Second Skin

by Michael Wiley

  We drove to the Dames Point Bridge – a huge white span with two central concrete towers supported by strands of heavy white cable. It looked like a giant fallen white angel. We crossed the river to Heckscher Drive and drove east past the Blount Island shipping terminal, where side-by-side tower cranes lifted matching white boxes from a container ship. We crossed an inlet to Little Clapboard Creek and drove on to Little Marsh Island.

  On one side, single-story stucco houses with neat lawns, small flower gardens, and well-mulched palm trees fronted the street. On the other side, the land fell hard to what existed before the developers arrived and what would exist again if the neighborhood canceled its lawn services, gardeners, and fertilizer trucks. It was ragged and wet, with oaks, palmettos, wild grape vines, marsh grasses, and a thousand other kinds of scrub plants pulling at each other, tangling, struggling at the roots for the fresh water that pooled in the rotting detritus before evaporating under the sun or leaching into the brackish marsh and creeks. Every hundred yards or so, a path cut through the border scrub into the shadows and clearings. We passed four paths before I saw a Watson Realty sign advertising a fifteen-acre property suitable for a hunting camp, residential development, or light industrial use. The police report had said that Peter Lisman had come to Little Marsh Island to look at a fifteen-acre plot.

  I pulled on to the grassy shoulder, parked, and stepped into the brush, Percy beside me. The ground was soft and sandy, marked with the footprints of the cops, detectives, and technicians who’d worked Sheneel Greene’s death. Insects buzzed in the branches, and marsh birds sang in the distance. As I walked from the road, the air smelled of salt water and rotting vegetation, then of animal death, as if the marsh land was slowly consuming the carcass of a bird or raccoon. Percy tugged at the leash, and I yanked him to my side. ‘Respect,’ I said, though I was unsure what I meant.

  The path bent to the left and opened to a clearing that the police had ringed with crime-scene tape. Inside the tape, next to two long logs that the neighborhood kids who partied in the clearing had dragged together to sit on, a dark-skinned man kneeled on the ground and stared at the sky. His short gray hair was matted to his head. He wore blue pants, a sun-bleached red T-shirt, and sandals. His face tilted up toward the treetops and he swayed slowly side to side. If he was praying, he was doing so without speaking.

  I watched him for a full minute, then said, ‘Hey,’ to let him know I was there.

  For several seconds, he remained as he had been. Then he stood and wiped the dirt from his knees and hands. He stared at me, defiance shining in his eyes as if I’d accused him of something.

  I tried again. ‘Hey.’

  But he walked across the clearing, ducked under the crime-scene tape, and disappeared through a stand of palmettos and low bushes.

  I ducked under the tape and went to the spot where he had been kneeling. He’d used a piece of broken stick to scratch a small drawing into the sandy soil. It was an almost complete circle with an open-mouthed snake’s head at one end – a snake eating its own tail. ‘Huh,’ I said, and Percy stuck his nose into the drawing, knocking the sand into its shallow grooves. I yanked him away and again said, ‘Respect.’

  Percy nosed back to the drawing, so I unclipped his leash and shooed him away. As he ran off to explore, I looked around the rest of the clearing. The police had trampled the grass and weeds, making the place look as if someone had made a long encampment, but a hollow in the ground showed where Sheneel Greene had lain as she died. I crouched by it and smelled the air. The odor of animal death was fainter than on the path, and that meant the evidence technicians had bagged the sand under Sheneel Greene’s body. I sat in the hollow. The earth felt warm under me, and I understood why Sheneel Greene might choose this place to die. The scrub trees and bushes blocked the road. The sun beat down. The salt air stood still, the breeze blocked by the vegetation. Other than a fly that landed on my arm and then flew off, nothing disturbed the silence.

  The hollow was about five feet from the two logs and the old man’s drawing. Sheneel Greene might have sat on one of the logs before killing herself. I wondered whether she had kneeled to pray or just to sway slowly under the hard blue sky. Eventually, she would have moved from the logs and lain on the ground.

  I stretched my legs into the indentations in the hollow and lowered my shoulders to the dirt. I rolled toward my shoulder the way Sheneel Greene must have lain. I closed my eyes.

  Stop treating the world like a piñata, Daniel had said.

  Easy enough. Sheneel Greene had stopped treating the world like a piñata.

  My heart raced. I breathed in deep and breathed out, trying to slow it.

  Then Percy charged through the brush into the clearing.

  He brought back a prize: a salt-white object the length of a rolled-up newspaper and, with it, the terrible stench of death.

  He dropped it beside me. It was a girl’s hand and arm, extending almost to the elbow. Its skin was as pale as the skin on Sheneel Greene’s dead face in the photos that Daniel kept in his case file, and the fingers were long and thin. An animal must have dragged it into the brush, and now Percy had brought it back. Its sickly whiteness gleamed in the sun. On the ship, I’d seen arms and legs torn from bodies and had tried to match them with the ID tags that I took from the soldiers’ boots before bagging them for transport home. Most of them were men’s limbs and were grimed with red Afghan dust and clay, not startlingly white and female like this. I stared at it. On the soft skin on the inside of the wrist, there was a tattoo of a snake circling to bite its own tail. The tattoo covered less than an inch, and the skin through the middle of it looked split as if by a razor blade, as if Sheneel Greene had tried to dig the tattoo out of her body or had made a partial attempt to slit her wrists. It matched the drawing that the old man had made in the soil.

  Worse, the bone and flesh toward the elbow looked neatly cut. No roadside bomb could take off an arm so cleanly, and no wild animal had teeth so sharp or jaws so strong. Someone had cut off Sheneel Greene’s arm with a blade.

  SIX

  Stephen Phelps

  Shades of white stationery paper in the Phelps Paper catalog:

  Alabaster, Bone, Calcite, Chalk, Eggshell, Pearl, Snow White

  Whites of the eyes. Ghost white. Wedding dress. Mirror, mirror.

  At the mills, we bleached wood pulp until the skin tones of sap and bark turned as fair as Snow White, the trade name we used for the finest paper we produced: nothing on the market whiter than Phelps Snow White. But in Alabama once, I saw a freshly split pine with wood even whiter – as white as Sheneel. If we had made paper from it, I would have named it after her. The tract manager took me into a shed where he’d laid out an eight-foot length, sliced down the middle – side-by-side pieces like twin corpses at a viewing. He spat on his hand and rubbed the raw wood. It shined like white ice. I knew too well that diseases and genetic abnormalities could do that to people: albinism, Griscelli syndrome, leukoderma. But a tree?

  ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  He rested his hand on one of the pieces as if he’d made it himself. ‘Slash pine.’

  Slash pine is yellow wood. ‘Can’t be.’

  ‘I swear. It was in a slash grove. But it’s the only one like this. If you could isolate it and grow more, you could clean-process it or sell it premium for furniture.’

  ‘What made it like this?’

  He shrugged.

  ‘Could be disease,’ I said.

  ‘Could be.’

  ‘Insects?’

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘Genetic?’

  ‘Maybe.’ He rubbed his palm on the wet spot. ‘Money in it if you figure it out.’

  It was beautiful but also monstrous – more monstrous in its discoloration than the gnarled, misshapen trees that sometimes grew among the straight pines. Monstrous because it was too perfect, too clean. ‘Pulp it with the others,’ I said.

  ‘You don’t want to test it?’

 
‘Pulp it.’

  Sheneel’s mother, Laura, shared only Sheneel’s eyes. Her skin was darker than my own. Did I love her? Could I have loved her?

  When she took me in the kitchen – the first to take me – I thought I could love her. She was angry afterward, like the rest of them. Not my fault.

  Now Sheneel was dead, her blood soaking into the sand on Little Marsh Island, her white bones yellowing in the sun, her beautiful and monstrous white skin of my skin as shredded as a torn sheet of Phelps Snow White. When she was sixteen, I touched the soft fatty skin on the inside of her thigh – tender as a baby’s belly. I had always felt compelled to touch strangers’ wounds and had gripped my own wrists or grabbed the wood of a chair to keep my fingers off. No wonder that I needed to touch a beautiful monster.

  And now she was sleeping. Dead. For a hundred hundred years. Until whose kiss? Not mine.

  Not my fault.

  Some people are born like that.

  SEVEN

  Lillian

  After teaching my first class, I went to my office, closed the door, and fought an impulse to climb under my desk. What remains of a woman who swallows herself? If she swallows herself, can the new self swallow herself again? How many self-consumings can occur before nothing remains – not a shoe, not a nipple, not a rib bone?

  The cause and effect made no sense. The equal and opposite – no sense. Johnny hadn’t caused Sheneel’s death, and yet I felt that he had – that, in refusing to concern himself with her, he’d torn a hole in the tissue that kept her in this world, and now she had fallen through it. There was no logic in that. I’d told Johnny about Sheneel after she’d died. If the newspaper was right, all that was left of her when I told him were ‘partially decomposed remains.’ Before last night, she was my secret. I’d held the secret too long. My secret, my fault. Should I blame Johnny for failing to act on a secret that I held to myself? No. But still …

  I left the window shade down and the light off. No student conferences today. Office hours canceled. I typed Sheneel’s name into Google. The first link led to Sheneel’s Facebook page. In her status postings, all more than a month old, she quoted Emily Dickinson, which upset me and made me glad at once. Her photos showed her in a red cocktail dress that, with her pale legs, made her look younger than nineteen. Other photos showed her at a party with friends, including the Asian boy from class – Samuel Huang.

  At the next link, for a site called Spring.me, a boy named Rick told Sheneel she was hot and asked her to meet him, before admitting that he lived in Cleveland. Her profile picture showed her in the red Ngafa T-shirt and with wet hair as if she’d just come in from the rain or stepped out of a shower.

  A third link led to Florida Mugshots, a site summarizing Florida municipal arrests. The page said that at three a.m. last June seventh, the Fernandina Beach Police Department had charged Sheneel with battery using a ‘personal weapon.’ The page listed her gender as female, her race as white, her hair as blond, her eyes as gray, her age as nineteen, her weight as 105 pounds, and her height as five feet four inches. It said she had bonded out of jail for $10,000.

  What did Sheneel do? What was a ‘personal weapon’?

  My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun. Sheneel’s eyes had lit up when she’d heard those words. I’d felt that we were dancing. But I wondered now if she really was dancing alone, moved by the private music in a memory of desire and violence.

  My cell phone rang and pulled me out of myself. Caller ID said it was Johnny. I silenced the ringer. I would talk with him later. Now, I would sit in the quiet of my office, dark except for the light of the computer monitor.

  On Florida Mugshots, a gray box appeared in the spot where the site creators would have put a photo of Sheneel if they’d had one, and in the middle of the gray box, a darker gray silhouette of a generic human face, and in the middle of the silhouette, where facial features belonged, a large white question mark.

  I clicked on the question mark and the silhouette appeared enlarged on the screen. If you don’t want to see it, don’t look. When, as a child, I first heard those words, a coyote had destroyed the neighbor’s cat. It had dragged the carcass across our backyard. Daniel and I had walked barefoot across the wet grass, and Daniel had picked up a piece of the cat’s tail. Even as a boy, he could do that with casual ease, as another child might pick up a broken tree branch. I looked then but shouldn’t have. I should have closed my eyes and tucked inside myself.

  Under the website silhouette, a disclaimer said, ‘The information presented here has been collected from County Sheriff websites. Contact the County Clerk or State Attorney’s Office for more information.’ But I could do better than that. I dialed Daniel’s number at the Sheriff’s Office.

  Before he could answer, someone knocked on my door. I hung up, closed the browser, and flipped on the light. Samuel Huang stood in the hall – a thin, clear-faced boy, wearing an untucked button-down shirt, khaki shorts, and flip-flops. His eyes looked uncertain.

  ‘Come in,’ I said.

  He sat in the chair facing mine, his backpack on the floor between his ankles. He glanced at the books on the shelves as if they would tell him what to say.

  I knew why he had come. ‘Sheneel?’

  His face screwed a little and he looked at the floor.

  I said, ‘It hurts.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said.

  I thought, After great pain, a formal feeling comes – Dickinson, whose words would do him no good right now. ‘You were her friend.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Do you know why she did it?’

  His eyes turned again to the bookshelves. ‘Her family was messed up – her dad – she had problems. She tried to kill herself two years ago. Her brother saved her.’

  ‘Were you her boyfriend?’

  He smiled at that. ‘No.’

  I had spoken to make sound so we wouldn’t have to listen to the emptiness, but he turned his eyes from the shelves and looked at me with a sudden ferocity that made me wonder why, until that moment, he had failed to meet my gaze.

  He said, ‘You’ve got a lot of books.’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Why?’

  A strange question. I said, ‘They’ve made me what I am.’

  He looked as if I’d confirmed some new thought of his. ‘That’s sad.’

  ‘Why?’

  He offered no answer.

  I said, ‘I’ll make an announcement about Sheneel in class. If you would like, you can say a few words.’

  An hour later, I stood in front of Samuel Huang and the rest of the class and said, ‘I mourned, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring. Walt Whitman wrote those words after Abraham Lincoln died. Whitman wrote of grief but also of beauty. In the same poem, he spoke to death, saying, I cover you over with roses and early lilies, as if he were talking to a lover who was full of sexual energy.’ The eyes of the students looked uncomprehending, so I said, ‘This morning, we learned of the death of one of your classmates.’ I told them what the newspaper had reported and said that therapists at Student Counseling would talk with anyone who made an appointment. I dismissed class after twenty minutes.

  When I returned to my office, Tom Corfield was standing outside my door. Tom taught American history, but the history that seemed to interest him most was the short one between us almost ten years ago when Johnny went on his first deployment. It was a good history: those nights relieved a fear unlike any I’d known before or again during Johnny’s absences.

  Now, he looked worried. ‘Got a minute?’ he asked.

  ‘Not really.’

  He followed me into my office.

  He talked about a lecture series he wanted to start. Interdisciplinary. The Confederate South. Nathan Bedford Forrest. Daughters of the Confederacy …

  My mind slipped and I imagined the remains of Sheneel Greene in a clearing by a clay pit. How much of her remained when she was found? How much of her had there ever been? The newspaper story said that, when last se
en, she was riding a bicycle. I imagined her riding on an empty asphalt road, her white hair streaming behind her. I thought about how the body works and does not work.

  Tom stopped mid-sentence and looked at me as if he saw something wrong. Maybe he hadn’t heard about Sheneel Greene’s death. More likely, he’d heard but saw no connection to me.

  I tried a smile. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I haven’t been listening to you.’ I meant the words to sting.

  He looked through the doorway into the hall, but, instead of leaving, he swung the door shut. He said, ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Nothing. Stuff I need to work through.’

  ‘With Johnny?’ He’d met Johnny at the end of the first deployment and had seen him once or twice when I’d brought him to faculty parties.

  I said, ‘I need time alone.’

  He shook his head sympathetically. ‘You know I’m here.’

  ‘I know.’

  He bit his bottom lip.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  As he reached for my hand, someone knocked on the door.

  ‘Get that?’ I said.

  He opened the door a crack.

  Johnny stood in the hall. He was sweaty, his hands dirty, his eyes wild and dangerous.

  ‘Ahh,’ Tom said. ‘I was – we were talking about a series. Lectures …’

  Johnny fixed his eyes on mine but he spoke to Tom. ‘Leave.’

  ‘Right. Of course.’ Then, to me, ‘We’ll talk later.’

  Johnny came in, closed the door, and dropped on to the chair. His skin was wet and he looked cold. ‘Hey,’ he said.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  He said, ‘Sheneel Greene didn’t kill herself.’

  ‘What—’

  ‘She didn’t kill herself.’

  Hope flooded my thoughts but only for a moment. ‘She’s dead. The newspaper says—’

  ‘Someone killed her. She didn’t kill herself.’

  ‘That’s—’

  ‘I went out to where they found her – what was left of her. They didn’t find everything. I’ve got her arm.’