A Secondhand Life

by Pamela Crane

  Mom gave an embittered haha intended to wound. Oh really? A loving sister wouldn’t have done what you did, Ari. Then she turned to Dad for support in sledgehammering my will. Burt, do something! She shouldn’t be here. Make her leave, Mom’s plea, to which Dad contemplatively stroked his mustache, then shook his head at me in apology. I muttered cuss words at their backs as he firmly guided Mom away by her shoulders, whispering consoling words in her ear.

  I wasn’t ready for round two and stalked away in the opposite direction.

  I had just hit my twenties at the time, and I hadn’t seen them since.

  Good riddance to bad rubbish. We weren’t a family anymore, just surly acquaintances bound together by tragedy.

  Pushing the sour memory aside, I gently placed a thick cluster of summer-sun-yellow dandelions on Carli’s grave. As kids, the eye-catching weeds had grown in abundance in our yard and became our favorite flower, dotting our hair, peeking from our pockets, and enchanting our bedroom décor. Grownups considered it the peskiest of weeds, the bane of the suburbanite’s perfect lawn, but we adored them unconditionally. I knew that wherever Carli was watching me from right now, she laughed at the irony. Always laughing … up until her very last breath.

  It was a moment I would never—could never—forget.

  While the before and after evaporated into a foggy haze, a memory slipping away like sand through my fingers, our final moments together burned like a brand.

  Blood pooling in the grass, trickling between the blades like a tiny red snake in flight. Carli sprawled out, spread eagle, unblinkingly staring up at me, a subtle smile lingering on her lips. Now you can have your own room, Sissy. A sardonic laugh later she was gone. Eyes an empty pond of algae-green, glassy and still. Sunlight kissing her pale face goodbye as her life drained into earth’s carpet beneath. And me, ever watching from above, frozen stiff with shock as she left me—her killer.

  It was that horrific moment that would turn me against myself. Little by little my self-loathing stripped me down to nothing. No one was laughing now. No one would ever laugh again in my little world.

  Staring blindly at Carli’s gravestone never got any easier over the years. As my eyes glazed over with salty tears, I could feel my heart quickening as the angst—not that third cup of coffee—fermented in my gut. Cheeks and neck flushing, palms sweating. The air swirled around me, threatening to hurl me onto the ground face-first.

  I recognized the face of this monster inside me clawing to get out. Anxiety—a constant companion that, over the years, had made my life a living hell.

  Breathe, I reminded myself. Slow breaths. In. Out. In. Out. I’d eventually get through this one, but I’d never shed this prickly skin altogether. It was Death’s brand on me. Killing had a way of scarring you permanently. Old wounds heal slowly, but the most scab-resistant are the ones we inflict on ourselves and pick at until the blood flows freely.

  Chapter 3

  Josef

  April 7, 2016

  One day earlier

  A picture-snap moment back to childhood flung Josef Alvarez into the nether regions of his subconscious where the serrated blade of the cheap steak knife no longer ripped apart his vulnerable flesh. While the pulsing jab to his abdomen leaked lifeblood, his eyes fluttered closed … allowing ancient history to whisk him away.

  A hazy summer afternoon. A seesaw of gigglers creaking up and down. A screaming knot of daredevils trying to stay aboard the merry-go-round before centrifugal force flung them off like rag dolls. Here Josef was, just a kid on his neighborhood playground, jostling the girl ahead of him to be first on the slide. It was a day of reclaimed innocence.

  Dust shrouded Josef as he clambered up the rungs and whizzed down with a wheeee, the breeze rippling his black hair, the hot metal scorching the naked thighs in his cut-off jean shorts.

  A momentary peace … before the torment of impending death.

  As his scruffy Chuck Taylor sneakers slammed against the packed dirt at the foot of the slide, Josef was jarred back to reality, the reality where his assailant was prepping for the kill. Bleeding away his awareness, Josef backed up against the sofa behind him for support. His attacker stood before him, eyes squinting with hot anger, kitchen steak knife in hand, lunging at him, but Josef held up his hands, pushing the knife aside before it rounded back at him.

  But his drugged state turned his world into a dizzying amusement park ride, twisting the double images into a helter-skelter reality his mind and body couldn’t track. A hand gripped his wrist, yet his resolve to fight surrendered. A knife slid through the air, caught his arm, then chewed its way down the skin toward his hand before releasing him. The jagged slice was an act of vengeance for Josef’s sins—and there were many—a final accounting, and Josef rang up short.

  With his unscathed hand Josef gripped his stomach, attempting to herd the gore back inside him but instead only sopping his shirt with the blood. Wooziness swept over him again, consciousness wobbling unsteadily, until a tidal wave of nausea fetched the bile to his throat. His legs quivered like two sticks of string cheese, his palm gripped the arm of the sofa, but slipped—a buttery sensation that sent him crumbling into the cushion. The fall gave him a temporary distance from his killer, a moment to whimper for mercy.

  “Please, please …” he wept. “Please don’t kill me. I’ll do anything. Please.”

  His heart beat a voodoo drum tattoo, and his head was filled with a strange whooshing sound, like when he’d held a conch shell to his ear as a kid. Blood seeping—his—drowning out his words. But his attacker heard. Josef could see it in the unclenching jaw, the sympathetic stare, the lax arm still holding the knife.

  “Forgive me, please. Let me live. Let me make it up to you.”

  But it was too late for I’m sorry. Too much blood. Darkness was already settling in.

  His tangle of limbs drooped lazily from the cream pleather sofa that over the years had flaked plastic peelings all over the ragged beige carpet. A lake of metallic red pooled in the gauzy fabric, staining it with his essence.

  Heavy eyelids drooped up and down, Josef fighting the urge for sleep. Feeling an obscure cool emptiness around him, he pried his eyes open, searching the living room. No one. He was alone … for now. Possibly forever. His vision lurched in and out of focus. An outdated plasma TV sat nobly on a card table he had borrowed from a cousin several Super Bowl parties ago but never returned. A mismatched La-Z-Boy sat permanently open next to him, the wreckage of a drunken-stupor temper and misguided kick. Other than the sepia-striped wallpaper, the two-bedroom house was a shithole even worse than the ones in the barrio. He fled Mexico hoping for a second chance here in Dunn, North Carolina—a colorless Podunk of pig farmers and tobacco cultivators. But the past that he ran from had eventually caught up to him. And here he was, playing tug-o-war with death, with no apology sufficient to turn back time.

  Wondering where his visitor was, he listened. Past the sound of his ragged wheezing. Past the adrenalin forcing him to cling stubbornly to life. Water rushing. The bathtub?

  Light footsteps approached. His last sight, through the narrowing slits of his eyes, was two near-drained el caballito shot glasses of Jose Cuervo Clasico Silver tequila, neat. The drink of champions. And then it made sense—the why. He should have seen it coming.

  As his slumped body exhaled its last, panicked thoughts seized him. What will happen to my corpse? Will anyone care that I’m gone? Can I reach that last sip of tequila? I hope they bury me in my good suit … Odd, random thoughts for a dying man. And then somewhere in the void between living and dead he felt it …

  Fingers probing.

  A tender pat on his cheek, then a quick slap. Almost a love tap, but it stung.

  A killer’s final good-bye. A nonverbal I’m sorry for taking your life this way, but it had to be done.

  Is this forgiveness? he wondered. For Josef Alvarez, absolution didn’t come cheap.

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