Don't Kiss Me: Stories(10)

The detective held his breath driving past the cemetery, pushing the panties into his mouth just short of gagging.

THE WIFE:

I was born with an extra spine in a lump on my shoulder. My parents had it removed but I can still feel it. Like a ghost limb. Like a ghost twin. She grew up and lived and she weighs me down and we share everything. My parents called her Imaginary Friend. Sometimes it’s just too hard to relate to the real thing. None of this is true, of course. It’s just the easiest way to explain.

Of course none of this is true. I’ll try another way. There was a girl that died mysteriously down the street when I was growing up. After her funeral I saw her white face in her bedroom window, watching me, mouthing, Wait for me, wait for me, and I waited and I’m still waiting. Every once in a while I hear her name being called, but there’s never an answer.

No. No. No. No.

Here: her room was across the hall. At night I stood outside her door and listened for her breathing but I couldn’t hear anything over the roar of silence. I watched her chest not move. She was dead and then the morning would come and she was alive. There was no way she could die. There was no way she could be revived. We wrote notes to each other and slid them under our doors. Mine said, I wish I was alone. Hers said, I miss you.

THE SISTER:

Oh, and the way he’d kiss me. Like I was you. Like I was the you he always dreamed I was. If you are discourteous with a rose its petals will bruise. That’s how he kissed me, so gorgeously discourteously. I could feel my heart beating in my lips. I could feel the throb of blood.

THE DETECTIVE:

The detective stopped at a do-it-yourself car wash. Got out and leaned against the car, did a few toots of Afrin. The lights hummed and a hot moist wind came in and made his neck sweat. He’d punched in three hours and forty-seven minutes ago. He had four hours and thirteen minutes to go. He had to be looking for something.

Pretty soon he heard the squeaking, like a mouse caught in a trap. The lights blinded him and all he saw was a vivid darkness. He listened to her getting closer.

Then she was there, squinting up at him from the edge between light and dark. A child’s head, the cherubic face, the purple empty gums, the wisps of hair. The body of a trucker, its puffed, sexless chest, its clumpy limbs. The wheelchair and the mangled hands forcing its wheels along. The drool bright on her chin. The smell of urine and cinnamon chewing gum. The MacGuffin.

She motioned to the Afrin and he gave it to her. He was glad for the other one he had in the glove compartment.

Pretty soon he couldn’t smell the urine anymore. He got used to it. She wheeled away and he figured that meant follow. He figured he had to start somewhere.

A JOKE, PUNCH LINE FORTHCOMING:

Once there was a man who wanted to build his wife the house of her dreams. He began working for a contractor, building other people’s houses, and each day he’d steal a brick, hiding it under his shirt or in his lunch pail and bringing it home. On his final day the contractor caught him. Please, the man said. This is the last brick I need to complete my house. I’ll do anything for that brick. Well, the contractor said, I’m going to throw it up as high as it’ll go, and if you can catch that brick it’s yours and I won’t come after you for the others. The man agreed that it was a fair proposition. The contractor took a few steps back, breathed deeply, and flung the brick high. The sun flashed behind it. The man’s heart pounded desperately.

THE DETECTIVE:

The detective began to feel the effects of the whiskey and Afrin. He put a few gobs of Vicks under his nostrils and talked to himself in the rearview. A man is dead, we can all agree on that. Count to ten. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Oh hell. Ten. Remember that God and murder are in the details. He noticed that the area around his mouth was a bit pink from the bloody underwear. He got stern. You’re makin me sick. Stop talkin to yourself and get out there and do it. The Vicks made his eyes water.

The MacGuffin squeaked along in front of him. The tears in his eyes and the headlights smeared everything and he lost her. He circled back to the office so he could start again, retrace his steps.

THE WIFE:

In my opinion she couldn’t tell she existed. That’s why she does it (did it) to us.

He had a tattoo of a heart over his heart because he said that’s how he knew where he ended and we began.

I still have those notes. I wonder if she kept mine. Oh God, all that blood? Is he a ghost now? Is he a white face in a window? Were we married?

THE SISTER:

We love(d) you more than all the bricks in Brooklyn.

THE DETECTIVE:

If this is tedious to you, Tin Ears, there’s a desk job with your name on it.

Murder’s tedious.

That’s just a label. We got a ransom letter. Prints all over it. Pubic hair taped in a circular clump—looks like it might be the point of the exclamation point.

Cripes. What’s it say. (come on come on)

Search me. I don’t read shouting. Bad for the eyes. Jameson, read it to me.

And.

It says if you want the body you’ll have to kill for it.

That doesn’t make any sense.

It makes perfect sense, Tin Ears. Perfect sense.

What’s it askin.

It’s asking you to produce the body. No body no death.

THE SISTER:

Dearest love, let me count the ways. Dismemberment, garroted, poisoned, drowned, named. I read that as soon as a species is named it begins its travels up the endangered list. Discovery meaning death.