People die. Skylar Faucher died on a Friday. I suppose that is the one thing I know that isn’t true. It was the day, at the urging of the other tenants regarding a foul odor, the landlord found her naked body slumped on the bathroom floor. Perhaps slumped is too generous of a term considering the cramped space. Her swollen feet were tangled around the toilet base, her arms trapped beneath her, and her forehead smashed against the door frame, the weight of her decomposing body splitting and shedding the skin.
To her left was a bathtub of stagnating water and, on her right, a viscous, dark pool of human broth dammed by thick layers of rotting flesh, hair, and vomit. Her olive-toned skin must have turned to stark yellow jaundice in the first few hours after her death. As time passed and her blood cooled, a shade of ashy purple replaced it. 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 one must see death’s face to witness this hue, but you can't unknow it once you know the look.
Her apartment was on the top floor of an old Victorian house. The structure was dissected in seven ways to produce seven rents. A fan was shoved in the window overlooking the street. The whirling blades did little to cool the stale summer heat and nothing to diminish the odor of death.
Then something was said about the flies.
The landlord called the police, and they called the parents. I suppose that’s my parents. After all, Skylar Faucher, the twenty-nine-year-old woman lying face down dead in a bathroom, was my sister.
Do I now tell you who we were? About our perfect childhood and a backyard full of green grass with raspberry patches and concord grapes? The distant sound of lawnmowers on summer mornings? Piles of autumn leaves and salted winter sidewalks? No, I don’t think it matters. Because I could tell you, but unless you lived it, you would never come to understand. Our world was created through pink gingham and station wagon windows. Peace and isolation like that exist only in the purest of childhoods and the loneliest of snowglobes. I find I am a collector of both.
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 there was always a disturbance at his daughter’s and refused. The officer persisted; he should come to the apartment. With his dark hair peppered gray and solid hands and arms turning to fat, our father informed the officer 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 I didn’t answer this time. I could drive myself mad trying to picture what I was doing when she died, but it wouldn’t do any good because I don’t know when it 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, kneeling between the shelves in the upper loft of the campus bookstore. Petting the glossy spines, I was judiciously deciding which books on my list couldn’t wait for men in ties and loafers to finish the paperwork for my school 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 because I was in the bookstore. Alouette Faucher, third-year medical student, shopping for my books. My only worry was a looming fall semester, which looked like a bear of Clinicals and Chemistry.
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.