What Comes After

by Joanne Tompkins

  If she was aware of my eyes on her, if she felt Daniel in the room, I saw no evidence. Her focus was half lidded and still. Her “friend” sat next to her. Thick necked and dark suited, he took one of her hands in his and stroked it with his thumb. She lifted her face to him, and then, as if remembering, she flicked a glance my way. On seeing me, she slipped her hand out of his grasp, set it alone in her lap. An act of kindness. Or maybe one of shame.

  Strange how I remember nothing of what was said that day, can recall none of the tributes paid to my son. But that moment stays with me. The connection and withdrawal. Love and loss, kindness and betrayal, Daniel present yet unseen, as if all I needed to know were contained in those few small motions.

  * * *

  —

  AFTERWARD, AS FRIENDS SET UP THE POTLUCK, I succumbed to an urge to flee, snuck out the back door and hid among the recycle bins, waiting for the parking lot to clear so I could cross it and walk home. I heard the back door open behind me. Jonah’s mother, Lorrie, was attempting a similar escape.

  I’d seen Lorrie earlier, sitting at the back of the meeting room, but my mind had refused to acknowledge her. She’d attended the Mass and the student gathering as well, but we had not spoken at either. Despite being next-door neighbors, we hadn’t so much as waved since learning of our sons’ deaths. I had forgiven Jonah. I had forgiven Lorrie. What more did God want of me? Why did God keep putting her before me again and again?

  Now, in the damp, gray drizzle, she appeared hardly more than a child, her fierce, small frame lost in a black dress. She turned and saw me.

  “Isaac!” An indictment, as if I’d planned this as a trap.

  “It was good of you to come,” I said, aware of the chill in my tone.

  Her expression flickered with fear, but she forced her features into a semblance of calm and lowered her gaze, a submissive posture I’d seen her use when her husband, Roy, was still alive. It pained me to have her use it on me.

  Peter burst through the door just then, nearly hitting Lorrie. “Sorry,” he said, “I—”

  “No!” Lorrie said, suddenly in motion, scrambling down the stairs, flapping a pale hand. “No. It’s fine. I was just leaving.” And even as Peter opened his mouth in protest, she hurried on toward the lot, that black dress billowing behind.

  Peter watched until she reached her car, then turned to me. “That must have been bad.”

  “I suppose it was.”

  He wanted to advise me. I could see that. To say something like, “She’s not the enemy, Isaac. She’s suffered huge losses too.” But he didn’t. He let me be.

  I took a deep breath. “I think your jacket is ruined.”

  “Probably,” he said. “But if I had to pick someone to ruin my best suit jacket, it would be you.”

  * * *

  —

  I loved Peter then. Perhaps I love him still.

  4

  Evangeline kept her eyes on the embankment at the side of the road, trying to locate a particular configuration of trees, the place she’d lost the boy’s small gift. Though just a silly token, it would prove she hadn’t imagined it. She’d had only the few nights with the boy, with Jonah, but he had loved her—or at least had longed for her in a way that could not be distinguished from love. And not just for her own real, warm body, but her . . . what? Her essence, she guessed. She would have said her soul if she believed in such things.

  A long block from the trailer, she found the spot, sloughed off the pack and untied from it a rusty machete she’d borrowed from a neighbor’s shed. After working her way up the steep slope, she hacked at a thicket a minute or two, then stood back to assess her work. Barely a dent. Suddenly angry, she flung her arm back and whipped it forward with every ounce of her strength. The wood handle splintered in two and the blade sailed free, its razor edge impaling a sapling mere inches from her thigh. She shrugged—no point in worrying about near misses—and began tearing at the brambles bare-handed, thorns shredding her skin.

  After clearing a narrow opening, she caught sight of something whitish strung along the roots and began digging blindly in the boggy earth. She thought she had it once, but the long, skinny thing writhed between her fingers and slithered away. Taking one last what-the-hell grab, she found—clutched in her hand—Jonah’s mud-encrusted bracelet. It was hardly more than a knotted piece of rope, but it had meant something to him and he had wanted her to have it. She scrambled down, tucked it into a zippered pocket of her pack, and started back out.

  As she rounded a corner, the lights of town crept into view, strung along the shore below. When she’d arrived with her mother in the spring, Evangeline had thought the place was nothing more than a half dozen blocks of old buildings. But even from this modest elevation, you could see that it was much larger. Port Furlong fanned out for a few miles from a corner that jutted into the Sound, sprawled across multiple low-slung hills, surrounded a small lake. The Victorian settlers had savaged the dense firs, stripped the earth for their buildings and homes and family farms. Grand trees still stood in parks and along rural roads, but in town people had taken their place. “Ten thousand people. More in the summer,” her mother had said.

  Now the whole of the town glittered, and Evangeline thought how this haunted old place woke each night, ghosts wandering the turrets and gables and widow’s walks of the Victorian homes. Even downtown, with its massive brick courthouse and post office, with its finials and balustrades and rows of high arched windows, seemed to bustle with the shadows of century-old business deals, with stiffly dressed couples floating through brick walls, seeking marriage licenses or letters from across the sea. And beyond all this was the Sound, where she could feel, as if tossing inside herself, the sailboats and tugs and ferries that pitched in the water’s black churn.

  Homes glowed on the hill above the town. She imagined the dinners and homework and family conversations taking place in those lighted rooms and wondered if she would ever belong somewhere like that, in a house you could walk into day after day, knowing you were home, knowing you were wanted. No, she thought, she never would. Yet she touched her belly and whispered, “But you will, baby. You will.”

  Evangeline spotted a dark stretch in the middle of those glinting lights. She had glimpsed the place only twice but remembered that it was on a couple of acres, surrounded by trees. The man, Isaac Balch, lived there alone. At least she thought he did. The papers said Daniel had no siblings, and that his mother now lived in Spokane. The place was huge, too huge for a single old man. It would have to have lots of empty rooms and at least one extra bed—not some broken-down sofa bed either, a real one with sheets and comforter, a fluffy pillow or two.

  * * *

  —

  THE LAST TIME SHE’D SLEPT in a real bed had been nine months back. She’d shared it with her mother, Viv. They were living in south Seattle, in a one-bedroom apartment over a private nightclub next to an animal shelter. The nightly yowling of the dogs and the vibrating bass beat shimmied up the walls, set everything in Evangeline churning.

  Then her mother’s boyfriend, Matt, moved in, and Evangeline was forced to sleep on the living-room couch. While her mother worked days at Safeway, Evangeline’s de facto bedroom became Matt’s personal lounge, where he waited for callbacks on auditions. Her only privacy was the bathroom, and even there she had to battle complaints at the door.

  She was suspicious of Matt from the start. The guy was tall and blond and too good-looking for her mother. Not only was the guy movie-star handsome, he could act too. At least he’d mastered a way of looking at a girl as if utterly indifferent yet obsessed all the same.

  He nauseated her, the way he stretched out on the sofa—the place she lay every night—scratching armpits and butt, critiquing the acting on afternoon soaps. Sometimes he wouldn’t move at all, turned reptilian, a lizard sunning on a rock, one lazy eye waiting for a passing fly.

  One
day, that eye landed on Evangeline and his tongue flicked out and rolled her in. He slipped a fingertip between her lips and whispered that he loved her. She would never have guessed that her body would go crazy the way it did. With his chest and thighs pressed against hers, she could forget the latest test she’d blown, the most recent scuffle with her mother. She became nothing more than skin and heat and a wildly beating heart.

  An afternoon in early March, she was in that place of pure escape—straddling Matt on the couch, his hands on her hips, her young breast in his mouth—when Viv arrived home early. She had a migraine, which, in retrospect, Evangeline suspected was partially to blame for what happened next. Her mother grabbed a fistful of Evangeline’s flying hair, yanked her off Matt, and flung her to the floor, hissing, “You disgusting little slut.”

  Evangeline made no great effort to sort out what happened after that. When she thought about it later, which she tried not to, the memory rose as random sounds and images: hysterical cries, threats of eviction, sharp kicks to her ass and thighs, neighbors banging, police at the door.

  She remembered curling fetal, lying on the Dorito-infested carpet for what seemed like hours. Finally someone threw a towel over her and she managed to get to her feet, stumble to the bedroom, and slam the door.

  As for Matt, he was kicked out into the night, a turn of events that set Evangeline sobbing for hours. Yet, as the only other option was her own eviction into the dark streets of low-rent Seattle, she was starting to get over Matt by the time she fell asleep.

  The next morning, Viv had thrown everything they owned into garbage bags and loaded the old Subaru station wagon. They drove up I-5 in silence and pulled onto the Edmonds ferry under heavy clouds, a sea of whitecaps lashing the boat. Viv set the parking brake, muttering, “He shouldn’t have done that. That son of a bitch.”

  Evangeline hated seeing her mother so defeated. “Mom, I—”

  Her mother whipped toward her. “As for you, whatever you’ve got to say, tell it to Jesus. I’ve got nothing for you.” She then commenced praying with such speed and fury that Evangeline thought she might be speaking in tongues.

  An hour drive from the other side, they arrived in Port Furlong, some kind of old-timey seaport, a place she concluded was the most desolate town that could be reached on a tank of gas. Her mother’s frantic cheer as she pointed out the sweeping Sound views, grand buildings, and historic homes only sank Evangeline further into despair.

  After a few days in a grungy motel, her mother rented a rusting single-wide on the outskirts of town. Evangeline begged her mom to let her go to school. She’d been in high school in Seattle after all. But Viv refused, deciding to homeschool Evangeline in order to protect her from “the rampant sexual promiscuity that has infected the culture,” a quote drawn, no doubt, from one of Viv’s many church pamphlets. She also refused Evangeline TV for fear that “lascivious portrayals of teens” would mislead a young soul, as if her daughter were a fragile innocent and not the girl she’d discovered fucking her forty-year-old boyfriend. Evangeline considered pointing out this discrepancy but didn’t think it’d further her cause.

  Homeschooling was fraught from the beginning, with Viv devising her own course of study based on her understanding of the Bible and elementary-school math. Only two weeks in, Viv landed a job in the deli of a local grocery, ending even minimal efforts at educating her daughter. Evangeline spent a wet, gray spring in the mobile home with a dripping kitchen faucet and mold stains appearing like religious apparitions on ceilings and walls. Shadows from the tall firs kept the place in dreary twilight even on the sunniest of days. At times, Evangeline didn’t bother to dress, just lay on the couch in her pajamas watching afternoon soaps, thankful the corrupting influence of television had become a moot point once there was money to pay for it.

  * * *

  —

  ON THIS EARLY OCTOBER NIGHT, the dark firs whispering around her, she longed for those lonely wet days with working lights and running water, with food in the cupboard, days when she luxuriated in the daily petty grievances a teenage girl could harbor against her mother.

  She stared a moment longer at the dark spot on the hill and turned around. As she trudged back to the trailer, she let herself imagine a new home. It might be Isaac Balch’s house. It might be somewhere else. If she had learned anything, it was that she could survive losing people. Life, she had discovered, could be managed without parents or friends. Without love of any type.

  Sometimes, though, the coldness of her heart gave her chills.

  5

  Peter attempted to drive me to his house following the service, but I objected and he didn’t argue. He understood that his particular riches—a wife and three sweet little daughters—were more than I could bear. He dropped me, as requested, at my property’s entrance.

  As I walked past weed-choked plantings and piles of rotting leaves, I felt as if entire seasons had come and gone in the past few hours. The house now appeared abandoned, stunned into a stillness so complete I doubted resurrection was possible. Even Rufus, a dog that barked with the slightest provocation, lay silent somewhere inside.

  * * *

  —

  KATHERINE HAD BROUGHT ME HERE. To this coast, this small town, this house that loomed empty before me. She couldn’t have been twenty-five when I first saw her sitting at the back of a large stone barn in the hills of Pennsylvania. We were staying at Fox Hill, a Quaker retreat and learning community with spartan rooms, half dozen to a bath, and serious work requirements. I was nearing thirty, teaching science at a nearby high school, and spending the summer attending daily meeting, taking silent walks, and scrubbing mountains upon mountains of cookware.

  I’d been there three weeks when Katherine appeared at morning meeting. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. It wasn’t that she was beautiful, though with her flawless olive skin and thick dark hair, she was. It wasn’t even that she wore makeup and black slacks with high-heeled pumps, all so out of place in that room full of plain faces and jeans and work boots that I suspected this was her first Quaker meeting. No, what focused my attention was how her eyes kept scanning the room, alive and curious, as if longing to drink it all in, this new place and people and style of worship. Then a remembering—of where she was and what was likely expected—and a downward tilt of her head, an effort to find stillness, to give this whole silence thing a shot.

  She must have seen me staring, because afterward she trotted up as I was heading back to my room. She asked if I might have a free moment to talk about my faith, mentioning she was Catholic, there for only a week. We met that afternoon and walked for hours through the neighboring woods and small town. Katherine spoke of many things: her love of nursing; a large, combative family; a romantic breakup; the remarkable beauty of birch trees in falling light. She hoped for children and dogs someday. “Lots of them,” she said.

  When we arrived back on campus, we stopped at the spot where we’d started. “Sorry,” she said, suddenly shy. “I’m kind of a talker.”

  “I like that,” I said. And I did, the way her words found my empty spaces and began to fill them. “Sorry that I’m not much of one.”

  “You’re not,” she said. “But it makes each of your words count more. You know what I mean?”

  I nodded.

  “Besides,” she said, letting her eyes rest on mine until she’d woken every cell in my body, “I can see you in there. That’s what matters.” She reached out and touched my wrist, the hair on my arm rising in a shiver.

  We married a year later. One July morning, she turned to me in bed, the sun dancing over her cheeks and lips and dark-lashed eyes. “Come with me to the Northwest,” she said. Her tone was urgent, as if her ticket had already been purchased. “There’s this place I vacationed as a kid. Port Furlong. You’d love it. It has boats and music and old hippies jigging by a fountain. Islands we could get lost in.”

  I kissed he
r lightly. “We’ll have to go sometime.”

  She pushed away. “No, not sometime. Not visit. Let’s move there. Live there. Now. Let’s go now.”

  “But your family. Mine.”

  She threw herself back laughing. “Exactly,” she said. “Exactly.”

  My wife longed for escape: from the East Coast, shattered romances, a painful teenage history. All the topographies of her life. She ached for the startle of something new. And no woman was ever more beautiful, more compelling, than Katherine on the brink of adventure.

  “We’ll start our own family, our own traditions.” She flipped toward me again, worked a warm thigh between mine. “You’re my family now. My anchor, you know that? You’re my very own Zen retreat—all that quiet peacefulness of yours.”

  A week later, I was at the desk in our home office when she stepped in to tell me she’d been researching Port Furlong. “The paper mill and hospital are the big employers in town,” she said. “Lots of listings for floor nurses. And guess what? There’s an opening at the high school for a biology teacher. Right now! Could the universe be any more obvious?”

  I swiveled to face her. “Sounds promising. Any Quakers?”

  “There’s a small meeting. Your kind.”

  “Unprogrammed? Really?”

  “Better believe it, baby.” She laughed, settling on my lap, wrapping her arms around my neck. “I’d never subject you to anything as entertaining as an actual service or a choir. God forbid.”

  “Catholics?”

  She pecked my cheek. “Catholics are everywhere.”