sent me.”
“Do you?”
Stephen shrugs. We both know the answer. Stephen is a packrat. He saves everything. “I sort of lied and said I’d spent about half. I mean, what does he need
my
money for? The only thing I can think is he’s, you know, doing drugs again, or — I guess
still
, maybe. Right?”
There is a faint convex shadow on the wall. Like the house has imperceptibly sagged with the years and the drywall is slowly caving between support beams.
“Probably. Don’t give him your money, okay? If he calls back, just tell him I’ve got him covered.”
“Are
you
going to send him money? Mickey? Do you send Dave money?”
I don’t say anything right away. Then I look at Stephen. “Either way,” I say, “he’s my problem.”
Stephen looks uncomfortable. He shifts on the sofa. Looks down at the photo again. “He’s my brother, too.”
“No, he’s not.”
Stephen looks up, surprise etched around his eyes, his chapped mouth.
I wave my hand briefly, erasing the words. “I mean, he’s like, what, fifteen years older than you? He’s old enough to be your fucking
father
. Forget him. Okay?”
“Forget him.”
“Well, whatever, just don’t worry about him.”
Stephen watches me for a minute. His lips squeeze together. Then he slides the photo back into the textbook and closes up his backpack. He stands up. “I like your — um, your TV. This is a cool pad.”
I watch him make his way to the door. He stops by the door again. “I’m glad we had this talk, Mickey.”
I laugh. “This wasn’t much of a talk, little brother. You should raise your standards.”
He shrugs a shoulder, hesitates.
“Well. Bye.”
I hear his feet trundling down the steps. He jumps off the last two. I go over to the living room window and watch him jog across the street. I watch until the knit cap bobs out of sight around a corner.
Then I go into my room and pull out my cell phone. I sit for a long time. A slow pulse of pain tightens my scalp. Pressure increases, steady as a heartbeat. After a while, I call Dave.
The phone rings for a while. When he answers, he sounds groggy like he just woke up.
“Wha — Mickey?”
“You’re a fucking pathetic loser,” I say. “What the fuck are you on? You can’t hit your seventeen-year-old brother up for cash. You utter
shit
.”
“Oh.” He coughs, spits. “Hold on, babe, you’ve got the wrong — I would never do that. Okay? Never. I mean, maybe I did call him, maybe I made something up about — but what else could I do? I’ve called you how many times since you’ve moved in with that pretty art creature?
How
many times? And you never call me back.”
When I don’t say anything, he says, “Twelve. Did you, can you fucking believe it? My own sister.”
“I don’t know what you want from me.”
“Nothing. I’m sorry, babe, it was nothing, it was, I was just really fucking lonely, you know? And our darling parents, well, dearest mum is so sweet it gives one cavities and you know I have
such
father issues, and I — ”
“You can call me. I’ll talk. I’m — ” The word sticks. I swallow. “I’m
sorry
. Okay?”
“Oh, Jesus, come on, babe, don’t be such a fucking martyr. I’m not asking you to do anything — just a few words, the pleasure of your company, not anything so terrible, is it? Is it?”
“Don’t,” I say. “Just — try not to be such an asshole.”
He laughs. “What about your lovely roommate? Do you speak to him? Do you gossip like starlings about his poor dear murdered mum? His
feelings
regarding the great loss?”
I hang up on him. The phone falls to the floor. I sit and stare at the fallen phone for a long time. Then I get up and go for a run.
Early evening. The frozen crust of earth purls with trapped melted snow. The scent of snow, of wet crumbling tree bark, of exhaust. And under it all the sharp bitter smell of scorched wood, melted rubber, overheated metal, the last traces of an apocalyptic fire. Overhead an exuberant, limitless arc of night swirls with dazzling white stars.
I run hard. The pounding rhythm of my feet, the whisk of breath. The trail winds its way down and the gurgle and lap of water rushes through the dark. I come out on an outcropping of rock and see a flare of ice-white foam, water cascading down tumbled rock, glittering in the moonlight.
Just like last night, Aidan doesn’t come home until almost two in the morning. He stumbles against the edge of the kitchen counter and whispers, “
Ow
.” I lie in the dark listening to the muted fumbling noises as he trips taking off his boots, his jacket. His keys fall on the floor. Finally his bedroom door creaks and the night grows quiet again.
In the morning I make coffee, set a red-capped bottle of ibuprofen next to the pot, and write
dumbass
on a napkin, which I fold creatively behind the pills.
He comes into the kitchen rubbing his eyes. He notices the bottle and gives a cracked laugh. “Thanks, Mickey. You don’t have to.”
“Damn straight,” I say.
I watch him sit carefully at the table, lowering himself as though his joints hurt. He sets the bottle of pills between his palms and drops his chin toward his chest.
I watch the creases in his face, human hieroglyphs of suffering.
I go to the refrigerator and get out a carton of milk. Pour a glass for myself and one for him. I set one glass in front of him. He reaches it for it. My hand remains touching the cool surface. His fingertips brush mine. He glances up, surprised.
“Your mom was a child psychologist.”
“No.”
“What?”
He reaches for the glass. Cups a pill into his mouth and then drinks. When he lowers the glass the skin around his eyes looks frail as parchment. He rubs his wrist across his milk-glazed mouth. “I mean, she wasn’t really a doctor or anything. She was a ‘play therapist.’ She mostly just played with kids.”
“Yeah? Interesting choice of career.”
“She used to work in a daycare.”
I go to the cupboard and pull out a bag of bagels and put one in the toaster.
“Till your sister was born, you mean.”
Aidan coughs a little and takes another drink of milk. He sets the glass down, puts his hands on the edge of the table. He picks at a hangnail, sucks his finger. “No,” he says. “Till she was diagnosed.”
Outside the living room window the street buzzes with life. Car horns honking, people calling to each other.
“With what?”
He takes a breath. “Autism. She’s severely autistic. She used to be pretty high functioning. She regressed after the — ” He swallows hard. “ — the fire.”
The answer surprises me. Autism seems so garden-variety damaged compared to the more homicidally-inclined psychiatric diagnoses I was expecting.
I think for a while. Then I say, “Did you know that I went to about a thousand shrinks of every stripe and color when I was ten?”
He raises his eyebrows, looks up at me.
“Wouldn’t it be weird if I’d gone to your mother?”
Aidan doesn’t say anything for a minute. Then he says, “I think I’d have remembered that.”
“Not really. You would’ve been, what? Four? Five years old?”
He looks down at the kitchen linoleum. Then back up at me. “Did you?”
“What, go see your mom?”
He nods.
Silence drags on. I let him listen to the quiet, the distant city sounds, let him realize that deep down he’s been thinking this all along. Wondering.
I say, “No.”
The skin around his eyes and mouth shifts. A dark light flaming behind his eyes. I realize that I was an idiot, that I can watch emotion unfurl, implode like a dying star, and still not know what it means. I smile. My mouth feels bruised, sore. “I’m going home today,” I say. “May be a while. Don’t wait up.”
He smiles, but lines drag at his mouth.
I drive to my parents’ house.
Archeology, the meticulous examination of sediment and bone, appeals to me. But human archeology is more complicated. How many layers of a self are there? The human capacity for self-deception is infinite.
When I walk up toward the front door I can hear a student playing the piano. I open the door and see a high school student’s skinny back swaying at the piano. Sunlight streams through the leaded glass windows and paints rays of yellow across the mirror-clear black lacquer finish on the piano. The student plays like a metronome. She chops out phrases of Chopin like a chef slicing vegetables. I stand in the monastic sterility of hardwood floors, brown leather couches with fuzzy gold pillows and a glass-and-black entertainment set. I wonder if my life feels to other people like this music feels to me. Disturbing, off-kilter. Technically perfect, but tonally wrong.
My mom is sitting on a stool on the opposite side of the piano. She sees me walk in the front door, and her eyes track my movements. I go through to the kitchen, and in the kitchen I stop facing the basement door. I put my hand on the doorknob.
I breathe in, hold the breath, and let it out, softly.
I turn the knob.
The stairs creak under my feet.
I stop halfway down but there is no sign of damage, no stain, no lingering scent of death. My imagination plays tricks on me when I sleep.
I shake my head and go more quickly the rest of the way down the stairs.
The basement apartment has a pale green carpet. The walls are goldenrod yellow. I stand and look at the countertop, the microwave, and through a small door a bedroom and a tiny bathroom. The last time I was down here was the summer of the fat college student who would become the first corpse I ever knew. He taught me to play cards. The summer he lived with us, he and Dave used to play cards together down here for hours.
I go into the bedroom. The white-painted bookshelves still hold copies of Dave’s books. He moved into this room after the college student’s death. Dave lived here till he graduated from high school. Since then, my parents haven’t rented the basement to anyone. I know that the upstairs photo albums are full of typical family pictures, and I also know that the photo Stephen found wasn’t one of them. He got it from Dave’s personal collection.
I pull a box painted with red and orange geometric shapes from the bookshelf. The box smells of cedar and candle wax. Inside are stacks of Polaroids. I sit on the end of the bed and spread out the photos like playing cards.
Dave used to collect photos like some people collect trinkets, a shot glass from every Hard Rock Café, the rookie cards of every Cleveland Indians player. The photos from the cedar wood box are mostly of him. Like pictures of him at three years old running down a shoreline, the taller figures of our parents in the background, only black silhouettes against the sun.
One of the pictures makes me pause. Dave is not in this picture, just a fat baby splashing in a kiddie pool. I look at the one-year-old me, all tubby belly and constipated expression, and wonder why Dave kept it.
Most of the rest of the photos are of Dave, or of him and me.
I sift through them and don’t know what I’m looking for. I squint at the pictures and wonder if it’s possible to read flawed DNA from a photograph, but I don’t think it is.
I don’t remember some of these pictures. Others I do remember. There is a picture of me at six years old, blowing out birthday candles. A party hat is on my messy hair, my eyes sparkling. It looks like a nice picture. I remember that birthday, but what I remember best was my mother walking in on us, on me and Dave in the kitchen, later that night.
I don’t remember consecutive events. I remember flashes. The sizzle and flare of light. Giggling. Holding a match in my fingers. Dave’s hands closing around mine. Fire blossoming in my palms. The sweet dark smell of cooking flesh. My mother said later that Dave told her I was experimenting with fire. Dave explained that he caught me and was trying to make me stop. I remember how she was crying when she smeared yellow ointment on my hands. I remember how she hugged Dave, her tears and snot dripping into his hair as she said, “You saved your sister. Thank you.
Thank
you.” I shuffle the photos together, tap them into a neat square, and set them back in the box. Then I go upstairs.
The piano student has left but the piano lid is open. I slide onto the bench seat, which is still faintly warm. I finger-pick, reading the sheet music still propped on the piano and sounding out the Chopin phrase by phrase. My fingers ease into the music as I play it through a second time, listening to the resonance and melody, the complex tonal variations, steel strings pitched at perfect tension and resonating at certain frequencies. I bring the student’s butchered black-and-white performance to sudden life.
When I stop, I lift my head and notice that the windows are dark, that I am playing in a shadowy room with the only light coming from the hall between the kitchen and living room. The house is quiet except for the creaks and hums of old pipes. And a faint, husky sound, like uneven human breath. I frown and slide the piano shut, and go into the kitchen. My mother sits at the island, perched on a stool. A large ledger, curling receipts, and a few slit-open envelopes lie around her. Her elbows are propped on the tile surface of the island and her hands are shielding her face. Her shoulders move in spasmodic jerks.
I stand in the doorway for a while. I don’t think she hears me. But then she gulps and sniffs and moves her elbows off the countertop, and presses the sides of her fingers against the corners of her eyes, probably so that she won’t smudge her mascara. But when she turns her head to look at me, her mascara is already smeared and caked in the fine creases by her eyes.
“Oh, hi there, honey. I didn’t hear you.”
Her voice is thick with mucus. She tries to smile.
My shoulders are hunched, my hands fisted in my jeans pockets.
We don’t say anything for a while.
Then she gets up and collects the receipts, folding them inside the ledger and snapping the ledger shut. “It’s late. I should start supper.”
“Are we, like, poor or something?”
“What?” She turns to me. Then she looks at the ledger and sniffs again and smiles brightly. “Of course not. We’re doing fine. I’m just — being stupid.”
I think she means about finances, and I think, Shit. Because I was going to ask for money. I don’t know if Dave was serious or not about needing cash, but just in case, I figured I’d hit up the endless well of parental love, expressed in twenty-dollar denominations. Usually I give him some of my stipend money if he’s running low, but I’m not the ATM I used to be now that I have to pay monthly rent and utilities.
I go over to the fridge and open it and look for something to eat.
“What are you here for?”
“I forgot something. Came to get it. Is there enough of that pasta for me to have some?”
“Of course. The marinara is in that container there. By the eggs.”
I carry the plastic containers to the counter and fix myself pasta and sauce, heat the plate of food in the microwave.
“So is everything going well? Your classes?”
I glance over at her. “Yeah. They’re okay. My classes, I don’t know. The students are so gullible. I could tell them anything and they’d believe me. They’re a bunch of rats in a box waiting for someone to start experimenting.”
She smiles a little, gets out a saucepan and slices butter into it. She crushes a clove of garlic. Papery garlic shells litter the countertop.
“Mom?”
She turns to look at me. Her face, creased with dark mascara, looks like a Greek tragedy mask.
“Do you remember me always being like this?”
She doesn’t answer right away. She blinks and gets a skein of green onions out of the vegetable drawer in the refrigerator. I pull back against the sink when she passes me.
She says, “We didn’t notice anything right away. But we wouldn’t. I mean, all babies fuss and poop their pants. You start noticing their — well, I suppose you would call it their personalities — later.”
“But then you noticed.”
She slices onions into the sizzling butter. “I don’t know.”
The microwave dings. I pull out the plate of pasta. Iridescent patches of oil glisten on the steaming sauce. I get a fork out of the silverware drawer and blow on the pasta.
“What do you mean you don’t know?”
“Well, I suppose I noticed things that — made more sense later.”
“After I killed that guy.”
She doesn’t say anything. I can’t see her face from the sink. I assume that she’s thinking about her answer, but then she puts out an arm, props it against the countertop, and her head drops forward and she turns it to the side, and I see that she’s biting her lower lip and her eyes are closed tight. Tears stiffen her eyelashes.
I watch her cry for a while. Her chest hikes up and down, water pooling in the hollows under her eyes. She looks old when she cries.
Then her breathing evens out, and she wads paper towels against her face and blows her nose.
“So what are you crying about now? The same thing you were crying about earlier?”
She takes a few breaths. Like air is something newly discovered and she’s tasting it, sampling it. Her face glistens. “Yes,” she says. “The same thing.”
“And it’s not finances.”
“No.”
“Is Dad having an affair?”
She gasps and then laughs. The wrinkles on her face ease. “No, honey.” She smiles and dabs at her eyes. “You don’t need to worry about that. Your father and I have been through rough patches before. We’ll work this one out.”
I eat some pasta. Chew. Swallow. “So it’s me.”
She moves the sauce off the burner. “It’s not anything. Sometimes I just cry.”
“That’s pointless,” I say. “Most people cry for a reason, right?”
She pinches her lips together. And then she takes a breath and lets it out, slowly. She looks up at me. Her face is calm but her eyes sparkle with collected tears. “What’s it like in your head? What are you thinking right now?”
I raise my eyebrows. I don’t know what she wants me to say. “Nothing, I guess. Nothing important. You’ve got snot on your lip.”
“Why do you think I’m crying?”
I squint at the pasta. “I just said I don’t know. If I had to guess, I’d say because being around me makes you sad.” I look at her. “But that doesn’t make any sense. Because you’ve lived with me my whole life.”
I watch as tears well up in her eyes again and spill over. Her eyes burn, incandescent. She doesn’t wipe the tears this time. She says, “You never cried. When you were only three years old, I found you in the sandbox playing with toys and you had banged your head. Your forehead was bleeding, dripping onto your sandcastle, but you didn’t seem to notice. And then one time I saw a little neighbor girl come over and take a doll out of your hand. You just watched her like she was a — a curious specimen.”
I just look at her. I don’t know what she wants me to say.
“Does it hurt you? When people touch you?”
I shrug. “It makes me feel — claustrophobic. Freaks me out, kind of. It probably feels like vertigo.”
“Vertigo.”
“I read about vertigo once and it sounded about right. I’m just guessing.”
She nods.
She doesn’t say anything for a bit. I notice that she’s stopped crying. Finally, she dabs off her face again and tosses the wadded-up paper towel in the trashcan. Then she goes to the fridge and gets out a plastic-wrapped package of raw chicken breast. She says, “You were playing that Chopin so beautifully, such good tonal control. And I was just thinking about how you can play musical emotions you’ve never felt. And how I can’t hug my own daughter.” She starts slicing chicken breast on a cutting board. I watch the knife blade flash through the firm pink flesh. She says, “I went through a stage when you were about fourteen, when we were realizing that it wasn’t going away — whatever it was — anyway, I went through a stage where — where I sometimes wished you had died.”
She brushes hair off her forehead with the back of her hand. She gazes up at nothing and then shakes her head and starts cutting chicken again. “I didn’t wish you had died. I just felt like my child had died, but wasn’t dead. I can’t explain it. I would wake up in the middle of night and realize I could never — never take my daughter shopping, or to the movies, or to — to
prom
. I could never — kiss my own daughter. Hug her. Talk to her.” She stops talking.
“We’re talking now,” I say. “We’re conversing.”
She gives a sound like a cat choking on a hairball. She says, “I could be talking to the — to the
refrigerator
. I’m explaining why human beings cry. That’s not — we’re not
talking
, Michaela.”
I don’t know what she means. It sounds like we’re talking, at least it sounds like it to
me
, but I think pointing that out will not exactly help.
“I just told you I used to wish you were dead,” she says. Her voice is shrill. She turns to face me. “Do you feel anything?
Any
thing?”
Her face is stricken with sharp lines. I imagine that if I touched my fingertips to her face the skin would feel moist and cool like a hard-boiled egg. I could smooth my thumbs over the dark smears marring her egg-white cheeks like Aidan brushing paint over a mess of penciled lines. And suddenly I want her to wake up in the morning, startled, to realize that I was never born, that my whole life was just a bad dream that she has finally woken from and that the sun is warm on her pillow and she is happy.
I look down at my hands, cupped around the pasta container. The sauce has left an orange stain on the plastic. “I understand why you feel that way, I do. I’d be pissed, too. I’m not what any mother would wish for in the daughter department, so I — ”
“Jesus!”
I stop, startled. My mother never swears. She looks brittle. The knife is wavering in the air. I watch the tip trembling.
“I’m your goddamn mother! I
love
you! Say something!”
Instead of making her feel better I have brought a wildness to her pink-stained eyes. I don’t know what to say.