Before and Afterlives (24 page)

I am off now, to space, to somewhere where there is more room for me. Somewhere in the West, or the Southwest even. I will sit in the desert below the blue bowl of sky until I become a part of that landscape. But not forever. I will move on, I will go further. I will do the things for which she never had the courage to leave.

Dear Sarah,

I realize now that my words will not reach you. This is a dead letter. You will never receive it.

Still, I cannot help but write in the hopes that somewhere my words are finding you. And maybe wherever you are, you are writing me too. Long letters, beautiful letters. Letters that one day I will find and read with great pleasure. Perhaps you are ha
ving adventures elsewhere, now that you’re not here. Perhaps you’ve moved on to a place that I will only understand as being better at some later juncture in this life, this life you gave me. But still, at some intersection, my hope is for our words to cross each other, so that we will feel, if only for a moment, infinitely loved and happy. It is the least anyone deserves.

Love,

Alice

Although I hadn’t seen my friend Gerith in years, I wasn’t surprised to receive a letter from him, asking me to come home. Gerith had been sending me these requests every year or so after I left Youngstown, most of them chronicling the misfortunes of the old neighborhood where we grew up. From his descriptions, it seemed not much had changed for the be
tter. Each day the city disintegrated a little further. People who had once been important to us disappeared without warning. Often he’d ask about my life now that I no longer lived there
.
Are you okay
?
he wondered
.
Are you happy
?
And each time I answered
:
I have a secure job, I live in a great city, I have a girlfriend who loves me more than I love myself. I have plenty.

No matter how I answered them though, Gerith’s letters filled me with a sense of guilt. Whenever one arrived in the mail, I’d put it in the pocket of my jacket for a while and fo
rget about it. Then, after I’d get up the nerve, I’d read it and end up laughing or crying, overwhelmed with nostalgia for the old neighborhood. Even though I’d spent most of my life waiting to escape Youngstown, the place was still my home. Gerith’s letters reminded me of that.

This time, as always, I hoped Gerith would allow me to f
inally make a clean escape. I wanted him to tell me that the South Side had received funding for re-beautification, that the shelter where he worked had enough food and beds, and that life in general was an eternal flame of mercy and generosity. But instead, his news left me reeling.

“Mrs. Burroway has died, David. The funeral is this Satu
rday. I hope you’ll come home for it.”

Immediately I had a vision of houses, stripped and gutted, left behind by the dead.

I’d already made plans for the weekend, so I spent a few minutes unmaking them. There was the financiers’ dinner on Friday, and on Saturday I’d promised my girlfriend we’d stay in and do nothing together all day. I called her answering machine and canceled our Saturday, then phoned the office and explained that an old friend had died. The boss was generous, asked no questions, only said to be careful if I planned on driving back. Then I packed a bag and left Chicago for Youngstown.

There was another reason for going home as well. I’d been keeping a secret for far too long, and now I needed to share it before it was too late. The secret involved a small amount of magic though, and these days magic is not something in which everyone can afford to believe. There is a suspicious absence of miracles. But sometimes impossible things happen when no one is looking.

It happened in Youngstown, during my last year of college. Fall arrived early that year and spattered the few trees on our street rust red and wax yellow, cinnamon brown and orange. The leaves were a welcome relief from the sight of our cru
mbling surroundings: boarded-up warehouses, empty storefronts with cardboard covering the windows, and walls tattooed with strange but banal graffiti. I remember the Market Street Bridge in particular, and the words YOU HAVE CROSSED THE LINE scrawled on both sides of it in black spray paint. I passed under that banner each day, as I walked to and from school. It bothered me to no end. I wanted to know what line. And who, exactly, had power over the geography of my life?

Gerith and I bought a house together that year. We’d finally decided to cut the umbilical cords that tied us to our parents. Both of us had grown up in that post-industrial shell of a fo
rmer steel town, a place steeped in a depression that no one knew how to relieve. Most people affected indifference to the situation. No one in our town wanted to be re-educated for alternative careers, but they’d spend their unemployment checks on the lottery and whiskey. We felt the world owed us some obscure inheritance. This strange psychology had been passed down by our parents and grandparents, who actually did lose their jobs during the seventies and eighties. We were children of the dispossessed who wanted to be the dispossessed.

The house we bought was an old Victorian on Chalmers Street, and it cost us only six thousand dollars. Houses were cheap in Youngstown because most of the city was a ghetto. The only profitable business was the university, which we thought would be our way out of town one day. Our house had two floors, a basement, an attic, and a front porch spread wide and deep as a cave. Between the turret that rose out of one corner of the roof and the newel posts on the stairwell, we felt like we’d bought our very own castle.

After using what money we’d saved to buy the place, Gerith and I were broke. We’d both won grants and taken out loans to pay for college, which left us with a little extra cash each semester, but that money never seemed to arrive at the right times. So for the first few months in our new house we had electricity and water but no telephone or heat. And when the autumn chill grew strong and wind began to rattle our windows, we wrapped ourselves in the afghans our mothers had crocheted for us before we left.

Whatever other luxuries we did without, the one that hurt most was food. We ate peanut butter sandwiches for lunch, r
amen for dinner, and drank tap water that tasted of chlorine. On our kitchen table we kept a wooden fruit bowl that was always empty. After a few months of living like this, it felt like my taste buds had begun to deteriorate.

We didn’t know much about our neighbors. Only that a black family lived on one side—a mother with two teenaged girls, one who had a son of her own—and on the other side was a Puerto Rican couple, Rosa and Manuel, who screamed at each other in Spanish until four in the morning most nights. Across the street in a Victorian like ours was Mrs. Burroway, a little, white-haired old lady who walked hunched over and carried a black cane with a silver horse head for a handle.

She seemed ancient to me even then, bone-thin, her skin hanging loose on her frame. She wore a pair of thick black-rimmed glasses that exaggerated her cloudy cataracts and the blue of her eyes. Almost every day she sat on her porch alone with her cane laid across her lap, watching the traffic go by at the end of the street. Sometimes when I was leaving for school, I’d see her heading to a neighbor’s house carrying brown bags, overfull with groceries, which she’d place on their porch, ring the doorbell, then scurry home again, her horse-headed cane trotting in front of her like a guide. And it was in that way, actually, while she was delivering her mysterious goods, that we finally met.

One morning, as I gathered my schoolbooks, I heard a thump outside the front door. Then the doorbell rang repea
tedly, loud and annoying, as it hadn’t been replaced since the house was first built. I pulled my backpack over my shoulder already saying, “I heard you the first time,” but when I opened the door there was no one on the porch.

A bird perched on the porch rail, cocking its head at me as I looked down to find a bag of groceries at my feet, a stalk of celery jutting out the top, a bag of bread and soup cans visible beneath. When I looked up again, I saw Mrs. Burroway cros
sing the street, hunched over as if several sacks of grain were piled on her back. “Wait a second!” I shouted, then picked up the bag and ran off the porch, finally catching her on the other side of the street. “I’m sorry,” I said, “but why did you leave these groceries on my porch?”

She turned those blue, cloud-ridden eyes on me then, and licked her lips. “You boys are looking a bit slight,” she said, u
ncovering her teeth with a smile.

“But surely you can’t afford to buy us groceries.” I smiled, hol
ding the bag out for her to take back.

“No, no,” she said, waving her hands as if the bag were cursed. “Those are yours now. Besides, I have plenty.”

“Well,” I said, and stood there for a moment, not knowing what else to say. “Well, thank you.”

“My pleasure,” she said. Then she turned around and co
ntinued on to her house.

Gerith and I spent that day at home instead of school. We opened cans of soup, stripped bananas out of their skins, ate stalks of celery with cream cheese spread in the grooves. We drank a six-pack of grape soda I found at the bottom of the bag, and smoked marijuana, which Gerith supplied, wondering aloud at what we’d missed in our classes. By evening, most of the food was gone. One banana lay curled on its side in the fruit bowl and two cans of clam chowder stocked our pantry shelves.

“So,” said Gerith, as we sat cross-legged on the braided rug in the living room. “Do you think Mrs. Burroway is crazy, or just very generous?”

I took a hit off the pipe and passed it back, holding the smoke inside until my lungs began to hurt. “Very generous,” I said, exhaling the smoke. “Though that doesn’t exclude the possibility of a mental disorder.”

“Wow.” Gerith shook his head. “That’s pretty amazing.”

I nodded, chuckling a little at Gerith’s astonishment.

“What?” he said. “Did I say something stupid?”

I told him it was nothing though, and waved away his question with a crazy, expansive gesture that made us both laugh until we’d forgotten what we’d been talking about.

Winter in Ohio that year filled the streets with snow and ice. The city became a stage for the weather to play on—ice-slicked streets, temperatures far below zero, and snowdrifts so big children cut tunnels through them. Winter that semester, I had International Finance, Human Impacts on the Environment, and Ballroom Dancing. By the end I still couldn’t write an essay on acid rain that made any sense, but I’d learned how to waltz. It didn’t matter. The finance course was my priority. Doing the work for that class drained me, but I kept reminding myself it would all be worth it one day.

Gerith, on the other hand, dropped his courses midway through the semester. He said he could finish them in su
mmer, started to volunteer at the shelter, and soon everything he did and everyone he knew revolved around that.

One night in December, while I sat at my desk and studied the effects of chemical treatments on water, Gerith appeared in my bedroom door, ringing a bell. He lazily clanged it back and forth, smiling in a way I knew meant he wanted som
ething. “I’m going to collect money for the Salvation Army at the grocery store,” he said. “You should come with me.”

“I have a final in two days,” I said, tapping the book spread out in front of me.

“Come on,” he said. “What are you going to learn tonight that you can’t cram in tomorrow?” He moved into my room and put his hand on my desk, tapping his fingers near the edge of the book.

“I can’t cram, Gerith. You know that.”

“Do something worthwhile for once,” he said.

“I am,” I said. “I’m trying to graduate.”

He flipped my book closed and grabbed my jacket off the doorknob.

“No more arguing,” he said. “You’re coming and that’s f
inal. This will be food for your soul.”

We stood outside the grocery store fifteen minutes later, in a swirl of snow. Christmas lights lined the awning, filled the storefront window, blinking on and off in time to Christmas songs. The Salvation Army bucket stood propped between us, and Gerith rang his bell continuously, clanging it louder whenever anyone approached from the parking lot or whenever the electric doors behind us slid open. I had a bell, too, which I rang reluctantly, only putting out an effort when Gerith shot me looks.

“I should be studying,” I said.

“You’re going to do fine,” Gerith assured me. “You can take that test without opening a book.”

“Easy for you to say. You’ve dropped out, and I have a C going into the final.”

The doors slid open behind us and a woman carrying two plastic bags of groceries exited. Gerith rang his bell in the air and looked intently at her. “Merry Christmas!” he said.

The woman nodded and returned the greeting. She moved one of her bags into her other hand and searched inside her purse. When she brought her hand out again, she had a small pile of copper and silver, which she threw in the bucket, then walked away.