After Life Read online

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright © 2000 by Rhian Ellis

  Introduction and Readers’ Guide copyright © 2012 by Nancy Pearl

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  A Book Lust Rediscovery

  Published by AmazonEncore

  P.O. Box 400818

  Las Vegas, NV 89140

  ISBN-13: 9781612182988

  ISBN-10: 1612182984

  for Diane Vreuls and Stuart Friebert

  and my parents, Sally and Robert Ellis,

  with love

  Notes and Acknowledgments

  Spiritualism is a philosophy, science, and religion founded in the nineteenth century and still practiced by many thousands of people across the world. This book, however, is a work of fiction, and the specific principles and beliefs set forth here are not meant to represent those of any particular group, sect, church, or person.

  Among the books I consulted while writing this novel are Thirty Years of Psychical Research by Charles Richet; Zolar’s Book of the Spirits by Zolar; The Science of Seership by Geoffrey Hodson; The Law of Psychic Phenomena by Thomson Jay Hudson; Beware Familiar Spirits by John Mulholland; and The “I AM” Discourses, volume 3, by the Ascended Master Saint Germain.

  For help with research into Spiritualism, thanks to my sister and brother-in-law, Laura and David Goodworth. For New Orleans info, thanks to Mary Bosworth.

  And for other kinds of help, thanks to: Julie Grau, Lisa Bankoff, Mary Evans, Lisa Dicker, Alex Babanskyj, Rebecca James, Ed Skoog, Jill Marquis, and Leslie Van Stavern Millar II of the Brunswick Building in Missoula, where this was written.

  Deepest thanks to Betsy Lerner, to Carole DeSanti, and to John.

  Table of Contents

  After Life

  1 what I did

  2 intercom

  3 an empty grave

  4 invisible

  5 cryptesthesia

  6 reconstructed head

  7 there’d always been deer heads in the ha-ha

  8 witch

  9 she was more than a glimmer

  10 sisters

  11 premature burial

  12 hands that melt like snow

  13 after life

  epilogue

  Readers’ Guide for After Life

  Discussion Questions

  Suggestions for Further Reading

  About the Author

  About Nancy Pearl

  About Book Lust Rediscoveries

  Introduction

  Rhian Ellis’s debut novel, After Life, is one of the books that always comes to mind when I tell my students at the University of Washington’s Information School that no two people ever read the same novel (and, moreover, that no one ever reads the same novel twice). What I mean by this is, of course, that a novel, as a work of art, is not something that should be simply and passively received, or absorbed, by a reader. (Is this perhaps an essential part of what it means to be a work of art? I think so.) When we read a novel, we all bring ourselves—our thoughts, our feelings, and our experiences—to the pages of the book. And those thoughts, feelings, and experiences are, of course, different from one reader to the next. In a very real sense, then, we collaborate with the novelist in writing the book we’re reading. (Novelist Paul Auster expressed the essence of what I have in mind here with admirable conciseness in his book The Art of Hunger: Essays, Prefaces, Interviews when he wrote: “The one thing I try to do in all my books is to leave enough room in the prose for the reader to inhabit it. Because I finally believe it’s the reader who writes the book and not the writer.”)

  After Life is a strange and wonderful novel that I found myself inhabiting. The “roominess” in its prose is reflected in how difficult it is to categorize. When I first read it in 2000, shortly after it was first published, I remember wondering if there was any other contemporary novel that could be read in such a myriad of ways. I couldn’t come up with one. Is After Life psychological suspense, like the novels of Barbara Vine or Shirley Jackson? Is it a tale about the often fraught relationship between mothers and daughters, like Carol Shields’s Unless or Gail Godwin’s A Mother and Two Daughters? Or is it a coming-of-age novel, such as The Little Friend by Donna Tartt or Ellen Foster by Kaye Gibbons? Or might it be a “whydunit” sort of mystery, in the manner of Elizabeth George’s What Came Before He Shot Her or Ruth Rendell’s A Judgement in Stone? (It’s certainly not a “whodunit,” since we know from Ellis’s wonderful opening line, “First I had to get his body into the boat,” that a killing has occurred, and there’s no doubt about who committed it—the title of the first chapter is, after all, “what I did.”)

  You might think that the strangeness of After Life is due simply to the strangeness of many of its characters, who are mostly involved with the spirit world in one way or another as clairvoyants, mediums, fortune-tellers, psychics, and such. But for me it was mostly the ambiguity, the slipperiness, of the novel’s narrator, Naomi Ash. (Ah, Naomi! I simply didn’t know what to make of you.) Normally, I must confess, I don’t do well with ambiguity. I would really rather know how a book ends before I begin it, and I all too often feel the urge—not always resisted successfully, alas—to peek at the last chapter immediately upon finishing the first, simply to relieve the tension. That’s why I tend not to enjoy novels with unreliable narrators. The uncertainty makes me too nervous. In order to allow myself to be absorbed into the voice of the narrator (or to have the narrator’s voice absorbed into me)—which for me is at the heart of the pleasure of reading—I need to believe that he or she is telling me the truth, or at least attempting, in good faith, to do so. (Thus my fascination, and love/hate relationship, with memoirs, where this is always an issue.) So Naomi both fascinated me and made me extremely uncomfortable, because I just couldn’t tell how reliable she really was as a narrator.

  Everything she related, from the disposal of the body in the first chapter to the resolutions of the last, sounded so plausible. Perhaps too plausible? I just couldn’t shake off the niggling questions that arose: Has Naomi really told us everything that she could have about her childhood? And her relationship to Peter (the body she’s trying to get into the boat)—has she told us all that we need to know about his death? And if not, might the book mean something entirely different than what I thought? And then I realized that that uncertainty—what kind of book am I reading? what is Naomi really like?—despite my discomfort with it, is a major reason why I fell under the spell of After Life and why I knew I had to include it in the Book Lust Rediscoveries series.

  After Life held other delights for me as well. The way an author uses language is always important to me in the books I choose to read. I realized a long time ago that, of all the books I’ve most enjoyed, the vast majority are characterized by their authors’ ability to put words together in ways that surprise and enchant me, ways that cause me to look at the world as I never had before. Invariably, there are sentences and paragraphs in these books that I am compelled to read aloud to my husband (or whomever happens to be close by), post on the bulletin board in my office, and copy into the by now multi-volumed set of notebooks I have kept for years and years, which contain my favorite poems and lines from the books I’ve loved, to be read to myself when I need comforting or aloud, by my husband, to help me fall asleep.

  Here are two of the lines from After Life I wrote down in 2000 in my notebook. One is, I think, central to understanding Naomi, while the ot
her I am drawn to simply because it puts into words an inchoate feeling I’ve often had.

  The first: “My mother began in honesty and ended in fraud; I began in fraud and ended in something at least close to truthfulness.”

  And the second: “…and I felt a small but swelling happiness, the kind that comes from a smooth carrying-out of an errand.”

  Perfection.

  Finally there is Ellis’s evocation of the setting of After Life. Although I am a novel reader who, as might be apparent by now, tends to pay more attention to character development and agility with language than a novel’s setting (unless I’m reading historical fiction), I found it impossible not to be wowed by the way Ellis brought the upstate New York town of Train Line to life. Train Line is based on the real community of Lily Dale, New York, which I felt I had heard of before I read Ellis’s novel. But maybe not. I’d certainly never felt any particular urge to visit there until after my first reading of After Life. When I finished the novel, I actually sat down at my computer and tried to figure out how many planes, trains, and buses it might take for me to get there from Seattle. (And believe me, it was much harder to get that kind of information in 2000 than it is today.) I still Google Lily Dale occasionally, noting with a skeptic’s delight that I could obtain a list of all the registered mediums in town, should I ever feel the need to consult with one. I have yet to make the trip, in part, I think, for fear that the possibly mundane reality of Lily Dale would mar the wonder of Train Line and of the young woman at the center of this unforgettable tale (written by Rhian Ellis—and me).

  I hope you enjoy After Life as much as I did.

  Nancy Pearl

  After Life

  1

  what I did

  First I had to get his body into the boat. This was more than ten years ago, and I’ve forgotten some of what came before and after, but that night and the following day I remember in extravagant detail. I had lain awake all night, trying to imagine how I might get him off the bed and down the stairs and into the rowboat, since he weighed at least a hundred and fifty pounds and might have gone stiff. My bed, I remember, felt absurdly uncomfortable, as if someone had slipped walnuts and bolts into the layer just beneath the ticking, and there was something sharp and prickly, like hay, poking out of my pillow into my face and neck, yet I hardly moved all night. Every noise paralyzed me with fear. I had to force my eyes shut to think, literally hold them shut with my fingers, and in this way I worked through the problem—getting him into the boat—over and over again, allowing for variations, so that by morning I was pretty sure I had it down. Once he was in the boat it would be easy.

  When it was light I sat up and put my feet on the floor. The room rocked and tilted slightly, like a room in a fun house or a ship. Lack of sleep made me dizzy, which caused a sense of unreality that I found comforting, as if now I was finally asleep, and only dreaming. But the feeling did not last, and after a minute or two I found some clothes on the floor and got dressed. I had worn these same clothes the day before, and perhaps the day before that, and as a consequence they were limp and smelled a little like onions. I washed my face in the bathroom sink, used the toilet, and went downstairs.

  In the kitchen I made myself a sandwich and put it in a plastic grocery bag, then got a small shovel from the back porch. It was the trowel I used in the garden, still caked with hard lumps of dirt. I cleaned it off as well as I could with my fingers, then gathered myself together and walked over to my mother’s house.

  Though it was still August it was getting cold in the mornings, and the grass was dewy, and a mist hung over the lake at the end of Fox Street. The air, when I breathed it, had a taste like cold lake water. Later, I knew, it would get hot and the wind would carry the smell of the ketchup factory from across the lake in Wallamee. That smell had always been a signal for me to dig out my leather shoes and wool skirts, that summer was ending and school was about to begin. Though I had been out of school for four years by that time, the smell still had the power to excite me, or more exactly, stimulate me. I had a tendency to be lazy in summers. It was a delicious feeling at first, but it cloyed. Fall aroused me to action, though I don’t mean this as an excuse for what happened.

  The boat—a battered metal rowboat with peeling green paint that had washed ashore on Train Line’s little beach one day, and that no one else had wanted to claim—was in the garage behind my mother’s house. The garage was rickety and packed with junk, but I kept my boat there because I had no storage space at my apartment. I took it out on the lake quite often, so I was pretty sure that anyone seeing me drag it down to the dock would not find it odd. I lugged the boat up to the back door, attached the hose to the outdoor faucet, and pretended to wash the hull. Water tributaried across the small dead lawn and puddled around the laundry pole. The sun, though it was barely up, burned the top of my head and made me feel spotlit and uncomfortable, as if I was being watched. Just in case, I continued my charade: giving the hull another good rinse, winding the hose back up, smiling slightly. Then I got a blue tarpaulin and some nylon rope out of the garage and went inside to get Peter.

  He was where I’d left him, of course, in the upstairs bedroom that had once been mine. When I was a little girl, I’d demanded red gingham wallpaper. It was still there. So were the shelf of paperbacks, the failed ant farm, the blue-flowered linoleum, and the rag rug made from my old dresses. It smelled of dust and dead wasps, the closed-in odor it always got in summer when I’d left the window shut. And another smell, a hot, difficult one I didn’t want to acknowledge: Peter’s smell. He smelled more powerfully like himself now that he was dead than he had when he was alive. It made me angry—suddenly and obscurely—that this had been done to my room, where I had once been so happy.

  Peter was in bed. One of his feet, still in its worn brown shoe, stuck out from the blankets. I recalled closing his eyes when it happened—I was sure I had done it—I remembered that I couldn’t look while I was doing it and that I had to turn away and find them by touch. But now one had opened up again. It stared milkily at the lightbulb on the ceiling. With my thumb I pushed the lid down again; this time it would stay only halfway shut. His mouth hung open, too, but there was nothing I could do about that except not look at it. It occurred to me then that I had not lost my mind, but had instead put it somewhere so far away and hard to reach that I had little hope of ever retrieving it.

  Dragging him from the bed onto the tarpaulin, which I’d spread on the floor, was like pulling a long root from damp soil. I couldn’t lift him, so I tugged him by his arm, then by his leg, and little by little extracted him from the bed. He hit the floor and the whole house shook. Again without looking at his face, I got him wrapped in the tarpaulin. By this time I was sweating and having trouble catching my breath. I sat down to rest at the top of the narrow staircase and looked down into the living room below. Hardly any light made it past the drapes, but I could see the glint of the clock pendulum and the long-legged shape of the oscillating fan. Good-bye, I said to it. So long. I wasn’t really going anywhere; I’d be coming back and this room would be exactly the same, but this ordinary fact was impossible to believe.

  I had to push Peter down the stairs. He slid, like a large fish, about halfway, then I pushed him again.

  I dragged him to the boat, tipped it onto its side, and rolled Peter into it, then hauled the boat the block and a half to the lake. Anyone looking might have noticed I had something bulky and heavy in it, but I was right to think no one would be out. Summer was almost over.

  On the lake, I rowed hard, my feet braced somewhat awkwardly on either side of Peter. Mist still hung over the surface, and droplets clung to my eyelashes and hair. The lake had been carved by glaciers; it was long and slender as a crooked finger. I rowed the length for half an hour, then navigated my way through a narrow inlet. There were cattails here, and the wreck of an old beaver dam, but my boat was steady in the water and nimble, and I slipped right by.

  I was going to a place I’
d visited a few times as a teenager, at the end of the lake and up the shore a bit. In fact, once I’d brought Peter there for a picnic. It was a grassy clearing, hidden from boaters on the lake by a tree-covered spit of land. A little farther inland there was a dilapidated barn: the only sign of people anywhere around. At the edge of this clearing, about fifteen feet from shore, was where I planned to dig the hole.

  I left Peter in the boat while I dug. I didn’t care if the hole was very deep, just that it was long enough. Once when I was a child I tried burying a dead cat in a hole not big enough for it, and I still cannot forget pushing down on it to make it fit, pressing its head with my trowel. Its ears filled horribly with dirt.

  It took all day. Though it was a clearing there were lots of rocks and roots I had to dig out, but I’d told myself all night that I would be patient, that I wouldn’t do a rush job under any circumstances. At one point, a pair of fishermen floated around the spit. I lay in the weeds, looking at my dirty hands and praying they wouldn’t find my boat, which was hidden in a stand of cattails. I could hear them talking.

  “Too shady back here, man.”

  “You think?”

  “Like the underside of my ass.”

  “Well. All right.”

  “I know this other place, back where we were.”

  “Whatever you say, man.”

  They floated off again.

  The dirt, which was soft and wet, had a fetid odor. It was the smell the lake acquired in summer, sometimes, when the water fell and exposed the rank mud. It was an odor of such active decay that I felt reassured—the earth would absorb Peter in no time.