After Life (5 page)

I leaned over to my mother and whispered, “But he’s not dead, is he?”

She rolled her eyes. “Sloppy work,” she whispered back.

Another time, I was told that I had to take better care of my eyes, because this life would have a lot to show me. I touched my eyes through their lids. They felt hot, tender, ready to explode.

We left New Orleans suddenly, one November morning. That is, my mother and I left. My grandfather remained, alone, in the tall, narrow house full of contraptions he had no use for. While we stood on the curb, waiting for the taxicab that would take us to the bus station, he stayed inside. He was too softhearted to even say, So long. From the back window of the taxi I caught a glimpse of him, watching us leave from my old bedroom then letting the curtain fall shut. He was my pal, my staunchest ally, but by leaving I had betrayed him. I hadn’t had a choice, of course. But in my love for my mother I knew I was complicit, and when he died, a few years later, I believed that in the subtlest way I had helped kill him.

The Church of Spiritualist Studies owned a whole town in the middle of New York State, and that’s where we were headed. My mother showed me the pamphlet on the bus. Originally, the town—it was called Train Line—had been planned as a spiritualist summer camp, though people now lived there year round. There was a lake with swans, many tall trees, tiny gingerbread cottages. We’d stay there a few months, maybe, at least until the police forgot about her. She thought they might have had our house under surveillance: she found some tramped-down grass and a pile of candy bar wrappers under a bush in our side yard. These, I knew, were my grandfather’s. He’d taken to lurking out there, sick of the constant comings and goings in our house. For months my mother had been growing increasingly nervous and paranoid, overwhelmed by the new life she’d created for herself, and our leaving had the character of flight: things forgotten and left undone, mail unforwarded.

We got on the bus and trundled northward. Outside, the landscape stiffened and cracked. One morning we were wakened by the idling bus to find ourselves surrounded by snow. I’d never seen it before, or at least, so much of it—occasionally a few damp flakes fell in New Orleans, melting before they hit the ground—and at first I thought we’d parked in a field of concrete. My mother took my arm and we ran out to the gas station to buy a box of crackers before the bus left again, our impractical shoes slipping on the asphalt. The air smelled different, like water in a tin bucket, and crows flapped in circles over our heads. When I spoke, my voice fell straight out of my mouth, completely swallowed up by snow.

Somewhere in Pennsylvania we had to switch bus lines, and there was a long layover. It was eight o’clock in the morning. We tried to sleep in the molded plastic bus station chairs, acrobating ourselves into complicated positions, but failing that we went outside and took a walk along the highway. The sun was just up. It was watery pale and much farther away than it usually seemed. A cornfield stretched along one side of the road, its dead, broken stalks poking through a crust of snow. My mother walked briskly. Her pantsuit flapped against her legs, and her hair, sprayed into a stiff globe, bobbed along with her gait. I had to skip to keep up.

Not far from the road there was a house. It was long abandoned; we could tell because none of the windows had glass in them and the front door hung open like a mouth. The clapboard siding was silver in the morning light, as if it had never been painted, and there seemed to be no way to get to the house other than cutting across the field. We waded through the ditch, my mother taking my hand, and tromped toward it.

The front steps of the house had been taken away, so we clambered up some broken cinder blocks to get in through the doorway. We walked the house carefully, watching for weak floorboards. There was nothing in it but wallpaper—so faded I couldn’t make out the pattern: flowers, maybe, or faces—and a rusted iron stove, and a suitcase. The suitcase lay open on the floor of an upstairs bedroom, as if someone had stayed for a bit, then left without it, arms full of clothes. It had a water-stained, aqua-blue lining.

My mother said she knew all about the people who’d lived there. She could feel it. She walked around, touching window frames and doorjambs.

“Here,” she said. “Here’s where the young daughter lay, in a bed right here. See how she could look out the window?” Through the glassless panes I could see more cornfield, a stand of trees at the end of it, some hills behind. It was all a dull winter gray. “She died in springtime. She knew she’d never get to walk through the woods again, but she could look at them and imagine it. She died of consumption. Lots of people did, in the old days.”

“Really?” I said.

She nodded slowly, her large glasses opaque with reflections. Something about my mother’s remarks made me uncomfortable. I had my own feelings—surprisingly powerful ones—about who once lived here. A nasty old woman, hoarding her things, going slowly mad, alone. She would put on a pair of black rubber boots and get her dog and go for walks in the cornfields.

“Honestly!” said my mother, angrily turning to me. “Do you have to stomp when you walk? Be quiet!”

I trailed behind her as she walked slowly through the other rooms. Now and then she stopped to caress the wallpaper, her hand cupped and fingers splayed in a gesture of such forceful intimacy that I found it hard to watch. The old woman—my old woman—would never survive in the bright light of my mother’s vision.

The house was so quiet. Sunlight filled the empty rooms.

We got to Train Line early that evening. The bus dropped us off at the tall iron front gate. We’d rented a house over the phone but had no idea how to find the place, so I waited by our suitcases while my mother went to look for the main office. Alone with our stuff, I realized I had brought all the wrong things: a new stuffed dog that I hadn’t even named yet, a dictionary, and a glass jar full of coins I’d collected. It had seemed foolish to leave money behind. The thought that there were so many things that I might never see again—my mother’s cauliflower-shaped potholders, or my old slippers—struck me with tremendous force. I wanted to cry out. A cold wind blew off Lake Wallamee, biting my lips and ears and chilling my skull. I no longer owned even a hat.

When my mother came back, she brought a short, chubby woman who was wearing a T-shirt and rubber thongs. She had black hair and giant breasts. She noticed I was staring at her.

“I don’t need a coat because I don’t feel the cold,” she said. “My skin gives off heat. Feel my arm.”

I felt it. It didn’t seem especially hot to me, though it was quite hairy for a woman’s.

“Naomi, this is Mrs. Blackthorn,” said my mother.

I curtsied—my grandfather had taught me that. “How do you do?”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, call me Robin,” said the woman, and grabbed three of our suitcases.

We followed her up a narrow, unpaved street lined with houses. The houses were very small, pushed right close together, with no room in front of them for yards. They had one or two stories and large pointed roofs. Most were dark and closed up, but lights burned in some, and the glow of a television in others. My first impression of the town was of clutter. Cars were parked nearly on the front steps, cats jumped from porch roofs and windowsills, hanging plants and wind chimes and mobiles dangled by every door,
WINNIE SANDOX
—said one painted wooden sign—
READER.
And another:
MRS. LAWRENCE, MEDIUM, IS OUT
. I couldn’t believe it: a town made just for us. The air was bitter and smoky, something I’d later learn to associate with wood stoves.

We stopped in front of a shabby cottage with a frill of gingerbread under its eaves. Robin Blackthorn fumbled with a ring of keys, then bumped the door open with her hip. She said to call the office if we needed anything, and we went inside.

The next few years were the coldest of my life. We heated with kerosene, which meant we had to keep a window cracked open so we wouldn’t suffocate. I’d wake up in the morning with snow in my hair, with ice crusted on the wallpaper. Our windows got so caked with ice I’d have to melt a little hole with my thumb to see out of. Even in the summer, when it was quite warm outside and even hot, I imagined that if I stuck my fingers deep into the soil I’d find ice crystals, a permafrost. I put on weight, maybe because I wasn’t getting sick anymore, or maybe my body wanted to stay warm. If so, it didn’t work. Every year the cold sank deeper into me.

From the little window in my bedroom I could see Lake Wallamee. In the winter it froze, and people rode snowmobiles and skied across it. For those months it would look like a field, vast and remarkably flat, the crops snowed under. The rest of the year it varied in blueness: sometimes gray, sometimes a deep navy, sometimes an algae-choked green. Train Line was on a spit, so the lake surrounded it on three sides. If I pressed my face to the window glass I could see the lake, its ripples flashing silver behind the trees, in any direction I looked. I imagined it had no bottom. It seemed like that to me: dangerous, enveloping, infinitely secretive.

I thought of a strange thing, lying in my new bed that first night. Strange shadows moved over the room’s slanted ceiling. My ears still roared with the sound of the bus, and when I closed my eyes I could feel the motion of the wheels beneath my body. I managed not to think of my grandparents and our house and my friends from school and my teacher. Instead I thought of Miss Beryl Kemper and the dead Irene. With my mother moved away, Miss Beryl might never speak to her daughter again. Of course, I had been the one speaking to her in the first place. But still. Something had been lost. What was it?

In the dark, I felt Irene Kemper’s painted eyes stare down at me, reproaching me for letting her die twice.

3
an empty grave

Peter stayed buried for ten years. When they found him, I had lived in Train Line for more than twenty, almost as long as Peter’s whole life, and I was thirty-one.

It happened the day before Labor Day, a bright and windy Sunday afternoon. A rich man who wanted a house on the shore of the lake had hired some men to build it for him. They were digging the foundation, hoping to finish it and put the walls and roof up before snow fell, when they came across the skull in a mound of excavated dirt. At first the men thought it was a joke. The skull was so perfect, with such delicately arching cheekbones and flawless, even teeth, that it looked like a prop from a doctor’s office or a play. But a little more probing into the pile of dirt turned up a scapula and a collarbone and a long section of vertebrae, still connected. They stopped their machines and someone called the police.