The Skin Beneath

by Nairne Holtz

  Table of Contents

  Part One: Questions

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Part Two: Risks

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Part Three: Warnings

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Part Four: Answers

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Epilogue

  Copyright © 2007 Nairne Holtz

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a license from Access Copyright, 1 Yonge Street, Suite 1900, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M5E 1E5.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Holtz, Nairne, 1967- The skin beneath / Nairne Holtz.

  ISBN 978-1-897178-39-3

  I. Title.

  PS8615.O455S65 2007 C813'.6 C2007-901157-8

  The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council, the Ontario Arts Council and the Department of Canadian Heritage through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program.

  Printed and bound in Canada

  Insomniac Press, 192 Spadina Avenue, Suite 403

  Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M5T 2C2

  www.insomniacpress.com

  For Wendy

  “No, facts is precisely what there is not, only interpretations.“

  — Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

  “If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.“

  — George Orwell,

  PART ONE:

  QUESTIONS

  Chapter One

  Sam unlocks the mailbox in the lobby of her building, takes out a single envelope, opens the back flap to discover a postcard inside. She reads the words on the postcard: “Your sister died while investigating a political conspiracy. Coincidence? How often do women kill themselves with a gun? Think about it.”

  Sam reads the words on the postcard a second, third, and fourth time with growing discomfort. Her life can’t twist apart. It’s the new millennium, the year of the future, the year of the anticlimax. Computers failed to crash, and the apocalypse hasn’t happened. The postcard is a joke, a hoax. Or is it? When Chloe died, Sam discovered she had been living every day in denial—fully expecting one breath to follow another—perpetual motion for herself and for those she loved. But she learned grief awaits.

  As far as Sam knows Chloe didn’t shoot herself: she died of a drug overdose in a New York hotel room. But whoever sent Sam the postcard has another, unofficial version of Chloe’s death. Getting the postcard is weird, but the allegation itself somehow isn’t shocking, isn’t inconsistent with her sister’s character.

  The unsigned words on the postcard are typed onto paper, cut out, and glued to the back. The method isn’t as cinematic as clipping words and letters from a magazine, but the intention is the same—to leave no trace of the author. Sam’s name and address on the envelope are also typed.

  Sam flips the postcard over and regards the image: a naked black man hanging from a white cross. Across the top of the card is the phrase: “Makaveli the Don Killuminati.” The artwork is colourful, a narrative realism Sam associates with cartoons and tattoos. She examines the tiny print and learns the image is taken from a Tupac Shakur album cover.

  At work Sam googles the name “Tupac Shakur,” then adds the search term “conspiracy.” (For four years she has been employed as a temp, a job she expected to be temporary.) A quick scan of the first dozen of hundreds of websites informs her that Tupac is a hip hop legend who was murdered in the prime of his career, gunned down in Las Vegas on Friday the 13th of September, 1996. His killer has never been apprehended. Speculation about his death continues to spread like an underground fire—snuffed out on the surface but with heat still consuming the roots below. A website claims Tupac set himself up to die. As evidence, the author of the site points to Tupac’s final music video, made a month before he died, which shows the gangster rapper being ushered into heaven, a foreshadowing of his death his fan deems too great a coincidence to be one. Another website claims his death is a disappearing act, and Tupac still walks the Earth, just like Elvis.

  Sam spends her lunch hour sitting in a food court staring at the postcard. Chloe died in August of 1995, a year before Tupac Shakur, so it doesn’t seem as if the alleged political conspiracy could have had anything to do with his murder. Is the image from the album cover intended to be symbolic? Perhaps someone is telling Sam her sister is a martyr. Who sent the letter? The envelope has no return address, but edged around the stamp is the word “Mexico.”

  Chapter Two

  When Sam was a little girl, she followed her older sister Chloe everywhere. Dogged her. Tagged along, unwanted. Shadow, Chloe would call her.

  Chloe was wrong. Sam felt like a real person when she was with Chloe. Sam became a shadow, a slice of herself, when she wasn’t with her sister—when Chloe wasn’t there.

  “Go away,” Chloe would say, wrinkling her nose at Sam. When she refused to disappear, Chloe would heave a dramatic sigh before conceding, “Okay, Samantha, you can play with me. You can be the boy.”

  The boy fetched objects for the girl. The boy built the Blanket Camp. The boy didn’t get to put on the denim halter dress worn for the game of Teenage Orphan Attending Her First Disco. Being the boy was punishment, but it never felt that way. Punishment was the time Chloe and Sam played hide-and-seek. Chloe explained the rules to Sam, but the words scattered in her head. Following Chloe’s thoughts wasn’t as easy as following Chloe because she was ten years old and Sam was four. They played indoors because it was raining. Water filmed along the windowpanes. Their father was cleaning the kitchen while listening to opera. Chloe and Sam went upstairs to his bedroom.

  “Put your hands over your eyes,” Chloe said.

  Through gaps in her fingers, Sam stared at her sister’s face, swimming in freckles. Peekaboo. I see you.

  “You’re not supposed to look,” Chloe said.

  Sam scissored her fingers shut. Counted down. Counted to twenty, got mixed up and started over. She opened her eyes. Now I see you, now I don’t. She surveyed the room, then checked under the bed and behind the door. She dashed over to the closet, creaked open the folding door. On the floor were Dad’s many pairs of shoes: Wallabees, Top-Siders, loafers, and boots. Clutching the sleeve of a sweater, she pulled it to the right. She shifted suits and pants until she reached the back of the closet, where she saw a large black fur coat Mom used to wear. She must have left it behind. A red braid dangled against the dark fur. Sam grabbed the coat.

  “Found you.”

  “You found me,” Chloe agreed, as she stepped out of the closet. She didn’t sound disappointed. She had wanted Sam to find her. “Okay.” Chloe said, “My turn now.”

  One-two-three-four- five-six-seven-eight-nine-ten-eleven-twelve-thirteen- fourteen- fifteen-sixteen-seventeen-eighteen-nineteen-twenty. “Here I come, ready or not.”

  Anticipating discovery, Sam stood in the closet, draped in the fur coat where Chloe had been. Sam hadn’t grasped the point of hide-and-seek; she thought she was supposed to use the same hiding place. Chloe’s footsteps faded as she left the
room. Sam waited. Scratched her arms. Wherever the fur came into contact with her body, she itched. At nursery school someone read a story about a girl who covered herself in animal skins and became a wolf who ate people. Her family moved from their village, leaving no forwarding address. The girl tried to hunt them down. She asked people where her family had gone, and when they could or would not help her, she ate them. The emptiness in her belly was filled, but not the emptiness in her heart. Bad girls came to bad ends. If Sam wasn’t good, her family would leave. Her mother already had. Sam’s heart beat harder, maracas shaking in her chest. She crouched down to get away from the coat, but it slid from the hanger and crashed on top of her. She thrashed the coat out of her way and ran out of the closet.

  Sam found her sister downstairs reading a book on the couch. Chloe looked up. She tried for nonchalance, but her eyes glinted with guilt. Sam began to sob. Chloe dropped her book and gathered Sam in her arms.

  Sam cried, “I thought you’d never find me. I thought you left me.”

  Chloe said, “Don’t you know I’d never leave you?”

  But of course she did.

  Chapter Three

  Because she has decided to talk to her father about the postcard, Sam doesn’t go home after work. Instead she takes the subway north to the part of the city where she grew up, a quiet commuter suburb now awash in traffic, condo construction, and gaudy electronic billboards. She walks the ten blocks from the subway to her father’s house. Spring has arrived, bringing a cloying fragrance of lilacs and magnolia blossoms. Yuppie parents drag their kids up and down the street in wagons, as if they are crippled emperors. Sam lived here in a stately, brown, brick house but currently resides in a one-room flat above a store on the west side of the city, close to the University of Toronto, where her father teaches art history, and where she takes various courses but never manages to finish a degree. The west side is home to the birds of the night, the pierced and tattooed set, filmmakers, musicians, or people like Sam who just dress like an artist.

  Sam’s father opens the door of his house. Kenneth O’Connor is wearing a bow tie—it’s his shtick, something to liven up his customary pressed khakis and pale cotton shirts. Sam hasn’t seen her father in several months, and his copper hair seems more woven with steel. She’s a younger version of her father with the same reddish hair, freckles, square jaw, and thin frame. When her father’s colleagues meet her, they think she’s his son, not his daughter. Sam passes for a guy until a closer inspection, until someone notices her small breasts and puts them together with her height, which at barely 5’5" is shorter than most men.

  “Sam. How unexpected. Tell me, have you had supper?”

  “I’m not hungry.” Sam is peckish, but her father always forgets she doesn’t eat meat. Whenever she reminds him, he challenges her vegetarianism. Conservation of non-renewable sources of energy, reduction in the risk of heart disease, the cruelty of factory farming—she scatters reasons like seeds. Although the truth is Sam can’t bring herself to chew and swallow a creature who can look her in the eye.

  “Would you like something to drink?”

  As she takes her shoes off in the foyer, Sam shakes her head, then follows her father into his living room where he reduces the volume on the trill of Baroque issuing from his compact disc player. The room is styled in Danish modern, and Sam sits on one end of a rectangular teak sofa.

  Dad picks up a striped bowl from a trolley displaying attenuated vases. “Steven found this at a flea market when he was at a conference last week in the Midwest. Some of the German immigrants who settled in the States brought over Danish ceramics, and he paid five dollars for it.”

  “Is it Saxbo?” Sam’s father and his boyfriend, Steven, collect Scandinavian art pottery and are obsessed with works produced by the Saxbo studio.

  He sets the bowl down. “The days of getting Saxbo at a garage sale are gone forever. This is a Rorstrand, but we’ve always found them pleasing.”

  “Where’s Steven?” Sam doesn’t really care. She’s glad he isn’t around, but she asks about him as a way to stretch beyond the mundane conversations she usually has with her father revolving around his and Steven’s consumer choices: what downtown restaurant they tried, where they went for a weekend getaway, and what new pottery they bought.

  “He’s at the gym.” Sam’s father sits down in the Swan, a chair with two brown side panels flowing upward in the shape of tucked-in wings.

  “That’s weird,” Sam says. Steven is nothing like the guys she sees in the gay ghetto with their buff bodies and shaved heads, which make them look as if they just got out of the Armed Forces. Steven teaches at a private boys’ school and reminds Sam of a heavily inbred crown prince. He’s interested in heraldry and wears ascots.

  Dad raises an eyebrow at her. “As much as I wish you would, it isn’t like you to drop by. Do you need money?”

  Sam crosses her arms. “Have I ever asked you for money? Well…since the winter I was twenty and got laid off? And you gave me a whole fifty dollars.” Except when it comes to his personal possessions, her father isn’t the type to dole out cash.

  “Why Sam, I had no idea you retained such bitterness over that incident.” A puckish smile forms on his lips. He doesn’t think there is anything wrong with how he behaved. He wrote the original tough-love manual.

  “I want to talk about Chloe. Did she shoot herself?” Sam is using the family guerrilla tactics Chloe was known for: the verbal Scud, accuracy questionable.

  Her father’s smile vanishes, his forehead wrinkles. In his pinched skin, Sam glimpses his geriatric future. “Why are you asking?”

  What sort of answer is that? Why isn’t he telling her the question is ridiculous? For the first time in her life, Sam raises her voice at him. “You lied! You lied to me! You told me she overdosed. And that it was most likely an accident.”

  “There were drugs in her system, Percodan.” His fingers frame his mouth, signalling his reluctance to give her information. “But yes, she died of a self-inflicted gun wound to the chest. I didn’t tell you at the time because I didn’t want to add to your distress. In fact, I don’t remember mentioning it to anyone besides Steven. How did you find out?”

  “Someone sent me an anonymous note.” From an ample front pocket on baggy, black cargo pants, Sam withdraws the envelope and postcard and hands them to her fa-

  ther. The only fresh conclusion she has drawn is the person who wrote the postcard was not particularly close to Chloe. The postcard is addressed to “Samantha,” not “Sam.” When she started school, Sam dropped the long version of her name. But the anonymous author is in possession of a fact she didn’t know: a gun caused her sister’s death.

  As he reads the postcard, Sam’s father frowns even more. When he finishes reading, he tucks the card into the envelope and gives it back to her, holding just the edge, as if the envelope contains powdered anthrax spores. Sam waits for him to speak, but he is silent. He leans forward to pluck a discoloured petal from a bouquet of white tulips on the coffee table. The flowers are arranged in the vase with synchronized precision, a corsage of soldiers. Her father is so unlike her sister in taste and temperament. Chloe’s favourite flowers were wild roses, the petals of which she cast around her bedroom. She listened to punk, loved The X-Files, and read books about political assassinations.

  Sam meets her father’s gaze. “We both know Chloe was a conspiracy freak.”

  “Please don’t tell me you’re going to try to turn what happened to your sister into a conspiracy theory.” He sinks back into the chair, closing his eyes. Chloe made Sam and her father watch Oliver Stone movies with her. Sam’s father disliked the movies, particularly the Kennedy one. He rejects all conspiracy theory as the simplistic fantasies of crackpots and thought even Oliver Stone could have done better.

  Once again, Sam raises her voice. She doesn’t yell but comes close. “Don’t do this. Don’t just dismiss it.”

  “I understand. You’re trying to construct meaning
from that which is senseless.” He bites off the word “senseless.” He is so fastidious in the way he talks about Chloe; direct discussion of her death has become taboo. His discretion keeps his and Sam’s emotions in a chokehold. Since they have never openly mourned, their heartache has never abated. Policies of containment are always corrupt.

  “Dad, listen. Whoever wrote this…” —Sam pauses to wave the letter—”…was right. Women rarely use guns to commit suicide.”

  He opens his eyes with reluctance, as if Sam is shining a light into them. Lines like crinkled tissue form in the corners of his eyes, making him look tired. “What is it you want from me?”

  Her father never surrenders, never lets anyone else be in charge. Sam has won but doesn’t feel triumphant—she feels uneasy at having power over him. “To be able to ask you questions. To have you answer me.”

  Her father keeps secrets, rarely tells anecdotes, and offers no memories of his life. Chloe pestered him, once asking him how old he had been when he had sex for the first time. He ordered her to her room. To Sam, he says, “What would you like to know?”

  “Did the police say she killed herself?”

  “She didn’t leave a suicide note, so the official police report ruling was death by misadventure.”

  Sam leans forward on the couch. “Then, theoretically, it’s possible someone could have killed her?”

  “There weren’t any indications of murder. The fingerprints on the gun were hers.”

  “How could she have gotten a gun?”

  “Is that a rhetorical question?” Annoyance sweeps across his face. “I have no idea how she got a revolver anymore than I know what she was doing in New York or…” He stops.

  Say it, Sam thinks, say it. You don’t know why she would have taken her own life. But the words don’t come, the words are clenched in a fist. He may not want to know but she does. She wants to know everything. There are so many questions to which she doesn’t have answers that she can’t even say whether or not the postcard is a hoax. About a year and a half before she died, Chloe impulsively moved to Montreal. During that time Sam wasn’t especially close to her sister, was even somewhat angry with her. Sam has no idea what Chloe was up to in Montreal, where her fascination with conspiracy theories could have led her. Sam only dimly understands the reason for her next question. “Do you remember the name of the pub where Chloe worked in Montreal?”