Lying with the Dead Read Online Free PDF Page A

Heaven. If anyone eats this bread he shall live forever.”
    Like she’s reading my mind and is duty bound to contradict me, Mom says, “No one should live this long. They ought to put me to sleep like a stray dog.”
    “A lot of people your age still enjoy life.”
    “Name two.”
    “Lawrence and I see them out on the golf course.”
    “Great! Buy me a bag of clubs.”
    She dragon-snorts smoke from her nostrils. I don’t suppose there’s anything worse about an old woman smoking than a young person poisoning her system, not to mention my system, with cigarettes, but she’s about to receive Communion. Do I dare ask her to brush her teeth?
    Instead, I say, “I’m sorry you had a bad night.”
    “Wish I could describe what they’re like, these spells of mine. It starts with music,” she says. “Eerie music and a hot flash in my chest that turns to goose pimples on my spine. All of a sudden I’m trembling and seeing colors. Streaks of brown and green. Excuse me, Candy, I know you’re a prude about language, but it’s like I have shit in my eyes. There’s an awful smell and something I’m dying to see but scared to see at the same time. I don’t know. I can never dial it in clear. I just wish there was a pill to cure it.”
    Since Mom downs a dozen medications a day—thyroid pills, antidepressants, beta-blockers for an arrhythmic heartbeat, anti-anxiety tablets, blood pressure pills, sleeping pills, pick-me-up pills—I timidly allow as how her panic attacks might be a side effect.
    “No, it’s a punishment,” she insists. “It’s God or the Devil getting revenge.”
    “For what?”
    “For my sins.”
    “Don’t be silly. You’re in a state of grace.”
    “Don’t be so sure of that.” She lights a fresh Kent off the butt of the first. “I’m paying for the past.”
    “You shouldn’t dwell on the past,” I tell her. Yet it surprises me that she’s examining her conscience. Is that another tip-off, like the pictures? Sign of a mood swing? Last week she shocked me by asking whether she had ever hit me. I feared a trap and didn’t answer at first. The fact is, she’s belted me so often, it’s just the big occasions that stick in my mind—the black eye on my thirteenth birthday, the bloody lip for high school graduation, the boxed ears the day Quinn flew off to Europe. Finally, without dwelling on dates and details, I told her yes, she hit me.
    “And Maury?” she asked.
    “Well, hitting I’m not sure, but there was the time you pushed his face into a bowl of hot pea soup.”
    “I did?” she said, amazed. “What about Quinn?”
    “You’ll have to ask him.” It’s like her brain is a sieve that no longer retains anything so minor as a memory of walloping us.
    From the box she lifts a snapshot of Maury as a boy. Knees bunched under his chin, he’s crammed into a fruit crate that Dad nailed in the branches of an oak out back. Maury called it his tree house. He loved to hide there, alone and out of reach.
    He was always climbing things. Agile as a monkey, he shimmied down from his high chair even before he could walk. To keep him in his crib, Mom and Dad had to flip it upside down and lower it over him like a cage. I remember him staring through the wooden slats, a little prisoner.
    But when Mom asks what I recall about Maury, I don’t mention cages. I don’t mention her or Dad shouting at him. I say what a beautiful baby he was.
    “He’s still a handsome man,” she insists.
    I agree, although neither of us has laid eyes on him for years.
    “When did you first notice something was wrong with him?”
    There’s no predicting what Mom wants to hear, except, of course, that she didn’t cause his problems. Maybe she believes there’s nothing wrong with him at all; he’s just unlucky. When Lawrence showed me a newspaper article about Asperger’s syndrome, and I passed it along to Mom, thinking it matched Maury’s symptoms, she rejected any notion that her older son might be “an