After Life Read online

  I couldn’t eat the lunch I’d brought.

  By mid-afternoon the hole was about four feet deep and five and a half feet long: the length of Peter Morton. I pulled the boat to shore—I was quite tired by this time, and shaking—tipped Peter onto the ground, then rowed out around the spit to make sure no one was coming. There was one boat on the lake, a speedboat, but it was far off and didn’t appear to be headed in my direction, so I rowed the boat to shore again.

  I realized, after I’d dragged Peter over to the hole and opened up the tarpaulin, that I should probably take his clothes off. People can be identified by their clothes; I had read this somewhere, or maybe seen it on a television mystery. The thought hit me with a wave of sickness, of almost incapacitating regret. I took his wallet from his pocket, put it in my lunch bag, then unbuttoned his shirt. I had to tear it to get it off over his arms. His pants were easier. I unzipped the fly and pulled them down, an action so familiar I could close my eyes and pretend for a moment that we were somewhere else, in any of the dozens of places we had made love. I quickly tugged off his briefs and rolled him into the hole.

  Oh, Peter!

  He lay facedown. He had pretty hair, black and wavy and shiny as an otter’s. I couldn’t bring myself to throw dirt on it. I couldn’t do it to his narrow back, either, with its delicate, knobby spine and shadowed ribs. I was almost knocked over by an urge, then, to pull his face out of the muck and blow into his mouth, to clear the mud from his eyes and his nose and save him.

  I turned and ran into the woods. I despaired that I would never get lost in them, that I would always be with myself, that the world was not big enough to swallow me whole. I wanted him to get up and be alive again; I wanted to fly apart. My forehead slammed and tore against the rough bark of a hickory tree, and the pain calmed me.

  Wiping blood from my eyes, I filled the hole.

  When it was all done, I threw my shovel and his clothes, weighted with stones, into the lake and walked up the rise to the old barn. Inside I found a wooden trough full of rainwater. I washed my hands and face as well as I could, then I lay down on a fallen beam, looking upward. Through the gapped boards of the roof, the sky was blue. I watched clouds slide by.

  It was a ruined world.

  2

  intercom

  When I was a child we lived in a house with an intercom. It looked like a telephone but it was made of a tortoiseshell kind of plastic, and instead of a dial it had a set of buttons, numbered one to eleven for all the rooms of the house. You could speak into the handset and your voice would come out of a speaker in whichever room you chose. This house also had a complicated and thorough system of dumbwaiters. Someone small enough—me, at the time—could climb inside and show up in any one of several rooms or corridors, or simply sit there inside the walls, listening.

  Since my mother was a medium, and held séances and gave readings at home, she found these features handy. Sometimes she let me work as her accomplice. I’d rap out ghostly messages from my place behind paintings, I’d fling objects across the room, I’d whisper through the intercom’s cracked wiring. Sometimes I’d hold the handset on the other side of a box fan, and speak through that, which gave my voice an interesting, otherworldly sound. Once my mother dressed me up in a lace tablecloth, doused me with talcum powder, and had me stumble around the séance room, posing as somebody’s dead child.

  My mother was not, however, entirely a fraud. The floating trumpets, the ectoplasm, the spirit rappings: all this, she said, was Theater. Every profession has its necessary theater—teachers with their apples and rulers, doctors with their tongue depressors and white coats. People demand a show. This was especially true in New Orleans, where we lived at the time. In that city you couldn’t go to a parade without having candy and beads hurled at you, or being flashed by somebody in a fright wig, even on the Fourth of July. My mother’s theatrics, she said, were a kind of misdirection. If she could shock and astound, she’d crack open a tiny hole in people’s skeptical armor—only briefly, perhaps, but long enough to sneak some truth in. People believe first, disbelieve later. Or anyway, that’s what she said.

  But I, for one, couldn’t always disentangle the real from the fraudulent, the truth from its trappings. Sometimes it seemed as if my mother’s fakery was just a more interesting and beautiful version of what was real. Sometimes it seemed that the truth needed the lies, as if there wouldn’t be any truth without them. At any rate, whatever my mother was doing, it was a rare and powerful thing, perhaps even a form of magic. It enthralled me.

  We lived in New Orleans until I was ten. My memories of that time are scattered and odd but mostly good: taking baths in the kitchen sink while my family sat around the table, playing backgammon; a sugar skull given to me by a customer of my mother, which I left under my bed until one day when I found it half-dissolved and swarmed over with ants; the green velvet walls of the séance room; and helping my mother, when I was three or four, to attach the fabric to the walls with a staple gun. Our house didn’t have air-conditioning, so every room had a collection of fans—ceiling, box, oscillating, paper—each with its own prevailing winds. Summers, we’d stagger from room to room and fan to fan, windblown and exhausted. To escape the heat, my grandfather and I went to the movies. I remember buying pickles in brown paper and eating them in the chilly dark. When the movie was over and we stepped back outside, the heat would feel intensely good for a while, damp and intimate but slightly threatening, like the breath of someone leaning in too close. Later, when my mother and I left for good, I would miss this heat more than I missed the house, or the city, or even what was left of my family by then.

  This was my family: my mother and her parents. My grandparents were kind, shy people; my grandmother was a librarian at my school, Saint Ann’s, while my grandfather—a gentle old man with a fringe of white hair on his forehead—kept house. He’d sold his stationery store around the time I was born and now puttered around in his tennis shoes, always sweeping and pulling weeds. The house belonged to my grandfather. It even looked a little like him: tall, hunched, dapper.

  The man who was my father did not live with us. He was my mother’s dentist and a good friend of hers, but no one, she said, she could marry. Anyway, he was already married. He visited us now and then, and would sometimes hang around during his lunch hour, wearing a white dentist coat covered with little blood spatters. My mother fixed him sandwiches and he made polite conversation with me. He called me “Squirt.” I was not supposed to let on to him that I knew he was my father.

  It was an awkward situation. My mother loved him. I could tell by the way she pretended not to: she avoided his eyes if anyone else was looking, and made a big deal about “forgetting” her dental appointments, as if they meant nothing to her, but she always called to reschedule. He might have loved her, too, though my mother didn’t think so. “Two people never love each other at the same time,” she told me once. She had just returned from a dental appointment and was sitting in the kitchen holding a teabag to a tooth, and frowning. “One loves, and the other is in love with being loved. The fun is in guessing which one’s you.”

  Bottles of perfume and silk scarves had a way of appearing around the house, and we were never short of toothbrushes. But if they ever planned to get together, if he ever thought about leaving his wife, I knew nothing about it. I would be surprised if he did. Run off with my mother? She did not seem to be the running-off-with kind. She was tall and bossy and had a big nose; I couldn’t picture her collapsing in someone’s arms, or galloping away on horseback. In any case, by the time I was seven or eight he was gone, to an army base in the western part of the state. And that was that. I never saw him again, though before he left he gave me a checkup and a set of windup choppers. To tell the truth, though, I was relieved. I didn’t like what he did to my mother. He made her moony and wistful, made her want something she could not have.

  It would have been easier for her, I think, if he had died. She had special access to the
dead. Living, but disappeared, he was completely out of the picture. If he’d died she’d at least have bits of him, now and then: his voice, flattened and tinny and small, floating from her trumpet, or a whiff of his aftershave in a darkened room, or—best of all—his ghostly fingers, probing her mouth for signs of decay.

  Those years, the years we lived in my grandfather’s house, my mother practiced a particularly outdated and quaint brand of spiritualism. She didn’t know. This was the seventies, and by then most mediums had turned into “psychics” or “tarot card readers,” and spent more time developing their ESP than communing with the departed. The few remaining spirit trumpets—the big tin cones that amplify the voices of the dead during séances—were preserved in museums or stashed in attics, but my mother had one, and sometimes it even levitated for her. I think she suspended it from a horsehair; it was lighter than you’d think. Modern psychics have no use for the dead at all. The living is what they care about, and lottery numbers, and horoscopes. My mother wasn’t aware of this trend. She learned what she knew from books. She ordered her equipment out of an obscure catalog from somewhere up north. I remember it—the pages were rough newsprint; the printing type, minuscule.

  But her work had a large following, especially among the old and morbid. One of these people was a woman named Beryl Kemper, who was obsessed with the thought of her own death. When she and my mother got together for one-on-one sessions, which they did every other week or so for several years, she’d often whip out her left hand and display the break in her lifeline.

  “What do you think?” she’d ask my mother, breathless. “Do you think I have three more years? It looks to me like I have at least two. Look at that crossline there.”

  My mother, neither fortune-teller nor palmist, would politely push Miss Beryl’s doomed hand back into her lap. “You know that stuff’s bunk. Besides, your left hand’s what you were born with, and the right is what you do with it. You can guess my advice, Beryl.”

  They’d drink coffee and gossip for several minutes, then my mother would take both Beryl’s hands into her own, as if to warm them. “Your mother’s here, dear,” she might say, looking right into Miss Beryl’s eyes. “She wants you to take better care of yourself. There’s an empty pot on the stove, she says. Does that makes sense to you?” Beryl ate it up. She didn’t need evidence—a floating guitar or a tipping table—as some people did. The session would always end with a long chat with Miss Beryl’s dead daughter, via the intercom. I would put on a gaspy, choked voice, because Irene had died of the croup when she was a little girl. For a baby, Irene could impart a great deal of wisdom. I would sometimes read from The “I AM” Discourses:

  Out of the heart of that Great Silence comes the Ceaseless, Pouring Stream of Life, of which each one is an individuized part. That Life is you, Eternally, Perfectly, Self-sustained…

  Beryl knew it was me. How could she not? But she’d always cry to hear “Irene’s” voice, and she seemed comforted by my mother’s prayer, which ended, “And there is no Death, and there are no Dead. Amen.” If I met her in the kitchen as she was leaving, she’d squeeze my shoulder and tell me to come by her house on my way home from school, so she could give me a Mallow Cup. Whether what had happened was “real” or not didn’t matter a bit to Miss Beryl. She—and really, all of my mother’s customers—swallowed it whole, and why not? My mother made their lives more interesting and more meaningful. From these old women I learned that belief didn’t have to be something you got after weighing the evidence; you could just have it. Belief was a decision you could make.

  Miss Beryl lived on Carondelet Street, which wasn’t on my way home from anywhere. But sometimes I wandered around after school, chasing cats and looking for money on the sidewalk, and one day I decided I would stop by and say Hello to Miss Beryl, and maybe get my candy. Mostly, I wanted to see the house where a dead girl had lived. I had never known any real dead people, let alone dead children.

  I knocked on the door, and after a long wait Miss Beryl answered, surprised to see me and without any makeup on. She let me in, though, and I stood in her front room while she burrowed through mounds of things, looking for her Mallow Cups. On the wall, over the piano, there was a blown-up picture of a child’s face, a girl’s. There was something odd about the eyes.

  “That’s Irene in her casket,” said Miss Beryl. “I had a man paint her eyes in.”

  It was chilling. I stared and stared at the photograph, unable to get enough of it. Her pale hair was clasped with two silver clips, and the fingers of one hand curled along the bottom of the picture, the nails dark. Her painted eyes could have shot bullets.

  When I said good-bye and was back on the sidewalk again, I noticed the Mallow Cup Miss Beryl had given me was so old—its yellow wrapper faded to white—it might have once belonged to Irene. The chocolate gave way under my fingers into a sticky, powdery mass, and the marshmallow in the middle was tough as cartilage. It smelled like an old book. I ate the thing anyway.

  For a long time after that I could not think about death without remembering the photograph of Irene Kemper in her casket. That picture became death to me: to be dead meant being suspended over someone’s cluttered piano, twice life-size, eyes forced open in an unnatural, unblinking gaze, forever.

  If I were to die, I often wondered, what would my mother do? How would she feel? These questions haunted me. Until I was eleven or twelve, I was sick a lot—so sick that I sometimes thought I would die, though I never mentioned this to anyone. My illness was mysterious: every couple of months I’d begin throwing up everything I ate or drank, and couldn’t even brush my teeth without vomiting. This would go on for a week or more. I’d lie in bed almost unable to move, falling in and out of sleep, under the flick flick flick of the ceiling fan. If I touched my fingers to my lips they felt like something else, not like lips at all, but like a bit of carved ivory or bone. I’d listen to the voices of people in the street outside and not remember what it was like to be well.

  The doctor didn’t know what it was. Except for the throwing up, I was fine. He gave me a bottle of pink stuff I couldn’t keep down and some advice: Don’t be so nervous! Take some deep breaths if you feel like you’re going to heave-ho. Lots of fresh air can’t hurt.

  Before he left, the doctor would pat my hand and tell me it would pass, and it would. After a week or so I’d wake up and see a glass of water by my bed, and it would look good. I’d sit up on my elbow and drink a little, then a little more. Later, when I woke up again, I’d notice the sunlight in the leaves by the window, and the shadows on the wall, and the bright blues and reds of the books on my shelves. Once, I smelled my grandfather cooking chicken downstairs, so I crept down to the kitchen, joined my family at the table, and began to eat without saying a word. My mother and grandmother glanced at each other, then at me.

  “I had a little chat with the doctor,” said my mother. “He said it’s all in your head.” She gave me an accusatory look.

  “My head?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” asked my grandfather. He frowned, brandishing his silverware.

  What she meant was, I was doing it for attention, though not necessarily on purpose. The very thought made my heart pound with shame.

  “Utter baloney,” said my grandfather.

  “She knows,” said my mother, still giving me a look.

  I swallowed my chicken. Could it be true?

  The next time I was sick, my mother’s manner was brusque and distracted. She set a glass of water on my night table and squinted out the window. It was raining.

  “I’m not doing it on purpose,” I whispered. My mouth was parched, dry as paper.

  “Oh, I know,” she said, still watching the rain. “But you don’t see me or your grandmother getting sick, do you? We have work to do. We couldn’t possibly lie around in bed.”

  I closed my eyes, trying to cry, but no tears came.

  “You’re not much of a trooper, are you?” said my mother.

&
nbsp; I didn’t die, of course. Instead, my grandmother did. It was a shock to all of us; she seemed immortal, not old at all, though she must have been seventy then. One spring afternoon she did not come home from work at Saint Ann’s. That night my mother called the police, who found her bicycle the next day, propped up against a fire hydrant in a not-very-nice part of town. Foul play was suspected. And though they found her a few hours later, alive but incoherent, wandering along the riverfront, she died in the hospital before we could get there. She’d had several strokes.

  My mother screamed in the hospital waiting room. How could this happen? she wanted to know. How could a sick old lady walk around town for an entire day, without anyone helping her?

  Unfortunately, they said, there’s no shortage of sick old ladies in this town. And anyway, somebody did help her. When the police found her, she was clutching a sack lunch some kind person had given her: an egg salad sandwich, a nectarine, and three sugar cookies.

  They handed the sack lunch over to my mother, who pressed it to her face and wept.

  But that was all the grief she allowed herself. By the time we got home that afternoon, she was, to all appearances, over it: she threw herself into housecleaning and funeral preparations with the energy of someone organizing a carnival ball. My grandfather, shrunken and pale, climbed the stairs slowly and shut himself in his bedroom. I wandered from room to room, crying and hiccuping. In the parlor my mother swept past me, smelling of lavender furniture polish. She turned and put her large hand on my head.

  “Poor Naomi. Silly Naomi. You’re crying for yourself, you know. Your grandmother hasn’t gone anywhere. She’s right here watching you.” She pointed to the corner, where there was a large vase of peacock feathers. “You’re making her sad.”

  I wiped my tears with my fingers. There was nothing in the corner, as far as I could tell, except for the feathers, which drooped and were clumpy with dust. I tried hard to see something else, a shimmer or a quiver or a glow, but there was nothing.