After Life (10 page)

Naomi.

It was Peter’s voice. I jumped, and my eyes flew open.

All five of them were looking at me. “I’m a little tired,” I said. “Give me a moment.”

Peter had never come to me before. But the voice was his; I knew the way his mouth formed my name. I had feared it and I had longed for it, and I had never forgotten his voice. My heart surged in recognition.

I took a steadying breath and told David some hopeful things: chin up, you haven’t found a job yet because the right one hasn’t come around, etcetera, etcetera. I wondered if he could tell I was winging it. Usually they couldn’t. But David looked disappointed.

Three syllables:
Naomi.
It was him.
It was
him.

Afterward, I shook everyone’s hand. I gathered my purse and sweater and pushed in my chair. I was shaking a little. All around people were leaving—chatting and hugging and laughing.

“Naomi.”

“Oh! Oh, Dave, I’m sorry…”

“No, no, it was me. My energy was all wrong. I’m sorry. My fault entirely.” He hunched himself into his windbreaker.

“I was tired. I
am
tired. I’ll make it up to you, any time you like.”

He made a wry face, obviously pleased. “Well, all right. Hey, how about some time this week? I’ll cook you dinner.”

Oh, geez,
I thought. “Maybe. You can call me.”

“Of course. I will. Really, I really am sorry.” He gave me a little wave, and I watched his narrow shoulders disappear into the crowd.

That night, after I walked my mother home, I thought I might watch the television news. Everyone else was in bed. From his room came the sound of Ron snoring, and occasionally I heard the squeak of Jenny’s bedsprings as she rolled around, trying to make herself comfortable. I had never liked television. It embarrassed me to watch people mugging and singing on behalf of new cars and drain cleaner. I waited impatiently through the weather and a car accident or two and the endless shots of ponytailed girls running up and down basketball courts, but there was no mention of the body in the woods. I turned the TV off and sat there for a few minutes, listening to the sound of my breath in my nose, then got up and went outside.

I walked down Fox Street, toward the dock, until I could see the lake spread out in front of me, black as oil. Music floated across the water from somewhere. For a little while I argued with myself:
It’s a woman, you heard what they said at the Safeway…they’re most likely Indian bones, anyway, it’s not Peter…Peter was
not
an Indian.
But as I stood at the edge of the lapping water, I gave it up. The bones were Peter’s. Out there in the dark, on the other side of the lake somewhere, his grave was empty. I could feel it. Before, whenever I stood on the shore of the lake, I’d think I could sense him there, across the water. The presence of his bones had always been something I could take an obscure comfort in, a source of heat I could turn my cold face toward. But not tonight.

He came to me; he said my name. Why? Could the disturbance of his bones have shaken his soul loose, the way prodding a dead animal might release a cloud of flies? I didn’t think so. He had come to me for a reason. To warn me? Maybe. Maybe he meant to taunt me.

I wanted to hear his voice again. I wanted to
see
him. If I tried hard I could see his face in the shadows of the hills beyond the lake, his features alive and shifting, and I could see him in the ripples on the water. The shape of his body was outlined in the trees above my head. He was everywhere, everywhere. Inside me, something trembled and broke free: love—love and horror.

4
invisible

During the night a storm passed through. Asleep, I interpreted the noise of rain to be a train I was riding, though in waking life I’d never been on one. I didn’t know where I was going or where I had been, but the train rocked from side to side as if it was going very fast, and the landscape out the windows was blurred. An old man leaned close to me.

It’s going to crash,
he whispered. He nodded his head toward the window.
If I were you, I’d
jump.

Oh, I couldn’t do that,
I said.

He shrugged.
Well, I
can.

And, scampering like a leprechaun over the seats, he climbed up to the window and leapt out. His coat billowed out behind him. I gasped awake.

I was lying on the living room couch. It was still dark; I had no way of telling what time it was. When I’d come inside after my walk to the lake, I hadn’t felt tired enough to go to bed, so I’d turned the television back on and watched some of a late-night talk show, though I must have fallen asleep in the middle of it. Someone, Ron no doubt, had turned the television off during the night. It seemed he also pulled an afghan over me. This touched me, though I was a little bothered to think he’d seen me sleeping. I hoped I’d kept my mouth closed. I fell quickly back to sleep, my jaw clenched tightly shut.

When I woke again, it was to a peculiar sound: a persistent scratching. I listened to it for a long time before opening my eyes, trying to figure out what it was. My mother, scraping the black from her toast? A dog, wanting in? But I no longer lived with my mother, and we didn’t have a dog. Finally I opened my eyes, but saw nothing that solved the mystery. The room was filled with a dull gray light. The place was a mess; tools were scattered around from the latest renovation project—Ron was building a new bannister—and magazines about health and vegetarianism and the men’s movement covered every surface. None of this stuff was mine; I kept my things upstairs, in my rooms.

With the afghan still pulled around my shoulders, I stumbled into the kitchen. Nothing there, either. But when I looked through the glass pane of the door to the back porch, I saw Ron. He was sitting cross-legged on the porch floor, scraping hard at a small animal hide that had been stretched and nailed to a board on his lap. His curly head was bent in concentration, and he didn’t see me. I recoiled, backed quickly away, and sat down at the kitchen table.

It didn’t take me long to figure it out. Jenny had remarked a few weeks before that Ron had run over a beaver in his truck—the jaunty brown truck that, as my mother once pointed out, looked just like Ron, with its rear end sticking up in the air—and, consumed with guilt, he decided that the best way to honor the animal was to cure its hide and make a ceremonial drum out of it. Jenny had mentioned this in way of warning: unless I wanted to know what a dead beaver smelled like, I should stay out of the back shed.

It wasn’t until this point, actually, that I remembered myself, and remembered the day before. It came back to me in a rush—the body in the woods, the news article, Peter’s voice. My heart skittered. For many months after Peter died, I felt the same way when I woke up each morning, remembering everything anew.

The train dream, the beaver hide, Peter’s bones. Together, they seemed to possess a secret and complicated meaning, one just out of my reach. I stood up and began making my coffee and toast, trying to clear my head. And as I busied myself, the world did indeed seem to fall back into its customary patterns. The rain tapped lightly on the window, and the smell of coffee filled the kitchen. First I’d eat breakfast, then take a shower, then go to work.

But just as I was sitting down to eat, the phone rang. We had an old-fashioned rotary phone whose fierce jangle never failed to startle me. I swallowed a mouthful of toast, and it rang again.

It was my mother. I knew this even before I answered it, because she was the only person who ever telephoned our house this time of day—she had no qualms about calling whenever it occurred to her. Sometimes I wondered if she thought that I, like one of her spirits, sprung into life only in reference to her.

“Yes?”

“Naomi, have you read last night’s paper?”

Uh-oh.
“Not yet.”

“Well, go read it. There’s an article on some bones they found in the woods outside Wallamee. I want to talk to you about it. I think I know whose they are.”

“Mama—I can’t. I have to go to work.”

“Not now!” she said impatiently. “Come over for supper tonight. Six o’clock. Bring Vivian. Honestly, I’m so excited I’m having palpitations.”

She hung up.

Mechanically, I finished my breakfast. Ron was still out on the porch, scraping away. The sound of it had become somehow reassuring, and I sat there for a little while, listening and imagining the poor beaver’s last minutes, the screeching of Ron’s tires, the look on his face. Then I went upstairs and got ready for work.

Outside the rain had mostly stopped, and as I stepped out the door a sun-sized hole appeared in the clouds, allowing Train Line a brief but dazzling spell of illumination. Everything glittered. Perhaps, I thought, heaven had opened up a trapdoor for me. It seemed likely that at any moment someone would reach down and drag me up through it.

As I made my way uphill toward the library, however, it began to rain again.

I worked all day. By three I had a tidy stack of newly cataloged books, including one called
Natural Philosophy,
which was a science text from the 1880s and not a philosophy book at all. Its deceptive title had apparently gotten it onto our shelves by mistake. Still, I found it absorbing and quite entertaining—it was illustrated with drawings of dour, bearded men conducting experiments in frock coats—and it kept me from thinking too much about the unburied bones across the lake. One chapter described the nature of light: a vibration of ether, it said. Some troubled reader had scrawled in a margin
Where is God in all
this?

I closed the book on my finger, uncertain where on the shelves it belonged, if anywhere. I was suddenly intensely aware of the physical world around me: the dust motes spiraling through the air, the relationship between the weight of each book and the force required to lift it.
There is something to be said for the concrete world,
I thought. Carefully, I erased the marginalia and gave the book a place in the philosophy section. The scientific method, I decided, was in fact a very serviceable philosophy.

Bolstered by this idea, I put on my sweater and locked up. Today was the first day of school, and I would be spending the rest of the afternoon with Vivian. Every day at three during the school year the bus dropped her off at the front gate, where I’d sit and wait for her on a squat concrete pillar, one of two put there to stop cars from smashing into the gatehouse as they rounded the curve. A gatekeeper worked here in the summer season, taking money from tourists and selling programs, but now the gatehouse was boarded up and the wooden drop-gates stored for winter. Years before, I’d spent a couple of summers as a gatekeeper, on the early morning shift. I remembered it would get so cold I’d have to turn the space heater on, and shed layers of sweaters as the day warmed. No one came through the gate until nine or so. Until then I’d read, or just stare at the trees and the empty road and the bit of lake I could see from the window. Mist hung over the water. We had a radio in there, but I didn’t listen to it.

I walked down the hill and sat on my concrete pillar. Vivian had spent much of the summer with her grandparents; it had been a few weeks since I’d seen her. I was looking forward to having her again, but I felt too preoccupied to take much pleasure from the thought of it. From here, the approaching cars looked as if they were speeding toward me, then turning away just seconds before running me down. I felt as if I was narrowly escaping death over and over again, and I found this exhilarating.

When the bus pulled up, the roar of yelling children came with it. That sound—the pent-up, malevolent hilarity of schoolchildren—still made me uneasy. Poor Vivian was the last child off, stumbling after a pack of Darva Lawrence’s blond grandchildren, with her lunch box and tote bag and raincoat. It had rained all morning—for hours the rain trickled down the library windows—but now the sun was out and the air steamy and warm. Vivian was wearing a blue sweater with a steam engine on it, the sleeves pushed up past her elbows.