Thereafter

by Anthony Schmitz

  Mrs. Brimsley’s daughter, I inform her. Clarissa.

  She doesn’t have a daughter. This is a trick. It’s a dream.

  I wish there were some other way to put it, but nothing comes to mind. I’m dead, I’m afraid, dear, just like you. She didn’t mention me, that’s all.

  Mrs. Hennessey takes a moment to turn over this information. It’s not enough she kills me? That doesn’t make her happy? She has to send a ghost after me?

  Let me explain, I begin, knowing that what I have to say will be neither brief nor comforting.

  Chapter Sixteen

  “Take my picture,” Mag demands. She hands Wald the old Brownie. She keeps James Brimsley’s camera on the bedroom dresser now, always loaded with film.

  “Who’s going to develop the pictures?” Wald asks. She is naked. He can count the ribs under her pale skin.

  “I’ll worry about that later. It’s for our album.”

  He does as he is told. He frames her in the viewfinder and says, “Okay, smile,” but she doesn’t.

  “Can you tell I’m pregnant?” she asks.

  “A little,” Wald says. Not really.

  She puts a hand to her breast, as if she might feel it grow. She has a child’s body and that heart-stopping face. Wald has never quite grown accustomed to the disconcerting effect.

  “You don’t want to admit it,” Mag says.

  “That’s not true.”

  He isn’t sure. Actually, she is right.

  The house isn’t ready. He doubts that Mag is. Her life for as long as he has known her has been directed at her painting. Which is to say, toward herself. Her thoughts spread onto canvas, with no concern, so far as he can tell, for whether the paintings will ever be sold, or, for that matter, whether anyone will ever see them. It is a degree of self-regard he cannot fully comprehend. If their baby is to be a creation of the same order, then he pities the child.

  The harshness of this thought surprises him.

  Mag looks over her bare shoulder at her reflection. The mirror, left behind by the Brimsleys, is scratched and tarnished.

  She turns and gave him a peck on the cheek. “I don’t care if you’re lying,” she says.

  “You’re reminding me of how much we have to do.”

  “I can help,” she says. “There’s no reason I can’t. I’m not sick. I could paint, for instance.”

  “I can paint the walls, Mag. That’s the least of it.”

  She pauses to look at herself again in Mrs. Brimsley’s mirror. Her shape is changing, even if Wald can’t see it. A permanent blush has settled on her cheeks and spread across her chest. She pushes her hair back over her shoulders. She feels suddenly light-headed.

  Wald gives her a quizzical look. “Are you okay?”

  Mag isn’t sure. She sits on the edge of the bed. She closes her eyes. She feels slightly dizzy. Wald pulls the covers over her and slowly rubs her temples, his thick fingers against her pale skin. Her breathing slows. He thinks she is sleeping, which is not true. Her disorderly thoughts are not quite a dream. She sees the Brimsleys, my mother and me and my lovesick father. There, too, is Mag’s father, together with us on a sunny sprawl of prairie. We appear to be the best of friends, gathered on a blanket set in the tall grass. The adults talk with no sense of her presence, until, finally, Mag’s father turns her way. He smiles, winks, and blows her a kiss. She hears two words. She is not sure who has spoken them.

  When Mag awakens it is with the sense that something has been delivered to her. A blessing, a commandment, an inspiration. A bit of each, she guesses. In any case, she understands what she must do.

  She opens her eyes and says to Wald with sudden certainty, “I’ll paint the walls. In the hallways and the dining room. I’ll take care of that.”

  “I can get out the sprayer. I’ll be done before you’d get started.”

  “We’re not talking about the same thing.”

  “Walls. We’re talking about walls.”

  “We’re not talking about the same thing.”

  ≈

  Like the Greeks and the Church scholars and most artists who ever stumbled the Earth, I wonder about the wheres and whys of inspiration. Here’s the bad news: I know as much as you. If there are muses, they fly under my radar. If there is a divine entity passing out plot lines, then He, She or It does so with extreme discretion.

  Yet Mag awakes with a clear sense that she has been spoken to, that the voice came not from the spray of neurochemicals within her head but from beyond. She accepts the possibility of such communication, and has no doubt about the message itself.

  Mag concludes that Gloria Taberna, that chihuahua of real estate, was right. The house speaks to her. The idea that sweeps over Mag is fully-formed.

  Wald will complain, of course. Morbid, he’ll say. Won’t help them sell the place. That’s the point of fixing this ruin, isn’t it? Buy, fix, sell. Buy, fix, sell. Until their pockets are so stuffed with money and their surroundings so opulent that they can’t be bothered to move again.

  She is done with that; done even though they have barely started. She will not be leaving this house.

  Who was it that spoke to her? Audrey? Her father? She isn’t sure. Anyway, it hardly matters. The important point is that she has been given a direction, an outline for a body of work, work inspired by the same desire that got the pyramids built, or initials carved into a park bench, or paintings scrawled on cave walls. The same impulse that led my mother to fill albums full of photographs. The reason why Mag would do the same. An unrealistic, irresistible desire, summed up in two words:

  Remember me.

  She will do as well as she is able. She doubts that she has a choice.

  ≈

  Mag decides that her painting will start in the hallway. Audrey and James on the prairie. Audrey in her wedding gown. The pregnant Audrey, beaming, her long dress caught by the breeze. Then Audrey with me in her arms. I will hold my rattle like a scepter. Her father will come last.

  Mag has not told Wald about me. By her reckoning he does not need to know. She knows what will happen: he will pull on that face of common sense that is so familiar to her. He will tell her, Honey, that’s what babies used to do. They got flu and they died. They got appendicitis and they died. Of course that is what babies used to do, before penicillin and x-rays and everything else. They died and were replaced by others who were no more likely to survive. She knows that.

  People will say the same thing fifty years from now, one hundred years from now. That’s what babies used to do. And they might be talking about her child. There will never be enough facts to fill the pit of ignorance. There will never be enough treatments to keep every child alive. She thought now to fill that hole as people always had, with art and prayer. If Wald feels obliged to call it superstition, well, then let him. She will make an offering to the past and hope to charm safe passage to the future.

  She says to Wald, “Hold me. Just hold me now. Later I’ll explain.”

  He draws her to himself, his arms crossing beneath her breasts. As he looks at their reflection in Mrs. Brimsley’s mirror he is reminded that they are not alone. Just beneath his hands, within Mag’s wiry body, is their baby.

  That night she searches her dresser drawers from her great-grandmother’s necklace, which she last wore at her wedding. Without stopping to think through her reasons, she clasps the piece around her neck and leaves it there.

  ≈

  The next morning Mag draws an outline on the wall in pencil. When Wald comes home they eat a hurried supper and spend the rest of the night together, each at their separate tasks.

  Day after day passes in the same manner.

  Wald starts on the windows. A half dozen of the panes are cracked, the windows having slammed shut when the sash cords broke. Wald chisels loose the rock-hard window putty, reglazes, fishes out the filthy sash weights and installs bright new cotton cord. Later he will scour the lead-poisoned sills. Only then will he begin to paint.

 
Tedium, defined — the usual business of trading the present for the future. At least they will profit from his labor, he tells himself.

  Someday in the not-so-distant future, he will be forced to sand Mag’s portraits smooth and hide them behind a two or three coats of paint. No one wants a house where the former owners stare you down each time you walk in the door. No one wants to live with ghosts.

  He argued with her briefly, until he saw there was no point. Once she made up her mind, protest was a waste of breath. She chose this particular house and they bought it. She wanted a child and they would have one. Now she would make her hall of ghosts.

  He watches as she works, spies on her as she tucks a stray hair behind her ear or pokes with her tongue at the corner of her mouth, like a child.

  Of Mag’s gift he is both resentful and bewitched. Her abilities are, practically speaking, no help to them at all. She spends more on brushes and paint than she will ever make from sales. Her portraits in the hallway will be a step backward, damage to be undone. Still it seems to him like sorcery. Nothing more than a pencil sketch on a wall, the outline for a painting, and already he feels another presence in their home. Mag’s Mrs. Brimsley: sexuality given form. Her husband: devotion. And that baby? To him my big eyes are so matter-of-fact, so apparently wise, that he can hardly think of me as a child. When he turns to work on his windows he feels me staring at him, taking his measure.

  Mag, he thinks, is so engrossed, so…

  Happy is not the word.

  So taken over. By this piece of work, by their baby, he tells himself enviously.

  As he repairs his windows, one after another, he feels like a mule plodding dumbly on an empty road.

  ≈

  Mag speaks softly to Audrey as she paints the sun that shines on my mother’s face.

  Can you feel the warmth?

  And she believes that she hears this response: You have no idea. I could throw off my dress and run through the grass.

  Not in my hallway.

  What’s there to stop me?

  Wald would object.

  He’ll do anything for you.

  “What?” Wald says from the next room.

  “Nothing. Talking to myself.”

  As the days pass, Mag discovers that my mother has much more to say. She makes no effort to explain to Wald. The attempt would only trivialize her experience. He would concoct an explanation. She could argue or agree. Neither appealed to her.

  With Wald it is best if she sticks to the basics. The price of paint. The best way to clean brushes. Where to toss her thinner. She made her bargain with him years ago and now has no choice but to live with it.

  Mag finishes her painting of my mother on her wedding day. She has spent an unjustifiable amount of time filling in the lace of my mother’s dress, rendering the faint pattern just so. She struggles over the fall of light on Audrey’s breast, the reflection in James’ eye. She knows she is dawdling. She is not certain she should begin what must come next — her version of that last photo of me, where I hold the rattle in my fat little fist as my mother squeezes me to her breast.

  Is it better if I let her rest? Mag asks. Her pencil is poised before the wall.

  That’s not my decision, she hears my mother reply.

  You must have an opinion.

  I thought about the girl too long.

  Mag struggles with my eyes, with the set of my lips. My expression, she feels, is so elusive, such a complicated combination of knowledge and trust. How will she ever get it right?

  You know, dear, that nothing can replace the child herself. What Mag takes to be my mother’s voice whispers in her ear.

  Mag thinks to ask about that phrase in the obituary. An accident in the home: what could that mean?

  She hears my mother sigh. She hears me cry for a heartbeat before silence settles on her again. Mag sets her brush on the top step. She steps down from her ladder. She has to catch her breath.

  ≈

  I suppose I should feel flattered. After all these years, to serve as inspiration. But when it comes to art, even the dead have opinions. I object to the simplification of my life. The artist gives you a picture of a hive and spares you all the buzzing, all the crawling and wriggling. So it is with this portrait of me. To seize upon an image left from my short life and claim that it shows what existence is truly about, to see me and my mother as a light shining in the darkness, well, by that we are made into something other than ourselves.

  Not that I would rather see myself honestly presented. The noble impulses are so few, the banal thoughts so numerous, the shameful too often at hand. People spend their lives learning how not appear as something other than slavering monsters. Why spoil all that hard work?

  The dead, I admit, are hard to please.

  ≈

  Mag makes a pot of tea for herself and Wald. He asks again if she should be painting. The fumes, the ladder, a woman in her condition: all the objections she expects, none of which matter to her. She will not stop. Not until she is done with the hallway, certainly. Not until she has completed all that she has sketched out. She will not set it aside. She is not sure she dares.

  She believes she has received direction. From where, or why, she can’t say. There is no point in getting stuck on that. Wald, if he knew, would insist that it is all in her head. Of course it is all in her head. Her painting has always been about the inability to see clearly and accurately. If it were possible to blow away the fog in her paintings, if it were possible to reveal those hazy gardens, there would be flowers, yes, but also the spiders and snakes, concealed by the fog, buried in shadow, so obscure that year after year they go unnoticed, seen only by Mag herself.

  For years she awakened in her dark room with the sense that her father was watching her. She chose to believe that he was thinking of her at that moment, focusing his attention so raptly that his thoughts traveled to her from wherever he might be. If this were nothing except self-deception, still it was better than the alternative, which was to accept that she had been abandoned and forgotten.

  Mag believes she has entered a similar realm with me and my mother. She believes that our thoughts, our longings, were so powerful that they now exist outside the moment in which they were captured by my father’s camera. They have infiltrated the wood and plaster of this old house, from which she is now exhuming them. By Mag’s thinking this is a service, which bears a price, which is her baby’s safety. She will do her part. She expects us to do the same.

  Mag and Wald finish their tea. Wald kisses her neck. He says softly, “Let’s quit in a half hour or so. We’ve been at this long enough.”

  “Maybe,” she says. “Let me see where I’m at.”

  ≈

  She gets back on her ladder. Her legs ache from balancing on the rungs. Paint dribbles down her hand and runs inside her sweatshirt. She reaches for a spot high in the corner.

  Later she can not describe exactly what happened. The ladder slipped. She lost her balance. It is almost as if she was pushed.

  She is aware of her body in space, of the ladder skittering away from her. Her palette clatters against the wall. She twists and falls on her shoulder. Her head bangs to the floor. She feels Wald’s footsteps as he runs to her, calling out her name.

  She balances on the edge of consciousness. Not unpleasantly so, for she feels no pain. As her eyes close she notices a baby’s rattle beside her hand. It is the rattle from her painting. She is not surprised. She reaches out and grabs it. To Mag the handle feels warm, as if it has just fallen from someone’s hand.

  ≈

  Murmuring, footsteps. Someone pushes open Mag’s eyelid and shines a light in her face.

  “What?” she says.

  “Don’t move her.”

  “Mag.” Wald’s voice, but from a distance.

  “Sir, stand back for a moment, please.”

  “You’re fine, honey. You’re going to be fine.”

  She spots him, stuck behind all the men in uniforms. Medic
s, cops, firemen. Where have they all come from?

  “I didn’t want to take any chances,” he says.

  “Who…” She tries to sit up. Someone pushes her gently back down.

  “Just bear with us for a few minutes here, ma’am.”

  They track in snow, which melts in dirty puddles on the floor. She wants them to leave. If someone would only cover her with her comforter, she will be fine. She wants to return to where she had been, though she can’t quite remember where that was.

  The red lights from their trucks flash through the windows. “Okay, let’s sit you up.” The fireman who held her down now lifts her effortlessly. She sees the ladder tipped on its side, a smear of paint on the wall.

  Mag remembers the rattle. She wants to find it again, before one of these giants crushes it without thinking. She glances around herself, pats the floor.

  “Maybe we sat her up a little too soon,” one of them says.

  “Where’s that rattle, Wald?”

  “What?”

  “There was a rattle.”

  “I don’t know, Mag. We’ll look later, okay?“

  “We’ve got to find it now.”

  “Mag…” he says.

  “I was holding it.”

  “I don’t know what…

  “Maybe we ought to take her in.” One of the cops looks at Mag dubiously. “Get a doc to take a look.”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” Mag says adamantly.

  “That’s a good bump on the noggin, ma’am. You don’t want to take chances.”

  “I’m not leaving now.”

  One of the medics looks to Wald, who shrugs. He recognizes Mag’s expression. She isn’t going anywhere, not unless they drag her off.

  “Okay,” the medic says. “You got our advice. We can’t force you. Tell you what, buddy, keep an eye on her. Wake her every few hours, take a look. Dilation, nausea, anything unusual, get her to the ER.”

  “Don’t let them step on it,” Mag tells Wald.

  The medics gather up their equipment and file out the door. Wald sits beside her. The floor is littered with latex gloves and puddles of melted snow.