After Life (30 page)

It might have been the failure of the garden that caused my mediumship to take the new turn it did. It happened during a normal home circle, one I held every Wednesday night that summer: the lights low, the occasional noise of cars rumbling by outside, the sound of breathing and shifting in chairs. I was glum; I wanted to make something happen. So, after ten minutes or so I said I was in touch with a spirit named Martha, who was full of rage. This was a bit of an exaggeration. There
was
a spirit of some kind, I thought, but the rage came from me. I felt it, leaping up like a sudden fire.

“She might not be one of ours. She seems particularly hostile—a restless spirit. Can anyone claim her?”

No one could.

But before long, someone—a woman from Arizona who was visiting that summer—said she could
see
the spirit. It was there, she said, in the middle of the room, glowing faintly.

I stared. People claimed to see things all the time, but rarely did more than one person see the same thing—no one liked to admit that someone else saw it first, I think—and as it happened, I never saw the phosphorescent shapes that people said showed up at circles. But this time, after staring for a few minutes, hard, I did. Just barely. It was as if light had gathered from the shadows around the room and collected in that one spot. It was the kind of thing you might dismiss if you were in a mind to. I wasn’t.

“Yes,” I said. “I see her, too.”

Other people chimed in. Oh, yes, they said. She’s wearing a long dress. Her hair’s up. She’s carrying something—a basket? Yes, a wicker basket.

Did I actually see these things? I wanted to—we all wanted to. That was enough.

She stayed for perhaps ten minutes, then faded. When the home circle met again the next week, though, Martha was back. This time, she was more than a glimmer. Someone said she could actually make out the hat pins in her hair, and someone smelled the perfume she wore. She stayed nearly half an hour, and—through me—told us about her life. She had been beaten by her husband, she said, and in the basket was a stillborn baby. Martha herself had died in childbirth. This electrified the circle.

It didn’t take long before the rest of Train Line heard about Martha. People wanted to join our circle, but we wouldn’t let them. It was a subject of immense speculation. Why me? I was hardly a physical medium. Some people thought it was a bunch of baloney, of course, but I didn’t care. Our weekly circle meetings stretched to an hour and a half, then two hours, and we were all obsessed with Martha.

I liked the attention. But before long it got back to Peter, who, when I explained it, choked on his milk.

“
You’re
doing that? Didn’t that manifestation stuff go out with the nineteenth century?”

“Obviously not.” And if he was going to be like that, I told him, I was simply not going to talk about it.

“Like what? Skeptical? Reasonable?”

And Martha wasn’t the only one. Soon, there were others: a little boy who didn’t talk, an old woman, a very old man. There was even one of the girls who drowned in the lake. She cried, cried, cried. To be perfectly honest, I wasn’t sure if I ever saw much myself. Some glowing, some movement, perhaps. But my circle did, and for the first time I was extremely popular around Train Line. That summer I got invitations to every party, every development circle, every meeting of every kind, New Age or not. The board asked me to teach a workshop the following summer. There was talk of starting a public-access television program, which I would host.

This, I suppose, was the last straw for Peter. We began arguing about it, loudly, at night. It was fine, he said, to operate on faith, intuition, psychology, all that, but when we started dealing with the
physical,
then we were going over the line.

“Who is going over the line?”

“Spiritualists and all of you freaking New Agers!”

There was nothing I hated more than being called that, and he knew it, but I kept my cool. “Going over
what
line?” I demanded.

The problem, he said, was in trying to co-opt science. Why weren’t religious people ever satisfied with their own spiritual niche? Why did they always feel like science had to be proved
wrong
in order for them to be proved right? That’s when religion becomes garbage, he said. Materialization is garbage.

I gave him a big shove and he sloshed his milk on his pants. He looked stunned for a second, then his normal cynical look came back. “Real mature.”

“Asshole.”

It was odd how quickly our arguments reduced to name calling. We used to be able to discuss things, but not anymore. I had an idea. If Peter would only believe me, I thought, everything would be better. Not only would we get along, but his hypochondria, his morbid fear of death, would go away. He wouldn’t come to any of my circles, of course, but maybe I could bring a circle to him.

That is how I began haunting Peter. My intentions, I swear, were good.

There were tricks I remembered from my childhood: a bladder hidden beneath a piece of furniture that, when squeezed, would blow cool air across a person’s ankles; perfume daubed on a lightbulb so that, when the light is switched on, a scent would fill the air apparently apropos of nothing; tiny bells installed in different parts of a room, so that the sound might seem to come from all directions. Those were the subtle things. Sometimes Peter didn’t notice my tricks at all; sometimes he’d look around, confused. Only rarely would he say anything. We were sitting in the living room one evening in July, watching the television news, when he asked, “What’s that smell?”

“Smell?”

He sniffed. “Are you wearing perfume?”

“You know I don’t wear perfume.”

“Hmm.”

The next day, when he was out, I washed and dried the lightbulb, rubbed it with a little vanilla extract, and replaced it in the lamp. If he noticed, he said nothing. It didn’t matter. My point was to undermine the world he was so damned sure he understood.

After a few weeks of this, I got bolder. I cooked up a complicated ruse: I whispered his name over and over into a small tape recorder and brought it to bed with us. While we read I kept it hidden in my nightgown. Twenty minutes or so after we turned the light off, I rolled over, stretched, and slipped my hand with the tape recorder under a corner of Peter’s pillow. I could tell by the way he was breathing that he was dropping off, so I gently pressed Play.

It only took a few minutes before he began to rouse. I quickly switched the machine off and rolled over, sliding it under my own pillow. Peter sat up, looked around, then lay back down again.

I did this every night for more than a week. Some nights Peter slept through the whole performance, but once, he even yanked his pillow away while my hand was still under it. I’d been expecting that, though, so I’d hidden the tape recorder in my sleeve.

“What?” I said. “Did you have a bad dream?”

“No! It’s nothing.” But he sat up in the dark for a long time, breathing hard.

Most of what I did was simpler: I moved his things around, stole things and replaced them, left strange or disturbing objects in unlikely places. I put a crow’s feather on our front steps, where he’d find it when he went out for his daily walk, and I balanced a penny on the toe of one of his shoes while they sat in the hall. I made sure I did nothing so obvious he’d ask me about it. Once, I left a mouse skull in his sock drawer, but removed it when I realized I’d gone just a hair too far.

It worked. Peter’s hypochondria, which had never really gone away, came back in full force. He spent nights wracked with a nausea that neither culminated in vomiting nor abated. He complained of itchiness and sweats, and the frantic look he’d had all winter returned. Finally, over a lunch of peanut butter on bread, I told him I had something to tell him and that he should promise not to get angry.

“What is it?” he said, angry already.

“You’re not going to like this, but I think you should know.” And I told him that a spirit had been hanging around the house a lot lately and that I had a feeling it was his.

“You know I don’t believe in that garbage.”

“I know,” I said calmly. “But I do. And I just thought you might be interested. Sorry I opened my big mouth.”

He stared at me, his eyes red-rimmed. “What do you mean, it’s
mine
?”

“Well, just that I think it knows you.
He
knows you. A relative or a friend, maybe.”

“I don’t believe in that garbage,” he said again.

We ate our bread. Peter got peanut butter all over his hands but didn’t seem to notice.

“One other thing. Can I tell you?”

“No!” he almost shouted.

“All right.” I waited a few minutes. Then, picking up crumbs with the end of my finger, I said, “The spirit keeps saying the name ‘Billy Friday.’ Do you know anyone with that name?”

Peter turned his head and looked out the kitchen window. His eyes, I could tell, were filling with tears. He covered his face with his hands, then slowly got up, went into the bathroom, and shut the door.

Billy Friday was the name of one of his cats when he was a child. It was killed by a dog who left it under a blackberry bush in the backyard, where six-year-old Peter found it days later. He’d never told me the story. I read it in his journal.

But in the end, I did go too far.

By August, the attention I’d been getting in Train Line for the Martha circles had faded. I should have known; people are faddy, and once the novelty wears off they’re onto something new. A woman who went by the name Sheree began “channeling” a spirit called Ta-Ne, who, because he was from Atlantis, had lots of enlightenment to impart. Suddenly, my Wednesday night circle was buying Sheree’s tapes and telling me all about them.

“You know, Naomi, you’re really limiting yourself. You should try contacting larger, more universal spirits. They have important stuff to say, you know.”

Of course, I had to be polite.

“Atlantis?” I said.
“Atlantis
?
”

A television talk show flew Sheree to New York City to appear on a whole special program about channelers. I watched it one morning in my pajamas, aghast.

“Peter!” I cried. “Look!”

He was dozing at the table. He picked his head up and gazed blearily at the television. Sheree was sitting in an armchair, her platinum-blond hair hanging over her face, and she was speaking in a goofy, low voice. “…because we’re all brothers and sisters…” she said, and, “…a golden staircase awaits us…”

“Oh, come on,” I moaned.

“That’s what your mother does, isn’t it? That trance stuff,” said Peter.

I yelped. “As if! Peter, that guy’s supposed to be from an
imaginary place.
It makes no sense at all.”

“I don’t see the difference.” He shrugged and shuffled off to the kitchen.

I could have argued with him, but I didn’t. Instead I decided it was time to make my next move. That night, I told Peter I had a message for him.

“Who called?”

That afternoon he’d gotten a haircut. His hair lay smooth over the back of his head, and his sideburns flew high over his ears. He looked good, neat and together, for the first time in a while.