Among the Dead and Dreaming. Samuel Ligon

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      Cynthia

      Wanting her became a kind of sickness, as if I’d been infected with longing for this nameless, faceless entity who would grow in me and make herself known to me and, after she came out of me, keep growing into who she would become. I guarded against my selfishness, this wanting I felt to bring her to life, so deep in me it overwhelmed my fear of the cliché I seemed to be embracing, biological clock or whatever it was. None of that mattered. Months before I was pregnant, she existed in me, of me and separate from me too, teaching me how to transcend the enormous selfishness of this world, and then I wasn’t even aware of selfishness or my want, because I’d already transcended that and was living only for her. I was far past wondering if she’d fill some hole in my life. She’d already filled it, or if there wasn’t a hole, she’d already made my life so much larger—finally giving me this profound reason to live. I’d known love as a child and a sister, a lover and a friend. But this was different, deeper, so deep I could hardly believe Mark couldn’t feel her everywhere around us. She was there, somewhere, I don’t know how many months before I was pregnant, waiting for me, her demands on my attention the beginning of this enormous gift. All I wanted to do was find her.

      Nikki

      The minute Alina sees me at LaGuardia she bursts into tears. I take her in my arms and hold her, trying to ignore the men in business suits checking us out as she cries into my shoulder. At thirteen, Alina could pass for seventeen and we could be sisters, but that thought reminds me of my mother’s awful vanity and what the first mastectomy did to her, how it made her hate herself, as though her body—her beauty—was all she’d ever had. For the first time in days, I wonder when I’ll get the cancer that killed her, when Alina will, and then I forget all that and the men gliding by and everything else as I breathe her in, rubbing my hands over her head, through her hair, over the soft skin at the base of her neck, my beautiful, beautiful baby.

      Mark

      Cynthia’s parents were at the funeral home when I arrived, waiting in a room with velvety gold wallpaper and overstuffed chairs. I wasn’t prepared for how much they’d aged in the hours since I’d left the hospital. They looked like they’d been awake for weeks, starving. “We’re glad you’re here,” Denys said. “We know you want to be alone with her.” I wasn’t sure I wanted to be alone with her, but a man with a silver pompadour escorted me to a reception room where Cynthia’s casket sat on a stand surrounded by blown up photographs—Cynthia eating birthday cake, Cynthia on a horse, Cynthia and me on her parents’ patio. Seeing her up there everywhere made her seem both closer and further away, all those images evoking her, but also emphasizing her absence.

      I wondered if Pompadour had seen her naked, if he’d handled her body. Of course he had. So what? From the back of the room I looked at her casket, only the top section of which was open. I walked toward her, thinking I wouldn’t recognize her, but I did, and she looked . . . not good, but not as bad as I’d expected, either. Her face seemed deflated and inflated, as though bones had broken before everything collapsed and swelled, shades of purple and yellow rising through her makeup. I petted her hair. Pompadour had probably washed it for her. I didn’t want to keep studying her for signs of damage.

      I remembered going to the Cape spring break freshman year with a group of friends we later used as weapons—my roommate Phil, a girl named Sarah, Ben and Julie. It was Sarah’s parents’ summer place, and Cynthia and I were given the master bedroom. Not everyone at Brown came from money, but everyone I knew did. They weren’t snotty, though, not even Cynthia, whose father’s annual bonuses from Goldman Sachs were more than my father would earn in his life. Ben and Julie hooked up that trip. Phil and Sarah got married later. After five months together, Cynthia and I still could not stop touching each other. The six of us stayed up late, talking and drinking, and then Cynthia and I walked the beach for hours. We didn’t need to tell each other anything then. We knew everything we needed to know and what everyone else knew, the reason we were given the master bedroom. And it seemed that now that we’d arrived at this place of fullness or perfection—love or whatever it was—we would always inhabit it, would never change or age or grow dull to each other. It was just that we were young and in love for the first time. And time itself was different then. So much more was always happening.

      Standing over her body, I could hardly put the chronology together, could hardly believe we’d start our cycle of cheating and clinging only five or six months after that morning on the beach. But that was long before any hint of erosion. When we finally returned to the sleeping house, we made a big breakfast for everyone, but no one woke, even with all our banging around the kitchen. I built up the fire and we ate alone, perfectly happy, then fell into bed, perfectly happy, and woke, perfectly happy. We stayed perfectly happy, too, for a while, and even rediscovered our happiness after we lost it. Then it got away from us again, and now we’d never get it back. I looked at the bruised and lacerated skin of her face. It seemed impossible that she wasn’t waiting for me back at her apartment or somewhere else. Anywhere else.

      “You know I found those pants,” I finally whispered. “That doesn’t necessarily mean anything, I know.” I leaned my forehead against her casket. “I often leave my pants in women’s apartments.”

      I lifted my head and touched her broken nose, her lips. They were unyielding. There seemed to be some frost on them, some freezer burn. I kept petting her and feeling how far away she was, feeling as alone as I’d ever felt.

      I kissed her forehead and walked back to the room with gold wallpaper, where Diana stood and pulled me into another embrace. “I want to spend a minute with her,” she said, “before we go to the luncheon.”

      I’d forgotten about the luncheon, forgotten that people would be there—friends, family, I didn’t know who. Cynthia wouldn’t be there, of course. She’d be here, surrounded by pictures of herself. I’d be at a luncheon, with everyone who’d lost her, with everyone but her.

      8

      Burke

      I didn’t quit Denny’s right away, even though our mother left me almost twenty grand. I took some time off when she died, a few days here, a few days there, and all I could think about was Nikki. I knew she was probably dead, but if she wasn’t, she was sure to know what happened to Cash. I was spending so much time with her pictures, it seemed like I already half knew her anyway, and if she was still alive, I thought she might be worth getting to know a whole lot better. I wanted to devote myself full time to finding her, but Billy shook his head when I told him I needed a leave. “Can’t get by without you now, Burke,” he said. “Not with Marlene on maternity and Sully back in the can.”

      Billy was a good man, had hired me not three weeks out of Huntsville as a dishwasher, and then promoted me to line cook. I could feel the heat build in his office back behind the walk-in. I never would’ve laid a hand on him in anger. I swallowed hard and walked away. That’s what ate at me the next couple days—how I was trapped by the man’s goodness. Most ex cons don’t get one decent shot, and here I was considering walking from mine. It started to eat at me how desperate I was to hold onto my shitty job, half convincing myself I was lucky to be working at that fucking Denny’s while my brother’s killers roamed free. And with Connie gone, with Cash gone, with our mother gone, what did I have to be so good for?

      I fell off the wagon, studying Nikki’s pictures with a bottle out in the Goat, feeling her alive in the night, but knowing in the morning they killed her, too. I was tired of answering to Billy and my probation officer. No one had done a damn thing about my brother’s murder. I drove to Austin again, but there was nothing left to discover. I didn’t know where else to search, until I learned about the internet from a waitress at work. I tracked Nikki to a newspaper in New York, the guiding hand of fate delivering her СКАЧАТЬ