After Life

by Rhian Ellis

  Old Charles B. Rosma was forgotten; he disappeared into the slippery space between the knowable and the unknowable. Everything we forget goes there, eventually; the dreams we don’t bother to recall, the people we meet once but whose names escape us. I thought Peter would stay there, too.

  When the police had gone, that morning after the Halloween party, I sat for a while on the sofa in my living room. The sofa was the only piece of furniture from the days of Welchie Pratt that Ron hadn’t yet replaced. It was a musty orange thing, sunk in the middle, springs poking through. I wanted to take my hooker dress off, but I could not make myself get up and do it. Behind me a window was open, and a cold draft blew against the back of my head.

  My mother sat down three feet away from me, staring raptly at a poster Jenny had hung above the television. It was of a polar bear moving across some tundra, white on white, only its black nose marring the landscape. Jenny told me once that polar bears cover their noses with their paws when they sneak up on seals, in order to make themselves more completely invisible.

  “It’s not him,” I said at last. My voice was steady and did not shake. “Peterson said it couldn’t be him.”

  “It fits, though,” said my mother. She swept her hand across her face, as if brushing away spiderwebs.

  “No, it doesn’t fit at all.” I said this firmly, then go聴 up and walked around the room, touching things. Almost nothing in this room was mine. There were Jenny’s little figurines, Ron’s candlesticks and magazines and cassette tapes: Frog Talk said one, and Rain Dances another. I was always uncomfortable leaving my things where other people would have to look at them, possibly disliking them and wondering why I had to fill rooms with evidence of myself. Dust clung to everything. The road out front was unpaved; dust got everywhere if you didn’t stay on top of it.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “There’s nothing to be sorry for,” I said. “It’s not Peter.”

  “Oh,” said my mother. She looked sick and confused.

  “Anyway, even if it is, what’s that got to do with us?” Somehow, my face relaxed, and I managed a small smile. “He left here. I even got a postcard from him.”

  “You did?” she asked, hopefully.

  “Yes. From Cape Cod. It had a clam kind of thing on it. A cartoon. He said he was going to Mexico.”

  “You never told me that.” She searched my face. “Do you still have it? That would be evidence.”

  “Of course I don’t have it! That was years ago. I threw it away.”

  She sighed and picked at some threads poking out of the sofa. She was wearing a loose cotton housedress covered with pink flowers, and I pictured her cleaning her house, dusting and obliviously singing to herself, when the police came to the door.

  “Mama,” I said. “What is it?”

  “Oh,” she said. Her face was strained, like the face of someone carrying a load almost too heavy to bear. “I found things.”

  “You found things?”

  She nodded slowly. “In the house, when I got back from Ohio. Things he left.”

  “What things?”

  “Underwear!” she said, as if the thought of it was surprising to her still. “Three pairs of boxer shorts. And some maps and some keys in a drawer. I thought it was strange, but you know, the things you forget when you move in a hurry.”

  “Well, then, so what?”

  “He also left his diaries.”

  The word diaries made me think of the one I kept for a sporadic year when I was nine, the five-and-dime diary with the shiny orange cover and the cheap lock, which I had to open with the tip of a ballpoint pen because I lost the key. Girls kept diaries, hid them under their pillows, tied them with ribbons, and at first I did not connect them with the blue-bound lab notebooks Peter kept his journals in. I stared blankly at my mother, unable to believe that Peter had a diary, and then, when the memory of those journals washed over me, unable to believe I had forgotten about them.

  “They were under the sink, wrapped in a paper bag. It just never made sense to me that he would leave them here, even by accident. It was so odd…” She rubbed her face hard with both hands.

  “Did you read them?”

  “No. Not really. Enough to know what they were. I sent him a note through his mother asking where I should send them, but I never got an answer. So I hung on to them.”

  “You never said anything to me about it.”

  “Well,” said my mother. “You made it pretty clear you didn’t want to talk about him, if I remember.”

  I left the room, went into the kitchen. I began to clean up frantically, piling dishes into the sink, throwing the scattered sections of newspaper into the recycling box. What I had to do, I decided, was get the journals away from my mother. I had to get them out of my mother’s house and burn them, or pour acid over them, or destroy them in some other way. How much had she read? Who had she told? That they existed was intolerable.

  She came up behind me, wrapped her arms tight around my chest. “It’s all right, it’s all right if it’s him,” she whispered. “Anything could have happened when he left here. It’s all right…”

  I got out of her arms and pushed her away. “I want you to give me those diaries,” I told her.

  She backed away from me, shutting her eyes and putting her hands over her ears.

  “Please, Mama!”

  But it was clear she did not want to hear me doing this; I was implicating myself, and though a tiny part of me knew it, I couldn’t stop. I turned and ran out the back door. Halfway across the lawn I slipped and fell—the stupid hooker dress was as tight as a sausage casing, nearly impossible to run in—but I got up and kept running, down Fox Street, over to Rochester Street, up to my mother’s house. I pounded across the porch and tried to open the door. Locked! She never locked the door, never since I could remember, I didn’t even have a key. I ran around the house to the back door—locked, too. The windows were shut tight. I tore at a screen with my fingernails, tried to pry it up so I could get at the real window and break it maybe.

  “Naomi! Stop it!”

  It was my mother, gasping and red in the face, leaning against the porch railing.

  “Please, stop it! People are watching!”

  I wheeled around. Rochester Street was empty, all the houses up and down were Sunday-morning quiet, shades down, curtains drawn. The sky was a blank gray void.

  “Who?” I cried. “Who?”

  She didn’t answer.

  I understood, then, the true horror of the world: it is that once a thing is done, it can never be undone. A universe of wishing can’t uncrush a bug, or unspeak a word, or erase even the tiniest action from the past’s ledger. The past is fixed and unalterable, a tyrant, and none of us has any power against it. How can we do anything, how can we live, knowing this? My mother came to where I stood among the trampled ivy that grew around her house. This time, when she pulled me into her arms, I did not resist. Her heart thudded hard through her pink-flowered dress.

  “Please don’t read them,” I said into her hair.

  “I won’t,” she said.

  When I got home again, I slept. It was a strange half-sleep; I heard Ron in the hallway telling Jenny that he needed to go to Wallamee to buy some caulk to fix the kitchen sink, and I dreamed she answered by saying that he shouldn’t bother, because a tornado was coming and it was heading right for our house. I woke up confused and with a headache. The clock said it was almost one in the afternoon.

  I took a shower. Usually I wouldn’t touch anyone else’s bath products. I was sure they kept track, and would notice the scent of it on me. Today that did not seem to matter. I used Jenny’s thick mud-colored shampoo and her translucent soap, which looked like a piece of foamy green glass. The smell of tree bark and pinesap, Jenny’s scent, rose in the steam around me. While I ran the soap over my body, I thought about Officer Peterson and Officer Ten Brink. Officer Peterson, I suspected, kind of liked me; Officer Ten Brink did not. But women like
her—those spunky, scratchy-voiced, energetic types—never did. She reminded me of the gym teacher I’d had in high school, the one who gave up on trying to make me play volleyball and let me hang around in the weight room alone, where I’d occasionally drop a dumbbell on the floor to let her think I was doing something. Officer Peterson was different, more like the tall, popular vice-principal. He might overlook things, if he liked you.

  Peter Morton had been all wrong for me. I should have known that the minute I met him. He was too sulky, too brooding, too self-absorbed. Someone like Officer Peterson would have been better. A calm-eyed country boy. A practical person—head full of nothing but ordinary facts and simple opinions. Or even better, no opinions at all. A mind as plain as a field of wheat. That’s what I wanted.

  I’d been standing in the shower for so long, soaping myself and fantasizing about Officer Peterson, that the water had gone cold. I put the soap down and got out, dried myself roughly with a towel, and yanked a brush through my hair. In the mirror my face was round and ruddy, my hair dark and stringy, my eyes…strange. For a long, disturbing moment I didn’t recognize them. Once, in a magazine, I’d seen paintings in which the artist had given his human subjects the eyes of animals—there was a woman with the round, baleful eyes of a cow; a little boy with bird eyes; someone else with the peculiar square pupils of a goat. That’s how I looked to myself. I squinted. Who was that?

  You’re a murderer, came the voice of Officer Peterson in my head.

  Yes, I thought to myself. The thought was a terrible relief.

  Yes, yes, yes.

  After I was dressed, I went for a walk around Train Line and found myself standing in front of Troy’s house, looking up at his kitchen window. Behind it, the old man appeared to be cooking. He moved back and forth, concentrating on something presumably on the stove, his white hair fallen across his forehead. I had put on a dress and a sweater after my shower, which wasn’t enough. I was cold. I rubbed my arms, watching Troy.

  After several minutes he turned and peered out at me, then signaled me to come inside. I unlatched the front gate and walked up the steps.

  “Hoping for an invitation?” he asked, holding the door open for me.

  “I didn’t think of it, but maybe I was.”

  The house was warm and steamy and clocks ticked from every wall. He had cuckoo clocks and school clocks and wristwatches hanging from their cracked leather bands, and grandfather and grandmother clocks and, in the parlor, an hourglass on a huge oak frame. Once when I was a child Troy turned it over for me and I timed it with my new digital watch. The last grain of sand fell through the aperture an hour and one second later.

  “It’s off by a second,” I told Troy.

  “It’s your watch that’s off, dear,” he replied.

  The clocks had all come from his father, an undertaker and medium in Australia. “It’s not me who’s obsessed with mortality,” he liked to remind visitors. People liked to make assumptions about Troy’s psyche based on the presence of the clocks. “It’s not the time aspect that’s significant, Troy,” I’d heard Tony K. the Hypnotist tell him once. “It’s that you control every single timepiece. None are electric, are they? They depend on you for life. It’s that you’re a control freak, Versted.” Or, “They symbolize your father to you, that much is clear.” It was my mother who said this. Troy just smiled and shrugged, conceding that he did keep them around for sentimental reasons, but mostly just because he was used to the sound they made. The whirring and clattering and chiming would have driven anyone else insane, and it would be a shame to break up the collection. Only a few were set to the right time. Others, I suspected, were set to some Australian time zone, but most seemed randomly set. It occurred to me, as I was taking my shoes off in the entryway, that every clock was accurate for some place on the globe—or would be, if time wasn’t standardized.

  “Do you like mulligatawny?” Troy asked, hurrying back to the kitchen. “It’s just about finished. I can take some Snickers bars out of the freezer for dessert, too.”

  “I’ve never had mulligatawny. It smells interesting, though.” It did.

  “Straight from the Colonies,” he said in his Britishest voice.

  The smell, I realized, was curry: something I’d had once or twice at a potluck and liked well enough, but not the kind of thing I normally ate. I felt suddenly and deeply relieved to be here, with Troy, who knew nothing of Officer Peterson or the investigation. Or did he? I might never discover how much he, or anyone, knew. He stirred the soup with a wooden spoon and put slices of white bread into the toaster, then stood and peered into the bright orange slots as they toasted.

  “Hurry, hurry!” he whispered at them.

  “You must be hungry,” I said.

  Troy glanced at me. “I certainly am. I have an atrocious metabolism. If I don’t eat all the time I turn mean.”

  I smiled. “I wouldn’t want to be around for that.”

  “You certainly would not.”

  When the toast popped up he scraped a little margarine over each piece and cut them into triangles, then set the table. I sat down, suddenly dizzy with hunger.

  “Sorry if I’m not much of a conversationalist at the moment,” said Troy, pouring soup into my bowl. “No talk when hungry. Eat! Then Troy talk.”

  We sipped from our spoons. After a few mouthfuls, Troy’s face visibly relaxed. His forehead smoothed out and his jaw loosened.

  “So,” he said, wiping his lips with a paper napkin. “What brings you here this fine fall afternoon?”

  “Actually, I was just going for a walk. I didn’t mean to invite myself over. Though I appreciate it. Thank you.”

  “Mysterious forces at work, I suppose,” he said. “Because, as a matter of fact, I wanted to talk to you.”

  “Really? What about?”

  “Oh, um.” He looked down and quickly scooped several spoonfuls of soup into his mouth. “It’s a coffee-and-dessert subject, I think. We can wait until then.”

  With his lowered head and tidy, nervous motions, Troy suddenly reminded me of someone. I couldn’t put my finger on who. Of course, he could have just reminded me of Troy; I’d known him for years, eaten dozens of meals with him, here or at my mother’s house or at Maxwell’s. Other places, too. Troy was a fixture. But no; it wasn’t him I was thinking of. This shy, embarrassed version of Troy reminded me of someone else—I’d never seen Troy shy before—but who?

  My grandfather, of course. With his face hidden in his soup bowl, all I could see of Troy was his white hair and narrow shoulders: my grandfather’s exactly. My grandfather! Somehow, over the last twenty years, Troy had grown as old as my grandfather was when we left New Orleans. By now, my grandfather would be nearly a hundred, but he’d died a year or so after we left. He had a live-in companion for the last several months, a young man from Spain, to whom he left everything: the house, the furniture, the meager bank accounts. The young man, whose name was Carlos but who preferred to be called Charles, was deeply embarrassed by this, and offered to split everything with my mother. He called several times, apologizing.

  “Please, we share?” he asked. “We share, please?”

  Nothing doing, said my mother. “It belongs to you, Charles. It’s all yours. You deserve it.”

  “You take some furniture.”

  “Absolutely not,” said my mother.

  How angry my grandfather must have been. It had never really occurred to me before. He died angry.

  “Are you all right, Naomi?” asked Troy, touching my hand.

  “Oh, yes, I’m fine.” I smiled at him. “I was just thinking of my grandfather. You remind me of him.”

  His face took on an exaggerated unhappy expression. “Am I that old? Oh, dear. How old are you, anyway, Naomi?”

  “Thirty-one.”

  “Really!” He seemed truly surprised. “You don’t look more than twenty-five. But it’s been that long, hasn’t it?”

  “I guess it has.”

  “You’re luc
ky. You have that round face. You won’t wrinkle for a while.”

  I shrugged. “I don’t really care about that.”

  He chewed his toast and gazed at me. “But you should. In a way. I don’t mean you should be vain. It’s just that you’re in the bloom of life. You won’t be this young forever. You should get married. You should leave here, Naomi.”

  Leave here! What a thought. I used to want to leave Train Line so badly; all through my teens I read travel books and road-trip novels. I’d fantasize about getting in a car and driving somewhere, just anywhere. Peter did that once, he and Nelson Karp, one summer vacation from Princeton. They had a guidebook of roadside attractions, and they drove from one attraction to the next for weeks, eating at truck stops and sleeping in the back of Nelson’s van at state parks and rest areas. Their favorite place wasn’t a roadside attraction at all, but a town called Ozona, in Texas. The whole state, Peter told me, was desert and grasslands, flat and dry and uninspiring. But when they got off the interstate at Ozona, it was suddenly lush and full of trees, huge oaks and Norway maples. He and Nelson ate at a restaurant that looked like a converted legion hall—they sat at card tables in folding chairs, and the walls were covered with calendars from local businesses—and the food they ate was surprisingly delicious. They had pancakes as huge and pillowy as mattresses, and huevos rancheros, and tortillas that came in a sombrero-shaped basket.

  We would do that, Peter used to tell me. He and I would travel together. We’d go west and swim in the Pacific Ocean, he’d show me the Grand Canyon and the rain forests of Oregon, and in California we’d pick warm lemons from trees along the side of the road.