After Life

by Rhian Ellis

  The only reason murder was suspected, the news stories said, was because of the place the body was buried. How could a body show up there by accident? One theory entertained was that the man had drowned in a bog years before, and that the land had dried up since. That theory only lasted a day or so, until Mr. Hennessey, owner of the property, said that the clearing had been exactly the same since he bought it in 1954, and no one could have drowned in it then unless they’d gone and dug themselves in.

  5

  cryptesthesia

  I was working in the library on Friday morning when a police officer came around to talk. It was only nine-thirty, so the library wasn’t open yet, but from where I sat at my desk I could see him come up the stone walkway. He was a small young man with a pale stubble of hair. I unlocked the door and let him in.

  “Miss Ash?” he said, holding out his hand. “Officer Peterson. I’ve been going around talking to folks this morning. We’re doing a little investigation across the lake there.” He gestured with his head. His hair was so short you could see right through to his skull, which was lumpy and coarse. “Would it be all right if I came in?”

  “Sure,” I said, shutting the door behind him. “We can sit in there.” I showed him into the reading room and sat down in one of the big wicker chairs.

  “This place is real old, isn’t it?” said Officer Peterson. He held his hat behind his back and peered at the spirit photographs on the walls. He stared for a long time at one by a man named Mr. Skoog; it was of two normal men shaking hands, with the tiny face of Edgar Allan Poe looking over one man’s shoulder. The floorboards squeaked under Officer Peterson’s feet. The reading room was my favorite place in Train Line. It had tall windows and wicker chairs with feather cushions and two large oak tables with lamps on them.

  “It was built in nineteen twenty-five.”

  “That’s old.” Officer Peterson looked about twenty-two. His face was still stuccoed with acne.

  He asked me what my job entailed, exactly, and said that a couple of people had told him I might be a good person to talk to. Was it true that I saw a lot of the people who came through Train Line?

  “Yes, I guess so. Though I don’t necessarily look at them.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I’m a librarian. I mostly only notice people who annoy me.”

  He laughed a little at this, unsure if he was supposed to. “But you worked at the gatehouse, too.”

  “That was a few years ago.”

  “We’re talking about a few years ago.”

  “Yes, then.”

  “Does anyone stand out in your mind? Anything odd or peculiar about anyone?”

  From one of the windows I could see the gatehouse, just down the hill from the library. The geraniums in its window boxes were dead. I tried to think.

  “Well, you know, an awful lot of strange people come through here.”

  “For example?”

  “There was man who had conspiracy theories. He’d hang around the gatehouse all day, telling me things. The government had a file on him, the army flew over his house every day in planes undetectable by radar.”

  “Describe him.” Officer Peterson sat down and took a little notebook out of his pocket. He held a pencil in an odd way, between his thumb and pointer finger.

  “Short, muscular. He had a tiny ponytail. Dark hair. Maybe thirty. He talked too fast. I think his name was Paul.”

  “And this was…?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Eleven or twelve years ago.”

  “Do you know what happened to this guy?”

  I shook my head. “People come and go all the time here. If I’d never seen him again I wouldn’t think anything of it. I don’t think anyone would.” This was true. When Peter went missing, no one in Train Line seemed to notice. That hadn’t surprised me, but I’d expected Peter’s family would come looking. For years I waited for them, my gut lurching every time the phone rang, but I’d never heard from them. I rubbed my forehead, pretending to think about Paul. “I might have seen him two summers in a row.”

  “But only in the summers.”

  “Not many people are around in winter.”

  “Would you call this winter?”

  Startled, I turned and looked out the window again. “I don’t know. Yes, I guess I would. Everyone’s left for the year. Or a lot of people have. More will leave before Christmas.”

  “But you don’t leave.”

  “No.”

  “How about the rest of your…business? Any unusual customers?”

  “That’s private.”

  He nodded slowly, marking that down in his book. “Okay, then. Anything else you recall, unrelated to business?”

  I racked my brains. I told him about the old Australian woman who claimed she was walking around the world, and how after she’d been lurking around for three days someone found her sleeping under a bush behind the lecture hall. I told him about the man who called up the main office and told them he was about to come down with a gun and shoot everyone, because we were all Satan worshippers. He said he’d heard about that one.

  “How long have you lived here?”

  “Twenty-one years.”

  “Since you were real little.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’ve never left?”

  “Not for any length of time. I went to Cape Cod with my mother once, and some other little trips like that.”

  “Do you like it here?”

  “I’m not sure what that has to do with your investigation.”

  He shrugged. “It probably doesn’t have anything to do with it. I’m just trying to get to know you. Is that all right?”

  “That’s fine,” I said. Officer Peterson, I noticed, had wide, almost beautiful shoulders, and a narrow girlish waist. I came close to imagining putting my hands around it, then stopped myself.

  “Good. So, do you like it here?”

  “I do.”

  “What do you do for fun?”

  “I have friends. I go for walks. I read books.”

  “No hobbies?”

  I did not understand why he was asking me these questions. They made me irritated and hot. I told him about Vivian and my mother and the details of my job. While he walked around the reading room I explained the theories behind spirit photography. He seemed to get bored with me all at once.

  “I guess I’ve taken up enough of your time.” He tucked his pencil in his pocket but made no move to go. “So,” he said. “So tell me something.”

  “Yes?”

  “Is this all for real?”

  “This?”

  “This whole town. Is it real? Or is it all fakers?”

  I looked at him right in the eyes. “It’s real,” I said. “It’s as real as you are.”

  After Officer Peterson left, I couldn’t concentrate enough to read. I still had an hour before the library had to be open, so I locked up and went to the cafeteria for a cup of coffee.

  CLOSED! said an index card taped to the screen door, BACK IN FIFTEEN MINS.

  So I took a walk up the path that ran around the edge of Train Line, behind the last row of cottages and through the woods. The trees were tall there, huge spreading firs and maples. It was, supposedly, one of the few stands of virgin woods in the county. It smelled delicious: damp, fresh, but decayed. This path connected up with the one that led to Illumination Stump, where message services were held in summer, but I took another branch, one that led to the pet cemetery.

  It always struck me as strange that there was a pet cemetery in Train Line, but no cemetery for people. When people died in town, they were either sent back to where they came from—lots of people had houses somewhere else, many in Ohio, for some reason, and many in Canada—or were buried in Wallamee. Spiritualists were fond of cremation, too, and of scattering their ashes. But pets could stay.

  The paths in the pet cemetery were arranged in a series of loops, with some loops the exclusive domain of one family. The Lawren
ces had numberless German shepherds, and they were all here, each under its own concrete tombstone. Their names had been scratched with a stick into the wet cement, CINDER, 1966–1972; BARBARELLA, 1979–1982 (hit by a car; I remembered that); POOPER 1976–1988. I’d never had a pet, myself, so I hadn’t buried anything here. One of the minor controversies at Train Line was whether there are animals on the spirit plane. Most of the mediums were—like my mother—softhearted where animals were concerned, and believed there are. I tended to believe that spirit is a human thing, exclusively, but opening my mouth on that subject would gain me no friends.

  I walked around, checking to see if there were any new graves. There was one, a very small one marked with a tongue-depressor cross, under a spiraea bush off the main path. I knelt down to take a look at it. SNIPPY it said, in ballpoint-pen ink. 1996–1998. Oh, no.

  Snippy was Jenny’s bird, a fat green-and-yellow budgie. I didn’t like birds, birds in cages especially, and Snippy in particular. Jenny kept it in her room most of the time, but sometimes she’d bring it downstairs and let it fly around the living room, where it would smash into lamps and try to attack its reflection in the mirror, then leave white streaks across the glass. And it screamed. Jenny was devoted to it. She thought the bird was cute, the way it screeched when we turned the radio on (“Oh, listen! Snippy’s singing!”). Most of the time I wanted to kill it. If it was absolutely still and quiet I could see how you might call it “cute,” with its little tilted head and its pointy little beak, but it had no purpose other than to make noise. Once when it wouldn’t shut up I put its cage in the closet, and then forgot about it and left for the day. Jenny never mentioned it, but I wondered what she did when she came home and found it gone.

  But now Snippy was dead. I hadn’t even known it was sick. I was up before Jenny so I hadn’t seen her this morning—I was, in fact, avoiding her—but she must have buried the bird sometime since. The arm of the tongue-depressor cross was stapled on. It must have been my stapler, and the tongue depressors Ron’s. What a tiny, careful grave. Of course, there was something absurd about it—tongue depressors!—but nevertheless it gave me a bad feeling. When I stood back up again I felt dizzy, and the trees spun. The pet cemetery, I decided, was not charming at all, but tragic. It made me think of something Peter used to ask me, something he brought up often. How come, he asked, spiritualists get so upset when someone dies? Why do they care at all? If it’s just a “change of form,” and all that? Usually I told him, we don’t get that upset. But once in a while I said, well, we can’t help it, we can’t help but miss the body sometimes.

  “So, there is no death, but death is sad,” said Peter. “They call that a paradox in my neck of the woods.”

  “You and your pair o’ ducks,” I said.

  I was walking back toward town when I spotted someone up the road ahead of me. I slowed down, trying to figure out who it was. It didn’t take long—he was wearing a cop uniform. My friend Peterson.

  He was reading his notes, his head bent over his notebook, walking distractedly along Seneca Street. He scratched his pimply cheek, stopped, and looked around. I stepped behind a tree. I didn’t want him to think I was following him.

  But I did follow him, all the way down Seneca and into Ferd’s Groc-n-Stop. When he’d been in there five minutes or so, I went inside and bought a box of doughnuts, pretending not to notice him. He was sitting at the back counter with a cup of coffee, laughing it up with the old guys.

  From the benches outside the Forest Temple, which was next door to the grocery store, I had a good view of the front entrance. I sat there, eating a doughnut, until Officer Peterson came out. An old guy came with him, and pointed him down Seneca Street toward Fox. He shook the old guy’s hand and walked off. At Erie Street he turned right, then disappeared into the candle shop. It would look funny if I hung around outside, so I took a slow walk around the block, saying hello to Ron as he jogged by, his wire-rimmed glasses bouncing on his nose.

  “You have a message on the answering machine!” he called back to me. “Don’t forget to check it!”

  “Thanks!”

  I spotted Peterson walking resolutely down Fox Street. He went right past my house, around the cafeteria, and up Rochester Street. He stopped about halfway down, then checked his notes. He walked a few more feet, slowed down, looked both ways, then turned in at my mother’s front gate.

  My mother’s!

  I went back home. Jenny was nowhere around. The message on the answering machine, it turned out, was from Dave the Alien.

  “Naomi! Sorry I missed you. Could you be at work already?” His voice sounded artificially energetic. “I know it’s, ah, short notice, but how would you like to come over to my place for, ah, dinner? You won’t have to bring anything or even give me a reading”—I cringed—“or, well, whatever. You have to eat, right? So you might as well. Give me a call or something.”

  Suddenly I noticed that I had a terrible headache. I washed my hands in cold water, which sometimes helped, and thought that maybe I would just lie on the sofa the rest of the day. I could put a sign on the door of the library: GONE HOME SICK. I never took sick days.

  Then I thought of Officer Peterson, and how he could walk by and see the sign on the library door and think he rattled me so much I just fell to pieces and had to go home. So instead I took four aspirin and a glass of water, went back to the library, and slept at my desk until three-thirty. I only woke up once, when the mailman came with the gross of index cards I’d ordered.

  “Thank God it’s Friday, huh?” he said, dropping the box on my desk with a bang.

  When I was a child, I believed in everything, without even trying. But in the years after my grandmother died, I found faith to be a trickier thing, something that could wriggle away the minute I had my hands around it, like a wild animal. It wasn’t a sudden transformation. I gradually grew embarrassed of my mother and her clothes and her exotic mediumship. When we first arrived in Train Line, she was exclusively a trance medium: no more trumpet, no more slate, no more gusts of perfume or ghostly voices. She’d fall down on the table with a thump, her mouth hanging open, groaning like a cow with a stomachache. In a minute or two she’d sit up, but it wouldn’t be her—spirits would be controlling her, speaking through her. At first I thought it was scary but important; later I came to see it as gross, indiscreet, and my distaste evolved into skepticism. I sulked in my room when she held home circles and told her I was going to become a news anchor when I grew up. She laughed at me—literally laughed—and said I had to be a blonde. I threw my shoes at her.

  At school in Wallamee I wanted clean-cut, wholesome-looking friends. I fell in love with fresh air and tennis shoes and Baptists. I had a friend named Becky Bell, who taught me Sunday school songs. But I was known as the spooky girl, the girl with the spooky mom who wore spooky clothes. In a small town a reputation like this will stay with you for the rest of your life, no matter what you do. They’d never, ever let me on the softball team, even if I could hit the ball, which I couldn’t. By the time I was fourteen I realized I needed to try a new tack: capitalize on what I had. I told my friends—a handful of misfit girls—that I would hold a séance.

  After school one afternoon, we met in the cemetery behind Wallamee Junior High. It was March and the grass was still patched with wet gray snow. The sky was clear blue and the wind was cold. Recently, a teacher in our school had died, a man named Mr. McGlynn who taught history and was famous for his meanness. He just didn’t come to school one day, or the next, and when some other teachers went to his house to look for him—he was divorced and lived alone—they found him lying on the floor, dead, surrounded by gin bottles. None of us had had a class with Mr. McGlynn, but the drama of his life and death intrigued us. Other students told us about Mr. McGlynn’s shaky hands, the alcohol on his breath; how the import of these details wasn’t noticed until it was too late. The poor man was buried right out behind the school.

  We sat in a circle, about twenty feet
from the fresh mound of dirt over Mr. McGlynn. There was no stone there yet, just a small metal sign from the funeral home and piles of flowers from Wallamee Junior High. I realized that I didn’t really think Mr. McGlynn would show up and that I had backed myself into a corner: my friends expected a show. All the tricks I knew—the spying confederates, the books of information on all the regular customers, the universal truths that sound like amazing insights—couldn’t help me now. Still, there was no backing out of it. One of my friends, a chubby girl named Sharon who had a lazy eye, started to cry as soon as we sat down.

  “It’s all right, Shar,” said my friends, patting her arm. They were nice girls, sensitive and awkward and benign. We waited until Sharon got herself together. I felt the damp ground soak through my skirt and my underpants. We held hands and closed our eyes.

  I knew the lingo. If nothing else, that impressed my impressionable friends. I said my mother’s prayer, And there is no Death, and there are no Dead, etcetera, and asked that we all keep ourselves hospitable to the spirits surrounding us. They liked that, I think—hospitable—as if we were part inn, part hospital, opening our doors to dead Mr. McGlynn. After a few minutes of silence, I threw my head back and started talking.

  “He’s with us,” I said.

  Sharon began to moan and shake.

  I told them that he was glad he was through teaching, that he hated it, and he hated all the kids, too. Just the loud, popular kids, actually; he liked the quiet students. I told them that he said we should be nicer to Miss Ludlum, the frail, frightened young woman who taught us typing, because she’d had a tragic life. I hinted at miscarriages. I went on a long time. I said that Donna, my skinny, odd-looking friend, would find true love before any of us, and that Marie would have a difficult life but would be wildly successful one day. I told them that Mr. McGlynn wanted us to study more in history. They bought it all.