After Life

by Rhian Ellis

  And this house—tall and narrow and sad, with shuttered windows and a tiny front lawn of dirt. Or the one next door, with the porch slanting down so sharply that once all my marbles rolled off it and disappeared into the weeds. Hadn’t I lived here? I gripped my elbows and tried to see something I was certain I knew. That banana tree? It would have grown since then.

  A car pulled up behind me and a voice called out. “Naomi!”

  I turned. It was my uncle Geoffrey, leaning out from the backseat of a police car. His face was stricken and wet.

  “Don’t run, please!”

  I didn’t run. I stood, exhausted, as the two officers got out of the car and approached me. One was white and one was black, and they looked like nice men. I put my hands over my face and staggered into them. “I’m sorry,” I said over and over. They led me back to the car, and my uncle pulled me into his arms.

  “Hush,” he said. He took my hands from my face and brushed away my hair. “Hush. It’s not your fault. It was her heart. It could have happened at any time. Shh.”

  I sat up, pushed him away from me. What was he saying? What did he mean?

  My mother, he said. My mother was dead. She’d had a heart attack in her kitchen, apparently making breakfast. Hadn’t Peterson told me? Isn’t that why I’d run off? Nobody had found her for several days, and then no one could find me, until Uncle Geoffrey left a message on her machine.

  “It’s not possible,” I said. “If she was dead, I would know.”

  My uncle wept and blew his nose. “I’m sorry I called the police. I thought you were going to do something to yourself.”

  “If she was dead I would know.”

  But even as I said this, I was beginning to believe that what my uncle was telling me was true. We were in the back of a police car, and my mother was dead. I had stopped being a medium. I would never again be one.

  “Is this where I lived?” I asked my uncle. The two officers were standing on the sidewalk, smoking. A mist was gathering over the grass. “Isn’t that our old house?”

  My uncle shook his head. “No, no. I’m sorry—your family didn’t live anywhere near here.”

  Outside, the police were finishing their cigarettes, dropping them to the ground and stamping on them. In a few minutes the white one came back to the car and poked his head in. “Are y’all ready for a ride home, or what are we going to do here?”

  “Home,” said Uncle Geoffrey.

  They got in and slammed the doors. The one in the driver’s seat mumbled something into a radio, started the car, and pulled into the street.

  We drove for a while. The city, from the backseat of the police car, looked rather ordinary: block after block of convenience stores and stoplights. I was surprised at how far I’d come. The two police officers were separated from us by a steel mesh that was bolted to the ceiling and sides of the car. I gripped this mesh with my fingers and leaned in close.

  “Officers,” I said. “I have something to tell you.”

  epilogue

  Eve tempted Adam, and Adam was tempted, and because of this humans have lived ever since in a state of sorry exile from the Garden they believe is home. But some early spiritualists figured out how to get back in. After death, they said, the soul goes to the Summer Land, a place of flowery meadows and soft breezes and magnificent scenery, all created out of the deepest wishes of the dead. Nothing is denied them. If the dead want art, art galleries spring up, and if the dead want fresh, ripe fruit, orchards grow from the mountainsides. There are schools in the Summer Land, but no one has to go. At night, the dead can visit the living, who are free to join their dead loved ones while they sleep. After a lifetime of thwarted desire, the dead can at last indulge it, and thus the very thing that caused our expulsion from the Garden in the first place will lead us back into it.

  I think about this sometimes and wonder what my mother’s version of the Summer Land might be like. I picture a sumptuous restaurant, linen tablecloths and golden silverware, endless lines of waiters bringing her desserts, bowls of flowers on the table, a new dress for every course. She might never get tired of it. But if she did, there’d be a huge front porch with a wicker chaise longue, and some tall drinks, and books with pretty pictures for her to look through. She could never get enough of prettiness when she was alive.

  It’s hard to believe in such a place, though. Wouldn’t there be conflicts? What if what you wanted didn’t want you? What if your greatest desire was to be alive again?

  Sometimes I imagine my mother coming back down here, and I wonder what she’d think. I’ve moved back into her house and have begun to fix it up a little. When I came back after my eighteen months in the Women’s Correctional Facility, in Delphi, the place was in terrible shape: the weeds were shoulder high and the paint was entirely gone from the siding. Inside, the linoleum floors were peeling up, spiders had built nests in the curtains, and all the taps leaked, so there was the constant sound of rain. Kids had pelted the house with eggs and broken some windows, and rain and snow came in, and the furniture sagged and wept. I wasn’t even sure if the house ought to be lived in anymore, but I had nowhere else to go, and to be perfectly honest, it looked no different from most of the others in Train Line. Things seemed to go from bad to worse while I was gone, but this observation might have been the result of my fresh perspective. The cats ran away when my mother died—Troy says he looked for months and never found them—but they returned a few days after I moved in. I find this miraculous, and a blessing.

  For a long time I found it painful to think about my mother, and instead I thought obsessively of Peter, hoping, I think, that I was making it up to him by confessing and by going to jail. Perhaps I did make it up to him, in a way. His bones are now in Oregon, buried alongside his mother’s and his father’s.

  I cannot forget him, but he no longer haunts me.

  It was a relief, actually, to be in jail at last. I wore a denim dress with a number on it. It was like being dead, a kind of afterlife in which my only desire was to be left alone—a desire that was granted to me. I worked occasionally, in the cafeteria or as a groundskeeper, but usually I had whole days to do nothing but read. The prison library was a disaster—nothing but self-help books as far as the eye could see—but Troy sometimes sent me books, and so did Dave the Alien, though this stopped suddenly when he met a girl at the video store, had a whirlwind romance, and got married. Ron sent me newsy updates about Train Line, and in particular about Jenny. Her health rallied for a while, then turned suddenly bad again, and she died a few months before I was released. Train Line renamed their children’s beach after her.

  I got mail from other people, too. People who’d read about the case in the paper wrote to me, some telling me I would burn in hell, others saying that if I repented all would be forgiven. Prisoners at other jails wrote with legal advice. Once I even got a Christmas card from Moira Morton. Enclosed was a holiday letter describing her year: she’d married in the summer, was pregnant already, and she and her new husband were relocating to Arizona, where he would work in aerospace. They were in the process of buying “a beautiful new home at the edge of the desert, where sometimes on nights with a full moon, the mournful howl of coyotes can be heard.”

  At the bottom she’d scrawled, “Your visions were true.” I kept the letter.

  Of my two jobs—one at night, cleaning a medical complex, and the other during the day, as a gardener at a nursing home—I prefer my nursing home one. I like being outside and taking breaks on the patio with the old people, and I have discovered I have a knack for pruning and digging and trimming. I like it in the winter, too, when I drive the tiny snowplow up and down the walkways and water the houseplants inside. The cleaning job is also satisfying in its way—I polish chrome and empty trash cans, and I do it efficiently and well. I vacuum, too. I have a way of backing out a door, sweeping over my footsteps as I leave, so it looks like I have never been there.

  One morning, I came home from work to find someone sitti
ng on my doorstep. I was quite tired, ready for a bath and a long nap, and did not recognize her for several minutes. She was much taller, for one thing, and for another she was dressed in a bizarre outfit—a cape that dragged on the ground, and a long black dress—but it was Vivian. Her glasses were gone, contacts no doubt, but her curly black hair was the same, as was her skinny, hunched shape.

  “Hi,” she said, as if she’d just gone round the corner for a carton of milk.

  Stunned beyond words, I unlocked the door and pushed it open for her. She went inside, holding up her cape so as not to trip, and I followed.

  “Goodness,” I said at last. “You’ve grown up.”

  “I’ll be thirteen in two and a half months.”

  “Dear God.”

  Instinctively, I began rummaging around my kitchen, looking for something for Vivian to eat. “Would you like some cheese? I have some crackers, too…”

  “Just crackers. I’m vegan now.”

  I fixed a plate of crackers, put some tea on to boil, and finally sat down to look at her. Though it’s nearly impossible to see the future adult in a baby’s face, the baby never leaves the adult, and I thought of the first time I saw her, in her high chair, with her rounded forehead and pot-handle eyebrows. These were exactly the same. She hadn’t really changed much, though she looked prouder, more angry, and less lost. She also appeared to be wearing eyeliner.

  “So,” I said. “What are you doing here?”

  “I’ll leave if you want.”

  “No, I don’t want.”

  She turned her head and looked around at the kitchen, and the living room beyond. “This house looks different from how I remember.”

  “I threw a lot of stuff out. And Ron helped me with the walls and floors.”

  “It looks better.”

  “Thank you.” I got up and poured the tea. “So…”

  “I want to be a medium,” she blurted suddenly. Her face turned pink.

  Oh, my. I stared down at my tea. “Does your mother know you’re here, Vivian?”

  “Yes. No. She doesn’t care. She and my dad got divorced. I mostly live with him. My mother and I fight all the time. I mean, like cats and dogs.”

  “So, then, does your father know?”

  “He lets me have my independence.”

  “I see.”

  She was breaking a cracker into little pieces and eating the fragments one at a time, picking them up with the tip of a licked finger. “I’ve been a Wiccan for two years,” she said, “but what I really want is to be a medium. I have to be one. Can’t you teach me?

  “You know, Vivian, I haven’t been a medium in a long time.”

  Her mouth twitched. “Is that because you killed that guy?”

  “Umm,” I said, startled. “Sort of. Not really. It was when my mother died. It was—I don’t know—complicated. I shouldn’t be telling you this.”

  “Why not?”

  “Oh, Vivian.” I sighed painfully. I had a memory of her as a little girl, a toddler, half-asleep on my lap, bumping her head beneath my chin. “I’m glad you came to visit. But I don’t know if I can help you.”

  “You have to help me!” she cried.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m tired right now. Can you let me think about it, and come back in a few days?”

  “Can I come back tomorrow?”

  “No,” I said. Then, “Come Friday.”

  In the days after Vivian’s visit, I felt restless, maybe a little dissatisfied. I found myself experimenting with the vacuum cleaner one night in the medical complex: was it quicker to vacuum in criss-crossing diagonals or overlapping stripes? Or perhaps taking sweeping strokes was more efficient, since a certain amount of time was wasted in getting the vacuum cleaner into position…and then I thought, looking out the tinted window at the lights along Lake Wallamee, Oh, who cares.

  I hadn’t missed mediumship before. And I still didn’t, really, but there was something about it I did miss. I began to think that I probably won’t be doing these jobs forever. I hadn’t thought I would. I just hadn’t thought about it at all.

  After work on Friday she was waiting for me, dressed in more or less the same getup, only this time her dress was red. I noticed a three-speed bike leaning up against the fence.

  “Did you bicycle all the way from Wallamee?” I couldn’t help but picture it—her cape flying out behind her.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Well, come inside, then.”

  I made Vivian wait while I changed out of my work clothes and brushed my hair, nervously tugging out the tangles, then I went downstairs and led her to my mother’s séance room. This was one room I hadn’t changed much; like her room in New Orleans, its walls were velvet, the curtains satin. There was a tiny table and two chairs. The air smelled like dust. Sometimes I just sat in here, thinking about my mother. But lately there was less to think about; I went over and over the same memories, and each time they became less immediate and real, and finally neither particularly pleasurable nor sad.

  “Cool room,” said Vivian.

  I handed her a grocery bag. In it were some of my mother’s things: her trumpet, her Ouija, a set of slates for spirit writing, some books. As she took it, I had sudden misgivings. Being a medium would not make her happy. Perhaps it would, in the end, make her unhappier than ever. But I had no way of knowing, I couldn’t see the future, so I let it go. “You can have all this, if you want it,” I said.

  Vivian looked in the bag, her mouth agape. “I do want it,” she whispered. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  She set the bag on the floor, reached into the folds of her cape, and pulled out a notebook. “Sit down,” she said.

  I sat.

  “Now,” she said, pulling out a pencil. “Tell me everything you know.”

  Readers’ Guide for

  After Life

  Discussion Questions

  What’s the significance of the title? Why is it two words—After Life—rather than one—Afterlife? How would that change affect how you thought about the book?

  Why do you think Ellis describes Train Line and its residents so meticulously? Could this story have taken place anywhere else?

  How did you feel about Naomi? Is she an unreliable narrator of her own life? Do you think she felt remorse for what she did to Peter Morton? Is she a bad person? Or is she a good person who did a bad thing?

  How do you think the spiritual elements tie in to the rest of the book?

  What do you think this novel is about? Is it a mystery? A novel about relationships? Or about mothers and daughters? Is it about our society’s fear of death and dying?

  Suggestions for Further Reading

  If you liked the whydunit aspect of Ellis’s novel, try:

  What Came Before He Shot Her by Elizabeth George. It’s the second half of her mystery novel With No One As Witness; George explores the events leading up to the seemingly random murder of a young upper-class woman by a twelve-year-old boy.

  If you liked the relationships aspect of After Life, try:

  Gail Godwin’s A Mother and Two Daughters, which focuses on the experiences of three richly described women—a mother and her grown daughters—as they try to navigate their lives and their relationships to one another after a traumatic event.

  Amy and Isabelle is Elizabeth Strout’s first novel, in which she brilliantly describes an often difficult relationship between Isabelle and her sixteen-year-old daughter, which is complicated by the guilt and shame Isabelle feels over her own dicey past.

  Ann Patchett’s The Magician’s Assistant, in which she introduces us to Sabine, a woman who discovers after the death of her husband, Parsifal, a terribly talented magician, that he was also excellent at keeping secrets about his past well hidden.

  Searching for Caleb by Anne Tyler. It’s probably my favorite of all Tyler’s novels, mainly because I adore the main character, Justine Peck, a fortune-teller who is much more successful unearthing the
past and predicting the future for her clients than for herself.

  If you liked the magic realist aspect of After Life, try:

  Alice Hoffman’s Fortune’s Daughter, in which two women, both suffering from related but not identical losses, meet one another in Southern California during earthquake season, a time when reality can become more than a little bit elastic and anything might happen.

  If you liked the psychological suspense aspect of After Life, try:

  Paul Auster’s Invisible, a beautifully written novel about the complex relationship between three characters (two men and a woman), in which the author examines the intricacies of memory and desire.

  A Dark-Adapted Eye by Barbara Vine, the first of Vine’s extremely unsettling psychological thrillers. Here she explores the darkness at the heart of the Hillyard family, a darkness that culminated with one of its members being hanged for murder. It won the 1986 Edgar Award for best mystery.

  Rhian Ellis told me in an e-mail that anyone who enjoyed After Life will definitely also love Shirley Jackson’s deliciously creepy novels. I completely agree. Here are the two with which I’d begin my reading of Jackson:

  Jackson’s third novel, The Bird’s Nest, is likely to send a frisson of unease down the spine of any reader as she explores the life of Elizabeth Richmond, a young woman whose mind has broken into four very different personalities.

  We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Jackson’s final novel, describes the surreal and isolated existence of Merricat and her older sister Constance (who have always lived in the castle) and how their lives are shaken first by a series of murders in their family and then—more seriously—by the arrival of a fortune-hunting relative.

  If you’d like to read about the real Train Line, try:

  Lily Dale: The True Story of the Town That Talks to the Dead. Christine Wicker, who writes about religion for the Dallas Morning News, visited the town of Lily Dale, New York, to meet and talk with the people who made their home there and the tourists who visited it. Not only did Wicker get a sense of the town itself, but she also explored deeper issues such as the meaning of faith and the human need for comfort in the face of grief.