Read Online Lying with the Dead by Michael Mewshaw - Free Book Online Page B

lap, and she breaks off chunks of the fish and feeds them to it.
    How long I talk, how long she lets the famished cat eat from her fingers, I can’t estimate. I only know I’ve finished a bottle of Greco di Tufo and Tamzin has reduced the fish to its skeleton. Just as I’m about to suggest ordering a second bottle, the cat stands up. It’s choking on a bone and convulsively gags into Tamzin’s lap every bite that it’s eaten. I rush around and fumble at her dress with a napkin. Suddenly we’re caught in a skit from an off-color cartoon, an underground clip of Charlie Chaplin in his cups. My hands are all over her. And she doesn’t object. In the elevator, I keep up this pantomime of pawing and cleaning, and murmur an apology.
    “For what?” Tamzin asks.
    “Your dress is ruined. The evening’s a shambles.”
    “It’ll wash off.”
    We’re barely into her room, the door half-shut behind us, when she stoops at the waist, seizes the hem of the dress and strips it off as she straightens up. Easy as … easy as skinning a cat. She draws a bath and plops the dress, not herself, into the warm water. Then it’s off with the rest of her clothes. Her skin is so pale and flawless, I’m afraid it’ll smear to the touch.
    “Thank God for that cat,” Tamzin says, stepping into my arms. “I thought you’d never quit talking.”

Candy
    While Mom’s upstairs, I shuffle through the photographs. It’s a melancholy business, this revisiting the dead and their out-of-date clothes and old cars and furniture that ended up in a Goodwill dumpster. I’m glad all that’s over and done with, and I don’t have to live through it again. It’s fading in the rearview mirror, like a crash you zoom past on the interstate.
    But a clutched-up feeling stays in my throat. When Mom comes back, I’m afraid she’ll pick up where she left off and plow on toward the ending where we’ve been too many times before. She’s like one of those old women with rosary beads reciting the same Sorrowful Mystery over and over. I’ve heard it so often, I could trade places with her and tell the story myself.
    Maury killed Dad on my fifteenth birthday. I was out of the house, treating myself to a matinee. I’ll never forget the movie, Splendor in the Grass , which was about whether Natalie Wood should have sex with Warren Beatty or go insane. Her dilemma hit me hard. Although I didn’t have a boyfriend and had never been on a date, I was sick with worry that if things didn’t work out for a beauty like Natalie, what hope did I have?
    On the walk home, I was chewing over the film’s sad ending—Warren married to a fat Italian, Natalie mulching the past into poetry—when I noticed that our house was decorated with yellow ribbons. My first foolish thought, I’m ashamed to admit, was that Mom had thrown me a surprise party. But then I saw neighbors milling around on the sidewalk, and there were squad cars and an ambulance with bubbling roof lights.
    “Here’s his daughter,” someone shouted. “It’s his sister,” another one said. At the crime scene tape, I cried out, “What happened?” And people hollered, “She lives here. Let her through.”
    “I’ve got my orders,” a cop said.
    “Where’s my mother?”
    A detective in a brown suit and snap-brim hat told the cop he’d take charge. He lifted the tape and motioned for me to duck under it.
    “What’s wrong?” I asked, although I was afraid I knew. I figured Mom and Dad had been fighting again. Neighbors were always complaining about their shouting and shoving matches.
    “Your father …” The detective hesitated, searching my eyes. “… he’s in bad shape.”
    “Where is he? In the ambulance?”
    “Still in the house.”
    “And my mother?”
    “She’s there, too, answering questions. Do you feel up to talking to us, hon?”
    “I want to see my mother.”
    “In a minute. After we talk.”
    A few reporters rolled in. I didn’t understand that. A flashbulb popped, the