After Life

by Rhian Ellis

  I thumbed the doorbell and waited. From somewhere deep within, chimes played a familiar tune. There was a large picture window some ten feet from the door, and although I stepped back and craned my neck, I couldn’t see in. Elaine’s husband was home, though; his car, a humpbacked sporty thing, was parked in the driveway next to my mother’s. I rang the bell again.

  It was a few more minutes before the husband answered. He needed a shave and a hairbrush and didn’t look happy to see me.

  “What do you want, Miss Ash?” A beery odor wafted from him.

  “Hi.” I smiled. “I just thought I’d stop by and say hello to Vivian. She, umm, left some things at my house and I—I thought I’d let her know she should stop by and pick them up sometime.”

  He frowned. “What kind of things? Why didn’t you just bring them with you?”

  “I should have, I know!” My grin hurt my face. “Actually, I didn’t plan on coming here, I was just in the neighborhood and…well, you know, there’s some, umm, schoolwork, a sweater I think. A few things like that.”

  “I’ll let her mother know. Good-bye, Miss Ash.”

  He tried to shut the door but I grabbed the knob and pushed. “Please, can I talk to Vivian? I just want to let her know she shouldn’t worry about—her things.”

  “She’s not here. Take your hand off the door or I’ll call 911.” And he gave the door such a sharp shove I nearly fell backward off the concrete stoop.

  “Then where is she?” I cried out, but the door slammed and I heard the lock click in place.

  I doubted he would really call 911. What would he tell them? A woman knocked on his door and talked to him? I stepped off the stoop and made my way around the enormous shrubbery to the picture window. Standing on the tips of my toes, I could only barely see in. The room was dark but there appeared to be a television glowing just out of my line of sight. The opposite wall was covered with mirrors, and I saw the top of my head and my eyes reflected in them. I looked silly and a not a little desperate.

  Then suddenly Elaine’s husband was there, rapping on the glass with his hairy knuckles and mouthing something at me. I stepped back into the bushes and he gave me the “take a hike” sign with his thumb, and so that’s what I did.

  Back in the car, I shook the rain from my hair and tried to pull myself together. My thoughts were piling on top of each other and I was sweating. “How can people live here?” I said out loud, to no one.

  I drove the car around the neighborhood, lost myself temporarily in the maze of loops and cul-de-sacs, then drove out again onto Vining Road, which curved around the north side of the lake. I felt a little bit better right away. Weeds and bushes pressed close on either side, and here and there through a gap in the trees I could see the lake, gray and reassuring, and, from this distance, calm and flat as the sky. I cracked the window open a bit so I could smell the air. It was rank with the odor of wet earth.

  The place I buried Peter was not far from here. I wondered if the police were still guarding it, or if they were satisfied they’d found all the pieces of the skeleton and had decided to let the construction resume. I hadn’t even driven by since the night my mother dragged me out here.

  I parked next to the dirt driveway that led down to the clearing. A couple of pieces of yellow crime scene tape still fluttered from the trees, but the sawhorses that had blocked the way before were now pushed aside. I slid the car keys into my pocket and hiked down.

  If there had been anyone there, I’d have turned back. But the site was silent and looked abandoned. I climbed down the steep dirt path, sliding on rocks with my inappropriate, slick-bottomed shoes, but managed to make it to the bottom without killing myself and followed the path toward the lake. Several yards from shore, a yellow backhoe crouched like a reptile next to a pit—the foundation, I assumed, and where they’d found the skeleton. A stiff breeze blew. I rubbed my hands up and down my arms. I’d forgotten to put a coat on and was chilled. Nonetheless, I waded through the tall dead weeds to get a closer look at the hole.

  It didn’t look like much. The construction men were part way through the foundation when they’d had to stop: two of the walls were straight and smooth, and most of the floor as well, but the two other walls were crumbled piles of earth and rock. Four stakes painted bright orange stuck out of the dirt, connected by string to form a crooked rectangle. That’s all there was to show where Peter had lain for the last ten years.

  It would be easier to get over there, I realized, without my stupid slippery shoes. I took them off. Then I squinted up toward the embankment to make sure no one was coming. But it had begun to rain hard again, and I could make out nothing through the thick line of trees.

  Stepping down, I sank to my ankles in the muck, then climbed over the piles of dirt to Peter’s grave. I touched the orange sticks, plucked the dirty string. It looked less like a place where someone had been exhumed than someone’s vegetable garden, before any of the seeds had sprouted or plants been put in. The dirt itself was darker and richer than most soil. I didn’t know why I’d come here, except just to see the place again. The rain came down harder, flattening my hair and soaking my dress. It was a funny thing, but I remembered something I hadn’t thought of in a long time, since I dug the hole ten years before: an airplane had flown over my head that afternoon. It was a jet, just a tiny shape in the blue sky, with a vapor trail that streamed and fattened behind it. What had the passengers seen? The flat mirror of Wallamee Lake, surrounded by green and brown squares, maybe thready black highways in between. Me? Not likely. As I went about my task I’d have been as small and insignificant as the eye of a germ, as the toe of an ant. Teeny, tiny. Practically nothing. Thinking of this helped me get through that day. I’d put myself on that airplane. I couldn’t even see what I was doing. It hardly mattered at all.

  I turned to go. But as I did, the earth beneath my feet gave way. The whole unfinished side of the foundation, saturated with water and disturbed by my stomping, slid into the bottom of the pit, bringing me and the stakes and the string with it. I fell to my knees and tried to grab at something, but there was nothing to grab. It was like dreams I’d had of falling—tumbling out of windows, over waterfalls, down elevator shafts—the same few panicked moments that seem long enough to live your whole life in. By the time I stopped I was half sunk in mud. There was mud in my eyes and hair and mouth, where it had the rotten, gritty taste of bad fish. I struggled up and climbed to firmer ground, and spat and shook myself and cried.

  At first I thought if I stood out in the rain long enough, it would wash me clean. It did no such thing. I wandered around the clearing, crying, feeling like I had spent my life working up to this day, the day I would lose everything and end up covered with mud and falling to pieces at a construction site. The rain began to let up a bit. Beyond the trees, cars on Vining Road flicked on their high beams. Soon, it would be dark.

  When I got to my mother’s house, she wasn’t home. Was this the night Troy was going to propose to her at Pizza Village? I couldn’t remember. I’d managed not to get much mud on the car seats by digging a blanket out of the trunk of the Oldsmobile and sitting on that, but it wasn’t until I was home that I realized I’d left all the sticky notes and labels and typewriter ribbons in the car.

  The next morning, as I was dressing for work, I told myself firmly that I would not do anything else rash. I would continue my life exactly as I had until Labor Day—working, going to circle meetings on Mondays and lectures on Sundays, eating slices of pie in the cafeteria, reading the newspaper, and chatting with people. Occasionally I would watch television and occasionally I would go over to my mother’s house. I could make a life out of that.

  I brushed my hair furiously, trying to get rid of the grit that seemed embedded in my scalp.

  But as I stood on the steps of the library, fumbling in my coat pocket for the keys, I knew I didn’t have the heart to catalog today. I didn’t really want to go home, either. I dropped my things inside the door, locked it f
rom the inside, and went into the reading room, snapping a couple of shades up to let in the weak November light. Then I pulled one of the overstuffed chairs close to a window and sat in it, missing Vivian.

  After a while I fell asleep, my legs hanging over the armrest and my face pressed into the dusty upholstery. I’d been thinking about Vivian’s house when I dropped off, trying to imagine what her life there was like, and when I began to dream it was of that house. In my dream, I owned it. It was filthy—sticky black dirt everywhere, overflowing ashtrays teetering on every end table and piles of junk mail sliding to the floor whenever I turned around. The whole place smelled like garbage. So I cleaned it. I was extremely thorough, squeaking Windex everywhere, kneeling down to scrub baseboards. And the more I cleaned, the more light poured into the house. The bad smells vanished. Something was baking in the kitchen, and somebody, my husband, presumably, was taking a shower in the bathroom. Though I didn’t see him, or anyone else for that matter, I heard the pounding water, him singing over it. At one point I stretched, raised my hands over my head to get the kinks out of my back, and realized I was pregnant. My stomach bowed out in front of me like the sail of a ship. Of course I was pregnant. I’d known it all along. I walked, swaybacked, to the front door and threw it open. It was spring. I loved it. I loved my unborn baby, I loved my house, I loved everything.

  A terrible banging sound woke me up. It took a few minutes before I was awake enough to figure out what it was—someone knocking on the front door of the library, shaking it and rattling the knob. I was frightened at first. Who could so desperately want to read dusty old spiritualist books?

  It was my mother. She was cupping her hand over her eyes and peering in through the window in the door. I unlocked it and let her in.

  “Oh, Naomi! You’re all right.” She had that wild-eyed look she sometimes got when I was a child and came home bleeding or with torn clothes.

  “Of course I am. Why wouldn’t I be?”

  She shook her head, then put her arms around me and gave me a quick hug. It felt strange, for a moment, to realize that my belly was flat and I wasn’t pregnant after all. Grief rocked through me.

  “Will you come to the cafeteria with me? I need to talk to you.”

  So I put my coat on and followed her down the hill. To my shock, it was snowing. I had forgotten about snow. Since the morning it had gotten much colder, though it was still warm enough that the flakes melted when they hit the ground. They grazed my face and hands like flying insects.

  My mother seemed energized, though with panic or something else I couldn’t tell. At the cafeteria, she picked up an orange plastic tray and bought us two slices of pie and two cups of coffee while I sat at a corner table, waiting. Part of me was still caught up in my odd dream.

  When she sat down in her rickety chair, the coffee sloshed onto the tray. My mother seemed hardly to notice. She leaned in toward me.

  “People are saying terrible things, Naomi.”

  I gazed at her steadily to show I didn’t care about what people were saying, then looked down at my coffee. It was old, burnt, and when I poured milk into it, it turned the color of ashes.

  “You don’t believe them, do you?”

  “Of course not!”

  “Then you should ignore them.”

  My calm unnerved her, I could tell. I ate a little pie.

  She turned and looked out the window, where giant flakes were whirling down. “I believe in you, Naomi.”

  “That’s fine.”

  “You are my daughter. I have made the decision to believe in you.”

  “All right,” I said.

  She picked up her fork, put it down, picked it up again. “Officer Peterson called this morning and told me that my help on the investigation is no longer welcome. He said that if any of the information I have already given them proves useful, I will of course be compensated, but since the investigation has come so close to home it would not look good if our partnership continued. So he said.” She gave me a wry smile.

  “Close to home,” I repeated.

  “That’s what he said. I asked him what had changed since Sunday, but he wouldn’t tell me.”

  She bent her head over her pie, and when she did I noticed that her hair was coming in gray at the roots. Though I sometimes teased her about dyeing her hair, I didn’t like to see it turning gray, because it looked like forgetfulness, or neglect, or illness.

  “I am a suspect,” I said.

  My mother looked up at me, alarm in her eyes. “No, Naomi. No, you aren’t.”

  “Yes, I am. I am a suspect.”

  I sat back, seeing how this felt. It did not feel bad; it felt right, it felt like things were falling into place at last. I took a deep breath, and my lungs expanded more fully than they had in a long time.

  “Don’t say that. Don’t say that.” My mother made two fists and placed them on the table. “Look,” she said. “I have a plan. We need to leave here for a little while. We can go home again.”

  “Home is here.”

  “No, it’s not,” she said, bitter. “We should never have left New Orleans. This is a hateful place. We have no one here.”

  “What about Troy?”

  “What about him?”

  “Did he ask you to marry him?”

  Startled, she said, “He did, as a matter of fact.”

  “And what did you say?”

  “I told him I couldn’t possibly. Not now. I told him you and I were going on a trip together. He wanted to come, but I…” She put her face in her hands.

  For a strange and fleeting moment I wished she were dead. What a terrible thought. But I did—I wanted her dead, I wanted her gone, because I could not stand her suffering; it filled me with loathing. There’s no suffering on the spirit plane, I thought. But what did I really know? And almost immediately I recognized that it wasn’t her I loathed, but myself.

  “We’re not going anywhere,” I said. “I’m sorry, Mama.” Then I stood up, kissed the top of her head, and left her there.

  She was right, though; people were saying terrible things.

  When I took the library’s mail to the tiny Train Line post office—it was like a paneled tool shed, with room for two medium-sized people to line up at the counter; everyone else would have to stand outside—the postmistress, a Miss Rita Raymond, would not even glance at me as she weighed and stacked and affixed postage. Once she had been a kind of friend, with kindly words for me on even my dourest days. Within a few days, I noticed that no one would make eye contact with me, not even Ron. People coming toward me in the street swerved, or turned around, or suddenly realized they were late and passed me at a rapid, distracted clip. The effect was odd. I found myself touching my face, my neck, making sure I was still there.

  In the Groc-n-Stop I heard someone say, “… surely can’t allow a murderer to live here. I mean, talk about PR problems…” I was kneeling on the floor, going through the boxes of macaroni and cheese to find one with a price tag, and I was hidden from the speaker, but I recognized the voice: Tony K. the Hypnotist. Pain shot up through my knees, but I stayed there until I was sure he’d gone. Later the same day, someone I didn’t know was talking about me in the cafeteria—“She was a babysitter, imagine that!”—until someone else I didn’t know spotted me and gave her friend a nudge.

  Still, I walked carefully and slowly and with my head up. I took my arrows as if I deserved them.

  When it happened, I read about it in the paper, like an ordinary person:

  MYSTERY MAN IDENTIFIED

  (Wallamee, NY) Thanks to careful police work and a sheaf of dental records, a positive identification has been made in the Lake Side Grave Mystery. The bones are those of Peter S. Morton, of Portland, Oregon, purportedly a summer visitor to the area, who was last seen approximately ten years ago….

  It wasn’t even a headline story, just a sidebar, and I imagined that people reading it felt a vague sense of disappointment that the skeleton was not from a local pers
on after all. Certainly, if he had been local, it would have made the headlines. There was no mention of me. If this was a good sign or a bad sign, I didn’t know.

  I was sitting on the porch in the wan November sun. A week had gone by since I’d seen Vivian, though I’d driven slowly past her school during recess and tried to catch a glimpse of her in the mass of running, screaming children in their identical pink and green and blue winter coats. Without her, I felt like I was going through life with one eye shut, or with huge mittens on; I felt clumsy and not quite there. I had hours to sit on the porch, or read the newspaper, or refill my coffee mug over and over. It occurred to me that I should get another job. It seemed like a daydream, though, something that would happen in another life, not mine. Me, Naomi Ash, filling paper bags with hot greasy food, or me in a turquoise smock, turning old people in a nursing home, seemed about as real as my paper doll trying on different crayoned outfits.

  The bones were Peter’s, definitely Peter’s. Why did this shock me? At first I didn’t recognize the sensation moving through me, slowly as Novocain. But I was truly shocked. I must have harbored some hope that it was all a paranoid fantasy of mine, that the discovery of the bones was a terrible coincidence, that everything I’d told the police was true. Oh, God, I’d wanted it to be true.

  A cloud moved over the sun. A dying bee crept across the porch floor, heading for the steps, though it couldn’t have known they were there.

  One morning that week I cataloged a book called The Human Vivisection of Sir Washington Irving Bishop, the First and World-Eminent Mind-Reader. It was a thin, pamphlet-sized monograph bound in faded blue paper with gold lettering, dated 1889. It was written by Bishop’s mother, Eleanor Fletcher Bishop, and told the story of her son’s bizarre death. Washington Bishop was a mind reader, one who performed stunts like this one: someone—preferably a prominent, well-known, and liked person of the city he was performing in, the mayor, perhaps—would hide a brooch or a hair pin or some other small object within a mile radius of an agreed-upon starting point. Bishop, with his hand tied to that of the person who’d hidden the item, would then rush about the city, invariably finding it within half an hour. Sometimes, he’d head straight for it, veering from the most direct route only when a building or river or some other immovable structure required it. However, these acts of clairvoyance took a lot out him, and often after such a performance, Bishop fell into a kind of cataleptic fit. He’d barely make it back to his room before succumbing to a deathlike state: his breathing would nearly stop, his heartbeat slowed to just detectable levels, his skin turned gray and cool. Anyone who knew Bishop would never mistake this state for death, however; he—like many Victorians—had a morbid fear of premature burial and spoke of it often. In the latter years of the century, all kinds of devices were patented to prevent such an occurrence or to catch it before it was too late. I’d seen them in other books. One, I remember, involved a sensitive air bladder placed on the chest of the deceased; any movement, even the slightest breath, would cause a bright red flag to pop up and signal to passersby that an exhumation was in order, tout de suite. Other devices involved megaphones and air tubes and lightbulbs—the only thing worse than waking up in a coffin underground being, presumably, waking up in a coffin in the dark.