After Life (36 page)

When I got to my mother’s house, she wasn’t home. Was this the night Troy was going to propose to her at Pizza Village? I couldn’t remember. I’d managed not to get much mud on the car seats by digging a blanket out of the trunk of the Oldsmobile and sitting on that, but it wasn’t until I was home that I realized I’d left all the sticky notes and labels and typewriter ribbons in the car.

The next morning, as I was dressing for work, I told myself firmly that I would not do anything else rash. I would continue my life exactly as I had until Labor Day—working, going to circle meetings on Mondays and lectures on Sundays, eating slices of pie in the cafeteria, reading the newspaper, and chatting with people. Occasionally I would watch television and occasionally I would go over to my mother’s house. I could make a life out of that.

I brushed my hair furiously, trying to get rid of the grit that seemed embedded in my scalp.

But as I stood on the steps of the library, fumbling in my coat pocket for the keys, I knew I didn’t have the heart to catalog today. I didn’t really want to go home, either. I dropped my things inside the door, locked it from the inside, and went into the reading room, snapping a couple of shades up to let in the weak November light. Then I pulled one of the overstuffed chairs close to a window and sat in it, missing Vivian.

After a while I fell asleep, my legs hanging over the armrest and my face pressed into the dusty upholstery. I’d been thinking about Vivian’s house when I dropped off, trying to imagine what her life there was like, and when I began to dream it was of that house. In my dream, I owned it. It was filthy—sticky black dirt everywhere, overflowing ashtrays teetering on every end table and piles of junk mail sliding to the floor whenever I turned around. The whole place smelled like garbage. So I cleaned it. I was extremely thorough, squeaking Windex everywhere, kneeling down to scrub baseboards. And the more I cleaned, the more light poured into the house. The bad smells vanished. Something was baking in the kitchen, and somebody, my husband, presumably, was taking a shower in the bathroom. Though I didn’t see him, or anyone else for that matter, I heard the pounding water, him singing over it. At one point I stretched, raised my hands over my head to get the kinks out of my back, and realized I was pregnant. My stomach bowed out in front of me like the sail of a ship. Of course I was pregnant. I’d known it all along. I walked, swaybacked, to the front door and threw it open. It was spring. I loved it. I loved my unborn baby, I loved my house, I loved everything.

A terrible banging sound woke me up. It took a few minutes before I was awake enough to figure out what it was—someone knocking on the front door of the library, shaking it and rattling the knob. I was frightened at first. Who could so desperately want to read dusty old spiritualist books?

It was my mother. She was cupping her hand over her eyes and peering in through the window in the door. I unlocked it and let her in.

“Oh, Naomi! You’re all right.” She had that wild-eyed look she sometimes got when I was a child and came home bleeding or with torn clothes.

“Of course I am. Why wouldn’t I be?”

She shook her head, then put her arms around me and gave me a quick hug. It felt strange, for a moment, to realize that my belly was flat and I wasn’t pregnant after all. Grief rocked through me.

“Will you come to the cafeteria with me? I need to talk to you.”

So I put my coat on and followed her down the hill. To my shock, it was snowing. I had forgotten about snow. Since the morning it had gotten much colder, though it was still warm enough that the flakes melted when they hit the ground. They grazed my face and hands like flying insects.

My mother seemed energized, though with panic or something else I couldn’t tell. At the cafeteria, she picked up an orange plastic tray and bought us two slices of pie and two cups of coffee while I sat at a corner table, waiting. Part of me was still caught up in my odd dream.

When she sat down in her rickety chair, the coffee sloshed onto the tray. My mother seemed hardly to notice. She leaned in toward me.

“People are saying terrible things, Naomi.”

I gazed at her steadily to show I didn’t care about what people were saying, then looked down at my coffee. It was old, burnt, and when I poured milk into it, it turned the color of ashes.

“You don’t believe them, do you?”

“Of course not!”

“Then you should ignore them.”

My calm unnerved her, I could tell. I ate a little pie.

She turned and looked out the window, where giant flakes were whirling down. “I believe in you, Naomi.”

“That’s fine.”

“You are my daughter. I have made the decision to believe in you.”

“All right,” I said.

She picked up her fork, put it down, picked it up again. “Officer Peterson called this morning and told me that my help on the investigation is no longer welcome. He said that if any of the information I have already given them proves useful, I will of course be compensated, but since the investigation has come so close to home it would not look good if our partnership continued. So he said.” She gave me a wry smile.

“Close to home,” I repeated.

“That’s what he said. I asked him what had changed since Sunday, but he wouldn’t tell me.”

She bent her head over her pie, and when she did I noticed that her hair was coming in gray at the roots. Though I sometimes teased her about dyeing her hair, I didn’t like to see it turning gray, because it looked like forgetfulness, or neglect, or illness.

“I am a suspect,” I said.

My mother looked up at me, alarm in her eyes. “No, Naomi. No, you aren’t.”

“Yes, I am. I am a suspect.”

I sat back, seeing how this felt. It did not feel bad; it felt right, it felt like things were falling into place at last. I took a deep breath, and my lungs expanded more fully than they had in a long time.

“Don’t say that. Don’t say that.” My mother made two fists and placed them on the table. “Look,” she said. “I have a plan. We need to leave here for a little while. We can go home again.”

“Home is here.”

“No, it’s not,” she said, bitter. “We should never have left New Orleans. This is a hateful place. We have no one here.”

“What about Troy?”

“What about him?”

“Did he ask you to marry him?”

Startled, she said, “He did, as a matter of fact.”

“And what did you say?”

“I told him I couldn’t possibly. Not now. I told him you and I were going on a trip together. He wanted to come, but I…” She put her face in her hands.

For a strange and fleeting moment I wished she were dead. What a terrible thought. But I did—I wanted her dead, I wanted her gone, because I could not stand her suffering; it filled me with loathing.
There’s no suffering on the spirit plane,
I thought. But what did I really know? And almost immediately I recognized that it wasn’t her I loathed, but myself.

“We’re not going anywhere,” I said. “I’m sorry, Mama.” Then I stood up, kissed the top of her head, and left her there.

She was right, though; people were saying terrible things.

When I took the library’s mail to the tiny Train Line post office—it was like a paneled tool shed, with room for two medium-sized people to line up at the counter; everyone else would have to stand outside—the postmistress, a Miss Rita Raymond, would not even glance at me as she weighed and stacked and affixed postage. Once she had been a kind of friend, with kindly words for me on even my dourest days. Within a few days, I noticed that no one would make eye contact with me, not even Ron. People coming toward me in the street swerved, or turned around, or suddenly realized they were late and passed me at a rapid, distracted clip. The effect was odd. I found myself touching my face, my neck, making sure I was still there.

In the Groc-n-Stop I heard someone say, “… surely can’t allow a murderer to live here. I mean, talk about PR problems…” I was kneeling on the floor, going through the boxes of macaroni and cheese to find one with a price tag, and I was hidden from the speaker, but I recognized the voice: Tony K. the Hypnotist. Pain shot up through my knees, but I stayed there until I was sure he’d gone. Later the same day, someone I didn’t know was talking about me in the cafeteria—“She was a babysitter, imagine that!”—until someone else I didn’t know spotted me and gave her friend a nudge.

Still, I walked carefully and slowly and with my head up. I took my arrows as if I deserved them.

When it happened, I read about it in the paper, like an ordinary person:

MYSTERY MAN IDENTIFIED

(Wallamee, NY) Thanks to careful police work and a sheaf of dental records, a positive identification has been made in the Lake Side Grave Mystery. The bones are those of Peter S. Morton, of Portland, Oregon, purportedly a summer visitor to the area, who was last seen approximately ten years ago….

It wasn’t even a headline story, just a sidebar, and I imagined that people reading it felt a vague sense of disappointment that the skeleton was not from a local person after all. Certainly, if he had been local, it would have made the headlines. There was no mention of me. If this was a good sign or a bad sign, I didn’t know.

I was sitting on the porch in the wan November sun. A week had gone by since I’d seen Vivian, though I’d driven slowly past her school during recess and tried to catch a glimpse of her in the mass of running, screaming children in their identical pink and green and blue winter coats. Without her, I felt like I was going through life with one eye shut, or with huge mittens on; I felt clumsy and not quite there. I had hours to sit on the porch, or read the newspaper, or refill my coffee mug over and over. It occurred to me that I should get another job. It seemed like a daydream, though, something that would happen in another life, not mine. Me, Naomi Ash, filling paper bags with hot greasy food, or me in a turquoise smock, turning old people in a nursing home, seemed about as real as my paper doll trying on different crayoned outfits.

The bones were Peter’s, definitely Peter’s. Why did this shock me? At first I didn’t recognize the sensation moving through me, slowly as Novocain. But I was truly shocked. I must have harbored some hope that it was all a paranoid fantasy of mine, that the discovery of the bones was a terrible coincidence, that everything I’d told the police was true. Oh, God, I’d wanted it to be true.

A cloud moved over the sun. A dying bee crept across the porch floor, heading for the steps, though it couldn’t have known they were there.