After Life (12 page)

We dropped Vivian off—she looked so small and hunched walking up the blacktopped driveway in the bright flood of motion-sensor lights—and then, instead of heading home, my mother turned down Vining Road. She wanted, she said, to take a look at the excavation by the lake.

“It’s dark,” I said, trying not to sound nervous.

“I don’t see why that should stop us.”

She slowed the car next to the unpaved driveway, which was now blocked with sawhorses. Yellow crime scene tape fluttered between them. My mother parked and turned off the lights.

“Police ribbon,” I said, glancing at her.

“Ancient Indians, my eye,” she said. “Let’s get out.”

“Mama! It’s
dark
…” But she had her door open and was heaving herself through it.

I followed her through the dried-up milkweed and Queen Anne’s lace to the edge of the woods. From here, we could look through the trees and down a steep embankment. The embankment smoothed out into a clearing, and there, at the very bottom, were lights. Also some machinery, the half-dug foundation, piles of dirt. It was hard to reconcile this vision with what I remembered about that day; nothing looked the same but the shallow slope of the ground as it dipped toward the lake. I’d expected to feel something, seeing this. I thought I’d feel like I was standing in a collapsing house; I thought the earth would give way beneath my feet. But oddly, I felt very little. Mostly I was cold. I rubbed my arms.

My mother was breathing heavily from the exertion. “Darva was telling me about it. Her husband knows one of the police. Apparently they got another forensics specialist to look at the bones this afternoon, and he said they couldn’t be terribly old. I guess there’s ways they can tell.”

There was movement down in the clearing; perhaps they had a watchman. I stepped a little farther into the woods, trying to see, and walked right into a barbed wire fence. It gouged my shin. “Ouch. Watch out for the fence, Mama.”

“He was
mummified,
” she said. “Partly, anyway.”

“He?”

“They can tell that, too. Don’t ask me how.”

My mother stood with her hands on the wire, peering through the dark. Then she closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and exhaled. It was less an exhalation, though, than a moan: long and low. It unnerved me.

“Mama,” I said, taking her arm. “Let’s go back to the car.”

“Shhh.” She batted me away.

So I waited, hugging myself to keep warm. I still didn’t recognize the place at all. The barn would be somewhere off to the left, but it was hidden in the shadows, and all I could see of the lake was a string of lights on the opposite shore. It was possible to think that I had nothing to do with what was going on down the hill.

My mother swayed a little and her dress rustled in the weeds. Then she gave another moan, even longer and lower than the first, and then she sighed deeply.

“They’re right,” she whispered.

“What?”

“That he’s a man. A white man…” She frowned.

“Not an Indian?”

“Definitely not,” she said, shaking her head. Then she reached out and touched me on the arm. Involuntarily, I jumped. “Can you get through?”

“God, no. It’s too cold to concentrate.”

“Well. I can’t seem to get much more, either. Let’s go, then.”

We turned and waded back through the weeds. I got into the driver’s side of the car and my mother dropped heavily into the passenger side. “Don’t take off just yet,” she said.

I turned the engine on and switched the heat up to high.

“You’re going to think I’m nuts,” my mother said, adjusting her dress beneath her thighs. “But I think I know who it is. Whose the bones are. I think they’re my brother’s.”

Again, I felt myself jerk, as if shot through with electricity. “Uncle Geoffrey’s?” I asked, dumbfounded.

“Oh, for God’s sake, Naomi! No, not Geoffrey’s! Don’t be stupid. He’s still alive. I mean Wilson! I think they’re Wilson’s bones.”

Wilson was her eldest brother, the one who left home and disappeared when she was a child; she hadn’t seen him since the forties, in New Orleans. I’d only ever seen one picture of him—a skinny, smart-alecky boy sitting on the bumper of a very large car. My mother’s glasses glinted in the light of the dashboard. She didn’t speak for a few moments. Then she sighed.

“Well, all right, I know. It’s pretty far-fetched. It’s just an idea I have.”

I’d never heard her sound so unsure of herself. “Well, it could be him,” I said, dubiously.

“It doesn’t matter. It’s somebody.” She sat up, turned in her seat, and looked at me. I could almost hear her confidence come roaring back. “And you know what? I’m going to save my career.”

I revved the car. “I don’t understand.”

“Naomi!
Pay attention!
If I can figure out what happened here, just think what it will do for my career! They’d think twice before canceling my radio show, that’s for certain. Someone was killed and buried and the spirit is
out there
looking for a medium, I can feel it. I’m sure of it.”

I turned to look at her. My mouth fell open.

“Maybe I could even write a book,” she mused.

After a long minute I nodded. “Maybe,” I said, and put my foot on the gas.

As I drove, she told me what she planned to do: she would continue to visit the site two or three times a week, then go home and meditate for an hour. Surely, she said, now that the spirit’s bones were disturbed, and people were curious about them, it would be receptive to contact. She would also do some traditional research, look up unsolved cases at the library, go to City Hall and look at old deeds to the land. The more information she could gather, the closer she’d get to the spirit’s vibration…

No,
I thought, reeling.

“Gosh, just look at that house,” she said, interrupting herself and prodding the window with her thumb. I took a deep breath and looked. Every window of a big Greek-revival-style house was lit up, revealing glimpses of chandeliers and woodwork and different wallpaper in every room. There were some beautiful houses along Wallamee’s Main Street, big immaculate Victorians with tower rooms and cupolas and porches as big as my mother’s entire house. In the daylight you could see how intricately painted they were, with different colors for every part of the window frames. One was pale blue with indigo and gray and violet trim. That was my favorite. They all had big front windows with lots of panes and lace curtains. You couldn’t see much of the insides, and I had never been in one. I imagined bright light and glass bowls full of flowers. When I was younger I had wanted to live in one of these houses more than anything. I’d forgotten that feeling until now. It seemed like you could live a certain kind of life in one of these lovely, solid houses—a respectable life. I used to wish my mother would marry a man who owned one. Or, if that didn’t work, perhaps I would. I didn’t expect that neither of us would marry and that I’d end up living a couple of blocks from where my mother did, in the very first house in Train Line we found.

“It’s beautiful,” I said. She nodded, staring out the window as we passed it. I used to wonder if she, too, wanted the kind of life that would allow her a Victorian house, a yard, beautiful curtains. Now I wondered again, missing those lost lives.

I stopped at a red light. A large crowd of well-dressed people crossed the street in front of us, having just left the restaurant on the corner. They were laughing, obviously having a barrel of fun. “You know what?” my mother asked me, watching the people going by. “I have this astonishing feeling. I don’t know if it’s Wilson or not, but there’s something special about this spirit, Naomi. It’s going to change our lives.”

My mother liked to say she’d been born a medium. That might be the only way to explain it. Certainly, there was nothing about her particular upbringing that encouraged spiritualism. Her name was Patsy then, and I can’t help but think of her as a different person from Galina, Mother Galina, who came later. Her father owned an office supply shop and her mother, who was to die, lost and confused, so many years later, was always a school librarian. She had two older brothers, Geoffrey and Wilson, and a pet pack rat named Walt Junior, after her father. They weren’t poor but nobody had much money then. In pictures, she is long-limbed and glowering, her wrists poking from sleeves, her socks down around her ankles. She looks a bit like I did, but more boyish, more fierce.

When she was twelve, Wilson ran away. This was, until the death of her mother, the big tragedy of her life. Wilson was her favorite brother, her favorite person in the world. He worked as a delivery boy around town and would sometimes bring my mother along with him, and they’d turn on the radio in his old Ford and they’d sing along with it. Wilson knew every word to every song. He taught my mother the most shocking dirty words he knew. He had a million girlfriends.

But one day after supper he announced that he was leaving. It was 1946 and Wilson was seventeen; he’d missed being in the war by just a few months, and it wrecked him. He’d decided to Go North and Experience Life. He was going to hop a freight, he said. Their father stood up to try and stop him, to grab and shake him or bar the door, but it was too late. Wilson vanished into the night. And that was the very last anyone had ever seen of him.

People vanish. My mother knew this; she knew that people died and moved away, but never really understood it before then. She’d never really thought of it as a permanent state, as something irreversible. She walked around thinking that any minute there’d be Wilson, grinning and singing and bearing presents. But it never was. For three years she walked around thinking he was there, just around the corner, or watching from a balcony, or trundling by on a streetcar. It made her feel better to imagine him that way, lurking just out of sight, seeing but un-seeable.

She was fifteen, in the middle of failing her first year of high school, when she found the peacock. She’d been sent home after lunch for hurling her sandwich at the lunch monitor and was wandering through the neighborhoods near the river. She was sitting in an alley on a broken wooden chair when she heard what she thought was a baby crying, a peculiar, sorrowful kind of cry. There, in a cardboard box behind a tobacco shop, she found the peacock. Its tail was raggedy and sparse, as if someone had plucked almost all the feathers out. It was dirty, too, but still beautiful, its body gleaming like something made of a strange blue metal. It didn’t move when my mother picked up the box. It didn’t move or make another sound all the way home.

She snuck into her brother Geoffrey’s bedroom and looked up peacocks in his encyclopedia, and found out that it could eat seeds and corn and bugs. It would have to look for bugs on its own, but she found a bag of birdseed in the back shed, and she sprinkled a handful around the peacock’s box. It pecked at it. My mother crouched down next to the box and watched it, close enough to see the tiny seedlike nostrils in its beak and the ring of bird skin around each of its small black eyes.

The peacock lived in their yard for nearly a year. They named it Hector. Every morning it cried for its seeds and corn, and every evening it cried from loneliness until my mother came out and sat with it, under its perch in the cucumber tree. It wasn’t satisfied with anyone else, and half the time it would chase Geoffrey right back into the house. This was enough to make my mother like the bird a great deal. But it also gave her dreams. From almost the first night the peacock lived with them, my mother began having wonderful, vivid, sometimes even prophetic, dreams.

Once she dreamed she got an A on a math test, for the first time ever, and then she did. Another time she dreamed that a boy named Ralph LaRoux would ask her to a dance—a miracle if there ever was one—and that happened, too. Most of the time, though, she dreamed about Wilson. There was Wilson riding the rails, wearing a greasy wool hat and a moth-eaten beard; there was Wilson working as a lumberjack in Canada, eating pancakes outside a log cabin. She even dreamed of him sleeping with a woman, once. Each of these visions—because she was sure they were more than dreams, now—had a feeling in them, too. It was a feeling of
rightness.
She wasn’t sure how else to describe it. It was a feeling that the visions were coming to her to reassure her, to announce to her that Wilson was fine and that life was moving forward as it should. My mother, who read obsessively, began to wonder if she was a witch. She’d read that witches sometimes had familiars in the shape of birds, usually crows or owls or something, but why not a peacock?

Eventually Hector’s tail feathers grew back, and then one morning he was gone. My mother felt sure he had struck out on his own, maybe to search for a peahen, or perhaps just to Experience Life. It wasn’t until she was grown up that it occurred to her he might have been stolen. At the time she just thought,
Ah, Hector’s moved on,
and that was that. Because by then she’d saved up her allowance and bought a Ouija board, and though her visions became less frequent after Hector left, that sense of rightness never left her. She realized she could know some things.