Chapter 1 (July 2016, A.L. Faucher)
People die.
Skylar Marie Faucher died on a Friday. That’s the first lie of many that I’ll tell you. In my defense, Friday is the day listed on her death certificate. It is also the most unlikely of days for her death to have occurred because that was the day her landlord, prompted by complaints of an odor, found Skylar’s naked body sprawled across the bathroom floor. Considering the size of the bathroom, perhaps 'sprawled' was too generous a word. Her one-room apartment was on the top floor of an old Victorian house, dissected into seven small apartments. Each one was little more than a human storage locker.
No, Skylar didn’t die on a Friday.
Time had passed.
Her blood had cooled.
Skylar’s olive-toned skin had turned 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 pool of human broth onto the floor. The fluid threaded through the thick layers of vomit and hair, running out the door, and into the tiny space carved out for a kitchen. A fan, shoved in the window overlooking the street, did little to cool the summer heat and nothing to diminish the smell.
And then the flies.
Discovering her body, 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.
Is it here that I tell you who we were? Tell you about our perfect childhood in a backyard full of green grass, a garden of raspberries, and fences of concord grapes? Do I tell you about the distant sound of lawnmowers and Saturday cartoons, falling autumn leaves, and salted winter sidewalks? I could, but I don’t think it would matter, because unless you lived it, you would never fully understand. Peace and isolation like that only exist in the most sheltered of childhoods and 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 and a show. 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, and my father called 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'll 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 loafers to finish the paperwork for my student loan.
Then I was driving. Watching the oily ribbons of July heat rise off the pavement into the suffocating dryness of a granite city sculpted from the Utah desert. Salt Lake City, a city of salvation and straight lines.
I missed the first dozen phone calls and the police because I was in the bookstore. Alouette Faucher, first-year medical student, shopping for books she would buy but never open. The memory of that day is slow and silent. I can see myself driving, suspended in a mosaic of filtered colors and sunlight stored beside dancing dust fairies and thick green shag carpet. My hand hanging out the window of my red VW van, fingers playing in the current on the last normal day of my life.
Did I say our childhood was perfect? That was probably a lie, too.
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