After Life (43 page)

It was a cool night, breezy, with a moon that reeled in and out of the clouds. I kept running for a few blocks, but soon lost my breath and had to walk. Beneath my feet the sidewalk was broken and bumpy, and it rose and fell sickeningly, like the ocean.
They know, they know, everyone knows what I did.
Officer Peterson must have searched my house, or my mother’s house, and found something, perhaps tapping my mother’s phone to find out where I was, or maybe my mother herself had told him everything. Anything seemed possible—it seemed possible, even, that the moon could roll out of the sky and crush me. I wanted it to. I wanted everyone who’d ever died to come walking out of the houses I passed and to take me into their arms.

The city at night was not the same as the city in daytime. Seeing it this way, lit from the inside instead of from without, confused and disoriented me, and it wasn’t long before I found myself on streets I didn’t recognize. Here was a shadowy park with blue streetlights, and there was a house guarded by statues of dogs. It made me think of my grandmother in the last few hours before she died, wandering lost through the city she’d been born in and had once known intimately. Had she felt this way? I ran my hand along an iron fence and imagined it was her hand, her long arm with its loose skin and the veins that wrapped it like ivy. I passed an open window, and the smell of cooking gusted out of it. People crowded by me, overflowing into the street, smelling of alcohol and perfume, laughing. Young men in baseball caps sloshed drinks onto the pavement. Cars roared by. The city spun around me, and inexplicably, my heart began to open.

This, I knew, was how my grandmother felt. Stripped of memory, of her past and her future, she had only what was around her: the weeds growing from cracks in the plaster walls, the litter caught in doorways, the trees reaching over traffic to clutch at each other, her cotton dress, her body. The unburdened heart sees everything. I saw the shapes of leaves and the shapes of shadows of leaves; I saw every doorframe and window ledge. My grandmother was happy the day she died. Stumbling across hot and busy streets, past shops and bars and offices all humming with mysterious activity, my grandmother must have felt real ecstasy—the ecstasy of saints, of ascetics and flagellants when they finally give up their attachments to life. We were wrong to think she suffered.

I’d never in my life felt so happy. I hadn’t known my soul was capable of such a feeling! I ran and walked and ran. It was all strange, all new and perfect. And how beautiful it was—neon signs and architecture and things in shop windows, and people with their clothes and hairdos. I wanted it all. All over town, half-memories flew out at me. I thought of dresses I’d owned but couldn’t remember how I looked in them, if they itched, or what happened to them. I passed a bar I thought I recognized—had my father taken me here once? I stopped at the door and peered in. It was smoky and at the back was a row of washing machines. The same old familiar bar smell rolled out at me, but I couldn’t tell if it was familiar because I remembered it or because all bars have the same smell. He had carried me on his hip and bought me root beer.

And this house—tall and narrow and sad, with shuttered windows and a tiny front lawn of dirt. Or the one next door, with the porch slanting down so sharply that once all my marbles rolled off it and disappeared into the weeds. Hadn’t I lived here? I gripped my elbows and tried to see something I was certain I knew. That banana tree? It would have grown since then.

A car pulled up behind me and a voice called out. “Naomi!”

I turned. It was my uncle Geoffrey, leaning out from the backseat of a police car. His face was stricken and wet.

“Don’t run, please!”

I didn’t run. I stood, exhausted, as the two officers got out of the car and approached me. One was white and one was black, and they looked like nice men. I put my hands over my face and staggered into them. “I’m sorry,” I said over and over. They led me back to the car, and my uncle pulled me into his arms.

“Hush,” he said. He took my hands from my face and brushed away my hair. “Hush. It’s not your fault. It was her heart. It could have happened at any time. Shh.”

I sat up, pushed him away from me. What was he saying? What did he mean?

My mother, he said. My mother was dead. She’d had a heart attack in her kitchen, apparently making breakfast. Hadn’t Peterson told me? Isn’t that why I’d run off? Nobody had found her for several days, and then no one could find me, until Uncle Geoffrey left a message on her machine.

“It’s not possible,” I said. “If she was dead, I would know.”

My uncle wept and blew his nose. “I’m sorry I called the police. I thought you were going to do something to yourself.”

“If she was dead I would know.”

But even as I said this, I was beginning to believe that what my uncle was telling me was true. We were in the back of a police car, and my mother was dead. I had stopped being a medium. I would never again be one.

“Is this where I lived?” I asked my uncle. The two officers were standing on the sidewalk, smoking. A mist was gathering over the grass. “Isn’t that our old house?”

My uncle shook his head. “No, no. I’m sorry—your family didn’t live anywhere near here.”

Outside, the police were finishing their cigarettes, dropping them to the ground and stamping on them. In a few minutes the white one came back to the car and poked his head in. “Are y’all ready for a ride home, or what are we going to do here?”

“Home,” said Uncle Geoffrey.

They got in and slammed the doors. The one in the driver’s seat mumbled something into a radio, started the car, and pulled into the street.

We drove for a while. The city, from the backseat of the police car, looked rather ordinary: block after block of convenience stores and stoplights. I was surprised at how far I’d come. The two police officers were separated from us by a steel mesh that was bolted to the ceiling and sides of the car. I gripped this mesh with my fingers and leaned in close.

“Officers,” I said. “I have something to tell you.”

epilogue

Eve tempted Adam, and Adam was tempted, and because of this humans have lived ever since in a state of sorry exile from the Garden they believe is home. But some early spiritualists figured out how to get back in. After death, they said, the soul goes to the Summer Land, a place of flowery meadows and soft breezes and magnificent scenery, all created out of the deepest wishes of the dead. Nothing is denied them. If the dead want art, art galleries spring up, and if the dead want fresh, ripe fruit, orchards grow from the mountainsides. There are schools in the Summer Land, but no one has to go. At night, the dead can visit the living, who are free to join their dead loved ones while they sleep. After a lifetime of thwarted desire, the dead can at last indulge it, and thus the very thing that caused our expulsion from the Garden in the first place will lead us back into it.

I think about this sometimes and wonder what my mother’s version of the Summer Land might be like. I picture a sumptuous restaurant, linen tablecloths and golden silverware, endless lines of waiters bringing her desserts, bowls of flowers on the table, a new dress for every course. She might never get tired of it. But if she did, there’d be a huge front porch with a wicker chaise longue, and some tall drinks, and books with pretty pictures for her to look through. She could never get enough of prettiness when she was alive.

It’s hard to believe in such a place, though. Wouldn’t there be conflicts? What if what you wanted didn’t want you? What if your greatest desire was to be alive again?

Sometimes I imagine my mother coming back down here, and I wonder what she’d think. I’ve moved back into her house and have begun to fix it up a little. When I came back after my eighteen months in the Women’s Correctional Facility, in Delphi, the place was in terrible shape: the weeds were shoulder high and the paint was entirely gone from the siding. Inside, the linoleum floors were peeling up, spiders had built nests in the curtains, and all the taps leaked, so there was the constant sound of rain. Kids had pelted the house with eggs and broken some windows, and rain and snow came in, and the furniture sagged and wept. I wasn’t even sure if the house ought to be lived in anymore, but I had nowhere else to go, and to be perfectly honest, it looked no different from most of the others in Train Line. Things seemed to go from bad to worse while I was gone, but this observation might have been the result of my fresh perspective. The cats ran away when my mother died—Troy says he looked for months and never found them—but they returned a few days after I moved in. I find this miraculous, and a blessing.

For a long time I found it painful to think about my mother, and instead I thought obsessively of Peter, hoping, I think, that I was making it up to him by confessing and by going to jail. Perhaps I did make it up to him, in a way. His bones are now in Oregon, buried alongside his mother’s and his father’s.

I cannot forget him, but he no longer haunts me.

It was a relief, actually, to be in jail at last. I wore a denim dress with a number on it. It was like being dead, a kind of afterlife in which my only desire was to be left alone—a desire that was granted to me. I worked occasionally, in the cafeteria or as a groundskeeper, but usually I had whole days to do nothing but read. The prison library was a disaster—nothing but self-help books as far as the eye could see—but Troy sometimes sent me books, and so did Dave the Alien, though this stopped suddenly when he met a girl at the video store, had a whirlwind romance, and got married. Ron sent me newsy updates about Train Line, and in particular about Jenny. Her health rallied for a while, then turned suddenly bad again, and she died a few months before I was released. Train Line renamed their children’s beach after her.

I got mail from other people, too. People who’d read about the case in the paper wrote to me, some telling me I would burn in hell, others saying that if I repented all would be forgiven. Prisoners at other jails wrote with legal advice. Once I even got a Christmas card from Moira Morton. Enclosed was a holiday letter describing her year: she’d married in the summer, was pregnant already, and she and her new husband were relocating to Arizona, where he would work in aerospace. They were in the process of buying “a beautiful new home at the edge of the desert, where sometimes on nights with a full moon, the mournful howl of coyotes can be heard.”

At the bottom she’d scrawled, “Your visions were true.” I kept the letter.

Of my two jobs—one at night, cleaning a medical complex, and the other during the day, as a gardener at a nursing home—I prefer my nursing home one. I like being outside and taking breaks on the patio with the old people, and I have discovered I have a knack for pruning and digging and trimming. I like it in the winter, too, when I drive the tiny snowplow up and down the walkways and water the houseplants inside. The cleaning job is also satisfying in its way—I polish chrome and empty trash cans, and I do it efficiently and well. I vacuum, too. I have a way of backing out a door, sweeping over my footsteps as I leave, so it looks like I have never been there.

One morning, I came home from work to find someone sitting on my doorstep. I was quite tired, ready for a bath and a long nap, and did not recognize her for several minutes. She was much taller, for one thing, and for another she was dressed in a bizarre outfit—a cape that dragged on the ground, and a long black dress—but it was Vivian. Her glasses were gone, contacts no doubt, but her curly black hair was the same, as was her skinny, hunched shape.

“Hi,” she said, as if she’d just gone round the corner for a carton of milk.

Stunned beyond words, I unlocked the door and pushed it open for her. She went inside, holding up her cape so as not to trip, and I followed.

“Goodness,” I said at last. “You’ve grown up.”

“I’ll be thirteen in two and a half months.”

“Dear God.”

Instinctively, I began rummaging around my kitchen, looking for something for Vivian to eat. “Would you like some cheese? I have some crackers, too…”

“Just crackers. I’m vegan now.”