After Life (35 page)

“Another babysitter?”

“Well, really, it’s a daycare center, but a small one. You know, intimate. And so close to work and home…”

“But Elaine…”

“And I figured, you know, with this investigation and all, you must have a lot on your mind…”

The investigation.
Elaine chattered on, but I didn’t hear her. Instead I stared out the window, watching Ron dig at the compost with his yellow rubber gloves. He squatted on his heels, his frizzy head bent, picking through the rot to find what had refused to decay. He pulled out a root, a handful of pebbles.

Very gently, I hung up the phone.

I did not know what to do with myself. My first instinct was to call around, find out which daycare center Vivian was at, and then go get her. Of course, they wouldn’t let me do that, and besides, there probably was no such place. They couldn’t accept children on such short notice, could they? More likely Elaine had persuaded her husband to watch her for a few days while she looked for a new babysitter.

I walked around the house, pulling at my hair and imagining poor Vivian plunked down in front of some Disney video, homework forgotten in her booksack.

When this all blows over,
I thought,
Elaine will come to her senses and give Vivian back, and everything will be back to
normal.

But maybe it wouldn’t blow over. That was beginning to seem like a very real possibility. I needed to pull myself together and think.

My mother didn’t want to lend me the car, but I convinced her that I needed to get some things for the library from the office-supply store. She handed over the keys with a worried look.

“You’re not coming to Circles, then?”

“No,” I said.

The rain had mostly stopped, but the wind had picked up, hurling wet leaves into the windshield as I made my way around the lake. I set the wipers to intermittent. Along the shore, willow branches waved in the wind like skinny arms. The water itself was dark gray and cruel-looking, and sent waves over the bank and into the road.

I had mostly just wanted to drive around and think, but the closer I got to Wallamee the clearer it became to me that my real plan was to go see Vivian. I was pretty sure she’d be at home, and if not, perhaps her father would tell me where she was. I wanted to tell her not to worry; anything they’d said about me was wrong, that I still loved her and would be her babysitter again soon. It was not fair to uproot a child like this. And if I knew Elaine, she’d lied to Vivian, told her terrible things to make her comply.

But first I stopped at the office-supply store and bought enough sticky notes and labels and typewriter ribbon to last me out the decade.

Then I headed up the wide, bland avenues that made up the development where Elaine and her husband lived. There were no sidewalks, because there was no place to walk to from here, and the trees were no more than saplings clutching desperately to their green fertilized lawns. People here did unnatural things to shrubbery. Every house was flanked by an army of green bowling balls or cones or cylinders that looked like nothing else alive. It was Train Line’s opposite, the anti–Train Line. Elaine’s house, a low brick-and-stucco “home,” as she and her real estate cronies would call it, was nearly invisible behind its wall of evergreen. The driveway was black and smooth and freshly tarred, the lawn plush. From the outside, you’d never guess at the place’s dank, ill-furnished, cigarettey interior.

I thumbed the doorbell and waited. From somewhere deep within, chimes played a familiar tune. There was a large picture window some ten feet from the door, and although I stepped back and craned my neck, I couldn’t see in. Elaine’s husband was home, though; his car, a humpbacked sporty thing, was parked in the driveway next to my mother’s. I rang the bell again.

It was a few more minutes before the husband answered. He needed a shave and a hairbrush and didn’t look happy to see me.

“What do you want, Miss Ash?” A beery odor wafted from him.

“Hi.” I smiled. “I just thought I’d stop by and say hello to Vivian. She, umm, left some things at my house and I—I thought I’d let her know she should stop by and pick them up sometime.”

He frowned. “What kind of things? Why didn’t you just bring them with you?”

“I should have, I know!” My grin hurt my face. “Actually, I didn’t plan on coming here, I was just in the neighborhood and…well, you know, there’s some, umm, schoolwork, a sweater I think. A few things like that.”

“I’ll let her mother know. Good-bye, Miss Ash.”

He tried to shut the door but I grabbed the knob and pushed. “Please, can I talk to Vivian? I just want to let her know she shouldn’t worry about—her things.”

“She’s not here. Take your hand off the door or I’ll call 911.” And he gave the door such a sharp shove I nearly fell backward off the concrete stoop.

“Then where is she?” I cried out, but the door slammed and I heard the lock click in place.

I doubted he would really call 911. What would he tell them? A woman knocked on his door and talked to him? I stepped off the stoop and made my way around the enormous shrubbery to the picture window. Standing on the tips of my toes, I could only barely see in. The room was dark but there appeared to be a television glowing just out of my line of sight. The opposite wall was covered with mirrors, and I saw the top of my head and my eyes reflected in them. I looked silly and a not a little desperate.

Then suddenly Elaine’s husband was there, rapping on the glass with his hairy knuckles and mouthing something at me. I stepped back into the bushes and he gave me the “take a hike” sign with his thumb, and so that’s what I did.

Back in the car, I shook the rain from my hair and tried to pull myself together. My thoughts were piling on top of each other and I was sweating. “How can people
live
here?” I said out loud, to no one.

I drove the car around the neighborhood, lost myself temporarily in the maze of loops and cul-de-sacs, then drove out again onto Vining Road, which curved around the north side of the lake. I felt a little bit better right away. Weeds and bushes pressed close on either side, and here and there through a gap in the trees I could see the lake, gray and reassuring, and, from this distance, calm and flat as the sky. I cracked the window open a bit so I could smell the air. It was rank with the odor of wet earth.

The place I buried Peter was not far from here. I wondered if the police were still guarding it, or if they were satisfied they’d found all the pieces of the skeleton and had decided to let the construction resume. I hadn’t even driven by since the night my mother dragged me out here.

I parked next to the dirt driveway that led down to the clearing. A couple of pieces of yellow crime scene tape still fluttered from the trees, but the sawhorses that had blocked the way before were now pushed aside. I slid the car keys into my pocket and hiked down.

If there had been anyone there, I’d have turned back. But the site was silent and looked abandoned. I climbed down the steep dirt path, sliding on rocks with my inappropriate, slick-bottomed shoes, but managed to make it to the bottom without killing myself and followed the path toward the lake. Several yards from shore, a yellow backhoe crouched like a reptile next to a pit—the foundation, I assumed, and where they’d found the skeleton. A stiff breeze blew. I rubbed my hands up and down my arms. I’d forgotten to put a coat on and was chilled. Nonetheless, I waded through the tall dead weeds to get a closer look at the hole.

It didn’t look like much. The construction men were part way through the foundation when they’d had to stop: two of the walls were straight and smooth, and most of the floor as well, but the two other walls were crumbled piles of earth and rock. Four stakes painted bright orange stuck out of the dirt, connected by string to form a crooked rectangle. That’s all there was to show where Peter had lain for the last ten years.

It would be easier to get over there, I realized, without my stupid slippery shoes. I took them off. Then I squinted up toward the embankment to make sure no one was coming. But it had begun to rain hard again, and I could make out nothing through the thick line of trees.

Stepping down, I sank to my ankles in the muck, then climbed over the piles of dirt to Peter’s grave. I touched the orange sticks, plucked the dirty string. It looked less like a place where someone had been exhumed than someone’s vegetable garden, before any of the seeds had sprouted or plants been put in. The dirt itself was darker and richer than most soil. I didn’t know why I’d come here, except just to see the place again. The rain came down harder, flattening my hair and soaking my dress. It was a funny thing, but I remembered something I hadn’t thought of in a long time, since I dug the hole ten years before: an airplane had flown over my head that afternoon. It was a jet, just a tiny shape in the blue sky, with a vapor trail that streamed and fattened behind it. What had the passengers seen? The flat mirror of Wallamee Lake, surrounded by green and brown squares, maybe thready black highways in between. Me? Not likely. As I went about my task I’d have been as small and insignificant as the eye of a germ, as the toe of an ant. Teeny, tiny. Practically nothing. Thinking of this helped me get through that day. I’d put myself on that airplane. I couldn’t even see what I was doing. It hardly mattered at all.

I turned to go. But as I did, the earth beneath my feet gave way. The whole unfinished side of the foundation, saturated with water and disturbed by my stomping, slid into the bottom of the pit, bringing me and the stakes and the string with it. I fell to my knees and tried to grab at something, but there was nothing to grab. It was like dreams I’d had of falling—tumbling out of windows, over waterfalls, down elevator shafts—the same few panicked moments that seem long enough to live your whole life in. By the time I stopped I was half sunk in mud. There was mud in my eyes and hair and mouth, where it had the rotten, gritty taste of bad fish. I struggled up and climbed to firmer ground, and spat and shook myself and cried.

At first I thought if I stood out in the rain long enough, it would wash me clean. It did no such thing. I wandered around the clearing, crying, feeling like I had spent my life working up to this day, the day I would lose everything and end up covered with mud and falling to pieces at a construction site. The rain began to let up a bit. Beyond the trees, cars on Vining Road flicked on their high beams. Soon, it would be dark.