After Life

by Rhian Ellis

  He didn’t leave me, though. He could have gone back to Oregon, or hung around with old friends in Princeton. But he still loved me. At least, that’s what I told myself. Why else would he stay? And we had sex quite often. It was a fierce business, with lots of pinching and scratching and slamming around. I always kept my eyes open, watching him, which is how I knew that he kept his shut, and that his mouth moved silently the whole time, as if he were praying for something.

  Spring came. It came in a sudden rush of water: rain poured down, snowbanks shrank, and puddles and rivulets flooded the roads of Train Line. Every day the ground breathed out the smell of relief. It was strange to see the battered grass again and strange to pry open the windows and let air flow through the house. We all shook ourselves and woke up a little. Peter and I started taking walks together again. The hard ground felt unbelievably good beneath my feet after walking on snow all those months. Peter got a haircut and his cheeks regained their color, at least for a while.

  Peter kept a journal. He’d kept one since he was fourteen, several volumes of those hardcovered blue laboratory notebooks. I’d never felt much urge to read it. He wrote in it when he was alone; at the library, I suspected, or when I was busy. I figured they were “deep thoughts”: observations on the beauty of nature and the stupidity of people, etcetera. There was a good chance, I thought, that I’d be embarrassed by what he wrote. Perhaps it was over my head, or perhaps it wasn’t very intelligent at all.

  So I don’t know why I picked it up off his desk the first time and opened it. It was a mild, indeterminate spring day: warm but cloudy, no leaves on the trees but no snow, either. I was cleaning the house, happy that I’d survived the winter, and feeling that my life was changing. Whenever the seasons changed I felt that way. Life was opening up. I thought about growing a garden that summer. We had a small square of lawn behind the house, and I wanted to grow potatoes and carrots and maybe something like strawberries. Seed catalogs had arrived in the mail. I pored over them constantly, loving the way the pages smelled, drawing diagrams of my plot. The Silverwood had hired Peter to do some preseason painting and repair work, so he seemed slightly more cheery, too. That’s where he was that morning. I expected him back in an hour or so, for lunch.

  The first thing I noticed about Peter’s journal was how regular and controlled the handwriting was. He wrote with a blue ballpoint pen, and every letter slanted the same way, and every page was filled: no margins. He’d pressed down hard, too, so that the pages were stiff and crinkly. I spotted my name.

  …unlike Naomi, who hasn’t washed her hair in a month…

  What? I washed my hair far more often than that. Was he serious? I pulled my hair over my nose and smelled it. It smelled fine, like hair. I flipped through the pages.

  As I read over the journal, I found references to my “large legs,” “hairy legs,” “man hands,” and “vast behind.” The nicest thing I found was from October; it referred to my “comfortably weighty presence” and “calm, simple soul.” The entries became worse and more insulting as the journal wore on. The most recent was from the day before. In it he described a fantasy about having sex with someone else.

  …she had a waist that fit in my hands as she rode above me, and we moved together, like waves peaking and crashing. Her slender, boyish hips held an ocean of pleasure, and I kept diving in, losing my breath…

  This went on for several paragraphs. Then:

  …when I awoke N. was snoring. When I nudged her to roll over, her big old arm flopped across my chest, nearly driving the life out of me.

  I had to sit down, my finger holding my place in the notebook. Sweat broke out on my forehead and under my arms. It seemed impossible that he could write this and still live with me. True, he was grim and unpleasant much of the time. I had chalked that up to the weather and having no money. What had I done to make him feel that way? Anything?

  At lunch I was subdued, but Peter didn’t seem to notice. He complained about the idiocy of the people he worked with—“You’d think they’d know enough to keep all the tools in one place, so we could find them again. I spend half my time looking for the godawful tools…”—and expressed, again, his wish that people with low IQs would be banished to an island somewhere.

  “What do you think my IQ is?” I asked him, suddenly wanting to know what he’d say.

  “Considerably higher than the sum total of those fools at the Silverwood.”

  “No, seriously. What do you think it is?”

  He gave me an impatient look. “How am I supposed to know?”

  “I’m just curious.”

  He chewed on his sandwich. “I was tested when I was a child, and my score was off the charts. Of course,” he added modestly, “I’m sure IQ testing for children isn’t all that accurate.”

  Peter talked like this a lot. It had never bothered me before; it wasn’t as if he did it in public or around people other than me. I thought he was just being honest. But he wasn’t honest, really. Not after what I’d seen in his journal. It hit me with a peculiar force. Why was he so critical? Incessantly, smugly, neurotically critical?

  After a few days I more or less forgot about the journal entries—that is, I never actually forgot about them, but I hid them away in the back of my mind—and threw myself into my work, my garden plans, the coming spring. I treated Peter with the utmost politeness—he didn’t seem to notice anything amiss—until finally I felt normal around him. Now and then I’d recall one of the insults—vast behind!—and be shocked all over again, but this happened less and less as spring rolled into summer.

  Part of me had stopped loving him. But another part of me desired him more than ever; I wanted to prove him wrong, somehow. I wanted to force him to love me, to want me, to fall under my spell. I wanted him to wake up one day, look at me, and think, I was wrong.

  In the late spring, and on into summer, something happened to Peter. At first it was just allergies. His eyes ran, his nose ran, he sneezed and coughed and stumbled bleary-eyed around the house. It was grass pollen, he said. At one point he got an infection in his throat from all the dripping and swelling, and lay around the house, shivering under quilts. Outside the air was lovely, the sun was warm, but Peter just stayed inside, sniffing. It disgusted me. I was surprised at the strength of my reaction.

  “It would do you good to get some fresh air,” I told him.

  “That air is not fresh.”

  “You’re going to look like a cave worm if you mope around all summer in the dark.”

  “Why are you telling me this? Can’t you tell I’m sick?”

  I told him I couldn’t sleep with him clearing his throat every twelve seconds—I timed it—and began sleeping on the sofa downstairs. I imagined him dying during the night. I’d be shocked, but I’d handle it. Trapped on the other side, Peter would be frightened and lost and utterly dependent on me. Imagining it was quite satisfying.

  But even when the allergies lifted, Peter didn’t believe he was better. There was something caught in his lungs, he said. He sat up at night probing his ribs. A doctor in Wallamee gave him a chest X-ray—which we couldn’t really afford—and a clean bill of health, but by then the problem had migrated to his neck. “What are these bumpy things?” he asked me, running his fingers along his jawline.

  “Glands.”

  “No, not there,” he said impatiently. “Over here.”

  I couldn’t talk him out of his hypochondria, so I decided to change my tack. I began to humor him, even encourage him. “Have you always had that freckle?” I’d ask, poking the back of his hand. Or I’d tell him, “The whites of your eyes look awfully yellow today.” I took a perverse pleasure in his reactions. He’d pretend to ignore me, but later I’d catch him staring at himself in the mirror, or looking up symptoms in a secondhand medical guide he bought at the Rummage Room. He called in sick at the Silverwood until they fired him. Every time he opened a door he had to cover his hand with his shirt before he touched the knob, in order to avoid
germs.

  I still took a peek at his journal now and then. Mentions of me were scarcer, but other interesting things replaced them.

  I know it’s ridiculous, but sometimes I’d swear there’s poison in my food.

  And,

  All day I’ve had an odd buzzing in my head. Possible stroke? Oh, God. I think I’m going to die.

  Some days he was better, others he was worse. I couldn’t predict it. We went to the beach in Wallamee one Saturday, and he took off his shirt, jumped in, and swam for a long time. When he came out, he was happy and chatty and had a sunburn on his nose. The next day he sat in the kitchen in his long johns, reading the Journal of the American Medical Association—I had no idea where he found of copy of that—with all the stove burners turned up. For heat, he said. It was seventy-five degrees outside.

  My garden didn’t grow. I watered it enough, I thought, and gave it some fertilizer, but the tomato plants withered, the carrots stayed tiny, and the lettuce bolted the instant it came out of the ground. The strawberries never showed up. I was horribly disappointed. I had failed at this one simple project, and now I had nothing to do all summer but work and hang around melancholy Peter.

  It might have been the failure of the garden that caused my mediumship to take the new turn it did. It happened during a normal home circle, one I held every Wednesday night that summer: the lights low, the occasional noise of cars rumbling by outside, the sound of breathing and shifting in chairs. I was glum; I wanted to make something happen. So, after ten minutes or so I said I was in touch with a spirit named Martha, who was full of rage. This was a bit of an exaggeration. There was a spirit of some kind, I thought, but the rage came from me. I felt it, leaping up like a sudden fire.

  “She might not be one of ours. She seems particularly hostile—a restless spirit. Can anyone claim her?”

  No one could.

  But before long, someone—a woman from Arizona who was visiting that summer—said she could see the spirit. It was there, she said, in the middle of the room, glowing faintly.

  I stared. People claimed to see things all the time, but rarely did more than one person see the same thing—no one liked to admit that someone else saw it first, I think—and as it happened, I never saw the phosphorescent shapes that people said showed up at circles. But this time, after staring for a few minutes, hard, I did. Just barely. It was as if light had gathered from the shadows around the room and collected in that one spot. It was the kind of thing you might dismiss if you were in a mind to. I wasn’t.

  “Yes,” I said. “I see her, too.”

  Other people chimed in. Oh, yes, they said. She’s wearing a long dress. Her hair’s up. She’s carrying something—a basket? Yes, a wicker basket.

  Did I actually see these things? I wanted to—we all wanted to. That was enough.

  She stayed for perhaps ten minutes, then faded. When the home circle met again the next week, though, Martha was back. This time, she was more than a glimmer. Someone said she could actually make out the hat pins in her hair, and someone smelled the perfume she wore. She stayed nearly half an hour, and—through me—told us about her life. She had been beaten by her husband, she said, and in the basket was a stillborn baby. Martha herself had died in childbirth. This electrified the circle.

  It didn’t take long before the rest of Train Line heard about Martha. People wanted to join our circle, but we wouldn’t let them. It was a subject of immense speculation. Why me? I was hardly a physical medium. Some people thought it was a bunch of baloney, of course, but I didn’t care. Our weekly circle meetings stretched to an hour and a half, then two hours, and we were all obsessed with Martha.

  I liked the attention. But before long it got back to Peter, who, when I explained it, choked on his milk.

  “You’re doing that? Didn’t that manifestation stuff go out with the nineteenth century?”

  “Obviously not.” And if he was going to be like that, I told him, I was simply not going to talk about it.

  “Like what? Skeptical? Reasonable?”

  And Martha wasn’t the only one. Soon, there were others: a little boy who didn’t talk, an old woman, a very old man. There was even one of the girls who drowned in the lake. She cried, cried, cried. To be perfectly honest, I wasn’t sure if I ever saw much myself. Some glowing, some movement, perhaps. But my circle did, and for the first time I was extremely popular around Train Line. That summer I got invitations to every party, every development circle, every meeting of every kind, New Age or not. The board asked me to teach a workshop the following summer. There was talk of starting a public-access television program, which I would host.

  This, I suppose, was the last straw for Peter. We began arguing about it, loudly, at night. It was fine, he said, to operate on faith, intuition, psychology, all that, but when we started dealing with the physical, then we were going over the line.

  “Who is going over the line?”

  “Spiritualists and all of you freaking New Agers!”

  There was nothing I hated more than being called that, and he knew it, but I kept my cool. “Going over what line?” I demanded.

  The problem, he said, was in trying to co-opt science. Why weren’t religious people ever satisfied with their own spiritual niche? Why did they always feel like science had to be proved wrong in order for them to be proved right? That’s when religion becomes garbage, he said. Materialization is garbage.

  I gave him a big shove and he sloshed his milk on his pants. He looked stunned for a second, then his normal cynical look came back. “Real mature.”

  “Asshole.”

  It was odd how quickly our arguments reduced to name calling. We used to be able to discuss things, but not anymore. I had an idea. If Peter would only believe me, I thought, everything would be better. Not only would we get along, but his hypochondria, his morbid fear of death, would go away. He wouldn’t come to any of my circles, of course, but maybe I could bring a circle to him.

  That is how I began haunting Peter. My intentions, I swear, were good.

  There were tricks I remembered from my childhood: a bladder hidden beneath a piece of furniture that, when squeezed, would blow cool air across a person’s ankles; perfume daubed on a lightbulb so that, when the light is switched on, a scent would fill the air apparently apropos of nothing; tiny bells installed in different parts of a room, so that the sound might seem to come from all directions. Those were the subtle things. Sometimes Peter didn’t notice my tricks at all; sometimes he’d look around, confused. Only rarely would he say anything. We were sitting in the living room one evening in July, watching the television news, when he asked, “What’s that smell?”

  “Smell?”

  He sniffed. “Are you wearing perfume?”

  “You know I don’t wear perfume.”

  “Hmm.”

  The next day, when he was out, I washed and dried the lightbulb, rubbed it with a little vanilla extract, and replaced it in the lamp. If he noticed, he said nothing. It didn’t matter. My point was to undermine the world he was so damned sure he understood.

  After a few weeks of this, I got bolder. I cooked up a complicated ruse: I whispered his name over and over into a small tape recorder and brought it to bed with us. While we read I kept it hidden in my nightgown. Twenty minutes or so after we turned the light off, I rolled over, stretched, and slipped my hand with the tape recorder under a corner of Peter’s pillow. I could tell by the way he was breathing that he was dropping off, so I gently pressed Play.

  It only took a few minutes before he began to rouse. I quickly switched the machine off and rolled over, sliding it under my own pillow. Peter sat up, looked around, then lay back down again.

  I did this every night for more than a week. Some nights Peter slept through the whole performance, but once, he even yanked his pillow away while my hand was still under it. I’d been expecting that, though, so I’d hidden the tape recorder in my sleeve.

  “What?” I said. “Did you have a bad dream
?”

  “No! It’s nothing.” But he sat up in the dark for a long time, breathing hard.

  Most of what I did was simpler: I moved his things around, stole things and replaced them, left strange or disturbing objects in unlikely places. I put a crow’s feather on our front steps, where he’d find it when he went out for his daily walk, and I balanced a penny on the toe of one of his shoes while they sat in the hall. I made sure I did nothing so obvious he’d ask me about it. Once, I left a mouse skull in his sock drawer, but removed it when I realized I’d gone just a hair too far.

  It worked. Peter’s hypochondria, which had never really gone away, came back in full force. He spent nights wracked with a nausea that neither culminated in vomiting nor abated. He complained of itchiness and sweats, and the frantic look he’d had all winter returned. Finally, over a lunch of peanut butter on bread, I told him I had something to tell him and that he should promise not to get angry.

  “What is it?” he said, angry already.

  “You’re not going to like this, but I think you should know.” And I told him that a spirit had been hanging around the house a lot lately and that I had a feeling it was his.

  “You know I don’t believe in that garbage.”

  “I know,” I said calmly. “But I do. And I just thought you might be interested. Sorry I opened my big mouth.”

  He stared at me, his eyes red-rimmed. “What do you mean, it’s mine?”

  “Well, just that I think it knows you. He knows you. A relative or a friend, maybe.”

  “I don’t believe in that garbage,” he said again.

  We ate our bread. Peter got peanut butter all over his hands but didn’t seem to notice.

  “One other thing. Can I tell you?”

  “No!” he almost shouted.

  “All right.” I waited a few minutes. Then, picking up crumbs with the end of my finger, I said, “The spirit keeps saying the name ‘Billy Friday.’ Do you know anyone with that name?”