Dead People's Things

Chapter 1 (July 2016, A.L. Faucher)

People die. Skylar Marie Faucher died on a Friday, the last week of July. That’s the first lie of many that I’ll tell you. In my defense, Friday is the day listed on her death certificate—lazy bastards. Friday was the most unlikely of days for it to have occurred, but it was the day her landlord, prompted by complaints of a foul odor outside her door, found Skylar’s naked body sprawled across the bathroom floor. 

Perhaps 'sprawled' is too generous considering the size of the room. The apartment was on the top floor of an old Victorian house that had been dissected into seven small apartments, each one a human storage locker designed for a set of people falling through the cracks to call home. 

As time passed, and her blood cooled, Skylar’s olive-toned skin turned ashy purple. Purple is a hard color to take seriously, but you will not find this particular shade in a box of crayons. It is death purple, and once you see it, you can’t unsee it. Eventually, the pressure split Skylar’s skin, releasing a viscous, dark pool of human broth onto the floor. The fluid threaded through the thick layers of vomit and disheveled hair, out the door, and onto the kitchen floor. A fan, shoved in the window overlooking the street, did little to cool the stale summer heat and nothing to diminish the growing odor. 

Then there were the flies. 

The landlord called the police, and they called her parents. I suppose that’s our parents. After all, Skylar Faucher, the twenty-nine-year-old woman lying face down, dead in a bathroom, was my sister. Do I tell you who we were? About our perfect childhood and a backyard full of green grass, a garden of raspberries, and fences of concord grapes? Or the distant sound of lawnmowers on summer mornings, piles of autumn leaves, and salted winter sidewalks? No, I don’t think it matters. I could tell you, but unless you lived it, you would never fully understand. Our world was created through pink gingham and station wagon windows. Peace and isolation like that exist only in the most sheltered of childhoods and the loneliest of snow globes.   

The police phoned our father to tell him there had been a disturbance at his daughter’s apartment and to please come. Our father told the officer that there was always a disturbance at his daughter’s and refused. The officer persisted. Our father informed the officer that he and my mother had arrangements with another couple for an early dinner. He insisted that he wouldn't alter his plans unless he was told what the trouble was. The police informed him of his daughter’s death over the phone. Then my father phoned me. 

When it was about Skylar, he always called me, but this time, I didn’t receive the call. I could drive myself mad trying to picture what I was doing when she died, but it wouldn’t do any good because I will never know when it actually happened. All I know is what I was doing when my parents climbed the stairs to her apartment, where I was when the medical examiner told them not to go in because no parent should see their child that way. I was across town, on my knees between the shelves in the upper loft of the campus bookstore, petting the glossy spines, judiciously deciding which books on my list couldn’t wait for men in ties and loafers to finish the paperwork for my loan.

Then I was driving, comfortably consumed by the domestic chores of life, navigating the rush of five o’clock traffic with the windows down. In the heat of the July evening, ribbons glistened above the pavement, floating off the city of granite and glass, the city of salt and salvation, lofting into the dryness of the Utah desert. I missed the phone calls, the police, and the smell of her rotting body because I was in the bookstore. Alouette Faucher, medical student, shopping for my books. My only worry was a looming fall semester, which looked like a bear of Clinicals and Biochem. 

It’s slow and silent now. I can see myself as if I never came home. The memory is a mosaic of filtered colors and sunlight dancing across the tiny proteins, stored next to dust fairies and thick green shag carpet.

Did I tell you our childhood was perfect? That’s a lie, too.