a new book project

[mischiefmeister]

This will be my somewhat different spin on vampires, with an "I" not a "Y".

This is only

“I’m sorry for your loss.”

Thus far, I’d heard that at least two dozen times, probably more than all the other times in my life put together. Was it my face? Did it look as if it needed 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.

I glanced into the reflective two-way mirror of the adjoining room and suspected that someone was on the other side staring back at me just as critically. My dark hair was stringy, my eyes were red, and my pallor wasn’t very good.

Papers were shuffled behind me. “The Medical Examiner hasn’t given us his findings yet and there were a few things that seemed out of place.”

I nodded, though I was not really listening. Eva is dead, I kept thinking, over and over, just to feel the emptiness of my foot dangling over the cliff and know it 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 one 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, and he seemed surprised at how calm I sounded.

He had a scrunched up face and it got a little worse as he frowned. “Did she have a history of depression, was there anything in her life that . . .”

“My sister,” I began, cutting across his familiar and comfortable groove, “was in love with the idea of wasting away. Everything in her life made her want to end it.”

I had tried to keep the disdain from my voice, but he was trained in hearing 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 only made the hollow of my stomach seem cavernous.

“You have to understand, we lost our parents when I had just graduated from high school and she was going into junior high. She was vulnerable and when . . . 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.”

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

“She was on anything and everything, but never stayed on any of it.”

“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, “and 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. “I don’t know what she was doing here.”

“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.”

“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, “In general?”

“Yes, she was a free spirit.” 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 had a good job and . . . I thought this time . . . I thought she’d . . .” and my voice disappeared somewhere in my sob.

He comforted me with an impersonal pat. “What did you talk about specifically?”

“We reminisced . . . about our parents.”
“Did she sound depressed?”

“She was always depressed,” and 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. Did she leave a note?”

He looked at me speculatively and removed his hand from my arm 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. “I thought she might have called instead.”

“My sister used to send me hand-written letters, on stationary . . . with penmanship and everything,” 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, 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. What kind of stuff?”

“Several tenants said they saw strange looking people coming and going from her apartment, 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 strange, thinking of her as an adult that did adult things like hang out in alleys or have loud conversations with strange men, but she was all grown up, or rather, she had been.

“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?” And that image just didn’t seem to make any sense. If there was one thing my sister was, it was 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?”

He closed his file folder and seemed to be debating what he should and should not 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 hand?” I repeated.

“They were antemortem, partially healed, which is why the M.E. is holding out for a time.”

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

He pursed his lips and stared fixedly at my pupils.

“I don’t know anything about it, but honestly, she’s the type that could have been.”

He nodded.
“When can I see her?” The man 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 as proof. I needed that, just like I’d needed it with our parents.

************************

There was a weird kind of separation. I knew it was her, but it was so unlike her that I felt nothing. It was just a body, in pieces.

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. 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.”

“Sorry, Ms. Peirce. 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, or the metal and glass crunch around one wrong turn. It was final and could so easily have been avoided, if I’d simply told her “yes”.

“Yes, but the tox panel has returned and your sister was not under the influence of anything when she did it, which is a bit unusual, though not unheard of.”

I nodded. “When will I know?”

“Our investigation will continue until we’re certain. The 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 took a deep breath. “Thank you.”

His face scrunched up and he seemed to shuffle without moving. “Have you . . . made any arrangements?”

I looked at my feet. “No, but I will.”

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

“Uh,” and 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 smiled kindly. “She died across town from her apartment, so there’s really no reason for us to keep you out. It might even help us. I’ll sign out her keys. If I need to visit, may I?”

“Absolutely. I’ll cooperate in full.”

The rest was a blur for me. I don’t remember getting into the rental car. I don’t recall listening to the GPS lead me to what remained of my sister in its cold feminine voice. But I do remember 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, traces of a life deteriorating that someone should have cared about. How many of her neighbors looked at her, 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, and 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, her head, without her there to guide me. Closest to her when we were farthest away.

I’m sorry.

I looked around blankly. It was a tiny one bedroom. The living room had a kitchenette in the corner and was otherwise lined with bookshelves filled with leather bound volumes. There was a yoga exercise ball, a yellow happy face bean bag chair, and a cheep 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 sides. A tasteless beaded curtain 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 hated her and her miserable life. I hated that I felt obligated to her, that I had needed her to be alive. How could I have thought I had failed her? Why hadn’t she thought she was failing me? Why hadn’t that thought 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?

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 stiffen, 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 book shelves. 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 nothing but emptiness. I felt sick with it.

The smiley face 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, pressing 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 hand’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.”

I closed the book. It slipped from my hands. I closed my eyes and tried to block it out, but it was no use.

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

“No,” I had said, knowing what she meant and just wanting her to shut up about it. I was tired of her constant search for compliments 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 fantasy. I was tired of it. I had been sitting at my kitchen table, trying to soap the ring off my finger for once and for all.

“You know, Ev, I don’t. I don’t remember anything 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 sure I can imagine better.”

“It’s different for every person and it changes as we learn. When we were kids, it was a room full of candy with no adults, but now I wonder what it is.”

“A place where Brad Pitt picks up on me for hours on end tells me how beautiful I am,” I had joked, just to stifle her. I didn’t want to talk about meaning. Meaning was having your husband dump you after five years because he’d impregnated a stripper. Had she asked me about my pain and suffering? 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 would never understand.

“You don’t get it,” she whispered.

“No, I don’t. I don’t believe in that and you know it. Why do you always feel it necessary to remind me that the memories I have of them are flawed? Why do you always have to make me feel like they are perfect and that I’m not living up to their standards?”

She sighed and seemed to halt what she was 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, Lil,” she had said with surprising certainty, “but that’s just it. It’s a thought. It’s meant to keep us alive. You can find hope all the time without stuff like that, but I just can’t see it ever. You’re strong, the strongest person I’ve ever met.”

I had snorted. Sitting in my happy face, I thought back on it and was ashamed that I had not accepted her compliment and found something to say back.

“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.

“It all means something, you know. Even if you don’t want to accept what it means, it means something.”

“What are you talking about?”

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

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

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

“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.

“They don’t stand a chance,” she whispered, and then the line had buzzed in my ear.

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? 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 hunched in a shadow. It reminded me of the ghost story books she had collected as a child. Below the drawing was a smeared 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 see things and scribble? 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 that 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 of a low battery as I hit the button.

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

“It’s me.”
“Ah, ok. I was just checking in to make sure you made it ok. Are you busy?” which was just cop-speak for are you too fucked up to talk to my annoying ass right now, and the answer was yes, but as Eva had said, I was curious to a fault.

“Of course. What’s wrong?”

The phone beeped again. “Your sister made a complaint a few weeks 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. She didn’t go into detail, but she mentioned that he may have broken into her apartment.”

Great, I thought, just fucking great.

“Do you know anything about that?”
“No, I’m sorry.”

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

I pinched the bridge of my nose and grew even more frustrated by his tentative chivalry, “Paranoia?”

There was a more insistent beep, as if the phone had a personality and was begging for food. “Yes. Please make sure to lock all your doors and windows, just in case. I’ll let you know if anything pans out.”

“I appreciate it.”
“Call me if you need anything.”
“Ok. Bye.”

I set the phone in its recharging cradle on the TV tray. The clothes were there beside me, and it looked as if they were the contents of her entire closet. I picked up a blouse and brought it to my face. Chanel, like always, ever since my mother had bought her a bottle for Christmas and she’d fancied herself an adult. Tomorrow I would have to start going through it all, washing the clothes, picking which things I would keep and which I would give away.

I would not sell a single piece of it.

The phone rang again, and I nearly ripped the cord out of the wall and threw it out the window in recoil, but just stared at it instead. After a few rings, I heard her voice, but it was not the almost shy voice it had been. It sounded strained to my ears.

“This is Eva Pierce. I screen my calls. Leave a number.”

Then there was the beep.

I listened. There was a scraping sound, like a hand over the mouthpiece. Then there was the hiss of a sensitive mic picking up ambient noise.

I reached for the loudspeaker button, prepared to tell whoever it was to piss off, but another sound stopped me: footsteps and the lonely wail of a car alarm.

I jabbed the button.

“Detective Unger?” I called, thinking he had perhaps called me from his pocket by accident.

There was the rhythmic chafe of breathing and then, “Lilith.”

It sounded like the forced whisper of an emphysema sufferer. No one called me Lilith. I had strictly forbid it after the jokes my teenaged friends had made about Cheers. For some reason a tingle shot from my sacrum to my skull.

I picked the phone off of the cradle and pressed it to my ear. “Who is this?”

I heard more footsteps, what sounded like a conversation taking place somewhere in the background. If eardrums could expand like pupils, mine were fully dilated. Scratching and jiggling became as loud as canons. When the phone beeped again, explaining to me in not too many words that it was about to shut itself off, I nearly went deaf.

“Hello?”

“I’m not sure what you mean,” I heard and recognized the voice as Unger’s, though it was muffled.

“Hello,” I repeated, hoping he’d hear the sounds of my tiny call and get the hint, but he just kept on talking to himself.

Suddenly, the raspy voice returned at full volume. “Everything means something,” it said.

The phone trilled angrily and went dead in my hand.

I stared at it and put it back on the charger. When it came back to life, I hit the loudspeaker button and dialed the number from Detective Unger’s business card, but before it got to the third ring, a new, harassed beep told me that there was someone else ringing in. Huffing, I tapped the flash button thinking that if Unger answered while I dealt with the other caller, it would be fitting payback.

What came from the other line was the sound of a cell phone ringing into an echoing silence.

“I’m afraid the detective is busy,” said the raspy voice.

I don't have it all mapped out yet, but I like where it's going and I'm going to keep working on it.