After Life

by Rhian Ellis

  “Wow,” I said. “That’s creative.”

  “I thought so,” he said. He stroked his hairy chin and looked me over. “You’d make an awesome prostitute.”

  “What?”

  “I mean that in a good way. See, if you dressed as a call girl, we’d be a perfect pair.”

  “I’ll think about it,” I told him, spraying the cabinets.

  He tapped his shoes on the wooden floor: tappada tappada! tappada tappada! “Oh, by the way!” he said. “Did you hear I finally found a job?”

  “Great!”

  “I took your advice. I didn’t settle for anything that wasn’t right.”

  “My advice?”

  “You remember. At Monday night Circles?”

  “Oh.”

  “Oh. I’m working at Big Ed’s Video, over on Marquis Street.”

  I looked at him. “Well, great.”

  “I get three free video rentals a week, and a thirty percent discount on every one more than that. Plus a raise after four months.”

  I nodded.

  “So…maybe you’d like to come over for videos sometime?”

  “Maybe,” I agreed.

  He sighed deeply. I stopped working for a minute and leaned against the windowsill to stare out the window. The sky was bright, bright, bright.

  “Do you have secrets, Naomi?”

  I didn’t turn to look at him. “Everyone has secrets.”

  “Maybe so. I don’t know as I do.”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Because,” he said, “either you’re a really dull person, or you have huge secrets. And I’d bet money on the latter.”

  “Well. Don’t bet too much.”

  “I wish,” said Dave, more forcefully, now, “I wish you’d be straight with me. If you don’t like me, tell me to get lost. If you do like me, just show it or something. All right?”

  I felt myself blush. I’d thought I didn’t care whether he liked me or not. But I did, very much. Suddenly I felt frightened and unmoored. “I’m sorry,” I said quickly. “I do like you.”

  “All right,” he said. “All right.”

  The night before her big party and parade, I got Vivian’s costume ready. I folded the dress and the wig and put it in a plastic bag, and reinforced the pointy hat with black electrical tape. I gave her detailed directions on applying the face paint.

  “And make sure everybody gets one of these candy pumpkins before anyone gets seconds. Got it?”

  “Okay, okay!” crowed Vivian, nearly hopping with excitement.

  In the car on the way to her house, she held the witch hat on her lap and told me all the things she’d do if she really was a witch.

  “I’d turn invisible and go inside people’s houses,” she said. “I’d watch them eat their food.”

  “That’s a strange thing to do.”

  “Then I’d turn my mom into a chicken!” She kicked her feet out and threw her head back against the seat, laughing as if this was the funniest thing she’d ever thought of. She bared her teeth like a rabid cat. “Then I’d turn my dad into an egg!”

  “Now you’re getting silly.”

  “I’d turn you into a ball of mush!”

  I pretended to cry. “That’s not—boo-hoo—very nice.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. She looked thoughtfully out the window. “Actually I’d turn you into a queen.”

  “Much better,” I said.

  I thought about her the next day, as I worked through the stack of books I was cataloging. I remembered wearing my costume to school in first grade—I was a clown—and how we each had to step in front of the class and make the class try to guess who we were. I loved my teacher, but I remember standing in front of the class, my curly black hair showing behind my mask—I was the only one in the class with curly hair—and feeling angry that the poor woman felt obliged to pretend she didn’t know it was me. Everyone knew who I was. And I knew they knew. The charade humiliated me.

  Around ten o’clock the phone rang, a startling racket. The library phone didn’t ring more than once a month this time of year. It was the principal of Vivian’s school.

  “You’re the babysitter, right?” she asked. “The parents left this number for emergencies.”

  “That’s right. There hasn’t been an accident…?”

  “Oh, no—ha ha—nothing like that. A little misunderstanding. I’m afraid Vivian’s costume is—um—inappropriate.” The woman said they’d sent home strict instructions that scary costumes were forbidden in school. It had been the policy for two years now. Instead, the children were encouraged to dress up as characters from children’s literature. “We have the cutest Rats from NIMH this year,” she said. “And an absolutely darling Moby Dick.”

  I didn’t know what to say. “Well, nobody told me.”

  “I suppose not. We did send home flyers.”

  She suggested I bring Vivian a new costume as quickly as possible, so she didn’t have to miss any of the fun. Meanwhile, she’d be catching up on homework in the principal’s office.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” I said.

  I closed the library and ran to my mother’s house, certain that Elaine had planned it all, undermining me for her own mysterious reasons. My mother wasn’t home, and neither was her car. Crap, I thought. I wondered if she’d started working with Officer Peterson again and pictured her touching bones at the forensics lab, or wandering the excavation site with her fingers at her temples.

  From her house I called Dave the Alien. I got him out of bed.

  “Sorry,” I said, and described the emergency.

  “So you want me to give you a ride to Murphy’s, then to the elementary school?”

  “Then back home again. If you have the time. I guess I could ride my bike.”

  He yawned noisily into the phone. “Oh, no,” he said. “I can do it. For a price.” The price, he said, was going to the costume party with him. “And dressing up as my Lady of the Evening.”

  “Oh, come on!” I said. I hemmed and hawed for a while. Dave was silent.

  After a minute or two I relented.

  “Great!” said Dave, fully awake now.

  He was at my house in minutes. His hair stuck up and he smelled like bedclothes. “Hop in,” he said, holding open the car door for me.

  David seemed excited to have a project and flattered that I’d called him in my hour of need. He drove quickly and a little recklessly around the lake, chatting about the dream he’d had that night. “And you were in it! You were eating macadamia nuts from a jar. I didn’t remember the dream until I saw you. Weird, huh?”

  “Too weird,” I said.

  Murphy’s had just opened when we got there. An old woman was in the costume aisle ahead of us, poking through the masks with her black-gloved fingers.

  “You go ahead and find a costume,” said Dave. “I have a rendezvous with destiny.” He headed off toward the bathrooms.

  Pickings were slim. There were skeletons and wolf-girls and Brides of Frankenstein, and a few oversized clowns, but not much acceptable in Vivian’s size. I asked one of the green-smocked women behind the counter if there were any others. She shook her head. “Had a run on Dorothy of Ozzes last night. Cinderellas went like that, too. All we got’s what you see. Most people buy their costumes ahead of time, you know.”

  I looked some more. On the very bottom, underneath a pile of Grim Reapers, I found a Wonder Woman costume in a faded box. I took it out to look at it: what looked like a set of red and yellow pajamas with a plastic face mask. But it was Vivian’s size. Excellent, I thought, and tucked it under my arm.

  “Hey,” said Dave. “Look what I found.” He held out a pair of spike heels, fishnet stockings, a blond beehive wig, and a spangly red dress. “Ooh-la-la.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “Please let me buy them for you. Please? You owe me.”

  “Okay, okay. But those shoes are about four sizes too small.”

  We bought the costumes and headed ov
er to the elementary school. Vivian was in the principal’s office, but she wasn’t doing any homework. She was crying, her green face pressed into her spelling workbook. “Viv, Viv,” I said, patting her head.

  “We got you a Wonder Woman costume!” said Dave. He pulled it out of the sack with a flourish.

  “NO!” yelled Vivian.

  Behind her desk, the principal shrugged. She was a mannish woman with a square head. “She’s been like that since this morning. Maybe you’d better just take her home.”

  “Mmm,” said Dave. “I smell a cafeteria lunch.”

  “Ravioli with peach slices and pumpkin bread.”

  “Mmm,” he said again.

  We ended up taking Vivian back to my house. I had to carry her out past children lining up for lunch: a crowd of Davy Crocketts and Little Bo Peeps. Vivian hid her face in my hair. She’d mostly stopped crying. Now she was just moaning, as if she’d broken her leg and pain was shooting through her with every step I took.

  Elaine called and apologized the next day, a Saturday, Halloween. “Sorry to put you through all that trouble. I honestly didn’t know about that silly policy. It seems pretty crazy, don’t you think?”

  I was getting dressed for the costume party. The dress barely covered anything. I’d never worn heels that high before, and they made me feel like a great big tottering bird. “I’m just worried about Vivian,” I said, grabbing the door frame for balance.

  “Oh, she’ll be fine. Her dad’s going to take her trick-or-treating. I just hope I can get her back into that witch costume. It’s darling, by the way.”

  Dave was going to be by any minute, so I got Elaine off the phone and slapped some makeup on. My mother’d lent it to me. I put on lipstick and glittery eye shadow and fake lashes, then decided to forgo the perfume. It was something called “Celestial,” and about half the mediums in Train Line wore it: a sort of mediumistic signature scent. When I’d gone over to her house to get the makeup, she seemed a little depressed. Her radio show was finished, now, and the people at WRUK weren’t excited about the television show idea. She was still working on them, but she didn’t hold out a lot of hope. I hadn’t seen Troy around much lately, either. She didn’t get up from the sofa the whole time I was there.

  When Dave arrived at my door, he had his cardboard television over his head, “Bay-buh!” he said in a thick, fakey Southern accent.

  “I forgot to ask where we’re going.”

  “Elk’s Club Trophy Room!”

  The Trophy Room, it turned out, was over the fried chicken place on Railroad Avenue. We had to go inside the restaurant, past the counters and tables full of chicken eaters and the vats of bubbling grease, through a big double doorway, and up a narrow staircase. When I smelled the chicken I wanted to stay there.

  The room did not look like it was over a chicken restaurant: there were chandeliers and velvet curtains and a multicolored sphere of lights. The dance floor was parquet. There were lots of vampires and vampiresses and devils and she-devils; also a gorilla or two, a Queen of Hearts, some zombies, an Abe Lincoln and a Winston Churchill.

  “I’d never think to dress up as Winston Churchill,” I told Dave.

  “I think that’s supposed to be W. C. Fields. See the nose?”

  “Ah.”

  We danced. Neither of us could actually dance—we didn’t know any steps and had no rhythm at all—but we moved around. I found I couldn’t move too much, or else I’d lose my balance. Dave managed to dance much as you’d think a televangelist would: a lot of shaking arms. People looked at us and pointed. I felt horribly self-conscious at first, but then it faded. My clothes helped, I think. It became easy to pretend I was someone else entirely.

  “Do you know anyone here?” I asked Dave, panting.

  “Hmm.” He looked around, then pointed at a woman dressed as a potato. “She works at the desk in my dentist’s office. I think I’ve seen that man she’s with come into Big Ed’s.” The man was wearing a tuxedo and had huge, lovely wings on his back. There was a witch there, too, a sexy witch dancing with her broomstick. She made me think of Vivian. I hadn’t really stopped thinking of Vivian, but now I was reminded of her with such force it made me queasy. I thought of her sad green face, her moaning.

  After half an hour, the music stopped. I staggered toward a row of theater seats along the edge of the room.

  “I’ll get you a drink,” said Dave.

  Sweat dribbled beneath my wig. One of the zombies took the seat next to mine, and his dirty bandages touched my arm. I recoiled.

  “I’m not a real zombie,” he said.

  “Oh, I know.”

  “This first break is for Funniest Costume, I believe,” he told me, and pointed at a small stage on the other side of the room. An emcee-looking person was trying to fix his microphone into a mike stand. When he got it to stay he tapped on it several times with his ring. “Okay! Prize for funniest costume goes to the Car Wreck! Congratulations, Car Wreck! Let’s give her a hand.”

  The Car Wreck, a young woman covered with sheets of shattered safety glass, a smashed bumper, a broken headlight, and dollar bills, received her trophy and took a bow. Her bumper hit the floor with a thud.

  “I don’t think that’s funny at all,” said the zombie.

  Dave came back with the drinks. “What a coincidence! I brought you a zombie, and here you are sitting with one!”

  The music started up again and the zombie lumbered off. I sipped my drink. It was sweet and strange, and hit me between the eyes.

  “Well,” I said, dizzy already. “Well.”

  We danced some more. We switched partners with the angel and the potato for a slow dance, and I got to run my hands over the soft, feathered wings that rose from the angel’s shoulders. He rested his hands on my hips and stared right into my eyes. “Did you know that angels have the sexual characteristics of both genders?” he whispered. I had never expected to find myself in the arms of a man so handsome, and could only smile and smile, embarrassed.

  Things were beginning to run together. Sometime during the evening I lost track of my shoes, so when we won the trophy for Best-Matched Couple, I had to go on stage in my stocking feet. A Book and Bookmarker threw us threatening looks. As the evening wore on I grew to like Dave quite a bit. He felt good to lean against.

  I don’t remember much about the rest of the night. I remember going back to Dave’s apartment and lying with him on the sofa. We kissed and hugged and Dave said, over and over, “Please don’t change your mind tomorrow, please don’t change your mind.” I remember throwing up in the toilet. Then I was waking up on the sofa and it was morning and Dave the Alien was cooking eggs in the kitchenette. It was the smell that woke me.

  “Oh my God.”

  “Think of it as a slumber party,” said Dave.

  Actually, I didn’t feel sick. I ate some of Dave’s eggs and drank some juice and cringed at the thought of his lips on mine. He gave me a few searching looks that I managed to evade. He was nice, though, and didn’t bring it up. He displayed our trophy—a small plastic urn—on the shelf over the stove, and then he drove me home. The streets of Wallamee were empty and strewn with toilet paper and candy wrappers. “Aftermath,” said Dave quietly.

  He dropped me off at the gate, not even trying a good-bye kiss. The air felt cold and vigorous, and I was glad the whole stupid, excessive holiday was over. Dave had lent me a pair of basketball sneakers, but I was still wearing my hooker dress and carrying my wig under my arm. No one was out. I kicked leaves and took in big lungfuls of air. I am a cruel, cruel person, I said to myself.

  When I rounded the corner of Fox and Chadakoin Streets, I saw a police car parked in front of my house. My first instinct was to run. I could hide in the woods, I thought. I could make my way to the highway, hitchhike, jump into the back of a truck…

  But running away would mean admitting everything, and I knew then that I could do anything but that. So instead I gripped my wig with both hands and forced myself through th
e door of my house.

  My mother was there, with Officer Peterson and a petite, severely coifed policewoman. They looked startled to see me come in.

  “Naomi,” said my mother. Her voice had a slight shake. “This is Officer Ten Brink, and Officer Peterson, of course.”

  “Hello,” I said, shaking their hands.

  “I let them in,” said my mother. “When you weren’t home, they came to my house…” She looked around, uncertain whether to stay or leave. “I’ll go make coffee,” she said, and hurried off into the kitchen.

  “Sit down,” said Officer Peterson, which was odd, since it was my house.

  I sat. Officer Ten Brink thumbed through an accordion file on her lap and handed something to Officer Peterson, who handed it to me. It was a photograph of Peter.

  “Can you identify this person?” asked Officer Peterson.

  It must have been Peter’s high school graduation picture: his face was fuller than when I knew him, and he had thicker, perhaps even blow-dried, hair. He wore the kind of sport jacket he would not be caught dead in later: it had gold buttons and terrible wide lapels. He was smiling.

  “It’s Peter Morton,” I said.

  I repeated my story again. I knew Peter for a year and a half or so, then he left, and I hadn’t heard from him since. We’d broken up. We’d had a fight; that’s when he left.

  “A violent fight?” asked Officer Ten Brink.

  “Oh, no,” I said. “Just arguing. I don’t even remember what about.”

  “And when was this?”

  I pretended to think. “Summer, maybe late summer, 1988.”

  “Ten years ago, then. Did he give you the slightest indication of where he might have gone?”

  I shook my head. “No. Well, I got a postcard from him. From Mexico, I think. That was about a year later.”

  He nodded. “That fits, more or less.” He explained: Peter’s mother had died a few years before, and his sister had been trying to find him ever since. She’d contacted the police departments in the places she knew he’d been, and after the discovery of the bones by the lake, they’d notified her.