Before and Afterlives (10 page)

“Adam!” my father shouted through the rain.

I didn’t move. Not even when they came right up to me, their faces white and pale as Jamie’s dead body. Andy said, “I told you he’d be here. The little freak.”

Lucy said, “My Lord, your poor mother,” and her hand flew to her mouth.

My father said, “Adam, come out of there. Come out of that place right now.”

He held his hand out to me, curling his fingers for me to take it.

“Come on, boy,” he said. “Get on out of there now.” He flexed his fingers for emphasis.

I grabbed hold of his hand, and he hauled me out onto the gravel around the hole and I lay there, naked, like a newborn. They stood around me, staring. My father took off his coat and put it on me. He told me to come on, to just come on back to the house. He put his arm around me, and we started walking down the tracks.

I decided right then I wasn’t a freak, not really. I took his hand, sure, but not because of anything remotely like defeat. I hadn’t “come to my senses.” I hadn’t “realized I needed help.” I took it to make them feel better about themselves and to get them off my back.

What I was thinking as they walked me home was: You silly people, I’m already finished. I’m already dead and gone. All you have is some mess of a zombie shambling through your kitchens and your living rooms, turning on your showers and kissing you goodnight. All you have is a dead boy, only it’s hard to tell, because I won’t rot. I’ll be like one of those bodies that people in South America pry out of old coffins, the ones whose hair and fingernails continue to grow in death. The ones who smell of rose petals, whose skin remains smooth and lily white. They call those corpses saints, but I won’t aspire to anything so heavenly. I’ll wash the dishes and do my homework and wheel my mother around in her chair. I’ll do all of these things, and no one will notice there’s no light behind my eyes and no heat in my step. They’ll clothe me and feed me and tell me what good grades I get. They’ll give me things to make me happy, when all I’ll be wanting is a cold grave to step into. I’ll grow up and go to college, marry a beautiful woman and have three kids. I’ll make a lot of money and age gracefully, no pot belly. I’ll look youthful when I’m fifty-eight.

What I knew right then was that everyone I’d ever know from here on out would talk about me and say, He’s so lucky. He has everything a person could want.

All through the rest of the house, it is quiet and still.

Inside the dining room, the woman has decided to turn over the china cabinet. With labored breathing, she heaves it away from the wall, felling it in one strained motion like a lumberjack. Glazed plates with cornflower blue rings painted around their rims slide off their shelves and spin through the air like flying saucers. A matching set of teacups with miniature portraits of the house itself painted on their bottoms clatter and crash to the hardwood floor. After a moment where she pauses to catch her breath and run her fingers through her hair—a job well done—a cloud of dust stirred up by the fallen cabinet begins to settle. The woman peers around the room with her eyes darting around in their sockets, angle to angle, perspectives shifting, in search of her next victim.

Aha, she breathes, and walks determined and directly to the side table where the tea service has been set out for all to see, art objects of her mother’s. The teapot is large and round, a swollen empty stomach. The woman picks it up by the handle and, spi
nning in a circle like a discus thrower, hurls it through the window over the sink that looks out onto the creek, where once she sat on a checked blanket and held mock tea parties with her older sister in the summers.

The teapot shatters the glass. The window is left smashed in the shape of an awkward star, with one shard of glass still dangling. It drops and clatters into the sink. The teapot is ou
tside the house now, landing and rolling to who knows where.

The woman is the daughter of the woman who died in the house the night before. Just an hour after her mother died, she received a phone call from her older sister, and was told in the practiced tone of disdain her sister reserves for her, the tone that forces her to imagine scenes of arctic bleakness, “Mother’s dead. The funeral is in two days. You can come or not.” Then the phone went dead as well and she wondered why dead is an uni
nterrupted buzzing sound that issues from phones and heart monitors. Flies, too, but they can be stunned into silence with a swat of the hand. She wondered was her mother now buzzing endlessly, wherever her body had been laid out? Was she humming her own death?

Shelves with dolls and porcelain figurines of cats lined u
pon them—here are the new targets. She lumbers across the room, awkward and unruly, until she reaches the wall where the dolls and cats all smile down at her from their higher vantages. With one stroke she sweeps them from their perches and tramples each and every one. Here lies a doll’s head with its eyes still clicking open and shut. There, in the corner, lay the porcelain scraps of a red Persian.

The Persian’s face remains intact. Its mouth turns up at the corners. Bold and bodiless, it smiles.

A door opens unexpectedly in the house, and in rushes an autumn wind, chilling the air quickly. Goosebumps rise on her flesh, and she rubs her arms repeatedly. She turns from her task of destruction and peers wearily into the front room. There, in the doorway, stands her older sister, a silhouette backlit by the day.

“What have you done?” her sister says, shocked and gestu
ring at the mess the house has become. She moves across the room and surveys the domestic rubble, repeating the words, “What have you done, Alice? Just what have you done?”

Alice—for now that her sister has reminded her of who she is, she remembers—stands stock still in the heart of the disa
ster zone. She does not move, not even an inch. She wants to thank her sister, though, because she almost lost herself for a moment there. If Maureen hadn’t swept in and named her so abruptly, she might have fallen down that dark, alien tunnel forever.

How did it happen? she wonders. How did she come to be here again? One moment she was answering the phone and hearing her sister’s voice tell her, Mother’s dead; and the next, she was boarding a plane that lifted her into thick dar
kness. She remembers a flight attendant nudging her awake in the middle of her flight—he had very white teeth and spoke with a French accent—and he said, “It’s time, Cherie.” He held a gold pocket watch close to her face, and it swung on its chain like a pendulum. Then he led her down the narrow aisle—past disheveled passengers sleeping in their seats or paging through magazines—till they reached the emergency exit, which he popped open. Wind rushed in, so fast and heavy it felt like hands groping her all over her body. “Go ahead,” the attendant said, nodding toward the black, curdling clouds outside. “Au revoir,” Alice told him. And she jumped out, into the dark void.

Falling, falling.

“Mother’s dead,” her sister says. It seems as though these are the only words in Maureen’s vocabulary. Like a stroke victim left with partial aphasia, with two words she can use to r
espond to any question put to her.

Q: How are you today, Maureen?

A: Mother’s dead.

Q: Would you like to go out for a breath of fresh air?

A: Mother’s dead.

Q: Do you need to use the bathroom, dear?

(Her face seems to strain at this one. Her lips rise like curtains to reveal the empty stage of her mouth).

A: Mother’s dead.

“Mother’s dead, Alice,” she says. “What is wrong with you?”

Alice doesn’t know how to answer. It’s the same question her mother and Maureen have asked since she was a little girl. She doesn’t know what’s wrong with her. She just does things that make them angry. Mostly becaus
e
she’
s
angry. She looks around in a sudden panic, searching the ruins of the dining room for some clue that will explain everything. The shards of cups and saucers lie strewn about her feet; the doll’s bodies lie with their arms flopped out at their sides, as though they’ve been lined up and shot. She chews her bottom lip. The evidence is stacked against her.

“You’re mad,” Maureen says. She bends down at her knees and scoops up random pieces of porcelain. “Mother’
s
teacup
s
,” she says, her voice straining. She holds the pieces in her cupped hands and rattles them at Alice. The porcelain scraps scrape against one another. “They were supposed to be left for me! You know how much Mother loved these. Ho
w
coul
d
you, Alice? Ho
w
coul
d
you?”

“I’m sorry,” Alice says, her voice weak and milky. She scuffs one foot against the floor and looks over her shoulder to avoid Maureen’s scrutiny.

“You’r
e
sorr
y
?” Maureen says. “You’r
e
sorr
y
? You’re a mad woman is what you are. A mad woman! Get out of this house right now.”

“No,” Alice answers. “I won’t leave. You get out.” She will not be made into a stranger in this house again. She will not allow herself to be treated as she once had, when she’d run away from this home to find another, one that opened its doors for her and sealed behind her, shutting out the light. In that place, in that other house, she used to sit on a braided rug all day, watching the legs of other people walk around her. She’d put any powder or pill or needle into her body. Wha
tever anyone gave her, she put it inside her. It was always very dark in that house. The blinds were always closed. But one day, for no reason she could think of, she stepped out onto the porch, blinking in the warm sunlight, and saw palm trees tossing their heads by the roadside. She didn’t know where she was, and stepped down off the porch. She called her mother’s home from a pay phone on the street corner, and was received with the words, “You are not my daughter.”

She picks up a sliver of plate, and holds it in her hand like a knife.

“Put that down, Alice,” her sister warns, holding out her hands like a traffic cop. “Put that down right now. I’ll call the police, I swear.” But Alice swings the broken plate in the air, missing her sister with it purposefully.

Maureen screams and runs out the front door, leaving it swin
ging ajar behind her. Mother would not be happy with her, Alice thinks. Maureen knows better than to leave a door open behind her. It isn’t proper. She was right though.
I
a
m
mad. I’m a mad woman. This is a mad tea party and there is only room at the table for one.

There is the sound of Maureen’s engine turning over, then its revving, and Alice knows she has gone. The shard of plate she’s holding slips from her grasp and falls to the floor. It clatters against the remnants of the other china, and Alice bends down to pick up the pieces. Now that she has nothing left to say to this room, she begins to clean it up. To pull it together again, back to a semblance of normality. All but one of the teacups is left in an irreversible condition, though, and even the sole survivor has been damaged. It has a long crack running through it. At any time it will split in two and then this particular species of teacup will be extinct.

“They were completely original,” her mother says. “There was not a set of teacups like them on this side of the Atlantic. How could you, Alice? You were always a difficult girl.”

Faint sobbing in the next room.

Alice gathers the pieces to her, holding them in her shirt as a peasant girl might gather apples in her apron, then pours them into the dustbin. Once she sets the china cabinet back on its feet (which is much harder than it was to topple it), she places the last teacup in the center of one of its shelves. B
ehind the glass of the cabinet doors, the teacup looks like a relic. It looks as though it should be a museum exhibit, squared off by a velvet rope.

She hears a monologue run of its own accord in her head: This here is Alice’s mother’s last teacup. It was brought here in the late twentieth century, after Alice herself destroyed the rest. You can tell by the details of the portrait of the house at the bottom of the cup that the artist had a steady hand and, in fact, was Alice’s father. Legend has it that he disappeared one night when Alice was a little girl, and that the circumstances surrounding his disappearance are vague. Alice’s mother maintained that he was a sickly man, and had to go away for medical attention. But Alice’s sister once told her he was a bastard and that she heard him one night on the phone, talking to a woman who was not their mot
her, and that she was glad he’d gone, and that she hoped he wouldn’t ever come back
.
Not eve
r
!

Are there any questions? Good. Then let’s move on.

She is tired. Although she’s the one who’s been dealing out the blows, her body feels battered and old. A second hand coat. She pulls herself up the staircase, clinging to the bani
ster in case her legs give way beneath her. When she reaches her room, her childhood room, she lays herself out on the bed with the lavender comforter and presses her face into a pillow.