After Life

by Rhian Ellis

  This was not as frightening as it sounds. I rode my bicycle home after it happened and tried to figure out how I felt. The answer was exhilarated. It was early spring and the air had lost its edge, and the long, bare branches of the willows along the lakeshore had turned yellow. Dirty piles of snow still lined the road. It seemed quite beautiful to me. I could still feel the place on my head that the man pressed the barrel of his gun to. For that moment, I had been able to imagine something besides Peter and what had happened to him. I could imagine my brains flying out the side of my head, obliterating every memory I had. For some reason, this made me feel better.

  I quit the Ha-Ha after that, with my boss’s blessing.

  Sometime during my stint at the convenience store, Vivian was born. I knew her mother. Elaine came in several times a week to buy a huge thirty-two-ounce cup of cola and sometimes a microwave burrito, and I’d chat with her while she dug through her enormous purse for money. She was cheerful in a relentlessly stupid, exasperating way. She dyed her hair bronze and wore floppy pantsuits over her chunky, then pregnant, body, and told me things I didn’t really want to know about her personal life. She took a leave of absence from her job a few weeks before the baby was born and didn’t come in anymore. Then, of course, the store was held up, and held up again, and I didn’t come in anymore, either.

  But when I answered an ad in the Observer for a babysitter, and it turned out to be Elaine, she gave me a big hug and kiss and said she missed me, and of course I could be her babysitter. We met at her house, a low brick one-story with an array of pillars across the front.

  “I’d heard you got shot,” she told me as I stepped inside. “I’d heard you almost died.”

  “No, no. I’m fine.”

  “Well, good!”

  I followed her through the house. It was decorated in a country style—there were wooden ducks and faceless dolls and watering cans painted with American flags, all piled apparently randomly in corners and on shelves. The impression it gave was of madness. Then again, I hadn’t gone into many houses other than my own; perhaps this was typical. We went into the kitchen and sat down.

  “I don’t really like my baby,” Elaine told me over a cup of herbal tea. “I hate to say it, but it’s true, and I believe in being honest with myself.” Elaine had changed since I’d seen her last. The bronze dye was half grown out, and the only jewelry she had on was a lumpy rock on a black cord. New Age, I thought to myself. The country decor was probably on its way out.

  “I should never have named her after my mother-in-law,” she went on, “but I thought, you know, Vivien Leigh, Vivian…aren’t there other Vivians? I thought it could be romantic. Huh. Anyway, it seems to suit her.”

  The baby was about ten months old, large-headed, with a tiny pair of eyeglasses. She had straight, dark eyebrows that shot out each side of her glasses, like pot handles. She was an odd-looking baby. She sat calmly in her high chair, gazing at the tail of the cat clock that swung back and forth on the wall.

  Elaine put her chin in her hands and leaned toward her. “My little egghead. Baby professor. Huh? My little professor. Actually,” she said, sitting back, “she’s not that smart.”

  “Oh,” I said, startled. “Well. She’s still a baby.”

  Elaine looked at me glumly. The wind had been taken out of her. “You know what I mean. I’m terrible, I know.”

  She told me how she was going back to work and didn’t want to put the baby in day care—“all those diseases and pedophiles and who knows what! I mean, I’m not a bad mother”—and hoped it would be okay if she brought Vivian to my house, instead of my coming there. Her husband had a home office, she said apologetically, and it had been hard for him these last months, with both her and the baby there. I nodded, said it was fine. I was still imagining, on and off, the feel of the gun barrel on my head—over my ear, at my temple, between my eyes, in my mouth.

  “I need to get back to work!” she said, gripping her mug. “And with you looking after Vivian, instead of some stranger, well, that’ll be a load off my mind.”

  Funny, I thought, how she could think she knew someone after less than a year of small talk, and most of that small talk having come from her.

  When I told her where I lived, her face lit up. “Really! I’ve been meaning to get over there. Is it true there’s a herb shop, and a crystal shop?”

  I told her it was.

  “Neat!” She wrote down the address and telephone number on a yellow, duck-shaped pad. “Does that mean you’re a medium, then?”

  I said yes, but that was something of a lie. It had been two years since Peter, and I was still giving very few readings, and mostly faking those.

  “That is so interesting! You’ll have to give me a reading sometime.”

  “Certainly,” I said, smiling.

  Elaine shook her head. “I should get into that. Really. I mean, real estate is just a dead end around here.” She folded her arms and looked at her baby, who was sucking its fingers and rocking back and forth, back and forth, looking at nothing.

  So then I had Vivian. Apparently real estate wasn’t such a dead end, because Elaine worked longer and longer hours, and got happier and happier. Vivian and I spent whole days with each other: taking naps together in my apartment, watching ants in the grass. I fed her from little glass jars of puree I bought at the Groc-n-Stop. She said her first word to me: Mama. I didn’t tell Elaine. There were times when she felt like my child, and I realized why people got married, took jobs, had children. She was a reason to get up in the morning.

  One night I dreamed about Peter. As in many of my dreams, I was burying him, but in this one, I was burying lots of people, it was my job or something, and the feeling was one of resignation: All these dead people, better bury them quick. They were the victims of a disease, or a natural disaster. Some were not quite dead yet, though. Peter was one of them. But I had to bury him, that’s the way it was. I had a white shovel and there were bouquets of roses to put on the graves. I flattened the soil with the back of my shovel and turned to go. As I did so I heard a noise, a faint groan, and a hand reached out of the ground.

  What to do? I recognized the hand as a sign of confusion; he didn’t know what was going on, didn’t know he was just about dead and already buried. So I put down my shovel and knelt down next to the grave. I took his hand in mine. And I held it like that until he died for real.

  The dream spooked me, though it was not, really, a bad dream. When I woke up that morning I felt calm. The day was sullen and overcast, a Sunday, and I’d slept too late, but it was all right. I tested myself: Peter’s dead because of you, you buried him, you threw dirt on him and left him there in that clearing. I pictured the grave site, the dull clouds over the clearing, the wind moving the trees beyond it, his body rotting in the soil. And it didn’t frighten me. All I felt was calm.

  After that, much of the power Peter had over me dissipated. Days went by during which I forgot to think, Any time now, they’ll come and get me. I gave some readings that felt good, felt right, almost. Vivian learned to say my name, and we went around Train Line piggyback. Peter was not coming back, neither to forgive me or to blame me. He was gone. This was difficult and lonely knowledge. It meant that I had gotten away with it, and that death was for real. This seemed intolerable, impossible, against everything I wanted to believe.

  But I managed somehow to live with my imperfect faith, as someone might learn to live with false hands, or blindly.

  I spent the rest of that Labor Day afternoon in the library. Since it was a holiday the library was closed, but because I worked there part-time I had a key. It was a small building of imposing design, a tiny Parthenon on a hillock above the lake. Upstairs were the book stacks, all three of them, and downstairs was the museum, a room full of spirit photography and spirit paraphernalia: trumpets, slates, Ouija boards, planchettes. I thought I would get a head start on my project for this winter, which was to catalog the collection. This task required that I read enoug
h of each book to see what it was about, then assign it a Dewey decimal number and type up some cards. I liked working when no one else was in the building, typing at the humming Selectric all day and watching motes of sunlight writhe across the floor. It was always shady and cool in the library, like the inside of a safe.

  Around four o’clock I took a break and stretched out in the reading room, using a thick leather-bound book for a pillow. I meant to just rest my eyes, but when I woke up it was nearly six. At six I was supposed to meet my mother; Monday night was Circle Night, and we always met for a drink beforehand. I stood up and shook the crumbs of leather from my hair, then grabbed my sweater and locked the place up. The sun was going down and the air had a chill. I wouldn’t have time to get a newspaper.

  I walked across Train Line rubbing the sleep from my face. The shadows were long and the setting sun lit up the grass. This is the kind of evening the Victorians had in mind when they designed Train Line, I thought: the twilit fairyland architecture, the fingers of mist creeping up from the lake. Not much had been added since then, just the cars and the telephone wires, and a general ramshackle feeling. Every other house, it seemed, had an orange FOR SALE sign in a window, and many were boarded up, bald of paint, tipping. It was worrying, but people had been predicting the end of Train Line for fifty years, and still it hung on. Inertia is a powerful thing.

  I crossed through a stand of trees, then down the hill toward the entrance gates. The gatehouse was closed up for the year, and the window boxes of geraniums were gone. The fountain—a naked golden baby topped with a showerhead—was dry. Labor Day marked the end of the season for Train Line. Many mediums had left already for warmer climates; more would leave before snow fell. There’d be no more daily lectures until June, and no public message services or workshops. Monday night Circles were one of the few regular events we had in the winter, besides Sunday services. A schedule in the main office listed the presiding mediums for the month’s Circle Nights. Most mediums tried to get out of it any way they could, but a few liked Circles. Troy Versted, for example, who was from a long line of Australian mediums, worked every week. He had a hook nose, white hair, and pastel-colored slacks with matching shirts. Another person who filled in for less accommodating mediums was Robin Blackthorn. Another was my mother. I went when I was scheduled, no more and no less.

  The bar where I was to meet my mother, Maxwell’s, was outside the gates of Train Line. Train Line was a dry town. The Victorians saw their summer colony as a place to better oneself; the only pleasures they approved of were the loftier kind. I walked down Line Drive, which curved along the shore of the lake and through arching trees. A breeze off the water got inside my sweater and cotton dress. My mother was on the deck when I got to Maxwell’s, sitting slumped in a shiny green outfit, a drink un-drunk in front of her. She didn’t appear to see me as I approached, crossing the gravel parking lot past a long row of motorcycles. Inside, I got a plastic cup of white wine from the bar, then took it out to the deck.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked my mother.

  She didn’t answer me right away, but stared into her drink. Then, “I’ve been waiting a long time, you know.”

  “I’m sorry, Mama.”

  “It wouldn’t have taken much to call. You can be awfully irresponsible.”

  “I know. I—”

  She waved her hand. “I don’t want to hear it. I’ve had a horrible day. You won’t believe what happened.”

  My mother was a physical medium. Most of us are not; we’re mental mediums, and we use only our minds in our work. Occasionally my mother still used her spirit trumpet, which she kept wrapped in a long piece of brown velvet on her living room mantel, and once in a while she levitated something. It embarrassed me to see her do levitations. I knew her tricks: the hidden rods, the threads, the surreptitious flings. The conventions of Train Line had worn her down, though, and she saved her most blatant sleight of hand for sweet-sixteen parties and appearances down at the senior center. As a rule, the only tool she used was her body.

  This is what she did. She’d sit across from her customer—“the bereaved,” as she liked to put it, though by her definition we’re all bereaved—hold his hands, and give him a long, searching look before closing her eyes. If the reading was successful, and it usually was, she’d soon make contact with a spirit who wanted to get through. Then she’d give her body over to the spirit, who would speak in a voice not unlike my mother’s—they were her vocal cords, after all—and perhaps even stand up, walk around, gesticulate, dance. This kind of performance could make some people extremely uncomfortable. My mother had, however, a large and loyal following. And I believed in her.

  Well, I mostly believed in her. A certain percentage of what she did was faked: I knew this, and I knew that it was part of who she was to go just a little too far, to push her material a bit further than it would stretch. Somehow, she carried it off, just as she carried off her flamboyant clothes and her long, unmistakably dyed hair. Though she was fat now, her nose was still her dominant feature; it looked ready to weigh anchor from her face at any moment.

  “I’ll believe it,” I told her. “What happened?”

  She gave me a sharp look. “Look, there’s no need to get snotty.” Then she sighed deeply, shifted in her chair, and took a sip of her drink. “They’re going to cancel my show.”

  Every weekday morning for the last twelve years, from nine to ten a.m., the local talk radio station broadcast The Mother Galina Psychic Hour. People called in with questions—“Should I quit my job?” and “Is he the man for me?” and “What color should I paint my house?”—and my mother, working with a team of what she termed “spirit advisers,” answered them, often so deftly and probingly the caller would break into tears. “What you need to do,” she said several times a week, “is get to the real question.” She was very, very good. And she was right: I couldn’t believe they’d cancel the show.

  “Why would they do a thing like that?”

  My mother shook her head. Her earrings, fat chunks of amber with ants in them, swung back and forth. They matched her hair, which was an extraordinary brassy color. “They say they want a change, that it’s been twelve years and I’ve answered everyone’s questions. They’re thinking of putting a shrink in that spot. A shrink! What do they think I do?”

  “Well, they’re making a big mistake.”

  “Obviously, Naomi.” She stared into her drink again, brooding. “I’m the only reason people listen to that godawful Morning Show. Do they think anyone wants to hear those two buffoons complain about town council meetings?”

  I took a long slug of my wine—it was terrible, like cough medicine—and when I put my cup back down again, I noticed that there was a newspaper sticking out of my mother’s tote bag. It was neat, tightly folded. She must have picked it up on her way over and not had time to read it.

  “Look, there’s Troy,” said my mother, waving. “Troy! Over here!”

  Troy smiled, waved back, but didn’t move. He was talking to a young woman in a blue blouse.

  “Lecher,” said my mother. “Hold on a minute, I’ve got to talk to him.” She pushed her chair back and struggled up. She’d been having trouble getting around lately: a bunion operation last year, and all that extra weight.

  When she was gone I slid out her newspaper and flattened it out on our table. Wind ruffled the pages, and I weighted them with our drinks. This was the headline:

  BONES FOUND IN TOWN OF WALLAMEE:

  CRIME OR ARCHAEOLOGY?

  POLICE INVESTIGATING

  And there it was: a full-color picture of the clearing by the lake. A big yellow earthmover, like the one I’d followed that morning, was parked next to a pile of rocks and dirt. Some official-looking men were standing around, not far from the old falling-down barn. I brushed my fingers over it, disbelieving.

  “That Troy!” said my mother, back already. “You’d think he…”

  I looked up at her, startled.

  “Wh
at’s the matter?” she said quickly.

  I looked down again, took the drinks off the newspaper, and began to fold it back up. I hadn’t had a chance to see whether the skeleton was a woman, or a man, or what. “Hmm?”

  She pulled her chair out, eased herself back into it, and smiled. It was a long, knowing, absolutely devastating smile. My mother had built her career on the effects of this look; it could make you think, She knows me better than anyone in the world. It could make you want to give her everything in your wallet. Of course, I was used to it. I had spent my life steeling myself against it.

  “You look,” she said, still smiling, “exactly like you did that day you came home from school and had wet your pants. Do you remember that? You told me you’d fallen into a puddle, but oh, the look on your face!”

  “I did fall into a puddle,” I told her, outraged.

  Her smile wavered just slightly. “Oh, Naomi, honestly! Why did you look so ashamed, then? I’m your mother, for God’s sake; you don’t have to fib.”

  I shook my head, refusing to say another thing on the subject. Suddenly I was beginning to doubt my own version of events; it seemed possible that I had lied all those years ago and had fooled myself into believing otherwise. I guzzled my wine, furious.