After Life (8 page)

One night I dreamed about Peter. As in many of my dreams, I was burying him, but in this one, I was burying lots of people, it was my job or something, and the feeling was one of resignation:
All these dead people, better bury them quick.
They were the victims of a disease, or a natural disaster. Some were not quite dead yet, though. Peter was one of them. But I had to bury him, that’s the way it was. I had a white shovel and there were bouquets of roses to put on the graves. I flattened the soil with the back of my shovel and turned to go. As I did so I heard a noise, a faint groan, and a hand reached out of the ground.

What to do? I recognized the hand as a sign of confusion; he didn’t know what was going on, didn’t know he was just about dead and already buried. So I put down my shovel and knelt down next to the grave. I took his hand in mine. And I held it like that until he died for real.

The dream spooked me, though it was not, really, a bad dream. When I woke up that morning I felt calm. The day was sullen and overcast, a Sunday, and I’d slept too late, but it was
all right.
I tested myself:
Peter’s dead because of you, you buried him, you threw dirt on him and left him there in that clearing.
I pictured the grave site, the dull clouds over the clearing, the wind moving the trees beyond it, his body rotting in the soil. And it didn’t frighten me. All I felt was calm.

After that, much of the power Peter had over me dissipated. Days went by during which I forgot to think,
Any time now, they’ll come and get me.
I gave some readings that felt good, felt right, almost. Vivian learned to say my name, and we went around Train Line piggyback. Peter was not coming back, neither to forgive me or to blame me. He was gone. This was difficult and lonely knowledge. It meant that I had gotten away with it, and that death was for real. This seemed intolerable, impossible, against everything I wanted to believe.

But I managed somehow to live with my imperfect faith, as someone might learn to live with false hands, or blindly.

I spent the rest of that Labor Day afternoon in the library. Since it was a holiday the library was closed, but because I worked there part-time I had a key. It was a small building of imposing design, a tiny Parthenon on a hillock above the lake. Upstairs were the book stacks, all three of them, and downstairs was the museum, a room full of spirit photography and spirit paraphernalia: trumpets, slates, Ouija boards, planchettes. I thought I would get a head start on my project for this winter, which was to catalog the collection. This task required that I read enough of each book to see what it was about, then assign it a Dewey decimal number and type up some cards. I liked working when no one else was in the building, typing at the humming Selectric all day and watching motes of sunlight writhe across the floor. It was always shady and cool in the library, like the inside of a safe.

Around four o’clock I took a break and stretched out in the reading room, using a thick leather-bound book for a pillow. I meant to just rest my eyes, but when I woke up it was nearly six. At six I was supposed to meet my mother; Monday night was Circle Night, and we always met for a drink beforehand. I stood up and shook the crumbs of leather from my hair, then grabbed my sweater and locked the place up. The sun was going down and the air had a chill. I wouldn’t have time to get a newspaper.

I walked across Train Line rubbing the sleep from my face. The shadows were long and the setting sun lit up the grass. This is the kind of evening the Victorians had in mind when they designed Train Line, I thought: the twilit fairyland architecture, the fingers of mist creeping up from the lake. Not much had been added since then, just the cars and the telephone wires, and a general ramshackle feeling. Every other house, it seemed, had an orange F
OR
S
ALE
sign in a window, and many were boarded up, bald of paint, tipping. It was worrying, but people had been predicting the end of Train Line for fifty years, and still it hung on. Inertia is a powerful thing.

I crossed through a stand of trees, then down the hill toward the entrance gates. The gatehouse was closed up for the year, and the window boxes of geraniums were gone. The fountain—a naked golden baby topped with a showerhead—was dry. Labor Day marked the end of the season for Train Line. Many mediums had left already for warmer climates; more would leave before snow fell. There’d be no more daily lectures until June, and no public message services or workshops. Monday night Circles were one of the few regular events we had in the winter, besides Sunday services. A schedule in the main office listed the presiding mediums for the month’s Circle Nights. Most mediums tried to get out of it any way they could, but a few liked Circles. Troy Versted, for example, who was from a long line of Australian mediums, worked every week. He had a hook nose, white hair, and pastel-colored slacks with matching shirts. Another person who filled in for less accommodating mediums was Robin Blackthorn. Another was my mother. I went when I was scheduled, no more and no less.

The bar where I was to meet my mother, Maxwell’s, was outside the gates of Train Line. Train Line was a dry town. The Victorians saw their summer colony as a place to better oneself; the only pleasures they approved of were the loftier kind. I walked down Line Drive, which curved along the shore of the lake and through arching trees. A breeze off the water got inside my sweater and cotton dress. My mother was on the deck when I got to Maxwell’s, sitting slumped in a shiny green outfit, a drink un-drunk in front of her. She didn’t appear to see me as I approached, crossing the gravel parking lot past a long row of motorcycles. Inside, I got a plastic cup of white wine from the bar, then took it out to the deck.

“What’s wrong?” I asked my mother.

She didn’t answer me right away, but stared into her drink. Then, “I’ve been waiting a long time, you know.”

“I’m sorry, Mama.”

“It wouldn’t have taken much to call. You can be awfully irresponsible.”

“I know. I—”

She waved her hand. “I don’t want to hear it. I’ve had a horrible day. You won’t believe what happened.”

My mother was a physical medium. Most of us are not; we’re mental mediums, and we use only our minds in our work. Occasionally my mother still used her spirit trumpet, which she kept wrapped in a long piece of brown velvet on her living room mantel, and once in a while she levitated something. It embarrassed me to see her do levitations. I knew her tricks: the hidden rods, the threads, the surreptitious flings. The conventions of Train Line had worn her down, though, and she saved her most blatant sleight of hand for sweet-sixteen parties and appearances down at the senior center. As a rule, the only tool she used was her body.

This is what she did. She’d sit across from her customer—“the bereaved,” as she liked to put it, though by her definition we’re all bereaved—hold his hands, and give him a long, searching look before closing her eyes. If the reading was successful, and it usually was, she’d soon make contact with a spirit who wanted to get through. Then she’d give her body over to the spirit, who would speak in a voice not unlike my mother’s—they were her vocal cords, after all—and perhaps even stand up, walk around, gesticulate, dance. This kind of performance could make some people extremely uncomfortable. My mother had, however, a large and loyal following. And I believed in her.

Well, I
mostly
believed in her. A certain percentage of what she did was faked: I knew this, and I knew that it was part of who she was to go just a little too far, to push her material a bit further than it would stretch. Somehow, she carried it off, just as she carried off her flamboyant clothes and her long, unmistakably dyed hair. Though she was fat now, her nose was still her dominant feature; it looked ready to weigh anchor from her face at any moment.

“I’ll believe it,” I told her. “What happened?”

She gave me a sharp look. “Look, there’s no need to get snotty.” Then she sighed deeply, shifted in her chair, and took a sip of her drink. “They’re going to cancel my show.”

Every weekday morning for the last twelve years, from nine to ten a.m., the local talk radio station broadcast
The Mother Galina Psychic Hour.
People called in with questions—“Should I quit my job?” and “Is he the man for me?” and “What color should I paint my house?”—and my mother, working with a team of what she termed “spirit advisers,” answered them, often so deftly and probingly the caller would break into tears. “What you need to do,” she said several times a week, “is get to the real question.” She was very, very good. And she was right: I
couldn’t
believe they’d cancel the show.

“Why would they do a thing like that?”

My mother shook her head. Her earrings, fat chunks of amber with ants in them, swung back and forth. They matched her hair, which was an extraordinary brassy color. “They say they want a change, that it’s been twelve years and I’ve answered everyone’s questions. They’re thinking of putting a shrink in that spot. A shrink! What do they think
I
do?”

“Well, they’re making a big mistake.”

“Obviously, Naomi.” She stared into her drink again, brooding. “I’m the only reason people listen to that godawful
Morning Show.
Do they think anyone wants to hear those two buffoons complain about town council meetings?”

I took a long slug of my wine—it was terrible, like cough medicine—and when I put my cup back down again, I noticed that there was a newspaper sticking out of my mother’s tote bag. It was neat, tightly folded. She must have picked it up on her way over and not had time to read it.

“Look, there’s Troy,” said my mother, waving. “Troy! Over here!”

Troy smiled, waved back, but didn’t move. He was talking to a young woman in a blue blouse.

“Lecher,” said my mother. “Hold on a minute, I’ve got to talk to him.” She pushed her chair back and struggled up. She’d been having trouble getting around lately: a bunion operation last year, and all that extra weight.

When she was gone I slid out her newspaper and flattened it out on our table. Wind ruffled the pages, and I weighted them with our drinks. This was the headline:

BONES FOUND IN TOWN OF WALLAMEE:
CRIME OR ARCHAEOLOGY?
POLICE INVESTIGATING

And there it was: a full-color picture of the clearing by the lake. A big yellow earthmover, like the one I’d followed that morning, was parked next to a pile of rocks and dirt. Some official-looking men were standing around, not far from the old falling-down barn. I brushed my fingers over it, disbelieving.

“That Troy!” said my mother, back already. “You’d think he…”

I looked up at her, startled.

“What’s the matter?” she said quickly.

I looked down again, took the drinks off the newspaper, and began to fold it back up. I hadn’t had a chance to see whether the skeleton was a woman, or a man, or what. “Hmm?”

She pulled her chair out, eased herself back into it, and smiled. It was a long, knowing, absolutely devastating smile. My mother had built her career on the effects of this look; it could make you think,
She knows me better than anyone in the world.
It could make you want to give her everything in your wallet. Of course, I was used to it. I had spent my life steeling myself against it.

“You look,” she said, still smiling, “exactly like you did that day you came home from school and had wet your pants. Do you remember that? You told me you’d fallen into a puddle, but oh, the look on your face!”

“I
did
fall into a puddle,” I told her, outraged.

Her smile wavered just slightly. “Oh, Naomi, honestly! Why did you look so ashamed, then? I’m your mother, for God’s sake; you don’t have to fib.”

I shook my head, refusing to say another thing on the subject. Suddenly I was beginning to doubt my own version of events; it seemed possible that I had lied all those years ago and had fooled myself into believing otherwise. I guzzled my wine, furious.

“Ha!” said my mother. “You know I’m right.”

Fortunately, she seemed to have forgotten what had started the quarrel in the first place, and sat smugly drinking her martini. We were quiet for several long minutes, looking out over the lake, where motorboats with their engines turned off drifted slowly by and fishermen cast lines across the calm water. It was a beautiful evening, but I felt irritable and uncomfortably cold. All around us, glasses clinked and people laughed and chattered. My mother sighed. “Oh, Naomi. I can’t believe summer’s over already. A whole winter without my radio show will be the death of me, it really will.” She gave me a sorrowful look.

I was still angry, but reached out and patted her knee anyway. “Oh, Mama. You’ll never die.”

She gave my hand a squeeze. “Oh, well, I certainly hope that’s not true,” she said.

We walked down Line Drive in the darkening evening, my mother leaning into me. Her feet had never quite recovered from her bunion surgery; she walked with a rolling, precarious gait, like a child on new roller skates. It pleased me that she needed my help. The weight and heat of her body made me nostalgic; I thought of falling asleep on her lap when I was a child. Although that, to be honest, didn’t happen very often.