After Life (26 page)

“Why, thank you, dear!” she said, her round, velvety face creased from years of smiling. It was a rare thing to spot a nun in Wallamee. She was followed by an old man who looked very much like her; her brother, maybe. “You have a good afternoon,” she added.

I couldn’t help but wonder what a nun would think of all this, the whole black-cat, grinning-pumpkin, floating-skeleton spectacle. I watched her as she waddled down the aisles. She pointed, chuckling, at a stuffed Frankenstein. Her brother leaned over and patted its head. I wondered, then, what she would think of
me.

Vivian and I spent the next few days putting the costume together. It was harder to line a dress than I’d expected, but I managed to do it after a lot of ripping and pinning, and then we spent an entire afternoon searching Train Line for the perfect stick to make into a broom.

The days were getting shorter. It was dark during the long hours I lay awake in the morning, unable to sleep and unwilling to get up. I thought if I lay perfectly still, my body would become so numb and bored it would fall asleep, but instead I just stopped being able to feel it. I felt like a pair of disembodied eyes propped up on my pillow, staring up into the dark. Sometimes, fixing my eyes on the light fixture, I imagined the ceiling was sinking—slowly, slowly—down toward me, and, being a mere set of eyes, I couldn’t do a thing to stop it.

Peter? Peter!
I called to him.

No answer.

A few days before Halloween, Dave the Alien showed up at the library. I was Windexing: the glass-topped end tables, the telephone, the locked bookcases, the windows. This was one of my favorite library duties, along with putting acrylic covers on books.

“If you’re too busy, I can leave,” said Dave, plopping himself down in an upholstered chair. He didn’t look very good; his hair was dirty and he hadn’t shaved.

“I can talk and Windex.”

“You must be a genius!” said Dave, grinning. He lowered his voice slightly. “I hope you don’t have any bad feelings about our dinner a few weeks ago. Because, you know, I don’t.”

“None at all,” I said, spritzing a tabletop and wiping it with a paper towel.

“Good.” He ran his fingers through his hair. “Umm…”

“Yes?”

“What are your plans for Halloween?”

“Sleep.”

He laughed: too hard and too long. Dave was a lonely man. It gusted out from him like a smell. “Because, see, there’s a costume party I was thinking of going to. If you’d like to be my ‘date.’ ” He made quotation marks in the air with his fingers.

“‘Costume party,’” I repeated, noncommittally.

“I think I want to go as a televangelist.” He described his costume: he’d find a bad powder-blue suit, a Bible, and shaded glasses, then grease his hair back and wear a cardboard television over his head.

“Wow,” I said. “That’s creative.”

“I thought so,” he said. He stroked his hairy chin and looked me over. “You’d make an awesome prostitute.”

“What?”

“I mean that in a good way. See, if you dressed as a call girl, we’d be a perfect pair.”

“I’ll think about it,” I told him, spraying the cabinets.

He tapped his shoes on the wooden floor:
tappada tappada! tappada tappada!
“Oh, by the way!” he said. “Did you hear I finally found a job?”

“Great!”

“I took your advice. I didn’t settle for anything that wasn’t right.”

“My advice?”

“You remember. At Monday night Circles?”

“Oh.”

“
Oh.
I’m working at Big Ed’s Video, over on Marquis Street.”

I looked at him. “Well, great.”

“I get three free video rentals a week, and a thirty percent discount on every one more than that. Plus a raise after four months.”

I nodded.

“So…maybe you’d like to come over for videos sometime?”

“Maybe,” I agreed.

He sighed deeply. I stopped working for a minute and leaned against the windowsill to stare out the window. The sky was bright, bright, bright.

“Do you have secrets, Naomi?”

I didn’t turn to look at him. “Everyone has secrets.”

“Maybe so. I don’t know as I do.”

“Why do you ask?”

“Because,” he said, “either you’re a really dull person, or you have huge secrets. And I’d bet money on the latter.”

“Well. Don’t bet too much.”

“I wish,” said Dave, more forcefully, now, “I
wish
you’d be straight with me. If you don’t like me, tell me to get lost. If you do like me, just show it or something. All right?”

I felt myself blush. I’d thought I didn’t care whether he liked me or not. But I did, very much. Suddenly I felt frightened and unmoored. “I’m sorry,” I said quickly. “I do like you.”

“All right,” he said. “All right.”

The night before her big party and parade, I got Vivian’s costume ready. I folded the dress and the wig and put it in a plastic bag, and reinforced the pointy hat with black electrical tape. I gave her detailed directions on applying the face paint.

“And make sure everybody gets
one
of these candy pumpkins before anyone gets seconds. Got it?”

“Okay, okay!” crowed Vivian, nearly hopping with excitement.

In the car on the way to her house, she held the witch hat on her lap and told me all the things she’d do if she really
was
a witch.

“I’d turn invisible and go inside people’s houses,” she said. “I’d watch them eat their food.”

“That’s a strange thing to do.”

“Then I’d turn my mom into a chicken!” She kicked her feet out and threw her head back against the seat, laughing as if this was the funniest thing she’d ever thought of. She bared her teeth like a rabid cat. “Then I’d turn my dad into an egg!”

“Now you’re getting silly.”

“I’d turn you into a ball of mush!”

I pretended to cry. “That’s not—
boo-hoo
—very nice.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. She looked thoughtfully out the window. “Actually I’d turn you into a queen.”

“Much better,” I said.

I thought about her the next day, as I worked through the stack of books I was cataloging. I remembered wearing my costume to school in first grade—I was a clown—and how we each had to step in front of the class and make the class try to guess who we were. I loved my teacher, but I remember standing in front of the class, my curly black hair showing behind my mask—I was the only one in the class with curly hair—and feeling angry that the poor woman felt obliged to pretend she didn’t know it was me. Everyone knew who I was. And
I
knew
they
knew. The charade humiliated me.

Around ten o’clock the phone rang, a startling racket. The library phone didn’t ring more than once a month this time of year. It was the principal of Vivian’s school.

“You’re the babysitter, right?” she asked. “The parents left this number for emergencies.”

“That’s right. There hasn’t been an accident…?”

“Oh, no—ha ha—nothing like that. A little misunderstanding. I’m afraid Vivian’s costume is—um—inappropriate.” The woman said they’d sent home strict instructions that scary costumes were forbidden in school. It had been the policy for two years now. Instead, the children were encouraged to dress up as characters from children’s literature. “We have the cutest Rats from NIMH this year,” she said. “And an absolutely darling Moby Dick.”

I didn’t know what to say. “Well, nobody told me.”

“I suppose not. We
did
send home flyers.”

She suggested I bring Vivian a new costume as quickly as possible, so she didn’t have to miss any of the fun. Meanwhile, she’d be catching up on homework in the principal’s office.

“I’ll see what I can do,” I said.

I closed the library and ran to my mother’s house, certain that Elaine had planned it all, undermining me for her own mysterious reasons. My mother wasn’t home, and neither was her car.
Crap,
I thought. I wondered if she’d started working with Officer Peterson again and pictured her touching bones at the forensics lab, or wandering the excavation site with her fingers at her temples.

From her house I called Dave the Alien. I got him out of bed.

“Sorry,” I said, and described the emergency.

“So you want me to give you a ride to Murphy’s, then to the elementary school?”

“Then back home again. If you have the time. I guess I could ride my bike.”

He yawned noisily into the phone. “Oh, no,” he said. “I can do it. For a price.” The price, he said, was going to the costume party with him. “And dressing up as my Lady of the Evening.”

“Oh, come on!” I said. I hemmed and hawed for a while. Dave was silent.

After a minute or two I relented.

“Great!” said Dave, fully awake now.

He was at my house in minutes. His hair stuck up and he smelled like bedclothes. “Hop in,” he said, holding open the car door for me.

David seemed excited to have a project and flattered that I’d called him in my hour of need. He drove quickly and a little recklessly around the lake, chatting about the dream he’d had that night. “And you were in it! You were eating macadamia nuts from a jar. I didn’t remember the dream until I saw you. Weird, huh?”

“Too weird,” I said.

Murphy’s had just opened when we got there. An old woman was in the costume aisle ahead of us, poking through the masks with her black-gloved fingers.

“You go ahead and find a costume,” said Dave. “I have a rendezvous with destiny.” He headed off toward the bathrooms.

Pickings were slim. There were skeletons and wolf-girls and Brides of Frankenstein, and a few oversized clowns, but not much acceptable in Vivian’s size. I asked one of the green-smocked women behind the counter if there were any others. She shook her head. “Had a run on Dorothy of Ozzes last night. Cinderellas went like that, too. All we got’s what you see. Most people buy their costumes ahead of time, you know.”

I looked some more. On the very bottom, underneath a pile of Grim Reapers, I found a Wonder Woman costume in a faded box. I took it out to look at it: what looked like a set of red and yellow pajamas with a plastic face mask. But it was Vivian’s size.
Excellent,
I thought, and tucked it under my arm.

“Hey,” said Dave. “Look what I found.” He held out a pair of spike heels, fishnet stockings, a blond beehive wig, and a spangly red dress. “Ooh-la-la.”

“Oh, no.”

“Please let me buy them for you. Please? You owe me.”

“Okay, okay. But those shoes are about four sizes too small.”

We bought the costumes and headed over to the elementary school. Vivian was in the principal’s office, but she wasn’t doing any homework. She was crying, her green face pressed into her spelling workbook. “Viv, Viv,” I said, patting her head.

“We got you a Wonder Woman costume!” said Dave. He pulled it out of the sack with a flourish.

“NO!” yelled Vivian.

Behind her desk, the principal shrugged. She was a mannish woman with a square head. “She’s been like that since this morning. Maybe you’d better just take her home.”

“Mmm,” said Dave. “I smell a cafeteria lunch.”

“Ravioli with peach slices and pumpkin bread.”

“Mmm,” he said again.