2
The last thing Connie wears is wrong.
Black polyester slacks still holding the crease from the Macy’s hanger. White Confirmation blouse buttoned one button too high. Borrowed funeral blazer from some other cousin’s closet, pinned with the silver Miraculous Medal that stays tucked away in the jewelry box until something like this happens.
She’d have made a bonfire of it all. She always hated looking like somebody’s modest daughter.
Back against the tile, Cortney keeps trying to make the body on the table match the singer he’d seen at Captive Eye. Whose long, lank strands were always in her face ‘til she whipped them back between songs. Who made Second To A Tragedy sound like an actual band. Who looked impossible to kill up on that stage.
His father steps to her head. “Comb.”
Cortney pulls it from the drawer in the prep island cabinet, hands it to him.
It passes between them, and Rocco starts at the part with a surgeon’s precision. He doesn’t pull and doesn’t force, but lifts, separates, smooths. Lifts, separates, smooths.
The hair—brown verging on black—stays where he puts it, stripped of every habit it used to have.
“Cotton,” his father says.
Cortney returns to the island. Cotton jar, second from the left, cap already loose from earlier prep. It and everything else is labeled in Rocco’s block printing.
Cortney crosses back with the jar.
His father pulls a tuft, rolls it into a tight wad, and works the corner of Connie’s mouth like he’s cleaning la Madonna before Mass.
Suddenly Connie’s sixteen and alive again. Cortney’s halfway down the stairs when he has to squint, late-afternoon sun hitting him before she does, streaming through the glass brick windows and bleaching every steel surface rose-gold.
She’s sitting cross-legged on the same prep table in grey sweatpants and her tee with the owl made of violet and teal triangles, eating cereal straight from the box. That s’mores cereal with the blue packaging, but only the marshmallows.
“You can’t sit on that,” he tells her. “That’s where Dad preps them and everything.”
“Yeah? Not right now it’s not.”
“I’m serious. He’s gonna get so mad at you.”
“Cor, your dad’s mad at pretty much everyone who’s not dead yet.”
He’s ten, and this seems somehow both false and probably true.
She surveys the room—the cabinets with their glass doors, the center drain, the subway tiles that go halfway up the wall. The anatomy posters where the human form becomes a blueprint. “This place is insane.”
“He says it has to be this way because the bodies leak.”
“That’s sort of how you know, though.”
“What?”
“When you’ve got a downstairs nobody’s supposed to talk about.”
He doesn’t know how to respond to that.
She waits, like maybe he’ll answer. When he doesn’t, she just looks at him. Like he hasn’t figured it out yet.
“What?”
“Nothing. You’re just…” She plucks another marshmallow from the box, turns it over in her fingers. The sunset catches it and suddenly it looks toasted, like it’s browning on a skewer. “You’re different than other kids.”
“No, I’m not.”
“I know. That’s why you are.”
Now she’s twenty-four and dead again, the fluorescents flattening everything as his father sets the swab aside and steps back.
“Applicator.”
He means the cosmetic kind, since the trocar button’s already in. Cortney reaches for the farthest jar.
His fingers catch the rim wrong, and for one stupid second the whole container tips toward the edge, makeup brushes shifting inside as bristles slide forward in a small sable avalan—
Tink! His other palm slaps down on pure reflex, barely stops it. Glass kisses counter.
The sound is nothing, yet still enough to turn his father’s head.
Cortney’s shoulders lock before he can stop them, fists and jaw clenching hard. Some trained, pathetic part of him immediately scans the distance to the sink, the cabinet, the biohazard bin, the stairs.
“Cortney,” Rocco’s about to say, in that mid-century monotone that completely scrubs out Staten Island and his Sicilian father’s father.
Or: “What are you doing?”
Or maybe: “There’s no such thing as almost dropped.”
Any of them would do, really, when Ciriaco Serpieri has a hundred ways to express your inadequacy.
So Cortney stands there with his palm pressed down on the jar and, for one second, hates himself so completely it erases words. Hates being skinny and five foot eight. Hates looking like prey, and especially hates that every fucking predator like his father knows it. Most of all, he hates that his cousin and only friend is dead, and Rocco still has to be Rocco. Hates that even here, beside her, with her body barely back from the coroner, the mighty Mr. Serpieri still needs someone smaller to crush.
The want is instant and all-consuming—to smash the jar into his father’s face so badly he can feel the impact. To rip the trocar from the instrument tray and drive it into his temple. To hit him with the hammer from the garage. Then the iron skillet. Then the matched mannaie Aunt Sabina used for splitting pork shoulder. To hit him and hit him and hit him until there’s nothing left of the motherfucker that resembles a—
That’s when Connie’s mouth slips open. Just a crack.
Maybe the lip suture loosens, or the cotton subsides, or the old man’s meticulous work just falls apart. Whatever the cause, it brings down Rocco’s backhand.
“Give it here.”
Cortney passes him the jar. Or his hands do.
Rocco sets it safely on the counter himself, then takes a lip brush and a tin of flesh-toned cream. “Hold the light.”
The overhead lamp swings down, angled into place.
Its beam catches Connie’s face. She’s so obviously dead under the brightness that the fire climbing Cortney’s throat sinks back down, goes cold, becomes something else. Something that pools in his gut like cold mud.
It’s shame, sick and sudden. How could he think that here, with her like this?
He steadies the lamp. Doesn’t look away.
Then Connie’s alive for the second time. Twenty and beautiful.
No. Nineteen.
Yes—he is thirteen, so she is nineteen, and they are in her room at her parents’ place, where the mini-fridge and windowsill are lined with Red Bull cans, and the whole room smells like Japanese Cherry Blossom and cigarettes she smoked out the window.
Living, breathing Connie sits with her left leg folded under her, coaxing the record back into its sleeve with a softness that shames even Rocco’s renowned hands.
“Okay, so, rule one: you hold it by the rim, see? Just the edges.”
He knows.
“I mean it. Not the grooves, because your hands are… I mean, you’re a kid, so you probably ate Doritos or something before you came up here.”
He didn’t.
“Sure you didn’t. Either way, your hands are still gross, promise.”
On the bed beside them is a stack of CD-Rs in paper sleeves, ‘S2AT - DEMO’ slashed across each in silver Sharpie. Three flyer proofs from the Staples in Carson, all slightly different because the guitarist keeps insisting the font is “too dentist,” and a Google Maps printout for a Torrance show with ‘CANCELLED???’ scribbled across the top.
Cortney picks up one of the flyer proofs, sees March dates. The inevitable Captive Eye. Distortion Hall, too, and some spot in Echo Park he’s never heard of. It’s jarring how professional their logo looks when it’s not hand-drawn.
“Are you famous, Connie?”
She snorts without looking up. “No.”
“Think you’re going to be?”
“I don’t think about it like that.”
She rakes her hair back with both hands, twists it once so the ponytail sits low and loose at the back of her neck. Gets up, steps over him, drops the needle on another record.
This one’s not hers, but something cleaner and colder. There’s a woman’s voice, serrated synthesizers underneath, guitars crashing in without being masturbatory.
“This is closer,” she murmurs, sitting back down.
“To what?”
“What we’re trying to do.”
“You mean your band?”
“Yeah. Those guys.”
He listens because she is listening, and because when Connie listens, the room rearranges itself around her.
The music itself moves like digital ice. Later, he’ll learn terms like ‘industrial’ and ‘darkwave’ and none of them will be as accurate.
“It’s not like your band.”
“No. My band sounds like we’re still figuring out what the fuck we’re doing.”
“But you want it like this?”
“This, but… ours. You can’t just copy shit, Cor.” Her eyes find his. “You have to take it somewhere else or it’s pointless, you know?”
“Right. Like how Scream was just ripping off every slasher but now it’s like… the one.”
“See, you get it.”
She lifts the needle and pulls another disc from the milk crate beside the bed. This one’s a CD-R tagged ‘PRE-HISTORY.’
“What’s that?”
“Stuff I probably shouldn’t play for you.” She flips the sleeve, finds only a sloppy phone number scrawled across the back, and frowns. “Old industrial. RevCo, some Thrill Kill probably, whatever else this creep from the show thought would earn him a phone call.”
“What’s RevCo?”
“Revolting Cocks.” A smirk, unapologetic. “Yeah, I know.”
“I mostly listen to Slipknot, actually.” He expects her to be impressed.
“Oof. Okay. Yeah, you need this immediately.”
“Hey, why’d you say it like that? And wait—shouldn’t play for me how? Because my mom’s super Catholic, and Uncle Enzu’s literally a deacon.”
“Then don’t tell your mom.” She slides the disc into her scratched-up Sony shelf stereo. “Easy.”
He goes still beside her, trying not to look too grateful, because he’d listen to Kidz Bop if it meant he got to stay, God help him.
She skips around, and the music gets meaner. There’s men’s voices now, predatory, like they’re talking dirty at a bar. Techno is in there too, and guitars that sound like beach movie soundtracks, mixed with something like old detective music—saxophone and everything. Some tracks sound like the metal he’s used to, but inexplicably more sinister than Slipknot without trying as hard. The combination’s wrong and somehow right.
After enough of it, Connie ejects the disc and slides it back into the paper sleeve. Holds it out to him.
“Here.”
Cortney just looks at it. “What?”
“It’s yours.”
He takes the CD-R like it might change its mind. “Why?”
“Because you actually give a shit. Most people just fake it.”
He stares.
She’s bent into the crate again, hair loose and falling, tank top slipping at one shoulder, anatomical heart printed on the front with flytraps blooming from the ventricles. The concentration on her face when she’s rifling through discs, and how her hands move through them. The intensity she brings to everything, even this.
It happens then. The crushing, idiotic certainty that he would do anything she asked. Absolutely anything she wanted. The kind of pathetic he used to think only happened to other people.
She catches him staring. “What?”
His father returns to her face, to the small architecture of closing a mouth that wants to open.
There’s no force in it, and Rocco never fights her body, but persuades it. A little pressure to the chin; more cotton tucked where the living will never see it. Then, once it holds again, cream where the skin has dried beside the lip.
“Less light.”
Cortney turns the dial.
“There.” Rocco picks out a detail brush, presses it to the palette. “Just the lips now. Little warmth.” He turns it toward Cortney, handle-first. “You.”
Cortney steps up and takes the brush, taps away the excess in a beige cascade.
“Right here.” Rocco points with his pinky, not crossing the last inch. “Feather. Don’t paint.”
“I know.”
“I know you know. I’m telling your hand.”
So Cortney tells his hand, and brings the brush to Connie’s lip, coaxing color along the bow first, then the curve beneath.
“Enough.”
Cortney stops. Lifts the brush, steps back. Stays there.
“Your aunt wanted more.”
Cortney looks at him.
His father’s focus doesn’t leave her. “I said no.”
Cortney doesn’t know what to do with that, so he does nothing.
For a while neither speaks. Just the two of them standing over her in the humming fluorescence, like she’s something wooden they shellacked in the driveway. His father breathes slow; Cortney holds his.
He’s done this before. Many times. Not this… but this. Mrs. Sobol, who was floating off the Point for three days before anyone found her. The Caselli kid after he put the shotgun in his mouth. Even a baby once, though Rocco wouldn’t let him touch that one. Only watch and pass tools.
Meaning: he knows you pack the mouth with cotton soaked in cavity fluid, and wire the jaw through the maxilla and mandible. Knows the trocar goes in two inches above and to the left of the umbilicus, and that you pierce the heart first, then both lungs moving right to left, then the stomach, liver, right kidney, left kidney, bladder, intestines—in that exact sequence. That the heart gives a wet pop, the lungs hiss like punctured pool toys, the stomach a low gurgle, the intestines next to nothing at all.
He knows all of this.
That doesn’t mean he can make Connie belong to it.
He could believe almost anything else first. That this isn’t her, even. That Concetta Lupino isn’t lying still before him while she looks like someone her mother could actually stand to see.
“She was a beautiful girl.” Rocco. His voice is very low now. “That’s what Loretta needs to see, Cortney.”
Was. The grammar does what even that piece of shit couldn’t strangle out of him.
“The pills, they…” Rocco clears his throat once. Arranges her hands, one over the other. “We brought her back from that. I couldn’t help her when she needed it. I didn’t see—none of us saw. But this I can do. I can make sure her mother doesn’t see what I saw. That’s what I can do.”
For that moment Cortney hates him much less, and that is almost worse.
His father turns from the table and begins gathering the used cotton, the brushes, the little tubes and caps and folded towels. “Go get Chiara. And your mother.”
Nothing in him answers the instruction.
Rocco raises his eyes, but there’s only exhaustion in them now. “Cortney.”
He nods, and the instinct to comply drags him to the stairs. At the bottom step he looks back.
Connie is still on the table.
She never knew.