What Comes After

by Joanne Tompkins

  * * *

  —

  KATHERINE FOUND OUR HOME ON TAX SALE, a long-vacant Victorian on a few acres at the edge of town. Blackberries crept to its foundation, crawled up the walls, pressed against cracked windows. Though similar houses could be found a few miles away in Port Furlong’s core, this was the only one of its kind in the neighborhood.

  Other grand homes had been planned on adjacent parcels, but the local economy collapsed in 1890 as ours was being built, and the projects were abandoned. Faced with economic ruin, the original owner left the second floor unfinished but completed the ground level in the highest style of the time: twelve-foot ceilings, crown moldings, ornate stained glass, and hand-tooled leather insets beneath walls of mullioned windows.

  Our house sat, decade after decade, grand below, barren above, alone and commanding, overlooking the town. When developers returned to the area seventy years later, they surrounded our place with dozens of small ramblers on modest lots.

  While such an ornate house might seem to conflict with the Quaker virtues of plainness and simplicity, the price was right, and we believed that our mission of restoration was virtuous. During those first years, Katherine and I spent every free moment working on the old place—stripping wallpaper, repairing water damage, sanding and patching and painting. Each night we’d wrap ourselves in each other’s arms and fantasize about a time when our children would romp happily through the house and fields.

  For all our efforts, we avoided the unfinished upper level. Everything we needed was on the main floor—kitchen, dining and living rooms, a den, master suite, guest room and bath. We had little reason to think about the empty space above. Even the stairs to that level were hidden. Most of the home’s total volume existed unseen and unused behind what appeared to be nothing more than a closet door.

  * * *

  —

  WHEN DANIEL WAS BORN THREE YEARS LATER, we had even less time to think of that unused space. He was an active, social child, and we struggled to find playmates in the area. The Geigers bought the place next door, and we rejoiced to discover they had a son, Jonah, the same age. If Lorrie hadn’t been expecting their second child, it would have been near perfect. As it was, Lorrie’s pregnancy was a painful reminder of Katherine’s new infertility. At the age of thirty, she had developed terrible fibroids and undergone a surgery. A “pelvic sweep,” the doctor had called it, as if it were nothing more than a little tidying up.

  Jonah and Daniel played nearly every day, often spending entire afternoons together. The boys grew so close we came to think of Jonah as another son. As Daniel entered middle school, then high school, he grew increasingly beautiful and athletic and popular. Our house swelled with more boys and then some girls, coming and going with an easy freedom, playing games in the living room, drinking Cokes on the veranda. Sometimes they’d bring their dogs and play Frisbee in the back field, laughing at poor Rufus, who’d propel his dark bulk into the air at the wrong time, in the wrong place, twisting around up there, shocked every time at his miscalculation.

  Katherine would often be with the group, bringing them food and drinks, cheering on their antics, but I preferred to give them space, content to hear their companionable shouting and laughing from my den.

  * * *

  —

  ALL THAT WAS GONE NOW. The air inside my home had grown stagnant, and I couldn’t bring myself to go in. Instead I wandered around back where light from Lorrie’s house stopped me, forced me to picture the woman. She was likely in her bedroom, her small, muscular body stripping off that black dress, tossing it aside, relieved to be done with it.

  I turned away, let my eyes rest on my home’s second level. Daniel and I had started construction up there the summer before his junior year. My son abandoned the project halfway through, and I refused to finish without him. When his mother left that fall, Daniel moved up anyway, settling into a doorless room with plasterboard for walls, using a bath with no walls at all, just an open frame with exposed wires and pipes, a freestanding toilet and sink and shower.

  I spent my rejected energy stripping the last of Daniel’s belongings from his old room, slapping up a coat of paint, and reclaiming it as the office it had been before he was born. My son didn’t notice my attempts to induce guilt. He spent his last year upstairs, never once complaining of the cold and dark and draft, seemingly at peace in his unfinished space.

  * * *

  —

  IT HAD TURNED DARK, and I finally entered the kitchen. The dog’s chair was empty. I headed toward the living room calling, “Rufus. Come on, boy.” As I passed the hall, my heart seized. The stairwell door was ajar. It had been closed when I left. I was certain of that. Daniel was the only one who ever forgot to shut it.

  Strange how this alarmed me. I knew full well the house manufactured its own atmospherics. Pressures built in certain areas, seeped out of others. Walls and doors shifted, sometimes popping loudly, other times in stealth. Certain doors—though never this one before—opened on their own regardless of how thoroughly they’d been closed.

  Yet I stood, staring at that open door, reassuring myself it was a matter of mechanics and temperature gradients and the moisture that accumulated in the bones of this old place. Hadn’t the house always been high-strung? Filled with ancient joists and secret hollows, it wailed and moaned during storms. When Daniel was five, he crawled into our bed one windy night and complained that the house was “singing way too loud.” His tone was of weary irritation, as if the house were a naughty sibling in need of scolding.

  So no, there was nothing ghostly in this—this door opening on its own.

  I was at the stairs, about to peek up, when Rufus nudged the back of my thigh with his blocky head. “Ah, there you are. Were you sleeping on my bed again?” He licked my hand, no doubt wanting dinner, and I closed the door, tested it, then went to feed the dog.

  Later that night, I checked the door again. Though it resisted my pull, I carried in a dining-room chair and jammed it under the handle. I told myself there were rats on that second level, and I didn’t want them infesting my living space.

  Roof rats had in fact rampaged when we first moved in. Katherine and I laid out poison and hauled away dozens of lifeless gray bodies. I still feel sick when I think of the carnage. But that was decades before. It was odd to be worrying about them now. Daniel had never complained of them, and I hadn’t heard a rodent up there in years.

  It was just a feeling. A sense of something alive and lurking in the darkness overhead.

  6

  Evangeline found yet another notice on the trailer door, this one claiming the sheriff would be arriving in the morning. As she had little interest in meeting him, she stood outside on a damp October night, staring at what had been her home for the past seven months, the last place she had seen her mother. Its door was flung wide. Let the animals crawl in, she thought. Let them nest in the sofa bed, root around my mother’s old clothes. She blinked and breathed, gave herself one final minute, then turned away.

  Hefting her overstuffed pack to her shoulder, she trudged out the drive. She’d just stepped onto the road when a car zoomed by. She swore at it. She wasn’t the only thing that could be hit in the dark. Fawns, all spindly legged innocence, grazed these narrow shoulders. Other creatures too. Only last week, a dozen cars backed up a midday street as a river otter and her three pups made a leisurely crossing. The wild was always attempting to reclaim what had been taken.

  She headed toward town. Weeks had passed since the boys had been found. They would be buried by now, wouldn’t they? She hoped things had settled a little, hoped people were starting to think of other things. Of course, this wouldn’t be true for Isaac Balch. She knew that. Life would never settle for him. But what other choice was there? In the morning, she wouldn’t have so much as a reeking trailer for shelter.

  The woods turned to pastures, and she passed one with sheep that ble
ated and scattered as if she were a wolf on the prowl. Then a house appeared, and another, and another, until they sat side by side with neat fenced yards and cars parked in front. If she stayed on this road another mile or so, she’d run into the park where she’d first met the boys.

  * * *

  —

  BY THE TIME THE BOYS ARRIVED IN HER LIFE, she’d been on her own nearly two months. She would often flee to the park, wanting to escape her mother’s absence in the trailer. That particular evening, it was a little after six and she was sitting cross-legged on top of a picnic table staring out at the Sound. The table, set near a cliff, was hidden from the rest of the park by tall firs, and she figured she’d be left alone. The day had been in the mid-eighties—sweltering by Port Furlong standards—and she wore frayed shorts and a tank top that showed off lean, freckled limbs. Behind her, little kids squealed as if still on summer break, and before her, the waves glowed in tones of rose and gold.

  She gazed out over the water toward dusky outlines of distant islands, to narrows and rapids and straits that funneled the Pacific Ocean to the beach below, and for a moment she forgot who she was. She imagined finding a way back to school, then to college and on to a career. An honest one. One with meaning. Maybe she would help sick people or argue cases for the disadvantaged. She would have a family. She would have love. Though she hadn’t the faintest idea how to build such a life, the Sound and the light and the distant views made everything feel possible.

  She floated on that expanse for a minute or two. Then she shifted. A simple tilt of weight. The table embedded a splinter in her thigh, and the breeze turned to gust, kicked up the cliff, and slapped her, and the endless wonder of it all came slamming down to her empty stomach, empty pockets, empty heart. Her own mother had chosen drugs and sex and Jesus over Evangeline. In what possible world could she expect more?

  She dove for a memory, one of the emergency rations she kept tucked away. She was eight and alone, wrapped in a blanket on a late-night couch, watching the shopping channel and waiting for her mother to appear. A few minutes before midnight, a key turned in the lock and her mom was home, finally home, tired from a long shift waitressing. Evangeline rushed to her, touched her huge purse, asking with her eyes if she could peek in. She never knew what she might find: sandwiches, fruit, a monster slab of bloody prime rib. This time it was cake, chocolate cake smashed from travel, with runny frosting that peeled off with the wrap. Evangeline had been hoping for that. But before she could dig in, her mother led her to the couch, wrapped her arms around her—nuzzling her neck, surrounding her in the dark-earth scents of sweat and cigarettes and grilled meat—and whispered, “I could just gobble you up.” And having her mother’s lips and breath on her like that was a thousand times better than cake.

  Even now, Evangeline could feel her mother’s arms around her, how they’d created an oasis of safety, had turned a dark world bright with love. But dredging up this tired old scene was a mistake. It only reminded her of the deserted mobile home, of a mother who—no longer in love with her daughter—had decided to leave her behind.

  She had no sense anyone was near until a voice said, “Want one?” She twisted to see two boys, the tall good-looking one offering her a beer. She took it and smiled as if at ease, reminding herself that this area of the park was secluded and the rising darkness added another layer of isolation. Even in a town where the local paper ran headlines like “Blueberries Stolen Off Patio Table,” shit could happen.

  “I’m Daniel,” the one with the beer said. He had to be over six feet, with dark hair and eyes, features so strong and symmetrical and chiseled that he held no appeal for Evangeline. After her mom’s boyfriend Matt, she distrusted handsomeness of this magnitude.

  The shorter boy, thin and pale, with brown hair that looked home-cut, stood with his hands jammed in the pockets of his baggy shorts. He glanced up, nodded a little and said, “Jonah.”

  “Hey,” she said.

  “You got a name?” Daniel said, and she disliked him more for this. She wasn’t about to give her real name, not in this hidden spot at the edge of a cliff, the waves breaking below. “Call me Red,” she said.

  She climbed off the table and got her feet beneath her. Everything was fine, it was, but the ground seemed to be rolling, and though she had to be twenty feet from the edge, she worried she might fall. “It’s getting cold,” she said. “Think I’ll find someplace out of the breeze.”

  The boys followed her, and as soon as the trees blocked the wind, as soon as there was no edge or distant islands, no broad night sky or crashing waves, they seemed like nothing more than high-school guys chatting up a girl, and Evangeline managed to relax. They found a bench that couldn’t be seen from the lot, in case the sheriff cruised through. The boys sat and Evangeline leaned against a scrubby pine, listening to them talk. Though, really, Daniel did all the talking.

  They were starting their senior year. Daniel had plans—college and football, then maybe law school and possibly politics. The Senate sounded interesting. He talked on, never once asking Evangeline about herself. She didn’t mind. She preferred to hold back, to watch for a while. It never took long to figure out what made people tick, their vulnerabilities and flash points.

  When you were homeless, when your life had led you to do things you needed to forget, you learned to read people, to dodge their manipulations and execute your own. Everyone had a favorite act, and Daniel’s was his repertoire of cute, self-effacing stories: “I was such a dumbshit, the first time my dad let me drive the car alone, I burned out the parking brake. Smoking and screeching and I just kept going . . .

  “And then the principal said, ‘Mr. Balch, I presume there’s a reason—a respectable reason—your pants are on inside out.’”

  Evangeline didn’t much care for boys who put on shows, but she supposed Daniel couldn’t help that he was popular and athletic, a ridiculously handsome boy who lived life assuming he’d be well received. He could afford to be stupid about her. If he ever needed a girl like her, there’d be no absence of contenders. Daniel Balch would always have girls and friends and opportunities. That’s what life held for him.

  But Jonah, the boy lurking in Daniel’s shadow, was different. She knew him instantly: his worn work boots and bad haircut, his hypervigilance and careful smiles, the nervous jiggling of his foot and the way his eyes darted away whenever they caught hers. The only time he talked was when Evangeline said she would never, ever get tired of all the deer and rabbits on the trails.

  He said his little sister, Nells, was “a crazy animal girl too.”

  She and Jonah were street dogs to Daniel’s pampered pet. She wondered if Jonah had spent time in foster care as she had when she was ten. She guessed he understood that particular aloneness, its daily humiliations. If not foster care, some other variant of suffering. She and Jonah had to fight for everything decent in their lives, and even then it could so easily be taken away. When she decided to join the boys on the bench, she slid next to Jonah rather than Daniel. It was like sliding in beside herself.

  An hour later, she sat between the boys in Jonah’s truck and asked to be let off at the paper mill. Daniel hopped out. Before Evangeline followed, she leaned over and kissed Jonah’s cheek. The look on both boys’ faces—one of pure stupefaction—wasn’t the reason she kissed Jonah, but it would have been reason enough.

  * * *

  —

  EVANGELINE SHIFTED HER PACK TO HER OTHER SHOULDER, remembering her final glance back that September night, the one before she’d trotted into the woods like the wild thing she was. Jonah’s look of shock had transformed. His face was lit as if by an inner sun, the picture of a pure and startled awe.

  She had felt her life turning in that moment. Only she’d never have guessed that it would take the direction it did. Now she scanned the hill above the town and headed toward the patch of darkness in its center. If she didn’t lose her way,
she’d be there within the hour.

  How strange it was to know two boys who had died so violently. She wondered if they lingered in her path, if it made sense to be heading toward their ghosts rather than away.

  7

  Day of My Death

  It’s twelve fifteen in the morning. I’ll be dead in a few hours, four at the most. I’m not looking for pity. It’s just how things are.

  I’m wearing lug-soled boots and canvas work pants, lying on top of my bed, a hard-sprung twin pressed against a wall. Something rattles and bangs outside. It’s nothing, just the wind knocking over a rake. My mom and little sister are asleep in their rooms. I suppose Mom could be awake with the racket, but I doubt it, not after her long day. And I’d know if Nells was. If you took out a wall, our beds would be touching. They’ll figure out later that I said good-bye to them a few hours back.

  It’s been ten days since I met Red. The first time she looked at me, all I could think was, Now, that girl’s eyes can slice a guy wide open. There was this crazy relief in being seen like that, in believing that Red knew me. Later, when her lips touched my cheek, in front of Daniel no less, it burned so much that spot had to be glowing like some holy tattoo.

  You couldn’t touch that girl without feeling your skin had disappeared, that you’d turned to water and flowed into a warm ocean. I’d give anything to touch Red one last time, to place a fingertip at the pulse of her throat, feel her life there, right there, hot and beating and contained. She’s alive, that girl. So much she still believes is possible.

  That’s why I’m using these last few hours to figure things out. For her. She needs to know she’s not to blame. I’ve only got my thoughts now, and I’m hoping that somehow they’ll make their way to her. Not that I could begin to tell you in what world that would really happen, but it’s pretty hard not to believe in unknown realms when that’s exactly where you’re heading.