After Life (17 page)

“You’re obsessed.”

“Or possessed,” she sighed. “It’s good though; I need a project. Next week is my last radio show. They’re throwing me a ‘retirement’ party down at the station. We’re all pretending I’m just retiring. It helps us remain polite.”

“Are you still hoping they’ll have a change of heart?”

“Actually,” she said, perking up, “I have a better idea. What do you think of this: a
television
show?”

I raised my eyebrows, waiting for her to explain.

“I know the people at WRUK from the times I was interviewed on the
Morning Show.
They’d be receptive, I think, especially if this investigation works out. I was thinking of a program with more or less the same format, except with a studio audience instead of call-ins.”

“Well, that would be great,” I said, careful not to radiate any more negativity.

“It certainly would,” said my mother.

I rolled an index card into my typewriter to show her that I had things to do. While I clacked away she walked around the reading room, looking at the photographs on the wall. She stopped at one and rapped it with a knuckle. “Those were the days, weren’t they? Look at how many people are listening to that lecture!” She put her glasses on and peered at it more closely. “It could happen again, you know. It’s almost the end of the century, people are searching…”

“Mama.”

“Yes?”

“A police officer came around a couple of weeks ago. He was asking about the bones. You didn’t happen to talk to him, did you?”

“A police officer? Oh, I heard about that. No, I didn’t talk to him. Why do you ask?” She looked at me right in the eye.

Suddenly, and for no reason that I could tell, I found myself suspicious of her.
She’s lying,
I thought.
She’s keeping things from
me.

“Why?” she said again.

I turned from her, shrugging. “He said he was going to talk to you, that’s all. I wondered what he said.” This was difficult to say, because my mouth had gone dry. I felt myself beginning to panic. I fought it down. If my mother noticed, she made no indication.

“Hmm. I wish he had talked to me. I’d like to find out what they know. It would be nice to get it from the horse’s mouth for once, instead of from that wretched
Evening
Disturber…
”

She chatted on for a few minutes, then picked up her purse and left.

When she was gone, I turned off the typewriter. I couldn’t type; my fingers were sweating and slipped off the keys. I’d
seen
Officer Peterson walking up to her house. I’d seen him go through the gate. Was it possible she wasn’t home? That was a Friday; her radio show was a repeat on Fridays, a day off for her, so she wasn’t at the station. She could have been grocery shopping, or at Darva Lawrence’s, though it would be awfully early for her to go out. Maybe she was only pretending not to have recognized Peter in the skull…maybe she knew.

I pulled myself together. I wiped my hands on my thighs and turned the typewriter back on and typed several cards, and then I felt somewhat better. Of course my mother didn’t know! And she would never know. She was probably still convinced the bones were her brother’s. She was a terrible medium, anyway—a fake.

If she only knew what
I
knew.

Everyone was obsessed with the reconstructed skull, even Vivian. One afternoon we were going for a walk, kicking the first fall leaves, when I noticed she was touching her face with her fingers, prodding her eye sockets and feeling her chin.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“What?”

“With your face.” I mimicked her, and she frowned.

“I’m trying to feel my skull,” she said.

I couldn’t help but picture that: the big, childish dome of her forehead, the delicate jaw and tiny teeth. “That’s gruesome.”

“What does ‘gruesome’ mean?”

“Gross,” I said, though that didn’t seem quite right.

She was silent a moment. “Andy Paulson is gruesome.”

“I’ll bet.”

We were heading for the lake, and Vivian had a plastic bread bag full of crumbs for the swans. She swung it around. “What would people look like if they didn’t have any bones?”

“Like sacks of jelly, I guess.”

“Could they walk?”

“I doubt it. Maybe they could slither a little bit.”

“Do ghosts need bones?”

“Ghosts?”

“How can ghosts walk if they don’t have bones?”

I shrugged. “It’s a mystery.”

She didn’t seem satisfied with this answer. She peered out over the lake, looking for the big dirty swans that usually hung around the dock. The lake was choppy and gray, and the wind blew right through my sweater. Across the lake in Wallamee, they were harvesting grapes. I could smell them. The grape harvesters were big bizarre machines; tall enough to arch right over a row of grapes, shake the daylights out of it, and fling the traumatized fruit into a hopper. You didn’t need to harvest these grapes by hand—they were dark, leather-skinned Concords, the kind Peter and I used to steal from the field behind Train Line. We’d pinch them until their insides burst out and suck the flavor from the skins.

Vivian turned the bread sack upside down, dumping the crumbs into the water. “Stupid swans,” she said.

This was something new in Vivian: a grim impatience, an angry willingness to be defeated. She used to be so
dogged.

“Well, geez, Viv,” I said. “Give them half a chance. Maybe they’re out visiting their friends or something.”

“I don’t care.”

How I hated that. “Don’t say you don’t care.”

“Why not?”

“It sounds ugly.”

She just shrugged, not caring or talking now.

We were heading for home, trudging gloomily up Fox Street, when it started to rain. It came down suddenly, as if someone had just thrown a sprinkler switch. Vivian lagged behind me. “Hurry up, Viv!” I called to her, and stood waiting.

When she caught up she came to me and looked me in the face. “Hurry up, Viv!” she said in a nasty, sarcastic voice.

For several seconds I just stared at her, unable to believe what I’d heard. She glared right back. Without even thinking about what I was doing, I slapped her, hard, across the cheek.

“Do
not
speak to me that way,” I said.

She barely flinched, but continued to glare at me, her left cheek growing red and hot. I turned and walked quickly back to the house. Vivian followed several minutes later, quietly hanging up her jacket and lying down in front of the television, cradling her injured cheek in her hand.

Horrified at what I had done, and panicky to think of what would happen if Vivian told her mother, I drank cup after cup of coffee at the kitchen table and finished the crossword puzzle in record time.

If Vivian did tell her mother, it didn’t get back to me. But I couldn’t stop thinking about it. In my head I slapped her over and over. I slapped her until she fell down. My hand felt huge and fiery. For several nights, I slept with it clamped between my knees, hating it and what it could do.

It was the middle of the night, long after we’d all gone to bed. I was dreaming my drowning dream—in the high school pool, crowds of boys swimming above me and blocking my way to the surface—when the phone rang. I sat straight up. The glow-in-the-dark dots on my clock were no longer glowing so I couldn’t be sure of the time, but judging from how deeply asleep I was it must have been three or four. I had an extension in my room, and I reached over and picked it up just after Jenny did. I heard her soft voice say Hello.

“Is this Naomi? I’m looking for Naomi,” said the other voice. It was my mother.

“I’ve got it,” I said.

“All right,” said Jenny, and she hung up.

There was a click, a pause, and another click, which must have been Ron seeing if it was for him. Then quiet.

“Mama, what’s wrong?”

She was crying. She made little choking sounds into the phone.

“Mama! What is it?”

“I had a dream. You were lost. You were with your father, and I couldn’t find you…” She cried, snuffling and blowing her nose.

“Mama, I’m right here. Do you want me to come over?”

She gasped out a laugh. “Oh, God, no. It’s all right. I’ve just never been so…discombobulated by a dream. Oh, Naomi, it was horrible. I was so lonely. It was…like you never existed. Like I’d made you up.”

There was a pause while she blew her nose again and got herself together. “All right. All right.”

I picked up my clock and tried to read the hands. “Did you say my father was in it?”

“I think. I’m sorry. It’s boring to hear about other people’s dreams.”

“No, no, it’s fine.”

“When I woke up, I didn’t know what was real. It was the same feeling as when my mother passed over, and I’d wake up and remember all over again that she was gone.”

“Why don’t you drink some milk or something? I can come over.”

“No,” she said firmly. “I’m fine. I’m sorry I woke you up.”

“It’s all right.”

She hung up without saying good-bye.

I got down under my blankets and tried to sleep. Usually, if I woke in the night I could go back to sleep immediately, but after my mother’s phone call I had the creepy sensation that there was something fluttering in the corner of my room, something like a bat, and it kept me awake. Every time I opened my eyes and checked, nothing was there, but the feeling didn’t go away. Maybe, I thought, it’s a spirit. I cleared my mind and tried to contact it.

What do you want? Leave me alone, I want to
sleep.

It didn’t answer. But after a minute or two it began to moan. The sound it made was like my mother weeping: dry, hacking sobs. I pulled my pillow over my ears, but the thing wouldn’t stop. It didn’t make any sense to me; I had no idea what it was. Maybe it was a demon, but I didn’t believe in demons. It seemed neither spirit nor animal, but like a thing in between, a thing incomplete, like the ragged neck of the reconstructed head.

Eventually I must have fallen asleep, because I woke up when it got light. Ron was stomping around downstairs, and the newspaper hit our front door with a bang. Morning. Whatever the creature was, it was gone. But the feeling it left me with was a sick and horrible one: like guilt, or regret. It was as if what I had done all those years ago had come back to life, and was trying hard to fly, howling, into the world.

In order to be a practicing medium on the grounds of Train Line—that is, to be able to hang out a sign and charge money for individual readings in your own house—you had to be approved and registered by the Train Line board of directors. You’d have to present yourself to the board, state your beliefs and philosophy of mediumship, and then hold a circle. It was a rigorous process. Every year, more mediums failed than passed. I failed two years in a row and was nineteen when I finally got my registration.

I spent those years living with my mother, finishing high school and practicing my mediumship on friends. In the summers I took jobs. It was because of these jobs that I never gave up on being a medium; I knew I’d never make it in the world if I had to have a job. The summer after I graduated from high school I worked at a tomato-packing plant outside Wallamee. I was a sorter. The other sorters and I had to climb up to a huge conveyor belt contraption—we had to duck under steel girders and go up ladders—and sort the tomatoes as they tumbled past us. They were all hard as baseballs, and green. Our job was to pick out the defective ones and the ones with any trace of red at all. Red tomatoes went on another conveyor belt, eventually to be made into ketchup, and the defective ones were tossed down a chute. These were smashed or gouged or had weird prongs, like green fingers, or else had “cats’ faces.” The woman who trained me had an accent of some kind, and was hard to understand.