Free Lying with the Dead by Michael Mewshaw Page A

sink, and bloodstains swam off the wool like stingers from a sea nettle. The sight of it made me sick to my stomach. But even sticking a finger down my throat, I couldn’t bring anything up.
    I sat beside the window in my bedroom, hidden by a curtain. The crowd on the sidewalk grew bigger, and reporters interviewed neighbors and snapped pictures of the house. Everybody pressed against the yellow crime scene tape and gawked. Nobody wanted to miss a thing.
    I felt … After all these years I’d just be guessing what I felt at fifteen. I’m positive self-pity topped the list. My birthday was ruined and so was my dress. The idea that my family and my life were ruined followed next. Then shame pushed everything else aside.
    It was like the summer I caught polio and came home from the hospital to find people staring and pointing and whispering. Now it seemed I had contracted another disease and if I didn’t agree to quarantine myself, people would do it to me.
    Later I sobbed to Mom that I felt scalded with shame. “Don’t be such a sissy,” she said. “You make it sound like you’ve been peed on.”
    Which was exactly how I felt.
    After the rescue squad carried Dad’s body out in a black bag and the crowd drifted away, it hit me how much I’d miss him. Because of my bad leg it had been years since I’d run and fetched him a beer. Now I’d never do it again, nor climb onto his lap while he blew smoke rings through my hair.
    After a few hours, I disobeyed Mom and left the bedroom. Downstairs, the living room and dining alcove had a scattering of gum wrappers, cigarette butts, and scorched matchsticks. Because the police hadn’t cleaned up after themselves, I did it, same as I did every time Mom and Dad stumbled off to bed leaving the house a mess.
    I postponed going into the kitchen till last. I was afraid there’d be blood wall to wall. But when I pushed through the swinging door, things were spic and span, every plate, glass, and piece of silverware in its place. Only the butcher knife was missing.
    I crossed the gummy linoleum floor in my bare feet. I got no spooky feeling that somebody had died here. That was the creepiest thing—the sense that nothing seemed to have happened, yet everything had changed.
    I pulled at the refrigerator door, and the rubber seals yielded with a moist pop. This was forbidden territory. Maury and I weren’t supposed to eat between meals. Snacks and soft drinks were against the rules except on Saturday night. Since I was sinning already, I grabbed a beer instead of a Coke. If there had been a pack of Dad’s Camels handy, I’d have fired one up and blown smoke rings through my own hair.
    With a second bottle of beer, then a third, a nice glow took hold. This, I decided, was how I’d survive. I’d sit tight and I’d stay tight. The beer pooled deep inside, freezing me at the center so that I felt less and less, then nothing.
    By the time Mom came home, I had passed out with my cheek glued to the kitchen table. It was after midnight, and she must have known I was exhausted. But that didn’t stop her from shaking me awake and yakking into the wee hours.
    The fight with Dad had started over nothing, she said. “Who knows what riled him? Some nights you needed to throw a net over that man. Not that it was anything Maury hadn’t heard before. Just the typical hollering and cussing. But it upset Maury and he grabbed the butcher knife and stuck it in Dad’s belly.”
    I heard her through a haze of beer, and as she talked on, the room started sliding under me. Some of the words didn’t stick. I didn’t want to picture Maury stabbing Dad. I didn’t want to know what he confessed to the police, or how he acted when they locked him in solitary confinement for his own safety.
    Maury probably preferred that to a cell full of prisoners. He liked to be alone in little places. I imagined him stretched out on his cot, like in the bathtub, his hands rubbing the walls for reassurance. Then