by Rhian Ellis
Washington Bishop’s big fear, worse even than being buried alive, was that of premature autopsy. He carried a note with him stating that under no circumstances should his “corpse” be subjected to autopsy, or packing in ice, or prodding with electrodes. However, stated Mrs. Bishop in her monograph, an autopsy is exactly what happened, not eight hours after his final mind-reading performance. It was carried out in secret—I couldn’t tell by whom, but it appeared to be initiated by a cadre of jealous, less-successful mind readers—and it wasn’t discovered until shortly before the funeral. A friend was helping the distraught Mrs. Bishop prepare her son for the service, combing his hair, when he dropped the comb. It disappeared. A little probing revealed that Bishop’s head had been sliced open and his brain removed; the comb had fallen into the empty cavity. Well.
The brain was eventually retrieved and buried along with the rest of Bishop, but his mother wasn’t satisfied. There was supposed to be no autopsy, yet one had occurred. Mrs. Bishop was convinced by this time that her son hadn’t died at all, but been murdered by the crazed “vivisectionists.” This turned out to be a tricky thing to prove in court. If he seemed dead, tested dead in every way, how could someone say he simply wasn’t? How could Mrs. Bishop be so sure?
A mother simply knows, said Mrs. Bishop, claiming for herself the psychic powers that killed her son.
On Saturday morning I got a phone call from Peter’s sister. I was in my pajamas, fixing an English muffin that I planned to eat upstairs in my room, when Ron handed me the phone.
“Moira Morton,” he said.
I set my muffin down and took the phone cautiously. It was several seconds before I could say Hello.
“Hi, I doubt you remember me. We met at the library last month. I hope you’re not busy today, because I’d really like to meet you for lunch. Moira Morton, Peter’s sister?”
“Right,” I said. I recognized her voice: the woman at the library. “Of course. Today’s actually kind of busy.”
A long silence. Then: “All right, I understand that, but can you meet me for lunch? I can be there at noon.”
“I don’t know.”
She sighed impatiently. “I’m coming at noon, then. Meet me outside the library.”
I hung up the phone and stood there for a moment, wondering what I had gotten myself into, and then the phone rang again. Again it was Moira.
“If you have anything of Peter’s, books or anything, I’d like you to give them to me,” she said.
“All right. I’ll look around.”
“Good,” she said.
She showed up at exactly noon, in a black minivan that looked like a government vehicle. It rolled down the narrow leafy road toward the museum. I was watching for her out a side window. I’d put my hair up in the closest thing to a French twist I could manage, and I was wearing a pink cotton sweater and a pink-and-blue plaid skirt. I hadn’t taken a shower, which I regretted now; my fingernails could have been cleaner and I suspected I smelled odd. Sometimes when I got very nervous I’d sweat, and I was nervous now. I sniffed myself and thought I could detect a faint oniony odor. I’d just have to keep my arms clamped to my sides all day. In my purse were two books of Peter’s: a biography of Tycho Brahe and the plays of Aristophanes. I hadn’t wanted to give them up, but I did want to make Moira happy.
I was already outside, locking the front door of the library, by the time the minivan had come to a complete stop. Moira got out and slammed the door. She was wearing a suit made out of a nubbly, woolly material, and her black hair was swept off her forehead and tied in a loose ponytail. She walked up to me with her arms folded, her eyes not quite meeting mine. They were hazel, darker than Peter’s, and sat above Peter’s small sharp cheekbones. The expression on her face was neither hostile nor friendly; she looked, as she had in the library, rather bored. I wondered what she did for a living. Something in an office, I’d have bet; something with numbers instead of people, a job that let you be as rude as you liked, as long as you dressed well.
“I suppose I should ask what this is all about,” I said. I tried to say it lightly, with some irony, but it came out stiff and frightened.
“Lunch, as I believe I told you,” said Moira. “Did you bring those things I asked for?”
I opened my purse and took out the books. “I brought these…some Greek plays, and a biography of Tycho—”
“Is that it? Two books? He didn’t leave anything else?”
“No. Why…?”
She sighed impatiently. “Well, let me put them in the car.”
I handed them over. As Moira tossed them into the back seat of the minivan, I wished I’d lied, said he’d left nothing. I wanted the books back. I had been planning to read them someday; I wanted to learn from them.
Moira returned, wiping the book dust from her hands onto her skirt. “So, where do people eat lunch in this place?”
“There’s the cafeteria.”
“Oh. I’ve been there. Well, all right.”
We walked down the hill, Moira a step or two in front of me. The ground was frozen hard and tricky to navigate. I slipped and stumbled a little and broke out in a fresh sweat. The cafeteria, as it turned out, was closed.
“Shoot,” I said. “This time of year you just can’t predict.”
“Where else, then?” Moira’s nostrils had turned pink in the cold, just like Peter’s used to.
“There’s Ferd’s. The, umm, Groc-n-Stop.”
We tramped up the road. Ferd’s was, as usual, cramped and steamy. There was no place to sit and not much to eat as takeout, but Moira seemed very interested in the freezer full of ice-cream novelties. She reached in and pulled out a shape unidentifiable beneath its thick coating of frost.
“I’ll have one of these,” she said.
“I guess I will, too.”
We paid for our novelties and went outside, where I managed to scrape away enough frost to see that I had a Fudgie Cone. Moira had a raspberry Ripple Cup. I peeled the paper off and at tempted to take a bite, but it was rock-hard, and my teeth could find no purchase.
“Why don’t you show me around,” said Moira.
“All right. Sure.”
We walked, gnawing at our ice cream, and I began to relax somewhat. I pointed out the sights: the Memory Garden, the trail to the Stump, the Silverwood Hotel, the Lecture Hall. For weeks now I’d felt as if Train Line were my enemy, as if the town itself—the trees and gravelly roads and houses—were pitted against me, but for now they seemed returned to their old selves: dull and benevolent.
“That’s the Crystal Cave,” I said, pointing to a large half-renovated house sided with plywood.
“Let’s go in.”
The bell tinkled as we entered, and I gave a little wave to Francesca, the large, very butch woman who owned the place. She nodded to me, somewhat coolly. The shop was filled with rocks—crystals and geodes, and jewelry made from them—and things like tiny bubbling electric fountains and wind chimes made of copper pipe. I remembered when the store opened: the summer Peter died. No one thought it would last, but it had expanded several times. There was room after room after room of glittering junk.
In the warm air my ice cream was acquiring some give, and I ate it quickly. I wadded up the wrapper and put it in my pocket. Now that I had nothing to occupy my hands, I began to feel my creeping nervousness return. Moira was poring over a display of turquoise jewelry, huge gaudy pieces that reminded me of wads of chewing gum. Her Ripple Cup had disappeared, and her fingers were laced behind her back so tightly, I noticed, that her knuckles were white. This frightened me.
“Naomi,” she said, not turning to look at me. “Tell me. How’s Peter?”
I was not sure I heard her correctly. “Pardon?”
“I said I want you to tell me how Peter’s doing. In the afterlife. That’s your business, right? So. How is he?”
We were in the next room over from the cashier’s desk, where Francesca was sitting and sipping from a mug. She could see us,
and certainly hear us, too. I blushed.
“I’m sorry—I don’t know. I can’t—he hasn’t contacted me. Not really.”
“Hmm. I wonder why.”
She still hadn’t turned to look at me, and without seeing her face it was impossible for me to tell how sarcastically she meant this. I began edging away, looking intently at some tiny chunks of amethyst. A hand gripped my upper arm, hard. I jumped.
When I turned to her, Moira’s face was not filled with rage, as I’d expected, but with sorrow. This was so shocking I couldn’t breathe for a moment. Tears welled in her eyes, and her mouth twisted. Francesca was watching us with great interest.
“My mother killed herself,” whispered Moira. “She was diabetic and stopped taking her insulin. My father died years ago. And now Peter’s dead. Naomi…” The tears dripped down her face and her fingers were beginning to hurt my arm. “Naomi, I don’t understand how this happened. Can’t you tell me how this happened?”
A voice came booming over from the cashier’s desk. “How can I help you girls?” it said.
“We’re just leaving,” I answered.
I managed to pull Moira, who was now crying hard and without restraint, through the door and into the street. After a couple of minutes I pulled a Kleenex from my pocket and offered it to her. She didn’t take it, but instead wiped her eyes and nose with her fingers. “I was so mad at Peter,” she said, sniffing and pulling herself together a little bit. “I was mad that he ignored my mother all those years. He was always like that. He never bought anyone presents, he didn’t remember anyone’s birthday. I never liked him. But I didn’t think he was dead.”
She broke down in tears again. I was shivering; my teeth chattered. The wind was cold and I hadn’t dressed warmly enough. In fact, I’d dressed for an Easter brunch, right down to my white strappy shoes.
“Naomi,” cried Moira, “what’s going to happen to me?”
“I—I don’t know.”
“No! No, Naomi. I mean, I want to know what’s going to happen to me. I want you to give me a reading.”
“A reading?”
“Please. I want you to tell my fortune. Please.”
Normally, the word fortune would have made me wince, but I did not correct her. “All right,” I said.
I led her to the Violet Woods and down the path to Illumination Stump. Though regular message services hadn’t been held here since September, the benches weren’t yet packed away for winter. I gestured for Moira to sit down. Without the leaves and the flower boxes full of petunias, the clearing seemed empty and desolate, like a bombed-out church. I stood next to the stump and rubbed my forehead.
“All right, Moira, just—center yourself. Try to concentrate.” She squeezed her eyes shut and folded her hands. “Okay,” I said. “Okay.”
I tried hard. I focused on everything I knew about her: her mother, her father, Peter. I thought of her face and how her mouth looked when she was crying. But for the longest time, I heard no voices, and no one came to me. I was about to give up and just say something, say anything, when I saw it: Moira dancing. It was summer, she was wearing a flowered dress, her hair was long and loose. It looked fake and unreal, at first, like a detergent commercial, but soon more details came clear. A picnic table; a band with fiddles and banjos; friends all around her.
Then another one. This time a group of children, staring up at the sky in wonderment as a flock of geese honked overhead.
Then Moira, older, on a Ferris wheel, gasping with pleasure, someone’s arm around her.
There were a few others—a dog running through a hayfield, a baby swaddled in blankets, a table with pizza boxes on it—and by the time I finished, Moira was crying again, silently.
And she would have all these things. Perhaps not exactly as I saw them, but similar things, good, happy things that I would never have. She was beautiful, after all, and her life was not yet ruined. My heart ached with envy.
“You will be successful,” I told her. She glanced up at me, her eyes teary. I wanted to make it up to her, to give her everything I had. “You’ll—you’ll never want for money or friends. You will live a long and comfortable life. You will be happy.”
12
hands that melt like snow
I walked Moira back to her car. It had begun to snow as we emerged from the woods; by the time we got to the library it was coming down in giant wet flakes. It was like walking through curtains, long sheer curtains that parted in front of us and closed behind us, layers and layers of them. I could barely make out the shapes of the trees that lined the road or the houses behind them. Moira said nothing to me on the walk, and I couldn’t even guess what she was thinking. I waited on the library steps as she got into her car, started it up, and drove slowly down the road and out of Train Line.
After that, it was quiet.
Things stayed quiet for a couple of days. The police didn’t show up again and Moira didn’t call. One afternoon I sat on my bed and slid the ribbon off the Christmas box that held Peter’s things. Outside, an inch or two of new snow was melting already, dripping off the eaves, though the sky was heavy as a wool blanket. I left my window open a crack so I could hear the outdoors: the dripping, the squirrels chattering in the trees, the rare car that crunched by.
The box was covered with dust and fuzz, so I wiped it clean with the corner of my bedspread before I opened it. I took the lid off and set it beside me. Each object was as familiar to me as if I’d looked at it every day; I’d inventoried these things in my mind so many times since the day he died. The gray wool socks smelled of the inside of the box—cardboard and dust. His glasses rested high on my nose, the earpiece digging into my ears. I took them off. The tube of foot cream was still soft and smelled medicinal. I rubbed a little into my hands. I touched the cards in his wallet and counted the money. The wristwatch fit my wrist, so I guessed at the time, set the hands, and wound it.
What I was doing, I realized, was trying to decide what to bring with me when I left.
I didn’t really know I was thinking of leaving, until then. But after that I could think of nothing else. Of course I was leaving. What else? My bedroom suddenly looked different. It was no longer my bedroom; it was just a place I rented, and when I was gone someone else would live in it. I imagined that—my clothes gone from the closet, the pictures off the walls, no more books on the floor. I imagined days and nights when the room would stand empty, no one turning on a lamp or even opening the door. Until one day when someone would move in, and obliterate me.
The money, of course, and the watch. I wouldn’t need to pack the watch because I could wear it. I could wear the socks, too, but I wasn’t sure yet where I was going, and it might not be the kind of place I’d want to wear wool. And of all the objects, the watch had the most of Peter in it, except, perhaps, for the glasses. I remembered how it looked on Peter’s wrist. He had lightly hairy arms and hair on the back of his hands, black silky stuff I liked to smooth with my fingers. His skin was a shade or two darker than mine, his hands were beautiful: long and square and delicate and strong.
I took the watch off and examined the back of it. Someone’s initials were etched there—JCM—and a date, 12-25-35. Peter’s grandfather, I supposed. In the fine crevices made by the etching was a tiny amount of dark dirt. I scraped a bit out with my fingernail and put it on my tongue. It had no taste at all.
In the end I brought everything: the watch, the money, the foot cream, even the terrible jar of pennies, which had rolled under the bed that day but somehow didn’t break. I couldn’t bear to part with any of it.
My mother invited me to dinner. She left a message on the machine; I played it in the empty living room. Ron was out, Jenny upstairs. My mother’s voice sounded unusually formal, as if she and I were only acquaintances, but friendly ones. On the way over I stopped at the Groc-n-Stop and bought a jelly roll for dessert. Ferd did not look me in the eye when he handed me my change, and I thought, This is the last time in my entire life that I will
shop here.
She had set the table with candles and a vase of dried flowers. I was struck with the sudden conviction that she had meant to call someone else, Troy probably, and had called my number by mistake. “Why…candles?” I asked her, standing in the kitchen with my jelly roll. She wore a loose green dress made out of something like furniture upholstery, and her face was unhappy.
“Oh,” she said, looking at the table. “I wanted it to be nice for you.”
