After Life (34 page)

“Of course not. Heaven forbid. It’s just another reminder that time is whistling by.”

“As if you need one!” I said, gesturing to the giant hourglass.

“Yes, indeed. The good thing about clocks is that they’re not linear. They go around and around and start fresh every day. It’s quite reassuring.” He put his coffee on the end table and clasped his hands on his knees. “I’m going to tell you something you might find shocking. Promise me you won’t run screaming from the house.”

I set my own coffee down. “Of course I won’t. What is it?” I braced myself.

“I’m in love with your mother. I might ask her to marry me. Umm, no. I
will
ask her. But I suppose I’m asking your permission.”

“Troy! But…you’ve known each other forever!”

Inside me, something was breaking into a thousand pieces.
He wants to marry my mother.
It was preposterous.
He’s in love with
her.

“Well, it hasn’t been
quite
forever. Anyway, things change, people change. I don’t know how to explain it.”

“Troy, it’s…it’s.…I don’t know. It’s wonderful. You don’t need my permission, though. I
am
surprised.”

“I thought you would be.” He smiled: a relieved, bashful grin. “Galina’s been a little busy and preoccupied lately. I haven’t seen as much of her as I’m used to. And I miss her. I guess I only just realized how used to her I’ve become.” Embarrassed, he threw several chunks of candy bar into his mouth and chewed noisily.

“So…when?” I asked.

“When?” He looked startled.

“When are you going to ask her?”

“Oh. I’m not sure. We have a date on Friday—Pizza Village. Do you think that’ll be romantic enough? I’m afraid if we go to a white-linen-tablecloth sort of place I’ll be too nervous to say anything.”

“She loves pizza.”

“
That
I am well aware of.”

I drank the coffee and rocked in my chair, gripping the mug tightly so that my hands wouldn’t shake. The last time my mother had gone on a date with a man, years ago, she came over to my house afterward to tell me about him—his thin mustache, his shiny narrow tie, how he wouldn’t shut up about his son’s new sports car—and we’d had a good long laugh about him. I felt a stirring nostalgia for that evening, a nostalgia so powerful my ears rang.

Now that he’d got his secret off his chest, Troy seemed more at peace. He fingered the doily on the end table and stared into space, saying nothing for a long while.

“I suppose I should be going,” I said. “Thank you for the mulligatawny. I’m warm all through, now.”

“Good, good!” He stood up quickly to walk me to the hallway, where I slid my shoes back on. “There’s one other thing I need to ask you, though.”

“Yes?”

“What do you think she’ll say? Do you think she’ll say yes?”

“Oh, Troy.” I took his hand—a thin and veiny old thing, the fingers yellowed from years and years of cigars. “Of course she’ll say yes.”

He gave my hand a squeeze. “Good,” he said again, nodding. “I’ve always wanted to be someone’s father.”

And with that, he shut the door behind me.

Already it was getting dark. I walked from Troy’s house to the lake, where bugs hovered and pricked the water’s skin. The air was clammy and smelled like mushrooms.

This is good, I told myself. Troy loves her, and now you are free of her.

But I did not want to be free of her. I wanted her to love me and no one else.

Out on the water, a small brown duck floated in circles. I picked up a pebble and threw it at the duck. It missed and dropped into the water with a tiny plop, and the duck didn’t seem to notice. It paddled around and around and around, and now and then I glimpsed the bright orange flash of its feet beneath the water. I wanted to affect it in some way, I wanted it to fly off or quack or dive under. It wouldn’t. I thought I might find a bigger rock, really pelt the thing, but I realized that was not what I wanted at all.

My empty heart was collapsing in on itself. A lonely life is a crime without witnesses, it is a movie playing in a locked theater; can you ever really be sure what happens in it? Can you be sure that it happens at all?

I am here! I am here!
I wanted to yell at the duck. But there was no point in that. The duck was smart; it knew I did not matter, in the scheme of things.

11
premature burial

When I woke up the next morning, I felt inexplicably full of hope. There was no good reason for this, but the sunlight that came through my windows looked cheerful and kind, and my heart was light. As I washed and dressed and made up my bed, I planned my day with something close to relish—a morning of work, a good lunch at the cafeteria, more work, then Vivian. The previous morning’s scene with Officers Peterson and Ten Brink seemed distant and small, unworthy of the agony it had caused, like a childhood illness. I had survived it, and as far as I knew so had my mother. It was survivable.

And I did have a good day, though I was distracted while working by the sound of branches tapping insistently against the library windows, and by a restlessness I could not quite contain. I kept getting up, looking out at the lake, sitting down again, getting up. I left early for lunch. I bought a hot sandwich at the cafeteria, brought it down to the lake, and ate it on the dock. The wind had picked up and the waves were tipped white.

Though it had begun to rain by the time I left to meet Vivian’s bus, I had enough of a good mood left not to mind that I was dressed poorly for the weather. Rain plastered my hair to my head and cascaded off the gatehouse roof. I stood a few yards away, under a large pine tree, and I began planning what Vivian and I would do that afternoon. We’d make popcorn, I thought, and work on the Vivian and Naomi paper dolls we’d cut out of tag board: our project before the witch costume debacle. I was designing a whole nineteenth-century wardrobe for mine, using the photographs in the library for inspiration, and Vivian was making a cheerleader’s outfit for hers. We spent hours decorating the clothes with crayons and colored pencils.

After ten minutes or so I heard the rattle and groan of the bus as it downshifted around the bend, but it didn’t stop. It slowed down, paused briefly, and then picked up speed and roared off over the bridge. I noticed, as it sped past, that someone had written
FUK YEW
in the steamed-over back window.

I waited for a while, imagining that Vivian had missed her stop and was perhaps kneeling on the floor of the bus right now, gathering her dropped homework and lunch box and umbrella and booksack, and would stagger up to the front in a minute or two and have the bus driver drop her off down the road. But this did not transpire. I watched as the bus turned at Dean Road on the other side of the bridge, and then it disappeared over the hill.

This had happened before. Once, on the first day of second grade, Vivian had gotten onto the wrong bus, and it was only after a series of frantic phone calls to the school that she finally showed up on my doorstep, tearstained and exhausted. Another time, Vivian was home with hives, and Elaine had forgotten to call me. I decided that this had happened again, so I trudged back home and called Elaine’s real estate office. Water dripped off me and pooled on the linoleum as I waited for someone to answer.

“Thank you for calling Downtown Realty. None of our service representatives is available to come to the phone right now, but if you leave your name, number, and a brief message, we’ll call ya right back! Your call is so important to
us!”

Hmm.

I called the school next. The school secretary couldn’t help and told me the teachers were in a staff meeting. But if I left my name and number, she said, Miss Strunk would call me as soon as she could. I said that would be fine.

So I made the popcorn and melted some butter and sat at the kitchen table eating it by myself, waiting for the phone to ring. Ron came in and joined me. He took a large handful of popcorn and chomped it down.

“Greazy,” he said, showing his shiny palm.

“I like it that way.”

“I do too, as a matter of fact. But, oh, Naomi, your poor heart!”

“I don’t care about my heart.”

He took another handful. “That’s not a very good attitude. Where, by the way, is Vivian?”

“I don’t know. She didn’t get off the bus. I’m waiting for someone to call and tell me why.”

“I always used to hate the school bus,” said Ron, shaking his head. “It was worse than the boys’ restroom. Did I ever tell you about the hell I went through in school?”

“I don’t think so.”

“I had thick glasses and an overbite and I was so skinny my pants hung off my hipbones—you wouldn’t believe the pictures of me then. They used to take me by the arm and the leg and throw me down the stairs.”

“Oh, Ron!”

“
Ronald,
then. I couldn’t walk down the aisle of the school bus without getting tripped. Most weeks something of mine would get tossed out the window. I’d have to get off at the next stop and search through the weeds for my hat or book or whatever it was, then walk the three, four, five miles home. I can’t tell you how happy I am to be an adult.”

“I’ll bet.”

“Do you think Vivian has that kind of trouble in school? Because she’s an odd one, you know. Those creeps can spot an odd one a mile off.”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. I really can’t tell. She doesn’t tell me much. I don’t think she’s very happy in general.”

He shook his head sadly. “The terrible part is, we can’t do a thing about it. Adults, I mean. We have no effect at all. My parents would sometimes call the school—if I came home so bloody and battered I couldn’t hide it from them—or, worse, they’d call someone else’s parents.” He rolled his eyes. “It just made it worse. Incalculably worse.”

I stood up and got some water from the faucet. “I don’t know. I like to think I make a difference to Vivian.”

“I’m sure you do,” he said, kindly. “It’s just that you won’t be able to take away her misery. No one can do that but Vivian.”

Ron had wandered out to the yard to work on his compost—he turned and watered it once a week, adding whatever substances he thought would hurry its decay—and I’d finished all the popcorn and washed the dishes before Miss Strunk called. She had a breathless, high-pitched voice.

“Miss Ash? I’m sorry to take so long to get back to you. Actually, I’m calling from my car. What a day!”

The line was dense with technological fuzz. “Sorry to bother you. I was just wondering if Vivian got on the bus this afternoon. She never showed up at this end.”

“She didn’t?” The signal vanished for a moment, and when it returned Miss Strunk sounded very far away. “…another bus, not her regular one. I think, anyway.”

“She got on a different bus? On purpose?”

“As far as I could tell. The bus drivers take care of all that, you know, the permission slips and all that. You should really call her parents. Sorry if I’m not much help.”

“You’ve been plenty of help,” I said.

Strunk, Strunk, Strunk,
I thought when I hung up. It really was a terrible name.

I did, finally, manage to reach Elaine, after spending ten minutes on hold listening to the local talk radio station. A rerun of my mother’s show was on:
The Mother Galina Psychic Hour, Encore
Edition.

“Stop crying, dear. He’s with you all the time, he’s watching over
you!”

“But I miss
him!”

“No, you don’t, dear, you can’t, because he’s not gone. Now
listen…”

“Oh, Mother Galina, I’m so
lonely!”

This continued for some time. I was quite relieved when Elaine’s loud and chirpy voice came on.

“Hi, this is Elaine. How can I help you today?”

“Hi, Elaine, it’s Naomi. I’m calling because Vivian…”

“
Oh, my goodness!
I can’t believe I forgot to tell you! Oh, shame on me!”

“But what—”

“Oh, Naomi, I can’t believe it. We found another babysitter for Vivian. Much closer to home, on my way from work—it’s just so much more convenient! And there’ll be other kids there, and a snack…”