After Life

by Rhian Ellis

  “Listen,” she said, whispering. “Don’t take this the wrong way. But get a haircut and buy some new clothes before you hang out your sign. You don’t want your customers thinking you’re hard up. Do you?”

  I shook my head, wrenched myself from her grasp, and fled.

  My mother lent me her wood-burning kit, and I found a small pine board behind the garage. I traced my name in pencil several times before I got it right, then carefully burned it in. NAOMI ASH, MEDIUM, it said, in block letters.

  For the first season I was registered, I lived with my mother and shared her séance room. She only gave a few readings on her busiest days, and my business was slow at first, so it wasn’t difficult to schedule around each other. I made sure I signed up for every message service and every Circle Night I could, and slowly got more customers. When I wasn’t busy, I hung around on the porch of the Silverwood Hotel. It was the social center of Train Line, late summer evenings, and we’d play cards and listen to the band play by the lake and watch bats swoop down. That was where I first met Ron, although at the time he lived in Cleveland and was only visiting for the summer. I met an aura reader there, too, and we became good friends, despite my mother’s disapproval. His name was Nelson Karp and he was not very handsome. His eyes bugged out. But we soon became allies, making fun of the obnoxious tourists behind their backs and taking picnic lunches out on the lake. Nelson had invented his own language, and he taught me some of the words.

  “Wribble kloffer,” he said to me one day, as I was rowing the boat.

  Wribble, he said, meant “beautiful.” Kloffer meant “woman.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  But he was shy, or else very perceptive, because he didn’t push it any further. On the last day before he left to go back to college, he gave me a yellow rose and said, “I tried to be a gentleman, but it wasn’t easy.”

  I kissed his thin cheek. “Thank you,” I said.

  He blushed a little and stared intently at something in the distance behind me. “I know you’re not into this, but you really do have the most amazing aura I’ve ever seen. It’s pink with violet and yellow flecks. You should wear pink.”

  “Thank you,” I said again.

  When Nelson came back the next summer, he brought a friend.

  “Naomi,” said Nelson, blinking his large blue eyes and wiping his skinny palms on his shirt. “Meet my friend Peter Morton.”

  Though they don’t often admit it, let alone advertise it, it’s fairly common for state police and sheriff’s departments to hire “psychics” to help out with difficult investigations. Usually these are missing-persons cases rather than regular criminal ones, since psychic evidence doesn’t fly well in court. But Winnie Sandox—my mother’s nemesis—often bragged that she worked with the FBI on a famous child-kidnapping case, and once Robin Blackthorn helped to track down members of a local drug ring. Mediums could make a lot of money this way, or at least get publicity. Or so I’d heard. Still, I was surprised when Officer Peterson called me up, saying he was looking for a medium to help with the investigation.

  “I don’t really have much experience with that kind of thing,” I said, startled. I’d been watching television, a nature show. Lately, I’d seen quite a bit of television. For the last day or two, ever since my mother had called in the middle of the night, I’d felt nervous and restless, and the dull noise and flicker of it soothed me. On the screen, a herd of gazelles stampeded by.

  “Well, actually, your mother’s the one we were looking for. Madame Gail—Galina Ash, right? The one on the radio.”

  “Um, yes.”

  “Is she out of town or something? We’ve been trying to get a hold of her for a couple of days, and there’s no answer. There’s no answering machine, either.”

  “She takes the phone off the hook a lot.”

  “Uh-huh. Well, do you think you could get her a message? Tell her we’d like her help, and that she should call Officer Peterson or Officer Ten Brink at the state police department. ASAP.”

  “ASAP,” I repeated.

  “That’s right,” he said. “So how’s it going at the library?”

  “Pretty uneventful.”

  “You must like it that way.”

  “I do.”

  “Good. Good. You pass that message on to your mother. I can trust you, can’t I?”

  “Of course.” On the television, a leopard came out of nowhere and pulled down one of the gazelles. They showed it again, in slow motion. “Officer Peterson?”

  “Yes, Naomi?”

  “Can I ask you a question?”

  “That depends. What is it?”

  I took a deep breath. The leopard was eating the gazelle now, his muzzle-fur spiky with blood. “Didn’t you already talk to my mother? I—I thought I saw you at her house.”

  Peterson’s voice dropped an octave. “Were you following me, Naomi?”

  “No. I just—”

  “You were following me. I saw you.” He paused, and I could hear his beard stubble scrape across the receiver. “But to answer your question: that’s none of your business, Miss Ash.”

  “All right. Good-bye.”

  “As it happens,” said Peterson, “your mother wasn’t available, but I had a nice chat with the man who answered the door. His name, if I remember correctly, was Trevor, or Troy or something.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Curiosity satisfied, Miss Ash?”

  I hung up. God, I thought. What an awful person.

  I put on my windbreaker and walked over to my mother’s. It was drizzling a fine, sleety rain. Talking to Officer Peterson had made me warm, as if I’d had something hot to drink. The back of my neck itched with sweat. He had taken a dislike to me, for some reason. This shouldn’t have bothered me, but it did, because his hostility had come out of nowhere. It was unfair, I thought. It was unprofessional. He reminded me of those leering boys from high school, boys who didn’t even know me, who catcalled and made ironic kissy lips when I walked past them. And I felt as I did then: befuddled and humiliated. Rain soaked through my stupid cloth shoes.

  A limousine was parked out in front of my mother’s house, taking up most of the width of Rochester Street. Its driver snoozed in the front seat. I walked around it and went in the front door, making enough noise to let her know I was there, then sat down to wait for her in the kitchen.

  She came in about twenty minutes later, dressed in a blue satin gown and matching nail polish. “Newlyweds!” she said. “Did they expect me to doom and gloom them? Lucky thing they’re a good match, or I’d have had to lie. So what are you doing here?”

  I told her about Officer Peterson’s message. She stared at the refrigerator a moment, then opened it and took out a bottle of wine. It was actually less a bottle than a jug, a squat green one with a small round handle at its neck, and it was two-thirds empty.

  “My goodness,” she said. “Have some? We ought to celebrate.”

  “Sure.”

  She poured wine into two plastic tumblers. I sipped at mine; it was cold and dank. I remembered the tumblers from when I was a child. We’d brought them from New Orleans, God knows why. Maybe my mother thought we might have needed them on the bus. They made me sad whenever I saw them.

  “Well,” I said. “Are you going to do it?”

  “I am, I guess. It’s what I wanted.” She gave me a weak smile. “But suddenly, I’m nervous. Do you think I should?”

  “Why not?”

  She shrugged her big satin shoulder. “I don’t know. It seems like a very large undertaking, all of a sudden.”

  I drank more wine, ransacking my mind for ways to talk her out of it. Appallingly, I had finished the glass almost before I realized what I was doing. I glanced at my mother to see if she’d noticed. She hadn’t. She was drinking her own wine with careful determination, frowning, as if it were a potent medicine.

  “Devil and the deep blue sea,” she mused. “If I don’t do it, my career could well be over. But if I do it, and
fail miserably…”

  She peeled back some foil from a pan of cake on the table and stabbed at a piece with a fork. If only Peterson had called me instead, I thought, a little jealously, my problems would be solved….

  “Well,” I said. A plan was forming in my head, almost as I was speaking. “I have an idea. If you’re interested.”

  She looked at me expectantly, her broad cheeks already pink with wine.

  “I’d like to help you. I know they didn’t ask me, they asked you, and I wouldn’t take any credit. But if we put our heads together…I’m sure we’d come up with something. Anyway, it wouldn’t hurt.”

  She drank the rest of her wine. Say yes, I begged silently.

  “I didn’t think you cared about any of this,” she said.

  “I want to help you.”

  “Hmm,” she said. “You’re jealous, aren’t you? It’s all right. I’d be too.” She paused a long moment, and then went on. “Well, see, I have made contact with the spirit.”

  My stomach leapt. “You have?”

  She nodded.

  “Then who…?”

  “That’s the thing. I don’t know. He doesn’t even know. Have you ever heard of such a thing? The spirit seems to have forgotten who he is.”

  She told me how it happened: That morning, she was coming home from shopping in Wallamee when she had the urge to drive past the excavation site again. She was just going to park and meditate a little, but instead she found herself getting out of the car and walking down the rutted path toward the lake. She’d only gone about thirty feet when she tripped and fell. She hit her knee on a rock, and she must have whacked a nerve because a sudden, excruciating pain exploded in her, and she saw stars and thought she was going to faint. Almost as suddenly the pain ebbed, and as she sat there gripping her knee and wondering if she’d ever get up again, she heard a voice.

  Use the Ouija, it said.

  Hitting her knee like that must have done something to her mind, made it more receptive, she said, because she’d visited the site several times and hadn’t heard peep one, but this voice was loud as anything. Still, she couldn’t believe the spirit would say that.

  What? she asked it.

  Use the Ouija.

  After that, nothing. My mother sat there for a while and tried to gather her bearings. The fall had taken so much out of her that she had to crawl back to the car on her hands and knees, and pull herself up by the door handle.

  “Oh, my,” I said.

  “Thank goodness no one drove past.”

  Back home, she dug a Ouija board and a planchette out of my old bedroom closet and took it down to the kitchen. She taped the pictures of the reconstructed head onto the planchette, drank a few glasses of wine, then got down to business. At first she got a lot of garbage: random letters and a few three-letter words: DIP, BRA. Then she asked the spirit straight out, What’s your name? And the planchette sprung into action.

  DON’T KNOW, it said.

  Are you a man or a woman?

  NO ONE NO ONE NO ONE.

  “And then,” said my mother, “when I asked what happened to him—I’m presuming it’s a he, since that’s what the police say, and he certainly seems masculine—the planchette flew off the table and smashed against the wall. The legs broke off. I had to tape them up. See?” She reached behind the row of coffee and flour tins on her counter and showed me the planchette. Each of its three legs wore a bandage of masking tape. She put it back.

  “More wine?” she asked. “I’m feeling decadent.”

  “No thanks.”

  She filled her tumbler to the top and stood there to drink it, holding on to the edge of the sink. “What I’ve come up with so far won’t be enough for the police, that’s for sure. Now that I have a sense for it, I’m sure I’ll contact the spirit again. But I need a name.”

  “You need a name,” I agreed.

  She closed her eyes and drank.

  Was this all a lie? It was so hard to tell with my mother; her lies and truths were constantly masquerading as each other. You could lift up one of her lies and find a truth beneath it, then find beneath that truth another lie, and spend your whole life pulling away layers and never get to the bottom of it. How easy, I realized, it is to become paranoid, to see every story as a trap for you to fall into, every person as a leering high school boy.

  “I love you, Mama,” I said.

  She opened her eyes and gave me a puzzled smile. “I love you, too,” she said.

  Was I drunk? I didn’t know. The room was hot and shimmered. My mother, with her glowing face and bright-blue dress, seemed huge, monumental: big enough, even, to hide in.

  “I want to help you,” I told her again. My eyes were springing small invisible tears.

  She nodded. “Well, then, I suppose we can work together. It can’t hurt, can it?”

  I could only say no.

  7

  there’d always been deer heads in the ha-ha

  This is what I couldn’t help but wonder: how many people remembered Peter Morton?

  I did, and my mother probably did, too. She never forgot anyone, and usually remembered their birthdays, the names of their children and pets, and could do a good imitation of them, too, with accents and gestures and favorite sayings. Dave the Alien didn’t know Peter well, but well enough to remember that I was his girlfriend, so that counted. Who else?

  His family, of course. They were from Oregon: Portland and Eugene. His father died when Peter was in high school; his mother remarried a few years later. There was an older sister. I’d never met them, but from Peter’s descriptions I imagined them as a brilliant, good-looking, somewhat cold family. Their houses were full of pianos and typewriters and Oriental rugs, and small white-paned windows without screens. I imagined coffee mugs left on bookshelves and desks that folded down out of the wall. It rained a lot in Oregon, the fine kind of rain, after which the sun came out but didn’t burn. His mother was the pianist. Both the children took lessons, and they both turned out to be accomplished, though lazy, musicians. The dead father had been a doctor, an anesthesiologist, who left them lots of money, though the family had plenty already. Peter was angry with his mother for remarrying, and his sister was angry at him for being angry. His mother called once or twice during the time I knew Peter, but his sister didn’t. They had stopped speaking years before.

  Some months after Peter died, his mother sent him a birthday card. In it was a photograph of her with her new husband, a ruddy, fat man, and a collection of blond stepchildren. The card itself had a picture of a South American blanket on the front, and nothing printed on the inside, but his mother had written Happy Birthday, Petie, in a precise, excruciating backhand. I resealed the envelope and sent it back to her, with a note telling her the same story I’d told everyone else: that he’d dumped me and left Train Line with no forwarding address. The following summer, when I went to Cape Cod with my mother, I sent her a typed postcard with Peter’s faked signature, telling her he was working as a waiter and had met this cool Mexican girl, and they were going to the Yucatán together. He’d had a fantasy about doing this, I knew. I remembered standing in front of a mailbox with my shoes full of sand, holding the postcard over the slot before finally dropping it in. Seagulls cried above me. It was probably the stupidest thing I’d ever done. To my surprise and immense relief, I hadn’t heard from her since.

  Peter lived in Train Line for a year and a half. Probably half the people who were here then were still around, at least now and then; some, like Edgar Phinney, had died, others, like Nelson Karp, had moved on. Troy would remember Peter; he never forgot anything. Teeny Lawrence, too. She’d wanted to date Peter at one time, though she wasn’t his type at all. Her mother, Darva, might also remember him. How about the others, Robin and Winnie Sandox and Grace? Or Ferd at the grocery store, or the women who worked in the cafeteria? Could ten years erase a not-very-significant someone from your mind?

  The answer, I suspected, was maybe.

  My m
other called Officer Peterson the next morning. He seemed pleased that she’d agreed to work with him, less pleased that I was going to be involved.

  “I didn’t plan on hiring the entire Ziegfeld Follies,” he told her. “This is a low-key thing, all right? Just a little consulting.”

  “Don’t worry,” my mother said. “My daughter’s very low-key.”

  They discussed particulars. My mother wouldn’t be paid, but if her help proved useful she’d receive 50 percent of any reward money. There was often reward money involved in missing persons cases, sometimes a great deal. My mother hadn’t thought of this before. “You, of course, would get half of my share,” she said generously. She’d called me at the library right after she talked to the police. I could hear her breathing heavily into the receiver. She always breathed heavily when she talked about money.

  “Oh, Mama, please.”

  “I’m just being practical,” she said. She told me we had an appointment to meet with Officer Peterson at the state forensics lab in Hollington at the end of the week. “We’ll be able to see the actual bones! And touch them, too, I hope. I told Peterson it would be helpful if he lent me a bone or two to meditate on, but he said that was out of his jurisdiction. Maybe there’ll be a little one I can slip into my pocketbook.”

  We’d try the Ouija again right after our trip to the lab, when the “vibrations” were still fresh.

  “That sounds good,” I said. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d used the Ouija. High school? Junior high?

  “I’m glad you’ll be there,” said my mother. “I’m too old for this.”

  Later that afternoon I took Vivian to Maxwell’s for french fries and Coke, to reward her for getting a hundred on her spelling test. We were speaking again, but not much. As we walked, it occurred to me that one day Vivian would be too old for a babysitter, and there would be no reason for us to see each other. Maybe we could be friends, I thought, consoling myself. I pictured a teenaged Vivian telling me about her latest boyfriend, us giggling over sundaes at her favorite hangout—but the girl I imagined was not Vivian, and the laughing confidante was nothing like me.