After Life

by Rhian Ellis

  From the little window in my bedroom I could see Lake Wallamee. In the winter it froze, and people rode snowmobiles and skied across it. For those months it would look like a field, vast and remarkably flat, the crops snowed under. The rest of the year it varied in blueness: sometimes gray, sometimes a deep navy, sometimes an algae-choked green. Train Line was on a spit, so the lake surrounded it on three sides. If I pressed my face to the window glass I could see the lake, its ripples flashing silver behind the trees, in any direction I looked. I imagined it had no bottom. It seemed like that to me: dangerous, enveloping, infinitely secretive.

  I thought of a strange thing, lying in my new bed that first night. Strange shadows moved over the room’s slanted ceiling. My ears still roared with the sound of the bus, and when I closed my eyes I could feel the motion of the wheels beneath my body. I managed not to think of my grandparents and our house and my friends from school and my teacher. Instead I thought of Miss Beryl Kemper and the dead Irene. With my mother moved away, Miss Beryl might never speak to her daughter again. Of course, I had been the one speaking to her in the first place. But still. Something had been lost. What was it?

  In the dark, I felt Irene Kemper’s painted eyes stare down at me, reproaching me for letting her die twice.

  3

  an empty grave

  Peter stayed buried for ten years. When they found him, I had lived in Train Line for more than twenty, almost as long as Peter’s whole life, and I was thirty-one.

  It happened the day before Labor Day, a bright and windy Sunday afternoon. A rich man who wanted a house on the shore of the lake had hired some men to build it for him. They were digging the foundation, hoping to finish it and put the walls and roof up before snow fell, when they came across the skull in a mound of excavated dirt. At first the men thought it was a joke. The skull was so perfect, with such delicately arching cheekbones and flawless, even teeth, that it looked like a prop from a doctor’s office or a play. But a little more probing into the pile of dirt turned up a scapula and a collarbone and a long section of vertebrae, still connected. They stopped their machines and someone called the police.

  I didn’t hear about it right away. I wasn’t there when they unearthed him, of course, and I wasn’t there when the police arrived and roped off the area, scribbling notes and kneeling in the soft dirt to take photographs. Still, I could picture it. Over the next several weeks I imagined the scene obsessively, adding details and making corrections: the grass trampled into the mud, the stiff wind, the cops’ hairy arms and shaved necks, the bones with something of Peter still clinging to them. Soon I’d almost convinced myself I’d been there, perhaps even helped with the digging. It’s the kind of thing you get good at, if you’re a medium.

  I was at the supermarket in Wallamee when I heard the first rumors. Usually I bought my groceries at the cramped and ill-lit Groc-n-Stop in Train Line, where they were used to me and I could buy my things in peace if not in private. People often came up to me at the Wallamee Safeway. Sometimes they’d grab me by the arm; sometimes they had tears in their eyes. You were so important to my mother at the end of her life here. They always looked at what I had in my basket: what does a medium eat? Sometimes they kept a cautious distance, but I could feel them looking, whispering to each other, pointing covertly.

  But there were certain things you couldn’t buy at the Groc-n-Stop—the cookies I liked for one thing, and chicory coffee for another—so once every month or so I borrowed my mother’s car and drove around the lake to Wallamee. I tried to go early, soon after the store opened, because the Safeway could be crowded by afternoon. That Labor Day morning, the day after they found Peter, the store smelled like a bakery and the floors shone. A stock person said hello to me in a friendly way, and I felt a small but swelling happiness, the kind that comes from the smooth carrying-out of an errand. I found my coffee and my cookies and some other things, and I set them on the conveyor belt at the checkout stand while I dug in my pocket for money. The bag boy, a fifteen-year-old with an unflattering buzz cut, snapped open a paper sack and said to the cashier, “They found a dead lady in the woods.”

  The cashier picked up my groceries, scanned them, and tossed them down as if they’d gone bad.

  “Sick,” she said. “Where did you hear that?”

  “My dad. His buddy’s got a multiband radio.”

  “Probably your girlfriend.”

  “Jesus, Crystal. You’re the one that’s sick.” The boy raked my food into the sack and handed it to me. “Here you go, ma’am.”

  I took my bag. There was something ominous about the exchange, something that made me pause before leaving: a microscopic wind that raised the hairs on my arm. I thought maybe I should say something.

  “You know,” I said, clearing my throat. “You really shouldn’t joke about the dead.”

  Clearly, they thought I was nuts. They gaped at me. After a long moment, during which I decided that explaining myself would just make it worse, the cashier handed me my receipt.

  “Thank you,” I said, and gave her a rigid smile. Nervous guffawing followed me out the door.

  Back in the parking lot, I sat in the car and tore open my cookies. A dead woman in the woods. It was just a rumor, just hillbilly gossip—possibly true, more likely not. There wasn’t much crime in Wallamee. Occasionally someone got drunk and shot someone else, and once in a while someone died after a knife fight. Crime, in Wallamee, was a natural but unpredictable derangement, like the blizzard we got every five years or so that collapsed roofs and power lines and froze old people in their beds. A dead woman in the woods would be news for a while, even if it turned out not to be murder. I wondered if the police were thinking of consulting a medium. Any time something interesting happened in Wallamee County, the Train Line mediums had a thing or two to say about it.

  I closed my eyes, trying to picture the woman.

  White thighs, I said to myself. Loamy soil.

  Moss, bark, leaves.

  Nothing. I tried again.

  Trees…trees…

  It was no use. Perhaps there was no woman. Each time I tried to picture her, my mind bounced back to myself; all I could see was a big girl in a big Oldsmobile, a bag of cookies in her hands and a lap full of crumbs.

  You are a crummy medium, I said to myself, and laughed aloud.

  It was a lady, the kid had said, and she was in the woods. But to reassure myself I didn’t drive straight home, instead took the long way on Vining Road past the clearing where Peter was. Once in a while I did this. Monitoring the site was a half-conscious accommodation I made to my secret. Usually I didn’t even turn my head to look, just checked that the place was as it had always been. And always, until now, it was: a weedy tangle of trees, the clearing down below, then the lake, of which only a brief blue flash was visible. There were a thousand places exactly like it around Lake Wallamee, unremarkable and undisturbed.

  I hadn’t gone far on Vining Road before I began to feel nervous. Driving was not a natural act for me. In fact, I didn’t even have a license—mine had expired a couple of years before, and instead of going through the trouble of getting a new one, I’d thought I’d just drive only once in a while, and as inconspicuously as possible. I probably wouldn’t have passed the test again. There was something I lacked when it came to driving, though I was hard put to say what it was. Maybe it was the ability to relinquish awareness of my own body. I’ve heard other people say that when they drive, it’s as if they become the car, that maneuvering the car through traffic is no harder than walking one’s own body through a crowd of other bodies. Easier, even, because there are rules. But I became more aware of myself when I drove—of my sweating armpits, a tickling hair—and so my attention habitually strayed from the road. Often I found myself on the shoulder, spraying rocks and dirt, or nosing my bumper into the car ahead. My trips to the Safeway were sometimes harrowing.

  But my nervousness on this trip had to do with the big yellow earthmover in front of me, which
was going about twenty miles an hour. Bits of dirt flew off it and plinked my windshield. I couldn’t pass it, because the road twisted too much for me to see very far, and whenever I moved over to see if the coast was clear, a car came out of nowhere and whizzed by.

  Where could it be going, I wondered, on Labor Day?

  The tractor slowed down even further, and its round yellow turning signal began to flash. To my horror, it turned into the trees at a place where before there was no road, but where there was now a rutted, muddy track leading down toward the lake. I recognized the place: there was the maple tree with the shattered limb that pointed out over the road, and there, beyond the trees, was the old barn. Not far from the makeshift driveway a bit of yellow police ribbon fluttered from a stake driven into the ground, like the flag of a small doomed country.

  I drove a short distance farther and stopped the car. In my rearview mirror the tractor trundled down the slope and disappeared. From here, I couldn’t see much of what was going on down below. When I opened my window a little, though, I could hear groaning machinery and shouting voices. I stared hard at the rearview mirror, half-hoping to see something without getting out of the car, half-hoping not to. The trees were just beginning to change color—here and there was a branch of red leaves, or orange—but the foliage was still dense and impenetrable. I couldn’t see a thing.

  After several minutes I started the car again and continued driving. They haven’t found him, I told myself.

  Outside, the sky was bright blue. Small ragged clouds sped across it. The weather would change soon: the trees on either side of the road tossed their branches in the wind. I took a deep breath, and braced myself.

  After dropping the car at my mother’s, I took my groceries home and made coffee. There was no one else in the house. I was relieved at this, because I had to think, and it was hard to think with Jenny and Ron around. Until a year ago the house had been owned by an old woman named Welchie Pratt, from whom I rented two of the upstairs rooms. She was a grumpy, unpopular medium—she told people terrible things, which were too often true—and we weren’t friends, but we stayed out of each other’s way. She kept the shades pulled down and made very little noise. When she died, Ron, a social worker and medium-in-training, bought the house, and suddenly the windows were washed, fresh curtains hung, the old crusty appliances replaced, and Ron’s somewhat giddy presence was everywhere: I could hear him laughing through the floor of my séance room, and when he stomped around, the house shook. Jenny Butler, a medium from Canada, moved in a few months later and took the rooms across the hall from me. We worked out a chore schedule for the shared parts of the house, and all in all I was grateful Ron hadn’t made me move.

  Still, sometimes I missed Welchie Pratt. I used to sit in the living room for hours, just watching the sun slant through the cracked shades, thinking. No one bothered me. No one asked me if I’d mind taking over her mopping this week, since she’d be attending a crystal-healing seminar and didn’t want to be distracted, and nobody filled the living room with his men’s meditation group. In the old days the place smelled like ointment, the kind Welchie bought in a flat round can and rubbed into her knobby fingers.

  I poured my coffee into a mug and found a note, butter-stained, on the kitchen table:

  Naomi—

  J and I are at the Psychic Faire—waited for you but then had to go. Hope that’s a-okay!!!

  Don’t forget: trash goes out tonight, so if there’s any in your room…

  See ya!—Ron

  Ron knew I never went to psychic fairs. They were held at the Rochester Holiday Inn two or three times a year—sordid events, where you had to wear a name tag and sit at a card table and dispense five-dollar dollops of advice—and the Train Line mediums rustled up extra business by attending them. I’d had bad experiences at psychic fairs. People would give me false names or demand I tell them lottery numbers, and one awful time a man tried to get me to reveal my “secrets,” as if I was a stage magician, and then he wrote an exposé for the local paper. Anyway, I neither needed nor wanted extra business. I was a very popular medium, even though I rarely left Train Line; I never had to do bridal showers or birthday parties or office bashes. Some of the other mediums in town accused me of being a snob, and perhaps it was true. Still. Some people preferred my mother, who had had her own radio show—The Mother Galina Psychic Hour—and some preferred the New-Agey vagueness of mediums like Jenny and Robin Blackthorn, but I, for better or for worse, was the one they told stories about.

  For instance: people would sometimes tell how I saved a man’s life. The man came to me, the story went, with incurable cancer, and I told him to find another doctor, a city doctor, who could help him. He did, and lived five more years. It’s a true story, though it wouldn’t be right for me to take all the credit. His wife came to me and I just repeated what she said: See a specialist, Harry. Don’t be a cheapskate. There was another story about a will, and a lost inheritance, and some people who became millionaires. It showed up every few years. To be honest, I wasn’t sure where that story came from, but I suppose it could have been true. And another said that I helped someone finish his master’s thesis, and another that I cured someone’s addiction to shopping. There were more. The truth of these rumors varied: some were slightly distorted versions of what really happened, others appeared whole and out of nowhere, like moon rocks. I didn’t bother to deny them. They were, for the most part, innocuous.

  There was another rumor, a stupid one, which I am almost too embarrassed to repeat. But it does shed light on my situation—that is, it sheds light not on me, exactly, but on the part of New York State I found myself in, and on the kind of place it was. The rumor was this: that once I had nearly died, and that in order to continue living I had made a pact with the devil, and promised to do his work here on Earth. That I was the devil’s proxy didn’t seem to stop anyone from coming to me for readings. Much of Wallamee County was alcoholic, superstitious, and backward—and hypocritical to boot. I was just a good medium, nothing more. And that’s what people said most often; I heard it when I walked past them.

  See that woman? That’s Naomi Ash.

  Oh, she’s good.

  I sat at the kitchen table, drinking my coffee and trying to formulate a plan. What I needed, I decided, was a newspaper. I poked around the house, checked in the recycling box: no dice. Ron and Jenny must have taken it with them to the psychic fair. Jenny would want to do the crossword between customers; Ron would be combing the classifieds for a new waterbed. I sat down again, drummed my fingers on the tabletop. Through the small kitchen window the sun was high: it must be almost noon. The Groc-n-Stop, I knew, didn’t carry the morning paper, which was from Rochester, and the Wallamee Evening Observer wouldn’t be out until three o’clock or so. Hmm.

  My mind wandered. I let it. I thought of the coming fall, then the winter, how icicles would grow from roof edges clear to the ground, how snow would pile as high as cottage windows. I thought of it longingly. In the middle of winter I would hate it, but picturing it now, it seemed beautiful and safe, with the lake frozen solid as a table and everything hidden under blankets and blankets of snow.

  I closed my eyes and put my head down, forehead to the Formica. It was cool.

  I should have buried him deeper.

  After Peter died, I thought for a long time I would have to kill myself. I was terrified. I was frightened of being caught, of course, but that was not the only thing. I was frightened of him. I had never been afraid of a spirit before. I wasn’t afraid of my grandparents, who came to me occasionally with kind if vague words, and I wasn’t even afraid of the angry, confused spirits I sometimes came across. But I had never had a spirit who hated me. I was sure Peter hated me. For two or three years I suppressed my mediumship, scared to conjure him up by mistake, or to allow him a way back. But I missed him, too. After all, I had loved him, and once he had loved me. And if I killed myself, I could be with him, and surely he would forgive me. Or would he? I fantasi
zed about it all the time, the various methods: eating poison, walking into the lake, rope, razor, car crash. In the end I didn’t do it, of course, and instead chose to live with what had happened.

  Those were terrible, dark months. I worked at the Ha-Ha, a convenience store in Wallamee, during the day, and plotted my suicide at night. Every morning I rode my bike the five and a half miles around the north end of the lake, past groups of kids with lunch boxes waiting for the school bus, and past flocks of ducks flapping through cattails, and past gas stations and real estate offices opening for the day. I rode through most of the winters, too, though when there was a lot of snow I got a ride from Teeny Lawrence, my neighbor, who worked similar hours as I did at a doctor’s office not far from the convenience store. I preferred to ride my bike, though. I wasn’t very good at small talk.

  I didn’t mind working at the Ha-Ha. In a way I liked it, or at least I took a desperate pleasure in the sameness of it. Every day I wore the same orange smock, rang up the same items—cigarettes and colas and overpriced groceries and lottery tickets—and said the same things to the same people. From my place behind the counter I could see the front door of a biker bar across the street. I watched couples stand in the parking lot arguing, sobbing drunkenly on each other’s shoulders, riding off too quickly with no helmets. Often they came into the Ha-Ha to buy a snack or a smoke before roaring away. I remember watching them, filled with incomprehension, completely unable to imagine their lives.

  Though Wallamee was not a big town by any means, and I never worked any night shifts, I managed to be on duty twice when the store was held up at gunpoint. Maybe something about me invited it. Or maybe criminals found it appealing to rob a store called Ha-Ha. The first time, the gunman lurked in back by the ice-cream freezer until everyone else was out of the store, then ran up to the cash register and pointed a snub-nosed pistol at me so fast that at first I didn’t even recognize the thing as a gun. I just looked at him, trying to figure out what was going on, then slowly backed away and let him take the money from the register himself. When it happened again, there were two of them. One stood by the door and made the other customers lie on the floor—just like in a Western movie—while the other held his gun to the side of my head. The right side of my head, just over my ear. I couldn’t move. The man was shouting at me, over and over, I want the money! I want the goddamn money! Finally, in slow motion, I punched in the code and the cash drawer shot out, and I gave the man everything that was in it, even the video game tokens and the food stamps and the credit card receipts. Thanks, you fat bitch, he said as he left.