Lydia’s cheek pressed into Joey’s thigh and his jeans were warm with urine. A lump in his pocket smelled of chocolate and she assumed it was a knot of melted Kisses, swiped from the bowl on the coffee shop counter. His hands were clenched into quiet fists and she could see the masking-tape bandages on three or four of his fingertips, but she wouldn’t look up again at the popped purple sockets of his eyes, nor the foamy saliva rolling down his chin, nor the blue swelling of his lips.
She could see the cemetery of books that had flapped to the floor as Joey had climbed the shelves, and the others he’d shoved aside to create footholds as he threaded the strap through the ceiling, and still others that had dropped as he’d tried to kick his feet back to stop himself from dying. By now she’d locked her hands together on the far side of his thighs and was trying to lift him up, but her sneakers kept slipping on the wooden floor, and each time she slipped the ratcheted strap cinched tighter around his neck. She must have stopped screaming because a ringing silence suddenly swallowed everything when she saw, a few inches from her face, poking up from Joey’s front pocket, a folded photograph of her.
Lydia.
As a child.
CHAPTER TWO
“Lydia?”
Ernest was hustling up the steps.
“Lydia? Where are you?”
Lydia plucked the photo from Joey’s jeans. In it she was ten, wearing frizzy braids and a blue cord vest, blowing out candles on a chocolate cake.
“Oh Jesus!” she heard Ernest say as he rounded the shelves into the alcove. “Here, here. Joey, c’mon, c’mon, man, don’t—”
In the dim bookstore light, in the stench of Joey’s death, in the warren of those shelves, Lydia slid the photo into her back pocket and tried simply to breathe. Ernest—responsible Ernest, who moments ago had been downstairs counting change, guarding the Bright Ideas bathroom from horny club rats, and who half a decade ago, in a previous life, had driven through sandstorms in the Persian Gulf War—Ernest dragged a footstool over and hopped to the top and yelled about an ambulance as his hands went to work. Lydia stepped back and realized that the drunk couple from the bathroom was now standing behind her, holding each other and looking on, and she accidentally stepped on the woman’s high-heeled foot and whispered, Sorry, and the woman said, That’s okay, and both of them started crying at once. Someone put a hand on Lydia’s shoulder and she shrugged it off.
“Is he moving? Does anyone see him moving?”
The long nylon strap that Joey had earlier unthreaded from a dolly or a cart had a metal ratchet built into it. Ernest released it high above his head and the strap unspooled like a whirring whip and Joey hit the floor.
All went quiet. No one attempted to move him, to defibrillate or resuscitate. Joey was obviously over.
Someone’s ride honked on the street out front, and the Union Station sign glowed red against the windows. Lydia felt a sharp stirring in her abdomen, something much more terrifying than sadness or shock, and she stooped to her knees and began scooping up the books that Joey had kicked to the floor, and once she had them all in a pile she began reshelving them because she didn’t know what else to do. Books that were pushed too far back she scooted forward, and books that were too far forward she scooted back, and then an older woman with thick glasses who worked part-time at the store took Lydia’s elbow and led her toward a couch in the Self-Help section, where she waited for the police, out of sight of Joey’s body.
After being interviewed by the reporting officer, sipping a cup of green tea with a coat from the lost-and-found draped upon her lap, Lydia went outside to the sidewalk and watched Joey’s bagged body get wheeled on a gurney into the back of an ambulance. She declined a few offers for a ride home and instead caught a slow bus up Colfax Avenue, where she could be alone with Joey’s photo.
Her late-night city passed by outside, streetlights and neon glowing over the noodle shops and cantinas, the fast food and the porn, the basilica and the temple, the wig stores and salons. She passed the diner with sixty-five-cent coffee and the dry cleaner’s with the ceramic Buddha in the window. Hooded figures drank out of paper bags and a pair of nuns pushed a grocery cart full of blankets. She loved riding the Colfax bus, with its potholes and its people.
Once the bus had emptied out some, she slipped the photo out of her back pocket. Her hands were damp and she felt as if she were breathing through a straw.
Lydia couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen a girlhood photo of herself and she was fairly sure she’d never seen this one. The spare snapshots of her childhood had been buried so deep inside her bedroom closet that she wasn’t certain they were even there anymore—all of which made Joey’s possession of this photo even more impossible. It had been taken during the only real birthday party she’d ever had, two decades ago, in the little bungalow off Colfax where she’d spent her early years, just a mile or two east of here. Inside the photo’s yellowing border Lydia was a ten-year-old girl leaning over her birthday cake, deep in a candlelit bliss. She found it hard to believe that her dad had been able to wrangle her curly black hair into those tight braids, and even harder to believe that this joyful little girl was her. But unquestionably she was: her big brown eyes, her blue cord vest, her crooked yellow buttons. So much had not yet happened.
Though Lydia occupied most of the frame, there were two other kids in the photo, her only fourth-grade friends. Raj Patel was seated to her right, wearing a light blue jumpsuit with silver buckles and staring with an adoring smile, not at the cake or at the camera but at Lydia, the birthday girl. Carol O’Toole was there too, on her left, but she’d been fidgeting so much that only a blurred corona of her orange hair could be seen. The photo’s composition was odd, canted and crisscrossed by twists of crepe paper, and Lydia realized this was because her father must have been trying to get all three of them into the frame as Carol bounced around and scraped her fingers through the frosting. It hadn’t worked.
Lydia’s stomach churned. Fourth grade, she thought, the same year she and her father had left—fled—Denver. And they’d fled all right, a month or two after this photo had been taken, straight from the hospital to the mountains without saying good-bye to a soul.
The bus jostled to a stop in the gut of Capitol Hill. Lydia hopped off and walked the rest of the way home.
In their second-floor apartment, David was still awake. He was perched at the kitchen table, wearing a headlamp and tinkering with a computer motherboard. A soldering iron and a small spool of wire sat on the table near his hands. The counter behind him was crowded with dirty bowls and cutting boards, garlic peels, a jar of olives, a zesting grater, and the lopped stem of an artichoke. The room smelled of soldering flux and baked chicken, and Lydia could hear Cobain screaming in the headphones that cupped his neck. It was the middle of the night but David was acting as if it were the middle of the day, and she could tell that his evening had once again disappeared into whatever project was currently dissected on the table. He tilted his head slightly when she came in, but his sight remained focused on the tiny circuitry below.