Life After Life (30 page)

And it really
does
scare her to walk back there. She doesn’t like the dark shade and the smell of the damp undergrowth. She doesn’t like the way people leave old dead flowers or, worse, ugly faded plastic ones junked up on the graves. She has had enough horror to deal with like that morning she kept yelling for her mother to get up only to finally give up and head on out to catch the school bus. When she got home and there were policemen there and everything, they asked didn’t she notice her mom wasn’t moving at all and she said that, yeah, she noticed, but it didn’t look any different from any other day for the past five or six or seven years.

Sometimes she tries to imagine her mom’s death, to walk through what happened that night with C.J. right there in the next room, painting her toenails and listening to Nirvana. Her high school art project was a sketch of Kurt Cobain and she played Lithium about a million times while she worked on getting his hands right. Sometimes she wants to give her mom the benefit of the doubt and call it accidental like that one really nice policewoman. That woman kept correcting anyone who said “suicide” like she was trailing behind with a broom, sweeping up the mess they were making. Not suicide.
Accidental overdose.

“How about
accident waiting to happen
?” she had asked the woman, and stared until she looked away. C.J. was a master at the game of chicken and had been for years. She could stare into the worst face or situation and not flinch. The woman was being nice to her and she would have loved to have uncurled her fists and accepted that, but she couldn’t; it had been way too long. The woman wanted to open the exit door so C.J. wouldn’t be trapped and locked in with the great legacy of suicide as all the shrinks and educated cops like to call it. She has thought of that term
legacy of suicide
so often. Plenty of people outlive it and when they do, they get younger like instantly being given the extra years they might have lost, like passing go and getting two hundred bucks. The thought of Monopoly makes her think of that kid Abby who is always hanging out at Pine Haven. She told how her dog ate the race car, and when it came out the other end, her dad boiled it and put it back in the box. Her dad is that old friend of Joanna’s who once hit on C.J. and is married to a total bitch who C.J. is convinced tried to kill the kid’s dog. Sam Lowe told her all about it, this woman in a tight miniskirt dragging in a dog and demanding that he put it to sleep on the spot. She said she would pay what was owed plus a huge tip. “Bless her heart,” she said, and patted the dog’s head. “She went completely mad and they say will likely do it again.” He took the money and when she turned to leave—maybe she didn’t know she could have demanded to watch—he asked if she wanted her cremated for pickup, but she said that would be way too painful. “It’s better this way,” she said. “The sooner the better, okay?”

He assured her that he would do it as soon as she left and then he sat there and kept putting it off until the end of the day when the dog had fallen asleep with her little pointed nose wedged up beside his foot. “There was nothing wrong with her,” he said. “She’s a great little dog so I took her home. What’s one more?” He had already told her how he had grown up with many dogs—that his dad was known for taking in strays and naming them after pirates. “My dad is known as a dog-collecting weirdo who lived in a trailer in what became a pricey subdivision,” Sam said. “His other claim to fame is being the son of a man who blew his head off when he was only like forty years old or something. Nice, huh?”

It was that story that had gotten C.J.’s interest and they have been friends ever since. She told him all about her own mother and how all she heard at school and from the foster parents who stepped in her senior year of high school was about her goddamned
legacy
like she might have been in line for the fucking throne or something. Sam said that when his dad got beyond the age of the suicide, it was kind of like he was born again. “Not religious stuff,” he said. “I mean it was like he seemed younger and was willing to do things he hadn’t ever done. Took my mom on a trip out west, encouraged her to go back to school. Finally built a real house at the beach like he’d always dreamed of doing.”

C.J. had never even thought of that before, how wonderful it would feel to get past the age her mother was—only thirty-six—and in a little over ten years, she would be there. Kurt would be in junior high and it would feel like a whole new life. It could be a whole brand-new life. When she said this to Sam, he turned and hugged her, squeezing so tight she could feel his heart beating, smell the detergent of his clean shirt. She knows that Sam really does like her and he likes Kurt, too, but he seems so young to her. That’s the difference in being a kid with a Mom and Dad who give a shit. It keeps a person younger. He went to college and always knew he would. Now he hopes to go to vet school in another year or so after he takes a few courses and gets his test scores up. He hopes all kinds of things and starts lots of sentences that way.
I hope I’m right about this little dog. I hope Kurt will someday know how hard you work and how much you love him. I hope you’ll let me help you get that muffler fixed or at least go to a friend of mine to look at it. I hope we will always be good friends.
She would like to tell him that she hopes all of that, too. She hopes for some part of herself to be everything he could ever hope to find in a woman.
You deserve that,
she wants to tell him.
You deserve every good thing this life can give you.

And now, even though she worries about giving him the wrong idea, she has a flyer that she plans to take out to him tomorrow, maybe while she’s driving Rachel Silverman around. It’s a picture of Abby’s dog, Dollbaby, who without a doubt looks just like the one he rescued, and no doubt about it, the woman Sam described sounds a whole lot like Abby’s bitch of a mom.

This is the kind of thing C.J. keeps in her journal in the safe. She has written how she plans to resurrect Dollbaby and leave her right out there on the front porch of their house. Of course she also wrote about that time the weird magician dad came on to her after a party she worked, complimenting her tattoos and wanting her to get into his truck. He’s not bad-looking, really, for an old guy—when he’s not drunk that is—but because C.J. was used to seeing his kid come and go, it changed the whole picture so she couldn’t think of him as just another of those jerks who can’t keep it zipped. Instead he was somebody’s dad who couldn’t keep it zipped. But because of the way Joanna obviously feels about him, C.J. has decided to cut the guy some slack and give him a break; blame it on alcohol as so many people do. Blame it on being married to a bitch, as so many people do. He’s certainly not who Joanna thinks he is or that’s C.J.’s opinion and she thinks Joanna can do a whole lot better and hopes that she will. Occasionally, when she has allowed herself to dream and imagine a secure life with someone like Mr. Jump-Start the Heart, she has immediately thought about how she could maybe introduce Joanna to somebody really cool who is smart and deserving of her. She likes to imagine that her life will be secure and happy, and that she will be someone Kurt is proud of, that he will be a boy like Sadie’s son, happy and successful in his own life but never for a minute forgetting about her.

The phone rings and she picks up to a distant buzzing and finally, on her third hello, he says,
Eight p.m. at Esther Cohen’s place.
He says,
And you better not be late this time,
and hangs up. She dreads the walk, but there’s no other way. Kurt is in his bouncy chair and grins when she looks his way. Kurt has his father’s eyes and maybe that is why she has such a hard time saying no these days. She goes in the bathroom and jots a little note in her journal:
Meeting at 8 p.m.
It sounds like he’s mad, but a lot of nights have started out this way only to end with him being really sweet and offering something extra for Kurt. There’s so much she wants Kurt to have and maybe it’s time to ask, a savings account or something.
Kurt will need a lot of things in this life. He will need an education and the right clothes, a good dog and summer camp. Someday he will need a car.

Even if he ever decides that he doesn’t want
her
anymore, he has to help Kurt. All of this is about Kurt, though there is a part of her that still wishes for something more. It’s hard not to wish for just a little bit more.

Rachel

L
UNCH IS NOT SOMETHING
Rachel ever in her life really looked forward to or participated in. As a working woman, she almost always worked straight through or used the time in her office to catch a cat nap. There were early years when she used that lovely hour of time to stroll Charles Street, all alone, window shopping. House things. Baby things. Clothes she imagined wearing and art she imagined on the wall. And of course since everyone knew she wasn’t someone who invested huge amounts of time in lunch unless there was a meeting of some sort she had to attend, then she was missing in action. This made it especially easy after she had met Joe and began meeting him in the middle of the day.

Business. Over lunch. She never liked mixing any kind of business with anything social. She is someone who likes firm boundaries. She has always wanted to be a voice in her community and someone actively participating, but what she never was able to tolerate was all the communication that went into it: who is doing what when. Where are you? What are you going to eat? What are you going to wear? Humans who get themselves all tangled up in that kind of thing must get something out of it, but she never did and so to get out on a city street all by herself where no one knew her felt wonderful. She feels the same way out in the cemetery talking to the dead. Just her and the long dead and the birds and the trees. And now C.J., of course, who scared the holy shit out of her, but she’s harmless, a good kid for sure. A sad good kid, all pierced and dyed and tattooed like somebody from the carnival, who will help her go where she needs to go.

Lately, Rachel finds herself looking forward to going to lunch. The food is pretty good and they serve the big meal in the middle of the day. Dinner—or supper as so many of them call it—is at five thirty. Who in the hell wants dinner at five thirty? You don’t have to be Einstein to figure out how a place like this works; a later dinner would require a later work shift for those in the kitchen and so on. It’s a business. Like anything else in the world, old age has become a booming business and—like any other endeavor—there are some who put their hearts in it and do a good job and there are those who need to be fired. Rachel is someone who came in reading the fine print on everything and asking enough questions and filing enough complaints that they would know she is someone
not
to cross—
ever.
So she has completely readjusted her schedule, eating her big meal in the middle of the day, which seems a small thing if you know your laundry is taken care of and the food prepared well and someone is keeping the place clean and scrubbed. At first she would come and get her food and take it with her, but now that she is used to being with Sadie and Toby, she just stays and eats right there with them.

The people at Pine Haven know that she is interested in a low-fat healthy diet—as they all should be!—and it has taken her weeks, if at all, to convince Sadie and Toby that frying a vegetable defeats the purpose of eating a vegetable. She orders unsweetened tea, but it almost always appears at her place as something that makes her body shake with the syrupy sweetness. There will be a whole new form of diabetes attributed to just that—gritty and grainy to the taste. Pure sugar. It’s a wonder that they don’t all weigh even more than they do especially with the lack of exercise.

When she asked what on earth the deal is, Sadie explained tea was just always sweet and then somebody, probably a doctor or somebody, said if people were tired of looking huge and dropping dead of heart attacks and strokes, they might think of laying off the sugar and all the lard intake. “Then people began to ask for unsweetened tea,” Sadie explained. “For as long as I can remember there was just
tea
and then
unsweetened tea.
If you asked for
tea,
it was sweet. I don’t know when all this fuss over
sweet tea
started. Now people say it all the time.”

“It’s quaint,” Marge Walker said. “People from the outside associate that with our homeland here in the South and I like it that way. Who here likes sweet tea?” she asked, and practically everyone raised a hand.

“I like a Long Island Iced Tea,” Stanley said. “That’s a northern drink. And, of course, tea is from China and I am part Chinese.”

“What part?” Marge asked, and everyone immediately looked away for fear of what might happen so she immediately added, “You’re about as Chinese as she is,” and she pointed over at Lottie who was working her tongue in and out of her mouth and shredding a paper towel.

“I
am
Chinese. I’m a terrible driver and I abused my children. I made them study all the time and called them bad names.”

“You’re a bigot,” Rachel said. It was one of those days when she could not put up with his ridiculous comments for one more second and didn’t even care what might come back to her. “You’re a racist idiot.”