After Life (27 page)

We ended up taking Vivian back to my house. I had to carry her out past children lining up for lunch: a crowd of Davy Crocketts and Little Bo Peeps. Vivian hid her face in my hair. She’d mostly stopped crying. Now she was just moaning, as if she’d broken her leg and pain was shooting through her with every step I took.

Elaine called and apologized the next day, a Saturday, Halloween. “Sorry to put you through all that trouble. I honestly didn’t know about that silly policy. It seems pretty crazy, don’t you think?”

I was getting dressed for the costume party. The dress barely covered anything. I’d never worn heels that high before, and they made me feel like a great big tottering bird. “I’m just worried about Vivian,” I said, grabbing the door frame for balance.

“Oh, she’ll be fine. Her dad’s going to take her trick-or-treating. I just hope I can get her back into that witch costume. It’s darling, by the way.”

Dave was going to be by any minute, so I got Elaine off the phone and slapped some makeup on. My mother’d lent it to me. I put on lipstick and glittery eye shadow and fake lashes, then decided to forgo the perfume. It was something called “Celestial,” and about half the mediums in Train Line wore it: a sort of mediumistic signature scent. When I’d gone over to her house to get the makeup, she seemed a little depressed. Her radio show was finished, now, and the people at WRUK weren’t excited about the television show idea. She was still working on them, but she didn’t hold out a lot of hope. I hadn’t seen Troy around much lately, either. She didn’t get up from the sofa the whole time I was there.

When Dave arrived at my door, he had his cardboard television over his head, “
Bay
-buh!” he said in a thick, fakey Southern accent.

“I forgot to ask where we’re going.”

“Elk’s Club Trophy Room!”

The Trophy Room, it turned out, was over the fried chicken place on Railroad Avenue. We had to go inside the restaurant, past the counters and tables full of chicken eaters and the vats of bubbling grease, through a big double doorway, and up a narrow staircase. When I smelled the chicken I wanted to stay there.

The room did not look like it was over a chicken restaurant: there were chandeliers and velvet curtains and a multicolored sphere of lights. The dance floor was parquet. There were lots of vampires and vampiresses and devils and she-devils; also a gorilla or two, a Queen of Hearts, some zombies, an Abe Lincoln and a Winston Churchill.

“I’d never think to dress up as Winston Churchill,” I told Dave.

“I think that’s supposed to be W. C. Fields. See the nose?”

“Ah.”

We danced. Neither of us could actually dance—we didn’t know any steps and had no rhythm at all—but we moved around. I found I couldn’t move too much, or else I’d lose my balance. Dave managed to dance much as you’d think a televangelist would: a lot of shaking arms. People looked at us and pointed. I felt horribly self-conscious at first, but then it faded. My clothes helped, I think. It became easy to pretend I was someone else entirely.

“Do you know anyone here?” I asked Dave, panting.

“Hmm.” He looked around, then pointed at a woman dressed as a potato. “She works at the desk in my dentist’s office. I think I’ve seen that man she’s with come into Big Ed’s.” The man was wearing a tuxedo and had huge, lovely wings on his back. There was a witch there, too, a sexy witch dancing with her broomstick. She made me think of Vivian. I hadn’t really stopped thinking of Vivian, but now I was reminded of her with such force it made me queasy. I thought of her sad green face, her moaning.

After half an hour, the music stopped. I staggered toward a row of theater seats along the edge of the room.

“I’ll get you a drink,” said Dave.

Sweat dribbled beneath my wig. One of the zombies took the seat next to mine, and his dirty bandages touched my arm. I recoiled.

“I’m not a real zombie,” he said.

“Oh, I know.”

“This first break is for Funniest Costume, I believe,” he told me, and pointed at a small stage on the other side of the room. An emcee-looking person was trying to fix his microphone into a mike stand. When he got it to stay he tapped on it several times with his ring. “Okay! Prize for funniest costume goes to the Car Wreck! Congratulations, Car Wreck! Let’s give her a hand.”

The Car Wreck, a young woman covered with sheets of shattered safety glass, a smashed bumper, a broken headlight, and dollar bills, received her trophy and took a bow. Her bumper hit the floor with a thud.

“I don’t think that’s funny at all,” said the zombie.

Dave came back with the drinks. “What a coincidence! I brought you a zombie, and here you are sitting with one!”

The music started up again and the zombie lumbered off. I sipped my drink. It was sweet and strange, and hit me between the eyes.

“Well,” I said, dizzy already. “Well.”

We danced some more. We switched partners with the angel and the potato for a slow dance, and I got to run my hands over the soft, feathered wings that rose from the angel’s shoulders. He rested his hands on my hips and stared right into my eyes. “Did you know that angels have the sexual characteristics of both genders?” he whispered. I had never expected to find myself in the arms of a man so handsome, and could only smile and smile, embarrassed.

Things were beginning to run together. Sometime during the evening I lost track of my shoes, so when we won the trophy for Best-Matched Couple, I had to go on stage in my stocking feet. A Book and Bookmarker threw us threatening looks. As the evening wore on I grew to like Dave quite a bit. He felt good to lean against.

I don’t remember much about the rest of the night. I remember going back to Dave’s apartment and lying with him on the sofa. We kissed and hugged and Dave said, over and over, “Please don’t change your mind tomorrow,
please
don’t change your mind.” I remember throwing up in the toilet. Then I was waking up on the sofa and it was morning and Dave the Alien was cooking eggs in the kitchenette. It was the smell that woke me.

“Oh my God.”

“Think of it as a slumber party,” said Dave.

Actually, I didn’t feel sick. I ate some of Dave’s eggs and drank some juice and cringed at the thought of his lips on mine. He gave me a few searching looks that I managed to evade. He was nice, though, and didn’t bring it up. He displayed our trophy—a small plastic urn—on the shelf over the stove, and then he drove me home. The streets of Wallamee were empty and strewn with toilet paper and candy wrappers. “Aftermath,” said Dave quietly.

He dropped me off at the gate, not even trying a good-bye kiss. The air felt cold and vigorous, and I was glad the whole stupid, excessive holiday was over. Dave had lent me a pair of basketball sneakers, but I was still wearing my hooker dress and carrying my wig under my arm. No one was out. I kicked leaves and took in big lungfuls of air. I am a cruel, cruel person, I said to myself.

When I rounded the corner of Fox and Chadakoin Streets, I saw a police car parked in front of my house. My first instinct was to run. I could hide in the woods, I thought. I could make my way to the highway, hitchhike, jump into the back of a truck…

But running away would mean admitting everything, and I knew then that I could do anything but that. So instead I gripped my wig with both hands and forced myself through the door of my house.

My mother was there, with Officer Peterson and a petite, severely coifed policewoman. They looked startled to see me come in.

“Naomi,” said my mother. Her voice had a slight shake. “This is Officer Ten Brink, and Officer Peterson, of course.”

“Hello,” I said, shaking their hands.

“I let them in,” said my mother. “When you weren’t home, they came to my house…” She looked around, uncertain whether to stay or leave. “I’ll go make coffee,” she said, and hurried off into the kitchen.

“Sit down,” said Officer Peterson, which was odd, since it was my house.

I sat. Officer Ten Brink thumbed through an accordion file on her lap and handed something to Officer Peterson, who handed it to me. It was a photograph of Peter.

“Can you identify this person?” asked Officer Peterson.

It must have been Peter’s high school graduation picture: his face was fuller than when I knew him, and he had thicker, perhaps even blow-dried, hair. He wore the kind of sport jacket he would not be caught dead in later: it had gold buttons and terrible wide lapels. He was smiling.

“It’s Peter Morton,” I said.

I repeated my story again. I knew Peter for a year and a half or so, then he left, and I hadn’t heard from him since. We’d broken up. We’d had a fight; that’s when he left.

“A violent fight?” asked Officer Ten Brink.

“Oh, no,” I said. “Just arguing. I don’t even remember what about.”

“And when was this?”

I pretended to think. “Summer, maybe late summer, 1988.”

“Ten years ago, then. Did he give you the slightest indication of where he might have gone?”

I shook my head. “No. Well, I got a postcard from him. From Mexico, I think. That was about a year later.”

He nodded. “That fits, more or less.” He explained: Peter’s mother had died a few years before, and his sister had been trying to find him ever since. She’d contacted the police departments in the places she knew he’d been, and after the discovery of the bones by the lake, they’d notified her.

“But she says the mother was in touch with him for at least a year after he left here. There were postcards, and apparently some phone calls.”

I’d sent the postcard, of course, but the phone calls were impossible. I nodded, though, fixing the look of concern on my face. They said they came up with my name through a friend, a Nelson Karp.

“So, anyway,” said Peterson. “We don’t have any real good reason to think Mr. Morton’s our John Doe, but we’re checking it out. The sister isn’t
real
eager to dig him up, so to speak. They didn’t get along too well.”

“Right,” I said.

My mother brought in the coffee. Her face was gray.

The police took just a few sips of their coffee, then shook our hands again and thanked us. They’d be in touch.

“And Mrs. Ash, you let us know if you have any of your ‘hunches,’ right?”

My mother nodded mutely.

They left, and I was alone in the living room with my mother. I drank my coffee very quickly, letting it burn my mouth.

“Peter,” said my mother.

I was shaking, so I set the mug on the floor.

“Naomi,” she said. “What was his middle name?”

“I don’t…”

“
What was his middle
name?”

“Samuel,” I whispered.

She nodded. She knew this. “Peter S. Morton,” she said, folding her hands and looking past me, out the window.

The room seemed cold. I pulled the hem of my dress down as far as I could, tried shifting it around to cover more of my body, but I still felt naked. My stockings were torn. The wig slid onto the floor.

9
she was more than a glimmer

I kept some of Peter’s things. There was his wallet, which I took from the back pocket of his khaki pants before I buried him. In it was five hundred eleven dollars—five hundreds, a ten, and a one—and fifty-three cents in change. I never spent any of it. There were several cards: his Princeton student ID card (he was growing a mustache when it was taken, an awful, smudgy-looking thing); his New Jersey driver’s license (grimacing at the camera, his hair tall and bushy); a Visa card that had expired in 1989; a business card for a used-book store in Hollington. My business card was in there, too, for some reason, perhaps because of the phone number he’d scrawled on the back. It wasn’t my phone number. A few months after he died, I called it. It was a pet shop in Wallamee. Was he thinking of buying a pet? Or did he meet someone who worked there? I had no way of knowing. The wallet was well organized, no receipts or paper clips or handfuls of pennies. There were no photographs of anyone, either.

I had his wristwatch, too, which he wasn’t wearing before he died. He might have been getting ready for bed before I came over to my mother’s house, where he was staying. I found it in the bathroom, on top of the toilet tank. It was an expensive watch, I could tell; I vaguely remembered Peter telling me it had belonged to his grandfather. It was gold, with fine hands and Roman numbers and a dark leather band. It stopped running after a day and a half, because no one wound it. I also kept his glasses, the lenses so thick they made me dizzy to look through, and a pair of his wool socks, a pencil, a third of a pack of chewing gum, his comb, his razor, a tube of athlete’s foot cream, his nail clippers, some keys to I didn’t know what, a few books, and a pair of binoculars.

All this, except for the binoculars and the books, I kept in a box under my bed. It was one of those Christmas gift boxes, covered with teddy bears in Santa hats, about a foot square. I tied a red ribbon around it and hid it behind some shoe boxes and rolled-up blankets. The door of my bedroom was always locked, but the box never stopped making me anxious. The rest of his stuff—clothes, mostly, and some of the books—I put in taped-up paper bags with some rocks, then I rowed out to the middle of the lake and dumped them. I’d have preferred to burn them with some leaves and yard waste I’d collected from my mother’s yard, but leaf fires had been prohibited here since the thirties, when one set a whole neighborhood of Train Line on fire. For months afterward I worried about the bundles, and found myself scanning the shore for signs of rotting clothes and swollen books every time I went out. But I never found anything.