Life After Life (14 page)

Toby said that sanity is good, but she thinks the secret to long life is water, water, and more water. Drink water all day long to keep your body all flushed out. “May your pee always run clear and carry no trace of a scent except when you go somewhere fancy and eat asparagus.” She said that a person should be able to hide, go underground at any second, and not be detected.

“That’s why animals don’t eat asparagus,” Mr. Stone told Abby, like he might be teaching a class.

“Yes, that would be one reason,” Mrs. Silverman said, and raised a pretend gun to her head. Ever since then, though, Abby drinks enough water to have clear pee. She is almost as obsessive about clear pee as she is touching all of her favorite stones and monuments in the cemetery and checking the notes in Esther Cohen’s urn.

S
OMETIMES LATE AT
night, Abby sneaks out through the cemetery and the arboretum and stands outside Sadie’s window. Sadie once got her to listen to a song playing on the radio about a man in a nursing home who had the bed by the window and spent the day describing the world out there to his roommate only there wasn’t anything there at all. When the man in the song died and his roommate got a turn by the window, he saw nothing but a brick wall, but he continued what had been started and described a pretty world for the new person just brought in. “That’s what I do, Abby,” she said. “I try to paint a pretty picture.”

“What about my parents?” she asked. “Can you paint a pretty picture of them?”

Sadie pulled her close and whispered in her ear. “I am going to try, sweetheart. I promise you I will try.”

The morning sun is bright and Abby can hear strains of music or television coming from different windows. She hears the sound of Richie’s skateboard even before she sees him. She waits for him to lift his hand first before she waves. He has built a really good ramp and is able to clear several feet before landing. He has his hair pulled back in a ponytail and a big scab on his knee. His Billabong T-shirt is orange and blue. Some people think he’s a loser, too, and maybe that’s why she likes him. Even if he is a loser, he went and got his bike and rode all over town putting up pictures of Dollbaby.
REWARD
, it said with a picture of Dollbaby she took last Christmas: Dollbaby with a rawhide chew shaped like a stocking. Abby promised that there would be a big reward even though she had spent all of her money so people would show up at her stupid party, trusting that her parents would give her whatever she needed if they were lucky enough to get a happy call. Every time the phone rings she freezes and in her mind she repeats the words she needs to hear, the same words the woman from New Jersey at Cracker Barrel said.
I have your little Dollbaby. I’ll hold her until you get here.

Abby needs her own phone and is supposed to get one for her birthday. She is about the only kid without one, not that anyone will ever call her, but at least she can look like she’s busy, hold it up to her ear in the cafeteria or at the bus stop so she won’t just be standing there trying to think of something to say or what to do with her hands. She will act like she’s talking to a friend and maybe her nosy mother will leave her alone. That would be easy enough:
Oh my God! You’ve
got
to be kidding. Like don’t I know
that
!
That would make her mother so happy, just like it made her so happy when she found Michelle Obama goody bags to give everybody. Abby has to be home for lunch to finish filling them, but until then she can just visit Sadie and then keep looking for Dollbaby. She holds her hand up to her ear to practice talking. She pretends it’s the woman at the Cracker Barrel saying she will sit right there and hold that sweet Dollbaby until they can pick her up. Richie has stopped skating and is shielding his eyes against the sun, waiting for her to walk over. She can tell he thinks she really has a phone, so she eases her hand down and into her back pocket.
Call all you want, but there’s no one home.
When she starts walking, he starts skating again. She will sit on the curb and watch him for at least ten minutes or so before she goes inside to visit Sadie. He will ask how things are and she will stick out her tongue and hold a fake gun to her head like she saw Mrs. Silverman do. She will tell him that there’s no news about Dollbaby and he’ll say, “That sucks,” and then she’ll tell him how her parents were at it again late last night, she could hear them through the hole around the base of the radiator in her room, and he’ll say, “They’re so fucked up,” which always makes her feel good even though it makes her feel kind of sick, too, and then when she thinks she might start crying, she thinks about Sadie and the way she will be waiting with a dollar bill and a big box of candy and how she can curl up on the daybed and just listen to Sadie talk or watch whatever is on the television. She does this every day.

Notes about:
Gregory Luke Wishart

Born:
October 14, 1957
Died:
February 12, 2007, 12:25 p.m.

Lake Winnipesaukee, New Hampshire

The day was dark and rainy, trees and roads glazed in ice, one of those days when it would be impossible to look out and know the time; morning could just as easily have been nightfall. The ropes on an empty flagpole at the school across the street clanged in the wind. He did not want anyone there other than David and Tammy and me, of course. He said I had to be there to take notes, that it was my job and we had made a bargain. He said this would be my test run for what I will do in the future. He said that I needed to describe the black silk nightshirt he was wearing and tell how sophisticated it looked, that I should always remember him looking so sophisticated and elegant in both life and death. His favorite color was green, the shade of moss, and his favorite food was cherry cobbler. He asked to hear Debbie Reynolds singing “Tammy” and he sang along, lips barely moving,
I hear the cottonwoods whispering above,
and otherwise wanted only classical—no words to get tangled up in. He said it was odd how he had loved that character Tammy, and why? “A rundown houseboat in the middle of some godforsaken bumfuck southern locale.” He laughed. “What was that about?” He said that he must have been southern in a previous life and that I should definitely include that mysterious detail in my notes. He said that Eddie never should have left Debbie. What was he thinking? Sure, Liz was hot, but Debbie was
Debbie,
the good girl, the girl next door, the girl who would be a good mother and a good wife and a dear and loyal friend. He loved Debbie as Molly Brown, too.
Unsinkable,
he said, and pointed at me,
just like you, thanks to Tammy,
and he asked to hear the song just one more time, that scratchy 45 he remembered his parents buying and slow dancing to when he was a kid, and he sang along, eyes closing with the drift of that solo violin at the end. He pointed to the corner just beyond his grandmother’s old braided rug he treasured and said that it was very calm over there—cool and calm. But then eighteen hours passed and he said nothing at all, just reached out as if plucking feathers from the air, his eyes wide open and staring. It seemed his breathing was a little bit faster whenever David leaned close and twice he moved his finger along my wrist where a watch would be if I wore one. He always said I needed to wear one so that I will never ever miss anything again, but I will always miss him. Every day I will speak to him. Every day I will remember.

[from Joanna’s notebook]

Luke Wishart

The light on the lake skips and shimmers like glass he can walk over, slick cool shiny glass, and his body tingles and moves without him, slick and cool and there is barking and singing and lapping, lapping, lapping, waves on the beach, and there is the clanging of the boat rocking in its slip while he waits in the warm water with the light whispering above. His grandparents are there at the outdoor sink, scaling and cleaning the fish they caught, and his parents are inside dancing, feet turning slowly on that worn braided rug, and when it gets dark they will all squeeze onto the bench at the end of the dock and watch the lights over the lake—the stars and fireworks and distant island, the glowing face of his father’s watch he reaches and holds as he leans in close and closes his eyes.

Rachel

R
ACHEL
S
ILVERMAN IS IN
the South—God only knows what she was thinking—and yet she thought it and she chose it and now she’s here in the middle of nowhere, the land of quilts and doilies, yes ma’am and no sir,
Don’t mind me, I’ll just take a little piece of chicken, I love the neck or a wing,
please and goddamned thank you, hot as hell and surrounded by some sweet-tea-soaked idiots she’d just as soon slap as listen to. Thank God, they’re not all that way—goobers and hee-haw and Judgment Day—but there are enough that are so she sticks close to her neighbor, Sadie Randolph, in the suite across the hall and the little lesbian from South Carolina who loves tobacco products. They were both schoolteachers, both still capable of and interested in reading the newspaper, and they don’t judge their neighbors, or if they do, it’s a judgment Rachel absolutely agrees with like the other day when Toby bit off the end of a cigar and announced she was tired of people trying to save her soul.
It’s insulting,
she said.
They don’t know my soul from a cat’s ass.

So Rachel is
here,
as the big
X
on the map in the front hall tells her. She is
here,
Pine Haven Estates—retirement village and assisted living—Fulton, North Carolina, not far from the ocean and minutes from Interstate 95, just seven hundred miles from where she spent her whole life in Massachusetts, which was also just an hour from the ocean and minutes from the same highway. She is here, her last adventure. She has come to see the hometown of her one great love—a man who was not her husband and who likely never would have been. She had three glorious months with him in the summer of 1970, which was the year she turned thirty-nine. Imagine, turning thirty-nine at a time when people still made reference to Jack Benny and found humor in a person never admitting he had turned forty. Now you’d be hard-pressed to find a young person who had ever even heard of Jack Benny and now thirty-nine sounds like someone barely living, still wet behind the ears, their muscles capable of doing all kinds of things they take for granted.

They met during one wonderful summer on the Cape, both there alone, and then after that there were occasional afternoons and odd Saturday mornings—some stretches of time more generous and giving than others—until the winter of 1976 when he was out of her life forever. Still, it seemed she talked more in those stolen hours than she ever had and likely the only comparable thing she has known (aside from friends of her girlhood) is her time with Sadie, a polite kinship growing each afternoon and evening to longer conversations and confessions.

Sadie is from this town and is well versed in the history and the natives and yet also seems somehow removed from it all—perhaps by her active reading life or maybe by her many years living alone.
Solitude can do good things for a person,
she has said.
The interior life is sometimes the only life.
Rachel could not agree more. It’s how people have survived adverse conditions through the ages, and though one might long for a physical touch, it’s not a bad way to go. Certainly there are far worse ways to go.
I am never lonely,
Sadie said just the other night, and Rachel realized that she and Toby both leaned in closer, as if about to hear some great wisdom passed their way.

His name was Joe, a simple, easy name for a seemingly easy man, but he was far more complex than what appeared on the surface and he made Rachel’s life complex for a very long time, the difficulties far outnumbering the comfort, and yet still she chose to continue. Several times he even said: “So just stop. Just end it.” But she never did. Now life is simple, and now she has come seeking his South, the place of his boyhood, the setting of all those stories he told her when they burrowed into the far back booth of a Duxbury deli or some small motel down on the Cape. That life was complicated and fraught. That life left her heart pounding and her sleep fitful, so afraid she might be caught, afraid she might speak his name in the darkness of the bed where her husband of so many years lay. That life involved long days at work where she was a lawyer—one of a handful of women in her firm and therefore needing to prove her value twice as hard as the men around her. That life involved dark winter days and snow shovels and raw hands and dry skin. And it involved those secret meetings—brandy-laced and delicious, the smell of wet wool and diesel fumes when standing and waiting for the train, suddenly intoxicating. Anticipation and deceit—lovemaking and lies—cases and stuffed files and somewhere in there a uterus that needed to be pulled out and tossed away, and the years of debating about adopting or not came and went, one day an obsession and the next a distant memory, the room in that first Beacon Hill apartment that would have been a nursery, stripped and shelved, a library guests asked to see, stopping and perching on the velvet-cushioned bay as she often did to glimpse the Charles River and distant spires of the Longfellow Bridge while they marveled at her impressive collection of first editions. Just before she migrated south, she had a taxi drive her back to that old apartment, and she stood on the icy sidewalk staring up at the library window. They had not lived there in years and she felt a wave of time sickness to see it, years of lost hope seeped into the cold red brick. She could almost hear their voices—her husband’s, her own, the heavy black wall phone in the kitchen, the radio on top of the refrigerator, always tuned to the educational network, rattles in the windows and rainbows cast by the warped bubbled glass of the panes. When she got back into the cab, she felt she was saying good-bye to something living and breathing, a life that would continue to exist, one that she could reach back and touch if brave enough to do so.