After Life

by Rhian Ellis

  I reached for a bone. Close up, it actually did look like a bone, a tiny one. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do, so I held it in my gloved fist and gazed out into space, frowning. Peter’s hand! I’d loved his hands. Square, broad, fine black hairs, scraggly cuticles. It seemed impossible that this was all that was left of them; in fact, it seemed impossible that they could be Peter’s, and that he was dead. Obviously I’d been fooled, somehow. The lab slipped out of focus.

  “…left-handed, they think,” Peterson was saying, and my mother said, “How on earth can they tell that?” and Peterson said, “Dominant hand’s usually bigger,” and I was on my knees on the hard floor.

  “Whoop,” said Peterson. He slid his hand under my arm and steadied me.

  “Sorry…I…um.”

  “What’s wrong? What’s wrong?” cried my mother. She knelt down and looked me in the face.

  “Lost my balance,” I said. “Here.” I handed her the bone, hauled myself up—with Peterson’s fingers digging into the soft flesh under my arm—and made a controlled lunge toward the nearest sink. I vomited hugely into it.

  “Did you see something? She saw something,” my mother said.

  Would an innocent person have vomited in this situation? I wasn’t sure. I hung over the sink, coughing and running water, in order to give myself some time to think. Had I reacted too strongly? Maybe. Maybe I had. The bones weren’t disgusting, weren’t scary at all.

  “Naomi…?” My mother put her hand on my back.

  “He was buried facedown,” I said.

  Though at the time I could not have said why I revealed this, why I chose a detail so telling and possibly dangerous, it was clear to me later. A good medium will always tell you something true before telling you something less than true—it only takes one true sail to float your ship of lies around the world. If you tell someone his grandmother’s maiden name, he will listen to the rest of your message with an open heart, even if it’s unmitigated nonsense. A medium ought to be a mistress of timing, a duchess of pill-sugaring, a queen of liars.

  “I had a vision,” I said. “He was face down.”

  My mother handed me some Kleenex from her purse, then turned to Officer Peterson. “Is this true?”

  “Well, I’m not sure I can disclose that information.” He scratched his bristly head. My vomiting seemed to have impressed him. “I mean, I don’t know offhand. That might be privileged information.”

  “Write it down, then,” said my mother. “We might be getting somewhere.”

  Peterson dutifully scribbled something on his pad, then asked, “All right. Anything else?”

  “Well…” said my mother. “I had a vague impression of—I know this sounds strange—a sort of feeling of money. Perhaps a lot of money passed through this man’s hands? Or maybe he was killed for money. He might have been a rich man, or a bookie. Or deep in debt.”

  “That wouldn’t surprise me,” said Peterson.

  I washed my face with cold water. What had I done? Perhaps nothing. Perhaps those earthmovers tumbled the bones over and over before dragging them out of the soil. Perhaps no one knew whether he was face down or up or sideways or anything. I dried my face on my sleeve and smiled at Officer Peterson. It was all I could do to wrench the muscles of my mouth into position. I did not feel well at all.

  “You might want to get some air,” he said, sticking his pencil behind his ear.

  Back outside again, I leaned against a bright orange Dumpster and threw up once more. The air smelled like formaldehyde.

  “That was a real vision, wasn’t it?” asked my mother, crunching toward me across the gravel. She had a can of cola from the machine in the lobby, and she handed it to me.

  “I guess so.”

  “You guess so!” She stood there with her hands on her wide hips. “You know, it’s so rare for me. I hardly ever have visions. I have to try and try and I’m lucky if I get a fleeting impression or an image. You don’t know how frustrating it is.” She looked so sad in her sensible pumps, her hair askew. She never made confessions like this, and I didn’t know whether to believe her.

  “Oh, Mama…”

  “I had such hopes.”

  “It’s not over yet.”

  “I know.”

  We got in the car. My mother drove and I sipped the warm and bilious cola. We took hilly back roads, which was a mistake; I made my mother stop after a while so I wouldn’t be sick in the car. She pulled off the road next to an old cemetery. It was about the size of someone’s kitchen, full of white limestone markers too weathered to read. I got out and sat on the grass.

  My mother called to me from the car. “All this upchucking reminds me of when you were a little girl.”

  I nodded.

  “If you’re still sick later, you should come stay with me tonight.”

  “I won’t be. I feel better already.”

  “But if you are.”

  “All right. Maybe.”

  It was cold, there on the grass. I wondered who cut it. The stones must have been a hundred and fifty years old; who could care enough about them to cut the grass? I reached out and ran my hand over one of the markers. It was rough, rougher than it looked. Poor Peter, I thought. Not even a headstone.

  The trunk of my mother’s car popped open then, and she climbed out of her seat and got something out of it. It was a Ouija board. She waved at me with it.

  “No time like the present!”

  “Oh, not now, Mama.”

  “Look.” She lumbered over with some difficulty. “You’re vulnerable now, the vision’s fresh. Let’s try it.”

  I was too tired and queasy to argue. When I shut my eyes, I could feel the rocking of the waves on Wallamee Lake. My mother leaned against a headstone to help herself down.

  She arranged the board between us and said a short prayer. The graveyard was on top of a hill, and Wallamee County was spread around us on all sides: the lake a silver finger, trees turning color, ribbons of highway winding in and out of sight. There was a steady wind. With our fingers resting on it, the planchette was a little wobbly.

  “Okay,” said my mother. “First think of the bones. Think of the vision you had, the way the body looked. I’ll try to get in touch with the spirit from the other day…”

  Before, I thought I’d take control of the board. I even had a name: Andrew, because it could be a first or a last and it was common but not too common. I thought I’d very gently pull and tug the planchette, spelling out A-N-D-R-E-W and vague answers to the questions my mother asked. But I was crumbling. The hill, the graveyard, the lake so small and far away, the worn-away names, all filled me with incoherent emotion. My fingers shook.

  “You, the one buried by the lake many years ago. Are you ready to talk to us?” My mother’s voice, loud and out of place here, was immediately caught by the wind and tossed away.

  The planchette jerked slightly, then slid to YES.

  What made it move?

  This question, this ridiculously obvious question, had never occurred to me before. I wasn’t moving the planchette, not consciously, anyway. And if my mother wasn’t, either, then that meant a spirit had entered us, both of us, and that we were no longer in control of our own hands. It was normal, it happened all the time, but now it struck me as awful and strange that we would allow this to happen, that we’d give up our bodies this way.

  “What’s your name?”

  The planchette moved with surprising speed. N-O-T N-O-W.

  “How did you die?”

  W-R-O-N-G-F-U-L-L-Y.

  Tears slid down my face and dripped off my chin.

  “All right, I’ve been patient!” yelled my mother. “Tell me your name or we’re through!”

  The planchette slid to P.

  Oh, God. What was happening? I felt, with sudden conviction, that I was moving the planchette around, that it had been me all along; that my mediumship had never been anything but me turning my face away from my own fraudulence.

  E-
T-E

  But if it was me, why couldn’t I stop?

  R

  The planchette paused, then went on. It meandered for a few seconds, then stopped at S.

  “Oh, very funny!” shouted my mother, and she picked up the planchette and flung it into the hayfield behind us.

  “What?” I cried. “What happened?”

  “Didn’t you see?” she said crossly, picking up the Ouija board and looking like she was going to Frisbee it into the hayfield, too. “It was spelling out Peterson! All this work and we’re the butt of some stupid joke!” She looked at me. “What’s wrong? Why are you crying?”

  “I don’t know. I feel weird.” Peter’s middle name, of course, was Samuel.

  “It’s too much, isn’t it?” she said, sighing. “I feel like I’ve been fooled with ever since this started. Maybe I’ll take a break and try something new for a while. Help me up, would you?”

  I held my mother’s hands and pulled her to her feet. What I was feeling could not properly be called relief; it was too tenuous and unreliable for that, like a paper boat on rough seas. I’d been convinced that once Peter’s name was out, everything would be over; and that the cataclysm that was sure to erupt from this disclosure would annihilate me, and my mother, too. But here I was helping my mother into her car, buckling my seat belt, making plans for dinner. It was the end of the world; it was an ordinary day. This was a lesson I should have learned ten years ago, when Peter died. The worst thing in the world can happen, but the next day the sun will come up. And you will eat your toast. And you will drink your tea.

  And then, for two weeks, nothing.

  Day after day, the weather was warm and the sky empty of clouds. The trees around the library turned a deep blood red, so when the sun shone through them, the light that filtered into the reading room was pink. It was quite beautiful. If no one was in the library or downstairs, in the museum, I’d sit outside on the stone bench beneath the trees and read.

  But there was, often, someone in the library. A young man doing research on the history of Train Line came in every couple of days, and, three or four afternoons in a row, an overdressed woman with dark, ponytailed hair spent an hour or so in the reading room. I thought she must be on vacation, because she seemed bored, and always asked me to recommend a book for her. I gave her Series of Letters from a Medium, “J” and Spirit Art: Prehistory to Today. She said she found them incomprehensible.

  “Well,” I said. “Try this one.” I handed her a book on spiritual healing.

  “I’m tired of reading,” she said, drumming her fingers on my desk.

  So I unlocked the basement door and let her wander around the museum by herself. She was down there until it was nearly time for me to go home. She was dusty and delighted when she came back up.

  “Those slates are amazing!” she said. “And all that equipment! What was that machine, a dynamistograph? Bizarre!”

  I explained to her how it worked: the machine would be shut in a windowed room, so that observers could watch from the outside without disturbing it, and the spirit would enter the cylinder in the center of the machine. A lettered dial on top could spell out long communications with the spirit. The woman nodded, her attention already somewhere else. With her chewed fingernails and wide hazel eyes, she reminded me of Peter. People didn’t often remind me of him, because he was so different from everyone else I knew. She had Peter’s thin mouth, too, and lips the color of her skin.

  It didn’t frighten me. Instead, it made me miss Peter.

  “Are you here on vacation?” I asked. Suddenly, I didn’t want her to leave.

  She rolled her eyes. “I wish! It’s awfully quiet around here, isn’t it?”

  “In the fall it is. It’s worse in winter. But in summer the place is a madhouse.”

  “I like madhouses,” she said.

  She wasn’t looking at me. Her nervous eyes scanned the shelves behind my head, looked down at my desk calendar, peered out the window. Peter was never that nervous. He exuded an extreme calm. But sometimes he ignored me in the same way, caught up in his own thoughts, running ahead of our conversation with his new ideas.

  Before the woman left, she turned to me and asked, “Are you Naomi?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  She shrugged. “No reason. I’ve heard about you, is all.”

  There wasn’t much I could say to this, so I said nothing.

  I watched through the glass door as she walked down the steps. She stopped at the end of the walk and looked both ways, wrapping her arms around her. A falling leaf caught in her hair. She didn’t seem to notice, but turned and walked smartly up the gravel road, moving on to the next thing on her agenda.

  When she was gone, I sat at my desk and wished I’d asked her to have coffee or something. She didn’t really seem like someone I could talk to, but still. I thought, I really need some friends.

  Outside, leaves fell.

  The week before Halloween, I drove Vivian to the Murphy’s Five and Dime in Wallamee to buy her a witch costume. Elaine had asked me to.

  “There’s going to be a party at her school,” she’d said, “and a parade, you remember all that. They sent home a flyer, which I lost, of course. Go ahead and get her one of those plastic ones in a box, if you want. I’d really appreciate it. And of course I’ll reimburse you.”

  When I was a little girl, all my costumes were from the Woolworth’s and came with those cheap plastic masks that smelled good inside. I loved the thin elastic string over my ears, the way my breath condensed inside them, the way every expression on my face was hidden by that frozen plastic sneer. We didn’t have parties in school, but I went trick-or-treating with a big gang of neighborhood children, and we came home with popcorn balls and apples and peculiar candy bars you never saw the rest of the year: Full Dinner Bars and Honey Chews.

  But I had bigger plans for Vivian. This, I thought, could be my opportunity to make it up to her. I made her lie down on a piece of newspaper so I could trace her body, and then we designed a witch dress. It would be long and black and would have draping sleeves and a bright green lining. Vivian insisted on the green, though I told her orange was the more traditional Halloween color.

  “So?” she’d said, belligerent. The tone in her voice made me want to spank her. I didn’t.

  But we’d made up by the time we got to Murphy’s. Big rubber gorilla faces and cardboard tombstones filled the windows, and inside it smelled like wax lips. I liked Murphy’s. The floors were made of wood and creaked, and you could buy anything there: a Naugahyde wallet, a wig, rat traps, a Chinese checkers set, sympathy cards, walkie-talkies, old lamps, tiny spiral notebooks, a paint-by-numbers kit. Old white-haired ladies, twins, worked there, and if you were under twenty-five or so they’d follow you around the entire time you were in the store. Their white bangs were curled up with rollers. They wore pale-green smocks.

  Vivian found a wig with long blond hair and put it on her head. She looked like a miniature nearsighted country singer.

  We gathered our supplies. We got yards and yards of black and green fabric, a thick black cord for a belt, and some green face paint. Vivian insisted on the blond wig and wouldn’t believe her own hair was much more suited to witchcraft. We also bought a bag of candy pumpkins. “I can throw them at people!” said Vivian.

  As we were leaving the store, hauling our giant puffy plastic bags, a nun was coming in. I held the door for her.

  “Why, thank you, dear!” she said, her round, velvety face creased from years of smiling. It was a rare thing to spot a nun in Wallamee. She was followed by an old man who looked very much like her; her brother, maybe. “You have a good afternoon,” she added.

  I couldn’t help but wonder what a nun would think of all this, the whole black-cat, grinning-pumpkin, floating-skeleton spectacle. I watched her as she waddled down the aisles. She pointed, chuckling, at a stuffed Frankenstein. Her brother leaned over and patted its head. I wondered, then, what she would think of me.

&
nbsp; Vivian and I spent the next few days putting the costume together. It was harder to line a dress than I’d expected, but I managed to do it after a lot of ripping and pinning, and then we spent an entire afternoon searching Train Line for the perfect stick to make into a broom.

  The days were getting shorter. It was dark during the long hours I lay awake in the morning, unable to sleep and unwilling to get up. I thought if I lay perfectly still, my body would become so numb and bored it would fall asleep, but instead I just stopped being able to feel it. I felt like a pair of disembodied eyes propped up on my pillow, staring up into the dark. Sometimes, fixing my eyes on the light fixture, I imagined the ceiling was sinking—slowly, slowly—down toward me, and, being a mere set of eyes, I couldn’t do a thing to stop it.

  Peter? Peter! I called to him.

  No answer.

  A few days before Halloween, Dave the Alien showed up at the library. I was Windexing: the glass-topped end tables, the telephone, the locked bookcases, the windows. This was one of my favorite library duties, along with putting acrylic covers on books.

  “If you’re too busy, I can leave,” said Dave, plopping himself down in an upholstered chair. He didn’t look very good; his hair was dirty and he hadn’t shaved.

  “I can talk and Windex.”

  “You must be a genius!” said Dave, grinning. He lowered his voice slightly. “I hope you don’t have any bad feelings about our dinner a few weeks ago. Because, you know, I don’t.”

  “None at all,” I said, spritzing a tabletop and wiping it with a paper towel.

  “Good.” He ran his fingers through his hair. “Umm…”

  “Yes?”

  “What are your plans for Halloween?”

  “Sleep.”

  He laughed: too hard and too long. Dave was a lonely man. It gusted out from him like a smell. “Because, see, there’s a costume party I was thinking of going to. If you’d like to be my ‘date.’ ” He made quotation marks in the air with his fingers.

  “‘Costume party,’” I repeated, noncommittally.

  “I think I want to go as a televangelist.” He described his costume: he’d find a bad powder-blue suit, a Bible, and shaded glasses, then grease his hair back and wear a cardboard television over his head.