Thereafter

by Anthony Schmitz

  She cannot resist opening the door to her bedroom. She stops at the threshold and looks inside, perplexed.

  “What is this?” she asks. “Where is the bed? The dresser? What are these …”

  “Paintings. They’re my paintings, Mrs. Brimsley. This is my studio now.”

  “They seem so hazy. I’m afraid my eyes aren’t what they were. Are they all the same painting, dear?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “But very similar.”

  “I’ve been trying to get it right.”

  “You’ve had the luxury of time, then.” Too much time, my mother suspects. She knows that trap. She takes hold of Mag’s arm again. The girl is all skin and bones. Hardly more herself than fog dressed up. My mother pulls her down the hall.

  They pass the doors to the nursery and to the boys’ room. Long ago, as light from the setting sun poured through the hall window, the varnished maple doors shone as if they were made of gold.

  “Tell me what you want and I’ll get it for you,” Mag says.

  If only, my mother tells herself. “It’s not what I want. It’s something you must see.”

  Despite the cold, my mother’s brow gleams with sweat. “I’m not sure this is a good idea,” Mag says.

  “Let me be the judge of that. Come on.” My mother tugs Mag toward the attic steps.

  “No,” Mag says. “It’s too steep.”

  My mother ignores her. “Have you been up there?” she asks. She remembers the day she asked James to seal the room. Without demanding any further explanation, he humored her request. He gathered up his hammer and a handful of four-inch spikes. She could still hear the hammer ringing against the thick nails. She had been forced to leave the house. The noise chased her for blocks as she hurried down the street.

  “We thought we had squirrels,” Mag says. “We had to open the door.”

  “Good. Then you pulled the nails. There’s no need to apologize.”

  “I found the things you had packed away. Clarissa’s things.”

  She had not meant to use my name.

  “I should have given them to someone else. Just given them away.”

  “Who would have taken them?” Mag says without thinking.

  “Oh, people couldn’t afford such pretty feelings back then,” my mother replies with more certainty than she feels. She might not have taken a dead child’s belongings herself. She would not have.

  My companions follow and watch, but say nothing.

  I know what is behind the attic door but still I have the sense that I am holding my breath. I wonder if my mother will live long enough to reach her goal.

  Her heart bangs against her frail ribs.

  Mag puts her arm around her, holding her up “You should sit. We should go back down.”

  “Help me up these stairs,” my mother replies, even though she doubts how much help the girl can be.

  “It’s too narrow,” Mag says. “I can’t get beside you.”

  “Then stay behind. Don’t let me fall.”

  The stairs are so steep that my mother climbs them like a ladder. She pulls herself upward with her hands. Her legs shake with the effort of supporting her weight.

  When she reaches the trapdoor she realizes she is stuck. She doesn’t have the strength to push it open. “You’ll have to help me,” she calls to Mag. She moves aside as much as she is able, so the girl can slip past.

  She feels Mag’s breath against her cheek. Mag presses against her for an instant. My mother fights back the urge to clutch her, to pull her to her breast.

  Mag throws her shoulder against the door. The hinges groan. A cold draft falls on them. My mother coughs as dust blows in her face.

  She pulls herself to the attic floor and rests there on her hands and knees.

  My mother remembers scrubbing the planks. She brought up pail after pail of water, hurling the gray waste out the attic windows. When the floors were finally clean and dry, she allowed James to bring the carefully-sealed boxes upstairs.

  Now the dust stirs with each breath.

  A windowless gable juts from each side of the attic. My mother steadies herself against the brick chimney and waits for her heart to stop beating so furiously.

  ≈

  Mag had studied the pictures of my mother, dreamed of her, talked to the woman she imagined her to be. Had loved her, for everything the photos revealed and implied. For her confidence and easy grace, for her beauty, for the spell she cast on her husband, for the simple focus of her life. And now, in the flesh, Mag finds Audrey Brimsley frightening. Her insistence on dragging herself up the attic stairs is beyond language or reason, like those salmon that return to their ancestral river to die, growing more distorted with each mile, until, finally, they are monsters.

  Mag wants assurance that her husband will remain at her side, that her baby will be safe, that she herself will not live alone and forgotten. She does not want this, whatever it is.

  So much of her life has been an argument with fear. That high dive into unknown water. Her painting, in its way. And more that she has never dared tell Wald, because she fears she will shock his conscience. The joyrides in stolen cars with her thuggish high school boyfriend. The routine shoplifting in her teens. All the small battles in which she had dared disaster to embrace her, then felt that she triumphed when it did not.

  What comes from her father now is like a low animal groan.

  “Take my arm,” my mother insists, standing shakily on the rough attic floorboards. Mag does not want to touch her. But my mother’s eyes blaze, as if to say that she will find a way to get what she wants, regardless. Mag does as she is told.

  ≈

  The light is from the windows at either end of the attic. The gabled roof is just high enough for my mother to enter without stooping.

  “Keep a hand on me now,” she says. “If I fall they’ll never get me out.”

  “What are you doing?” Mag says in return.

  My mother does not bother to answer, except to say, “Help me down.”

  Mag’s eyes slowly adjust to the gloom.

  “Here,” says my mother. “Come here and look.” She points into the corner.

  Mag sees a gray box, hidden between the rafters.

  “Hold on to me,” my mother whispers. Mag reaches out to steady her. My mother’s knees creak as she settles against the planks. Mag kneels beside her.

  “Do you see what it is? Do you see?”

  A once-white kerchief covers a shoe box done up like a small altar. Candles stand at either side. A picture of me, now curled and yellowed, leans against the rough roof planks. The rattle is there between the candles.

  My mother picks it up and blows the dust from it. She shakes it softly. Beads clatter inside the painted tin.

  “That’s it,” Mag says.

  “Of course it is. It’s been here all along.”

  “I held it in my hand.”

  My mother passes the rattle to Mag. “I couldn’t think what else to do. I tried to bury it. I had a little ceremony. I couldn’t tell James. I couldn’t tell anyone. It seemed so necessary then. So foolish now.”

  She had manufactured her own misery. She feels Mag is determined to do the same. James had never left her. He was true to her, while she was true to her belief in the importance of her own messy thoughts. She had left him without bothering to go anywhere. She had thrown in with the dead, she tells herself. The dead instead of the living.

  Mag turns the rattle in her hand. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do,” she says.

  “This is all the past. It has nothing to do with you.”

  “Then why did I see it?”

  My mother finds herself growing impatient. “What if you did not?”

  “But I felt it so clearly. The same as now.”

  “Does that make a difference? To your child? To your husband?”

  “I can’t ignore it.”

  James’ warning comes to her again. “You are flattering yourself.” />
  “What do you mean?”

  “Put that back.” My mother points to the rattle. Words are not enough. Her means must be more blunt. The gulf between the complexity of her feelings — the love, guilt and fear — and the remorseless facts of the world cannot be conveyed with a few words, or by pointing simply to her ridiculous shrine. The dead, she tells herself, are only dead. The thought strikes her with such clarity, such force, that I expect to disappear at that moment, to be drawn finally into whatever comes next. I feel at last that my work, the work of six decades, must surely be done. Yet the moment passes and I am still here. I don’t understand what can remain for me.

  Mag sets the toy reluctantly on Audrey’s altar. She removes the necklace rescued from her great-grandmother’s grave. The cheap diamonds manage to sparkle, even in the attic gloom.

  “What are you doing?” Audrey asks.

  “I can leave something, too.”

  “It was foolishness, that’s what I’m saying.”

  Mag arranges the necklace around the picture.

  “I don’t know that I’d do that,” my mother warns her again.

  “Do you think…?”

  “Oh, do what you like.” She hopes the girl will not regret the loss too deeply.

  “Leave me alone,” my mother says. “Just for a moment . Wait on the stairway. I’ll be right there.”

  ≈

  Audrey reaches behind the kerchief-covered box. “Still there,” she says to herself, putting a hand on the box of matches she left behind so long ago. She strikes one against a roofing nail that juts through the plank above. Amazingly, it lights.

  I look out from the old photograph, fat-cheeked and solemn. My mother thinks to say good-bye, then decides against it. She puts the flame to the candles on her makeshift altar.

  She pushes the lit candles closer to the roof planks. Then she hurries, inasmuch as she is able, to the stairwell where Mag waits.

  “Close the door,” she says. “We’re done here now.”

  She leans against Mag’s slender back as they make their way down the steps.

  ≈

  In the parlor my mother falls exhausted onto the sofa. She has no idea how long this last journey through her house has taken. The exact meaning of time has rarely been clear to her within its walls. She could set a timer to boil some eggs and manage to recall them only after they had burned in the dry pan. All that would soon be, once and for all, the past. Hennessey and Wald look at her expectantly. She ignores them. She will need her energy again soon enough.

  “I’ll make us a pot of tea,” Mag says. She escapes to the kitchen before they can turn their curiosity on her.

  She leans against the counter, waiting for the water in the kettle to boil. The grease-stained kettle with its scorched wooden handle had belonged to my mother, as had the table and chairs and all the rest of it. None of it is truly Mag’s. Even if this house is speaking, she wonders, is it speaking to her? Had that thought ever been anything except romantic nonsense, a sales pitch by a clever agent? Mag wonders if she has merely been talking to herself.

  The water boils. Steam pours from the spout. She looks out the window and notices her neighbor, Al Worth, head turned skyward, staring slack-jawed at her roof.

  ≈

  “Hold on, hold on, I’ll open it,” Wald grumbles. “You don’t have to knock it down.”

  Worth lays into the door again as Wald reaches for the knob. “Jesus,” Wald says. “What’s the problem?”

  “The problem? I’ll show you the God damn problem.“

  “Calm down, Al. Watch the language, okay? We’ve got company.”

  “Yeah, not for long.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Worth drags Wald out the door by the arm. When they reach the yard he points to the attic. The front window has already popped from the heat. Black smoke pours into the clear winter sky.

  “Maybe you’re planning a weenie roast, excuse me for interrupting.”

  “The fire extinguisher…” Wald begins.

  “Spit on it, that might work. Or maybe you should just get your ass out of there.”

  ≈

  People come from all directions, drawn by the sirens and the smoke. On the roof a trio of firefighters hack at his house with axes. Wald wonders if such large holes are strictly necessary, not that it matters anymore. Another crew trains a hose on the flames that leap from the second floor.

  “Like a fucking box of matches,” Worth marvels. “You ever seen anything burn so fast?”

  “Thanks for mentioning it.”

  “You been working up there? Electrical, maybe?”

  “No, nothing.”

  “One of your squirrels then. Chewed through the wires. Must have got under the floor boards. Should have picked the little bastards off with the pistol. That’s what your bleeding heart gets you.”

  “Yeah,” Wald says. “I suppose that’s it.”

  He looks past Worth, toward the psychic, my mother and Mag. He wonders whether and, if so, how he will ask Mag if she and the old lady burned down his house.

  And what will he do if they have?

  ≈

  Hennessey pulls the shawl over my mother’s neck. She is back in her wheelchair, staring intently at the flames. “Should I move you to the car?” Hennessey asks.

  “I’m not leaving yet.”

  “A blanket then. I have one in the trunk. I’ll be right back.”

  She doesn’t argue. Her feet are cold. Had she known, she would have worn her boots instead of her black shoes. Certainly she would have put on something other than nylons and a thin rayon dress. But when she left the Sheltering Arms she had not known that this is what the day would come to. She most certainly had not.

  The curtains dance in the windows with the heat. The smoke and flames create odd shadows. Well. That will soon be over. There will be a fire-blackened hole in the ground.

  The firemen give up on the house, concentrating instead on drowning the cinders that drifted toward the surrounding homes.

  My mother looks over at Mag, hoping to catch her eye. As they fled the house, Mag had grabbed that old photo album. My mother snatched it from her hands and threw it on the sofa, declaring, “Let it be.” she said. This was her battle, and she believed it was nearly over.

  She would have stopped the fire engines from arriving, had she been able. As the smoke issued from the broken windows she felt liberated. Purple, gray, black — all the colors of a bruise, drawn so violently upward. She catches a view of something, a movement in the window, barely visible through the smoke.

  A curtain bursting into flame, or paper caught in the fire’s draft. It could have been a thousand things. She tells herself she will give it no further thought. She tells herself she is finished forever with that.

  Mag crouches at the side of her wheel chair, her hand on my mother’s arm. They both stare at the blaze. My mother does not wait for Mag to ask the obvious question. “If you must have a trap, make one of your own. Don’t borrow mine.”

  “It was our house.”

  “You bought it, dear. But it was mine. From top to bottom, it was mine.”

  ≈

  Like the smell of smoke, the three of us linger.

  You’re still here? Mrs. Hennessey asks me.

  Of course, of course, why wouldn’t I be?

  I only thought… You poor dear, it had the feel of an exorcism, I must say.

  Yes. Well.

  I cannot stop my thoughts. Surely my mother should move on. Should have moved on half a century ago. Should have restarted her life in earnest and left me behind. Yet it was hard not to want just the opposite. To make such a claim on the life of another for all those years; it has been in equal parts horrifying and intoxicating. And now…

  It’s one thing to leave, Mag’s father observes. It’s another to be driven off.

  You’re the expert.

  Please, Mrs. Hennessey. Not now.

  Certainly, darling. I just
wonder, what will you do?

  What are any of us supposed to do? Jack Marault asks, a note of panic in his voice.

  I have no idea. I never have. What we please, I suppose.

  But it seems… Forgive me for being so blunt, dear, that you’re… Not welcome sounds harsh, yet how else …

  I wonder what comes next. A further remove from the living? Nothing, in the most thorough sense of the word?

  There is no one to tell me, and I have no idea.

  Chapter Twenty Three

  In the heat of the Atlanta summer, Hennessey stands on the balcony of Barbara’s apartment, looking over the verdant spread of Peachtree Park. As an act of atonement he all but gave his mother’s house to Mag and Wald. He left with hardly more than his clothing and his bank book. Hennessey called Barbara only after he arrived in Atlanta. He knows no one else here.

  Before he left a few hundred of his friends and partners held a party for him at The Mirage. Dimici and his wife invited him for what they said was to be a quiet supper. As he entered a darkened back room, Dimici flipped the light switch and revealed the until-then silent mob. Hennessey’s eyes filled with tears. “So, Mr. Psychic,” Dimici declared as he embraced Hennessey. “You didn’t know about this, did you?”

  “No,” he lied. “No, I never guessed.” His tears came with the understanding that he would miss neither this place nor his obligations. The endless demands to make order out of the mess of life for his friends and their friends. The hubris it required, no matter the veneer of humility he attempted to glue over it. Then to undertake all that from a home that could never be cleansed of his mother and the things she had left behind. If the problem were only the mountains of bric-brac, he could solve it in a few hours with a dumpster and some hired help. But it went much deeper than that.

  Somewhere into his third or fourth scotch that night, he wondered if he defined a certain type of failure, having constructed a life that could, in the fullness of his years, so easily be left. Through the night he heard his friends and associates wonder how they would replace him. Who would find the things they lost? Who would set them back to right?