Afterlife

by Douglas Clegg

  Livy went around lining up more nightlights, pulling them from the three bathrooms in the house, and then the ones that Julie had bought at Home Depot. “They’re like little soldiers,” Livy said.

  “See? We’ll catch the ghost,” Matt said, attaching the NannyCam to a small block of wood to steady it.

  “There’s no ghost,” Julie crossed her arms, a bit annoyed with Matt for saying it in front of his little sister.

  Livy seemed thrilled to think that her bad dreams might end.

  5

  The first morning after they’d set the NannyCams up, Julie sat down with Livy and fast-forwarded through the resulting videotape in the rec room. The hall tape showed nothing but the sentry line of nightlights, occasionally punctuated by Matt coming out into the hall and walking sleepily to the bathroom. “He pees a lot!” Livy giggled.

  She and Livy laughed while Matt sped up, walking like a fast-paced Charlie Chaplin up and down the hall to the bathroom. For fun, Julie showed it backward and then forward.

  “See? Nobody.”

  “Matt was funny,” Livy giggled. “Let’s make him walk fast again.”

  “Okay,” Julie said. Then, she sped through the rest of the tape. “See? Nobody’s in the hall. No one in your room other than you.”

  Livy shook her head. “He didn’t come last night.”

  6

  They repeated this morning ritual for the next several days, and Livy was thrilled to see Matt—or even herself—wander to the bathroom in the purple light of morning. One tape had her looking right into the NannyCam and singing a silly little made up song. She played the tape for Livy, and Livy laughed at herself and told her to turn it off before she exploded. Then, she let Livy watch herself sleeping in bed. “I snore!” she cried out with glee. “Just like you do Mommy!”

  One morning, Julie woke up and Livy was in bed with her, pressed against her back.

  7

  “I had a bad dream again,” Livy said.

  After they’d been up a bit, Julie got out the videotape and said, “Let’s watch the NannyCam and see.”

  “No,” Livy said.

  “Come on. We can laugh about how Matt waddles down the hall.”

  “No, Mommy. I don’t want to see him.”

  “I promise you won’t,” Julie said, playing with Livy’s hair. “I promise you, Olivia Hutchinson, that you will not see a single person on the videotape unless it’s you or Matt going down the hall to the bathroom.”

  Livy reluctantly agreed, and they went to watch the tapes. Julie sat in the rec room and fast-forwarded through the NannyCam tapes. There was Matt on his nocturnal trip to the john, and then, she saw a blur of movement. She stopped the tape, and then froze on the picture.

  “That’s him!” Livy cried out, pointing to the screen. “That’s the ghost!”

  Julie shushed her, and told her that it was nothing. “It’s just shadows, baby. It’s not a ghost.” But she shut the tape off, and tried to get Livy to think of something else. She took her out into the garden and they planted some seeds from packets that they’d bought at the local nursery. Livy, now and then, mentioned the ghost, and Julie did what she could to talk her out of it.

  But later in the day, when Livy was in her room reading, Julie went back down to the rec room to watch the tape.

  It wasn’t much. Might’ve just been a problem of the tape. She played it in slow motion.

  She held her breath for a moment, surprised.

  It was a blurred figure moving down the hall, but in weird jumps of motion. Then, she played the video at regular speed, but it was impossible to see it. She could only see it when she slowed the tape down.

  She went backward and forward with the tape.

  The hallway with the nightlights in a row like luminaria outside Livy’s bedroom.

  It wasn’t that it was a blur—it was that whoever was crossing in front of the nightlights darkened them in such a way that they created a blurring effect. There was no way that it was Matt. It was a large person. An adult.

  Then, she put in the tape for Livy’s bedroom NannyCam.

  Fast-forwarded through the night as Livy tossed and turned, throwing her American Girl doll from the bed (where it should not have been in the first place), and pulling her pillow down to her chest. And then—Julie paused the tape, freezing the picture.

  It looked like a dark movement, near Livy’s bed. For just the flash of a second.

  Then, it was gone.

  After it moved back into the shadows, Livy’s eyes fluttered open, although it was hard for Julie to make out much about her face in the darkness.

  Livy sat up, and looked as if she were watching someone in her doorway. She clutched her blanket and pulled it up around her shoulders, and then shut her eyes tight.

  8

  Julie got Matt to watch the tape with her, and he said, “Wow. I wonder what that is?” He squinted. “It’s hard to make out in the dark. Sometimes video sucks.” “Do you think it’s a person?”

  “It has to be, Julie. Look at that—the way it moves

  around. That has to be an arm—right?”

  “I don’t even know what this means.”

  “Maybe it means someone is coming in our house at

  night,” Matt said.

  9

  She showed the tapes to Mel, but she told her she wasn’t sure it was a person at all. “I don’t know. I don’t want to jump to conclusions,” Mel said. “I think it’s just shadows and stuff. I don’t really see anyone.” But she suggested that Julie get some kind of protection system in place. Julie decided to go all out: she got a burglar alarm system that keyed to the windows and doorways. They installed it within a week, and although it cost a small fortune, she decided it was well worth it. She made Matt memorize the code, but she kept it fairly simple. “At least until it gets cool, we keep the windows closed, and only in and out through the front door, okay?” She told both of them not to play with it. Then, she tested it once to see how fast the local police could get there.

  She had a nice talk with the cops who showed up, and told them about the tapes. One of them volunteered to sit down and fast-forward through the tape to see what he could make of it. When Matt came back up from the rec room, he said, “Julie, you must’ve erased the tapes last time you watched them.”

  “Yeah,” the cop said. “It looked like Seinfeld reruns on one of them.”

  “Mel,” Julie said.

  Matt turned to the cop and said, “My Aunt Melanie. She loves Seinfeld. She taped over my movie of last year’s Fourth of July parade, too.”

  10

  Julie kept taping the hall and the bedroom for several days, but didn’t see the shadowy movement.

  And Livy began sleeping through the night.

  11

  On the phone with her mother the next day: “Did you read it?” her mother asked.

  “Read what?”

  “That book. The Life Beyond.”

  “Some of it.”

  “Well? Did you love it?”

  “Mom, you know I don’t believe in that stuff.” “I’ve seen him twice. He’s fascinating.”

  “I am not going to delude myself, Mom. I’m not

  going to pretend that there’s someone out there who speaks to the dead.”

  “No, it’s not like that. He doesn’t do that,” her mother said. “He just picks up things about you. When I was there a year ago, he told a man that his brother was looking for him. And within a month, it turned out the brother he thought was dead was actually alive. And a woman who had blocked childhood memories suddenly recalled that she’d witnessed her mother and her uncle making love. And that’s why she’d hated her mother so much. It’s halfway between psychic and therapy.”

  “I have a great therapist.”

  “Anyone can be a therapist,” her mother said. “Michael Diamond is a psychic. A real one. Did you read the whole book? I thought not. He’s not like those others, sweetie, believe you me. I’ve researched t
hem all. He’s not as flashy, maybe, but he delivers the goods. And we have tickets to his show. I’ve been waiting for them to come through since mid-May. And guess what? It must be fate. They came through today.”

  “I am not going,” Julie said, and clicked the phone off.

  Chapter Fifteen

  1

  “I don’t know how you roped me into this,” Julie said. It was a lie: she knew how her mother had done it. Julie’s interest had been sparked by Michael Diamond’s book, and by her curiosity about Hut’s childhood, and how it might be connected to psychic ability, whether that existed or not. People believed in it. Detective McGuane had even told her that while he didn’t wholly believe in it, he had seen psychics consult on murder cases once in a while, with impressive results. She didn’t believe in it. But people did. Even the U.S. government, for God’s sake. Even homicide detectives in New York City, the city that wasn’t exactly the city of gullibility. Cops who couldn’t catch killers believed it.

  She sat sandwiched between her mother and sister in the television studio with its uncomfortable chairs and blinding overhead lights. The place was packed, but Julie guesstimated that there weren’t more than 200 seats. The stage was round and small. Three large cameras and their operators moved around on it. And various lights came up and down. Taping wasn’t scheduled for another twenty minutes.

  “I can’t wait to get his autograph. I loved his new book,” her mother said. She had a small cloth bag stuffed with paperbacks. “Melanie, you really should read some of them.”

  “I prefer to stick to the classics,” Mel said, grinning, poking lightly at her sister.

  When the show began, Michael Diamond came out onto the stage. He was tall, and looked something like a gawky high school kid who had just hit his mid-40s. His hair was a little too long, and he had the sheen of one who has just been made up to look fantastic—but Julie was unimpressed. He looked slick and sort of comfortably geeky at the same time—not her type at all, although Mel raised her eyebrows a bit, her signal that she thought he was cute.

  He spoke more to the cameras than to the audience, but within several minutes had stepped off the stage, and went into the audience. He asked about someone who had lost a child, and a woman in the back raised her hand.

  He jogged up the steps to where the woman now stood. The woman was short and stout, and had a mullet-style hairdo, and wore a sweatshirt and jeans. Diamond went to her, and took her hand. One of the cameramen followed, trailing thick electrical cords up the steps.

  “What’s she saying?” Julie’s mother asked.

  “Quiet,” Mel whispered.

  “Here’s what I’m getting,” Michael Diamond said. “You have been beating yourself up for years about the event. Do you have an item?”

  The woman nodded, producing a small shoe from a wadded-up brown paper bag.

  On the monitors that hung over the stage, the cameras went in close up on the small red sneaker in Michael Diamond’s hand.

  Diamond closed his eyes. He said, “His name was Jimmy. He was four. No, five. You lived on a…cul de sac. In…somewhere in Connecticut.”

  “New London,” the woman nodded.

  Diamond opened his eyes. “Please, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. Let me tell you, and you can tell me if I’m wrong.”

  He closed his eyes again, pressing the shoe against his left ear as if the sneaker were a seashell and he was listening to the ocean. With his free hand, he pressed his fingers into the corners of his eyes, rubbing at his eyelids.

  Then, he opened his eyes and passed the shoe back. “I’m sorry. His name was Dennis. You lived separately from his father. A woman with the name of M. Mary? The name Miranda is somewhere in there. Or a name like that. Mary Anne? Marianna. That’s it. Is it?”

  The woman nodded.

  “You need to forgive her,” Diamond said. “She’s not at fault. It was an accident.”

  The woman took the sneaker back, staring at it.

  “If he were here, he’d want you to forgive her. That’s really all I can say,” Diamond said, touching her gently on the shoulder.

  The woman’s head slumped against his chest.

  “You need to get some rest. You can’t put yourself through this. You’ve relived that car accident for two years. Dennis wouldn’t want it.”

  “I hate her,” the woman whispered, her voice barely audible in the microphone that hung suspended on a boom one of the TV crew held overhead.

  Michael Diamond pulled sharply away from her, and put both his hands on her shoulders—more to separate himself from her than to console. “You need to look in the mirror, Alice. You need to see what role you played in this. Accidents happen. You need to forgive Marianna. She was only a girl herself. She had just gotten her driver’s license. You could as easily blame yourself. But Dennis would not want you to do that. Dennis is gone.”

  Julie touched the top of Mel’s hand. Mel looked over at her, a question forming on her face.

  Julie whispered, “He seems a little harsh.”

  2

  After two more readings, Michael Diamond went to the stage and said, “Someone is here who recently lost a husband. Someone named Jewel?”

  “Julie!” her mother called out, pointing to her daughter.

  3

  “I’d like to do a one-on-one this time,” Diamond said. His face was enormous on the monitor screen that Julie watched. She felt she could count every pore in his skin. She saw flecks of yellow in his brown eyes.

  Then she looked from the screen down to the man in front of her. He half smiled, and for some stupid reason, she felt comfortable with him, as if she’d known him all her life.

  “Okay,” she said, and just before she got out of her chair, Mel leaned over and whispered, “sit on his lap.”

  4

  The one-on-one was a segment of the television show where the subject sat with Michael Diamond on the low-backed curved sofa at the back of the stage.

  “You’re still grieving,” he said.

  “Yes,” Julie said. She was about to say: And I don’t believe in psychics, thank you.

  “It doesn’t matter if you don’t believe in me,” Michael Diamond said. His words sent a shock through her. “Belief has nothing to do with it.”

  5

  “Tell me about the brain radio,” he said.

  “That what?”

  “The brain radio,” Michael Diamond grinned. He

  kept his hand on her forehead. She felt a warm gentle pressure from it, but the headache she’d had began to dissolve.

  “It’s what Livy—Olivia—my daughter—calls it when she hears things.” Then, Julie realized that was inadequate as an explanation. “She thinks she talks to people with it. Or hears songs on the radio even when the radio isn’t on.”

  “She talks to your husband. Sometimes.”

  “When he was alive. They had a pretend game like that.”

  “Do you listen to what your daughter says about it?”

  “It’s usually silly, fun stuff.”

  “Your husband was murdered.”

  Julie gasped. She glanced toward her mother and sister, who sat at the far end of the couch. The bright lights and the anonymous eye of the camera seemed to wall her in. “Yes. He was.”

  “It’s terrible,” Michael Diamond said. “You’ve been fumbling through things since then. You’ve seen movies? Movies of some kind. There’s a place. A place in the city. A number and a letter. You won’t face what others want you to face. You…you haven’t listened. No. No, that’s not true. You’ve tried to listen. You just don’t know what it is you’re hearing. Your daughter. Your daughter needs you. She needs you. Someone else needs you. Needs her. Someone needs both of you. Someone desperately wants you. Male. Someone male. Someone wants you to understand. Badly. But death is all around you. Fear of death is inside you. Ah,” he said this last part as if catching his breath upon seeing something— something that left him awestruck.

  And the
n, she felt it.

  No longer in the studio, no longer with lights and camera and mother and sister and audience and sofa—

  She felt as if he had pressed his warm hand beneath her breast, and rested it just along the thumping halo of blood encircling her heart—as if he had reached within her, and emanated a strange warmth that took her back to her dreams of Hut:

  Making love to Hut in the warm bath, candles glowing all around the tub, Hut pressing into her, as she gasped and felt love in a way she had not thought possible—

  Giving birth to Livy, the way Hut had clutched her hand tightly, had breathed with her, and kissed her on the forehead as Livy arrived into the world—

  Holding Livy for the first time, a bloody, hideous baby that was the most beautiful human being she had ever seen, and Hut there, his happiness extreme as he laughed with her, with the exhaustion at the end of labor, with the surrender that childbirth demanded—

  And then, a moment in time that had been long forgotten—but it came to sudden life within her mind as she felt an electric shock—seeing Hut in the shower, water cascading over his body, his muscles taut, drawing back the shower curtain and seeing the look on his face, the seething anger, and he turned to face the tile wall, and then, seeing the scratches along his back, and wondering if he had been in an accident, and then she realized it was something else—something about why Hut hadn’t been home in three days—

  And then, her vision turned red, and Hut, not vibrant Hut, but the dead man from the metal table, milky eyes, shiny maggoty skin, his arms around her, pummeling her with his hips, driving himself into her, turning her over onto her stomach, taking her like that—and she felt ecstasy as he whispered filthy things, his lips pressed into her earlobe, his tongue etching fire as he said things she’d never heard a man say.