After Life

by Rhian Ellis

  Peter turned his head and looked out the kitchen window. His eyes, I could tell, were filling with tears. He covered his face with his hands, then slowly got up, went into the bathroom, and shut the door.

  Billy Friday was the name of one of his cats when he was a child. It was killed by a dog who left it under a blackberry bush in the backyard, where six-year-old Peter found it days later. He’d never told me the story. I read it in his journal.

  But in the end, I did go too far.

  By August, the attention I’d been getting in Train Line for the Martha circles had faded. I should have known; people are faddy, and once the novelty wears off they’re onto something new. A woman who went by the name Sheree began “channeling” a spirit called Ta-Ne, who, because he was from Atlantis, had lots of enlightenment to impart. Suddenly, my Wednesday night circle was buying Sheree’s tapes and telling me all about them.

  “You know, Naomi, you’re really limiting yourself. You should try contacting larger, more universal spirits. They have important stuff to say, you know.”

  Of course, I had to be polite.

  “Atlantis?” I said. “Atlantis?”

  A television talk show flew Sheree to New York City to appear on a whole special program about channelers. I watched it one morning in my pajamas, aghast.

  “Peter!” I cried. “Look!”

  He was dozing at the table. He picked his head up and gazed blearily at the television. Sheree was sitting in an armchair, her platinum-blond hair hanging over her face, and she was speaking in a goofy, low voice. “…because we’re all brothers and sisters…” she said, and, “…a golden staircase awaits us…”

  “Oh, come on,” I moaned.

  “That’s what your mother does, isn’t it? That trance stuff,” said Peter.

  I yelped. “As if! Peter, that guy’s supposed to be from an imaginary place. It makes no sense at all.”

  “I don’t see the difference.” He shrugged and shuffled off to the kitchen.

  I could have argued with him, but I didn’t. Instead I decided it was time to make my next move. That night, I told Peter I had a message for him.

  “Who called?”

  That afternoon he’d gotten a haircut. His hair lay smooth over the back of his head, and his sideburns flew high over his ears. He looked good, neat and together, for the first time in a while.

  “No one called,” I said. “I don’t mean that kind of message.”

  “Then you must know I don’t want anything to do with it.”

  “It’s from your father.”

  Peter gave me a wild-eyed look, then covered his ears and ran out the door.

  He came back just before dawn. I’d been sitting up for a long time, but I’d finally given up and gone to bed. I woke to the sound of him throwing things into his duffel bag.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m going to go stay at your mother’s.”

  “You can’t do that!” We’d been house-sitting for her while she was at a retreat in Ohio somewhere, watering her plants and slowly eating all the food in her cupboards.

  “Of course I can,” said Peter angrily. “In fact, she’s glad to have someone staying there. I called and asked. Where I can’t stay is here, with you.”

  “What do you mean? Why?”

  He threw one of his shoes at me. I caught it and threw it back. “I’ve figured you out,” he said. His face was contorted. “I know what you’ve been doing.”

  There were many things I could have done at that point. Screamed and argued, cried, fallen at his feet. Instead I kept my pride, got back into bed, and let him go.

  But every morning and every evening I went over to talk to him. He wouldn’t listen to me. I tried calmly explaining to him the difference between what I’d done and fraud. He would have none of it.

  “But, Peter, your father does want to contact you. It’s true. I’m sorry if you felt tricked…”

  “I never felt tricked.”

  I had lost him, I had lost him. He decided to move to Cambridge, where he’d work as a research assistant, or something, until the spring, when he’d start graduate school. He took all the money out of his bank account in order to buy a truck to move with. “I’m getting myself together,” he told me. “I suggest you do the same.”

  At home I cried long and hard and hated myself and spiritualism and Train Line. I spent whole days digging in my dead little garden, trying to coax the plants back to life, chopping away at the lawn that kept trying to reclaim it. The sun burned down on my head. When I went back inside the house, my light-adjusted eyes would be nearly blind, and I’d lie down on the sofa and stare at the dull white August sky.

  The full significance of what I had done gradually dawned on me. The tricks I’d played on Peter had not undermined him at all. They had undermined me. It was as if I had carefully dismantled my own faith and built a tacky outhouse with the bricks.

  It was an accident.

  It was an accident, because when it happened it came out of nowhere. It was an ordinary day. The sky ached to rain, and the wind off the lake smelled like fall, like the ketchup factory in Wallamee. I wore the black-and-white sundress I’d worn almost every day that summer and picked the only two tomatoes from my garden. I sliced them and ate them for lunch, sitting on the back steps with the plate on my knees. They were the best things I’d ever eaten. I wished Peter was eating them with me. He’d agree, tell me how amazing they were. That morning, when I saw him at Ferd’s grocery buying salami, he’d ignored me.

  The day was hot, so when I lay down on the sofa that afternoon I trained the box fan on me and fell asleep. When I woke up it was dark, and I was cold and disoriented and my ears roared from the fan’s artificial wind. Welchie Pratt was due back in a week or two, but for now she was still at her sister’s, who’d finally died. The house was quiet and dark and empty.

  I sat in the kitchen, feeling groggy and achy. I wanted to enjoy this solitude but I couldn’t. There was no ice cream in the freezer, and flies tapped against the window glass, and the refrigerator hummed on and off. I had a headache. I knew I was going to go over to my mother’s house and cry in front of Peter, and I hated myself for it. I found a sweater, put my sandals on, brushed my hair, all the time cursing my stupidity and weakness.

  The walk over there was like any other: bits of gravel got caught between my foot and sandal, and I had to stop and shake my leg until I dislodged it. The sound of televisions floated from open windows. A dog barked at me. I was still grumpy from my long, windblown nap, but the walk made me feel a little better, and by the time I got to my mother’s house I was sure I’d be able to control myself. I wouldn’t beg or plead this time. I would just talk to him, because I was lonely, and surely he was lonely, too.

  He let me in without looking at me, just opening the door and walking away. The house was stuffy and smelled like something burnt—dinner gone bad. All the overhead lights were on. I asked him how he could stand that.

  No answer.

  He went into the kitchen and began washing dishes. I sat on the tall stool and asked him when he was planning on leaving.

  Still no answer.

  I could feel it coming on, that terrible desperateness I’d wanted so badly to avoid that night. I looked around the kitchen for something to occupy myself, something to fix or clean and distract me. The room was spotless. Peter dried his last plate in silence and put it in the cupboard.

  “I have a secret to tell you,” I said.

  He walked out of the kitchen, headed up the stairs. I followed, three steps behind. My face was level with his rear end. In the old days, I’d have tried grabbing it, and he’d have run up ahead of me.

  In my childhood room, Peter sat down on the bed and took off his shoes. One of the laces had broken, and he took a new package of laces off the beside table and opened it up. I leaned against the doorjamb.

  “You don’t think you owe me anything, do you? Not even an answer to a simple question.”

&
nbsp; Finally he answered. His face was a mask of revulsion. “You don’t think a year of my life is enough? I gave you that. That’s a year I fucking crumpled up like trash, and fucking threw out the window.”

  I slapped him across the face. He grabbed my wrist and pushed me away.

  We stared at each other from across the room. “Peter,” I said—I couldn’t help it, I knew it was wrong, it was pathetic—“I want to tell you…”

  “Don’t you ever give up?” He shook his head slowly, amazed.

  “I’ve read your journal,” I said.

  Peter put his shoes back on. They were good, expensive shoes, the kind you can order from a catalog for a hundred dollars, but they hadn’t been polished in a year. They looked like they’d been carved from wood. I hated them. Peter turned his back to me, and his shoulders began to shake.

  I could do something about this, I thought. I could make it up to him. I knew how it would feel, too; falling into each other’s arms like we did that first summer, kissing at first, making love. I imagined it so sharply it hurt. I stepped toward him, put my arms around his waist, lay my head against his damp back.

  He spun around suddenly and shoved me hard toward the wall. What I’d thought was sobbing was anger. My head hit the edge of the door molding hard enough to disorient me for a moment, but if it hurt I didn’t notice.

  “You are such a fraud,” said Peter in a choked voice. “You’re a fraud and you know it, too.”

  God, I hated him. I picked up a book from the dresser and threw it; it hit him on the shoulder. “You don’t know anything!” I screamed at him.

  The room was small, with a ceiling that sloped at one end. The air was always close in here, and it smelled like old paperbacks, and the single window cranked open only with difficulty. It was the room of my childhood, and I knew everything about it. The window screen had a certain bitter taste if you pressed your mouth to it; a trickle of dark water slipped down the wall and across the dresser when it rained. It was my room, but Peter’s stuff was scattered across every surface now. Stupid, heartless stuff—packages of Kleenex, allergy medicine, socks—next to my china dogs and the candles I made in a craft class when I was twelve. He fouled everything. He made everything of mine look poor and tacky.

  “I hate you!” I shouted. “You think…!” I threw at him whatever I could grab, all the ephemera of my childhood. A pocket dictionary, a handful of pens, the stuffed dog I’d brought from New Orleans and never named, a coffee mug. It rained around him. He put his hands out to stop it. I threw harder: my tape player, which struck him across the chest so hard the door popped open and a tape fell out, and the glass jar of pennies I’d collected as a child and brought to Train Line with the stuffed dog. Peter and I had taken and spent the silver coins, many of which were minted the year I was born, because my grandfather used to save them for me. It was a heavy jar, the size of a pineapple and with a similar shape, and when I hefted it at Peter it did not seem like a dangerous object. It was just my penny jar. He saw it coming and turned from it. It caught him on the temple and he fell.

  I screamed. The way he dropped seemed permanent, his spirit yanked from his body like a magician’s handkerchief from a sleeve. How could it be? I covered my mouth with both my hands to stop the screaming. Forces pulled at me; one toward Peter and one away from him, and so I was stuck where I was, staring at the small amount of blood collecting by his face. It came from his ear, I think, or perhaps his nose. There was only a little, on the blue linoleum.

  How could it be?

  My hands moved over my body. I was still here, hot and panting.

  I went into the bathroom and found a washcloth, dampened it, and cleaned the blood from the floor and from Peter’s face. Then I returned to the bathroom and rinsed the cloth, hung it from its nail over the tub, and went back to Peter. He was lying on the bed.

  What happened? Had I imagined him on the floor? Had he gotten up? His head was near the center of the bed, far from the place I thought I’d wiped clean. I knelt on the floor and felt for dampness. There was none. Could it have dried?

  I put my fingers, slick with sweat and humming electrically, on his throat to feel a pulse. I didn’t feel one. I couldn’t even find a vein.

  Memory is unreliable. I would like to say with certainty that I called an ambulance then and sat waiting for it half the night, but it is equally possible that my wishing it were so is what put the memory in my head. No ambulance came, of course. I have tried so hard to remember that phone call, to recall whether I dialed the wrong number, or whether I gave the wrong address, or whether I was perfectly clear and the confusion was on the other end, or if in my distraction I never called at all. But I sat at the table waiting, and I’m sure of this, because I made a cup of tea and spilled some boiling water on my hand, and as I sat at the table, waiting, I watched the burned place blister and turn white. The pain was a point of clarity. I slept with my face on the enamel tabletop and in the morning I went outside.

  Train Line. All around, the same things. The houses looked sleepy and surprised. Ragged blue chicory flowers grew around the telephone poles and in weedy places, and some kind of small, hairy, orange flower poked out of lawns. I took a walk and soon found myself in the Violet Woods. The air was heady, the woods tangled with jewelweed. The clearing around Illumination Stump was deserted. I sat on a bench. Crows hopped along the ground. Leaning forward, my head resting on the bench in front of me, I prayed very long and very hard for an explanation for what was happening.

  I sat until evening, when fireflies flashed their cold lights in the trees around us. There is no Death, and there are no Dead. I told it to myself over and over until it felt true. Faith could be the rope that pulled me out of this chasm. There is no Death, and there are no Dead. And Peter was still Peter, my mother would still love me, and I could go on.

  Back at my mother’s house, I cleared up Peter’s things, turned off the lights, locked the door. I went back to my apartment and took a warm shower, then lay in bed, thinking how I would get Peter down the stairs, into the boat, and across the lake. My mother, far away at her retreat in Ohio, was asleep in a rented bed. She would be home soon, and I couldn’t wait. I missed her terribly.

  10

  sisters

  Every religion has at its source a person confronted with the inexplicable. Spiritualism has Kate and Maggie Fox, two stern-faced young women who lived in the small town of Hydesville, New York, in the 1840s. Their portraits hung in Train Line’s main office, and in the library, and in the lobby of the Silverwood Hotel. I remember seeing their stubborn, unbeautiful faces when I was a child, with their thin lips and heavy hair, and asking my mother who they were. She didn’t want to say. “They were the first mediums,” she said, pulling me along, “but not really. Jesus Christ was the first medium.” But they were everywhere, so I knew they were important, and bit by bit I pieced together their story.

  In the spring of 1848, the Fox family—Mr. and Mrs. Fox and their daughters, who were twelve and fifteen at the time—began to be disturbed by weird noises echoing through their tiny rented house: knocks and crashes and bangs that were sometimes so loud it seemed as if someone must be throwing objects against the walls, or pounding the floors with his fists. It was terrifying, at least at first. But after a couple of weeks of this, of sleepless nights and restless haunted days, one of the girls had had enough. Snapping her fingers, the twelve-year-old, Katie, cried out, “Mr. Splitfoot! Do as I do!” And he did.

  Maggie tried it, too, clapping three times. Three raps echoed hers. When the girls’ mother asked the spirit to tell the ages of her children, he did it, including those of the four grown ones and a baby who died. Suddenly they were bubbling with questions: Are you alive? No answer. Are you dead? Two affirmative raps. Did someone hurt you? Yes. Did someone kill you? Is the killer living? Are you buried beneath this house? Yes, yes, and yes.

  Neighbors were summoned. They heard the raps and were thunderstruck. One of them came up with the idea
of reciting the alphabet and asking the spirit to rap when the correct letter was reached—a kind of oral Ouija. The spirit then told them more: his name, Charles B. Rosma—or was it Ross? Or something else? No one was sure—and that he had been a traveling peddler, killed and robbed by a previous occupant of the Fox house named John Bell. Mrs. Fox and her daughters went to stay with a relative, and the next day, investigative committees were formed among townspeople, and the Foxes’ cellar floor was dug up, but the hole kept filling with water and nothing was found. Much later, someone claimed to find some bits of teeth and bone, but this was never proved.

  Then, a former servant of the Bells came forward. She told a story of a peddler who showed up one day and vanished suddenly, leaving behind some new thimbles and an old coat that Mrs. Bell took to wearing. The servant remembered stumbling over freshly mounded soil in the cellar not long afterward. She, too, had heard ghostly raps. Someone else said that the summer the peddler went missing, the Bells had bad, evil-smelling water for months.

  Mr. John Bell, the accused, was outraged. He denied everything—there was no peddler, he said, and no murder and no secret burial. And no evidence, either, at least nothing from this world, the only world that counted in a court of law.

  At any rate, the Fox sisters were caught in the uproar. After a few months, they moved to Rochester, but the knocks followed them, and they discovered they could communicate with spirits other than the murdered Mr. Rosma. They began to tour the country, charging lots of money and drawing enormous crowds, and so Spiritualism was born.

  But that, unfortunately, is not the end of the story.

  People began accusing them of fraud. The girls were examined by a group of professors of medicine, who discovered that Maggie could not produce any raps when her legs were being held. Many years later, she confessed: it was all a fraud, they’d made the raps by cracking their toe and knee joints. Her sister confirmed it. But by that time it was too late. Spiritualism had spread across the world, there were thousands of mediums, hundreds of spiritualist churches. Train Line was a bustling town with dozens of buildings and a two-hundred-year charter. There was nothing to be done with the Fox sisters’ bit of information. When they recanted their confession a few years later, they found that few people paid attention to that, either.