The bed frame was a cheap metal contraption and scraped against the floor loudly as soon as we began to move against each other. She squeezed my arm and I went still for a moment, perhaps giving the bed an opportunity to cooperate.
“Okay,” she said. “Sorry.”
To avoid more noise, I tried to keep my movements slow and soft but thirty seconds later I forgot myself, and the bed belched so enormously against the floor that Annie slapped my back. We were both very quiet. Her eyes flicked left, toward the door, as she listened for any stirrings in the rest of the house. An odd whispery giggle escaped her then, and she cupped her hand over her own mouth.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “You probably think this is insane, don’t you?”
“Maybe we shouldn’t be in the bed?”
We migrated to a rug on the floor, her on top of me now, and finished there. Annie disappeared to the bathroom for a few minutes, and then I did the same. She didn’t indicate that she wanted me to leave, so I slid back into bed again alongside her.
—
I WOKE UP THE NEXT MORNING to find Annie sitting cross-legged on a yoga mat under the circular window. In her hands was my phone. Realizing I was awake, she blushed and offered it to me quickly.
“I’m not snooping. Your phone buzzed, and I thought it was mine, and then I clicked on it and . . .”
She showed me the screen. There my heart was beating, electric blue and red.
“I haven’t looked at anything else, I swear,” she said. “There are such things as boundaries, I do realize. I support boundaries. I have a friend, she goes through her husband’s emails and his texts religiously. Like, every night. She doesn’t even suspect he’s having an affair. She says she just likes to know who he’s talking to all day. She says it’s a form of intimacy.”
“Feel free to snoop. I’ve got nothing to hide.”
“Does watching your heart on here make you feel more or less mortal? Be honest.”
“A little bit of both.”
“I don’t think I could stand it. I think you should delete it.”
“Well, I sort of need the device.”
“Not the device, just this, the app.”
She stood, tossed my phone into my lap, and went into the bathroom. The shower kicked on. I sat up in bed, feeling the pleasant breeze of the fan on my face. I was naked under the sheets. Already I could hear noise downstairs: laughter, news radio, pans. The smell of coffee swirled into the room. I followed her into the bathroom naked, as if to prove to myself—and to her—that I wasn’t feeling modest, that I wasn’t afraid of her seeing me naked in the daytime, and closed the door behind me. She didn’t seem to mind my being there, so I sat down on the toilet lid. The bathroom was very small, nearly closet-sized, and I was maybe one foot from the shower.
“Let’s just say, hypothetically, that ghosts exist,” I said.
“Hypothetically.”
“Right, hypothetically. The voice in the recording—it’s real. Wouldn’t that indicate to you that we may not simply disappear when we die? That we are more than our bodies?”
She considered this for a moment. “I’m not sure. It depends on what ghosts are, exactly. Because what if ghosts are more like cicada shells? Husks left behind when a person dies. Like an echo. Or maybe ghosts are visitors from the future. Time travel might be involved.” She laughed at herself. “I have no idea what I’m talking about, by the way. You do realize that, right?” She grabbed a springy white loofah hanging off the hot water nozzle and ran it quickly between her legs. The water glided down the glass in lazy sheets and splattered loudly at her feet.
Who was this incredible person? We’d only dated for three, maybe four months in high school. I don’t think we’d been in love back then—or had we? I’d been too young to recognize it, if we had been. It seemed possible to me that we were now, but I was trying to be careful not to overinflate any feelings I had for her. I had a tendency to overinflate.
What I really didn’t want was another Marlene situation. Marlene was the woman I’d been with for two years after college. We’d met at the wedding of a mutual friend. She was redheaded, freckled, and short, with large, flat breasts, a homebody but very extroverted and elegant when she needed to be, which was often since she was a director of marketing and advertising for Shula’s Chamber of Commerce. I’d fallen hard for Marlene, so hard that by the end of our second month, we’d moved into an apartment together, cosigned a lease. Unfortunately I began to cool on the relationship about three days later, though it took me more than a year to figure that out and another six months to extricate myself, which, in the end, I’d done somewhat passive-aggressively by buying a foreclosed property at auction outside the city limits, a house that I knew Marlene would hate. The fallout had been messy and protracted. She still lived in Shula, and I saw her from time to time, though we hardly said much more to each other than hello. She was married now, to a contractor, with two sons.
Ever since Marlene I’d been wary to trust too fully in what I felt at the beginning of any new relationship. And yet here I was, moon-eyed, watching Annie shower, entertaining a crazy idea that maybe she should just give up her house hunt and come live with me instead in my foreclosure.
She wrapped a towel around her waist and stepped out of the shower onto the white mat, wiping her feet dry with little quick kicks. Then she shimmied the towel-wrap up snug under her armpits and opened her medicine cabinet. I relished each of these little maneuvers, much as I had her chewing gum wrapper routine all those years ago. I couldn’t believe that I was here, that we’d slept together.
I left the bathroom to give her some space and to put on my clothes. The unpacked boxes were stacked along the wall between a dresser and the door. The top box was open. Peering inside, I saw photographs in identical black frames. I studied these photos as I buttoned my shirt. There, in one, I saw a younger, fleshier Annie, her hair long and braided over her bare shoulders. She was wearing a strapless bikini. Beside her was a man with thick blond hair and a muscular body. He had aviator sunglasses over his eyes, and his arm was wrapped around her waist. He made appearances in other photographs, too. In another they were seated on a patio with other couples, a flaming dessert at the center of the table, a birthday celebration maybe.
“Anthony,” Annie said, standing behind me now in a T-shirt and shorts. Her face softened. “Be honest, does it freak you out I’m a widow?”
“I don’t think so, no.”
“I would understand if it did. You don’t have to pretend like it’s a nothing.”
The bedroom door jiggled, and my eyes darted over to it.
“Mom?” a soft, slightly irritated voice said.
“Be down in a minute!” Annie called.
We didn’t move again until we heard Fisher’s footsteps on the stairs.
“I don’t think you can come down for breakfast,” Annie said to me. “I hope you understand. I’ll get them to go for a walk before we sit down to eat, and you can make your escape then.”
She opened the door and then was gone.
I rarely had reason to visit Shula’s public library, but when I was unable to dig up anything very interesting online about the history of the restaurant—or, rather, about the people who’d lived in the house it now occupied—I stopped by one evening after work. Inside, White Hairs were sitting in all but a few of the plush reading chairs distributed across the main floor. They lounged and chatted. With fashionable reading glasses over their noses, they devoured Scandinavian detective novels and flicked at their tablets. They were very technologically adept, these old-timers, unwilling to slip into obsolescence. I could feel them watching me as I stood at a computer terminal and tried to navigate the library’s intranet.
Public records, newspaper articles, obituaries—I scoured them all for clues.
The house, I slowly pieced together, had originally be
en built in 1920, like many others in that neighborhood. In 1924, a man named Robert Lennox had bought it. Robert had been a prominent businessman in Shula. Numerous advertisements for his furniture store, Lennox & Sons, appeared in the Shula Journal between the years 1898 and 1929. I gathered that the store had been founded by Robert’s father. The same year he bought the house, Robert had married a woman named Clara Hopstead, also of Shula, and, as far as I could tell, they’d lived there for eight years—until 1932, when it was partially destroyed. In a fire, cause unknown. Robert died in the fire, but apparently Clara survived. According to the library’s records, her obituary appeared in the local newspaper in 1934, but for whatever reason that week’s paper was missing from the archive.
One of the librarians, a slim man with greasy dark hair, was eating a salad in an aluminum tray at his desk. I approached, explained the missing newspaper, and asked how I might track down a copy elsewhere.
He munched. “Missing?”
“Yes, not there.”
“Huh. Well, that’s odd, isn’t it? We don’t loan them out, typically. Could be we never had it to begin with.”
“Is there somewhere else I could look?”
“Oh,” he said, putting down his fork. “Well, I doubt it. We’re the only library in the country, I guarantee you, with old copies of the Shula Journal. Not exactly the New York Times, you know? If it’s not here, it’s nowhere. Sorry.” He smiled. “Why, you doing some family history? A genealogy project, I’ll bet.”
“Not quite,” I said.
“We have an archivist, part-time. She’s here once or twice a week. I can put you in touch. She might be of some assistance.”
“Thank you, please.”
He scribbled down her name and email address. That night I wrote her to ask if she might be able to help me track down more information about the deaths of Robert and Clara Lennox.
—
“SO THERE REALLY WAS A FIRE,” Annie said.
“Yes, but Clara didn’t die in it. She lived another year or two.”
“Meaning, she wouldn’t be haunting the house and it wouldn’t be her voice in the recording . . . ?”
I shrugged and took another bite of my cheeseburger. I had no idea of the rules of hauntings. We were driving around town on our lunch breaks, eating fast food as we checked out potential houses for Annie and her daughter. We entered a hilly suburb of very modest homes, squat midcentury two-bedrooms with just enough charm to not feel depressing. Around a curve we came to a For Sale sign, and Annie pulled into the driveway. No one appeared to be home, so we got out to have a look around. I walked up to the house, cupped my hands over my eyes, and peered through a front window into a dining room furnished with only a table and chairs.
“I don’t think anyone’s living here,” I said.
Annie nodded and unlatched a gate that led around to the back. The grass was a bit soggy, though it hadn’t rained in two or three days. A doghouse sat empty at the far corner of the yard. A frayed hammock sagged between two trees. Through the trees I could see a neighbor in his underwear collecting beer cans from his yard. Already I didn’t like the idea of Annie living here.
“We should probably go inside and make a recording, huh?” Annie said.
“Why?”
“So we can listen for any voices. I don’t want to share my house.”
“What would you do if you saw a ghost? A real one, I mean.”
Annie assumed a strange, slightly crouched pose, her hands in front of her face, as if warding away an evil spirit. With a deep, tremulous voice, she said, “I am harrowed with fear and wonder!”
“A play, right?”
“Hamlet, dummy. The king returns as an apparition in his battle armor, but he won’t say a word to anyone.” She raised her arms again, her eyes widening. “‘Stay!’” she yelled, taking two quick steps toward me. “‘Speak, speak.’” Her voice was pleading. She was looking into my eyes desperately. “‘I charge thee. Speak!’”
She bowed. Scene.
“Fear and wonder about sums it up for me these days,” I said. “Last night I had this dream where I couldn’t find any pencils for a test, but this morning I heard a report on the news about a man who walked into a movie theater, scooped out his eyeballs with a spoon, and threw them at the audience. Most people thought it was part of the movie. So you can understand if I get my nights and days confused sometimes. Nothing adds up. Sometimes I feel like maybe I’ve had a brain injury and didn’t realize it.”
“I think your brain is fine, Jim.”
“Okay, but the other day, I was sitting at a red light when I realized I was nodding yes and no to sex questions posed by a radio DJ. Everything feels inverted, turned around. At this very moment, a thousand satellites are circling the earth, and the government can use them to zoom all the way down to our arm hairs if they’re in the mood, and yet an entire airplane drops from the sky, and we can’t ever locate it again. People pay hundreds of dollars for a blanket that tells you the temperatures under the covers and above. Viral eye-dyes. Condoms that glow green when they detect STDs. Pills that cure baldness but make you limp. Pills that make you stiff but make you lose your hair. So why not ghosts? is my question. Why not the voice of a dead woman on a CD that sounds like a broken vacuum cleaner?”
Annie was listening to me with a wry expression that indicated she disapproved of what I was saying but was, for the most part, amused.
“You’re a bit of an oddball, huh?” she said finally.
She slid behind a row of hedges and stood up on her tiptoes, trying for a better view through a high window. I suggested we just call the realtor, but she demurred, asking instead that I give her a boost, which I did, my arms wrapped around her legs, the side of my face against her butt.
“What do you see?”
“Bedroom. Sort of small, though. Fisher wouldn’t like it.”
Annie slid back down through the hoop of my arms. We were very close together now, both of us quiet, uncertain. I kissed her, and her hands slid inside my suit jacket.
“Come over tonight,” I said.
“I promised Fisher we’d get dinner.”
“Bring her, too, then.”
Annie’s hands dropped away, and she took a step back.
“What?” I asked.
“Nothing.”
“You don’t want me to meet Fisher.”
“It’s not that I don’t want you to meet her.”
“What, then?”
The back door squeaked open, and we shoved our way out of the hedges. An older woman dressed in a long pink nightgown walked over to us with a very serious expression on her face.
“Sorry,” I said. “We didn’t think anyone was home.”
The woman said nothing.
“We like your house,” Annie added. “I’ll call the realtor and make a proper appointment. Very sorry.”
“There’s just too much yard,” the woman said. “Otherwise I’d never sell. I’d stay forever. “
“Understandable,” I said, already moving toward the gate.
Annie was two steps behind me.
“I raised two kids in this house,” the woman said. “For sentimental reasons, it will be difficult to leave, but I must.”
“I can imagine,” Annie said. “Sorry again.”
The gate popped shut behind us. We rushed back to the car and drove away. Both of us were quiet until we reached the end of the street, then Annie laughed. “It will be difficult to leave, but I must,” she said, drolly. “She was a ghost, right?”
I smiled. She drove me back to my office. Just before I got out of the car, she took my hand. “If you’re interested, you could check out this church on Sunday, the one I was telling you about. The Church of Search. Fisher will be there with me.”
“Is that what you want?”
“It�
�s up to you. Either way is fine with me.”
I nodded and told her I’d think about it.
We’d been to church together before, actually, many years earlier, as teenagers, when she’d dragged me to an overnight youth group lock-in. She’d been a hard-core Baptist back then, a borderline fundamentalist. After the doors had shut, we’d spread our sleeping bags out in the church gymnasium and played basketball until two a.m., at which point the group leaders rolled out a giant television and played us a movie called Afterward, Pt. 2. The film, I gathered, was the second installment in a series about the end of days. The main character was a female journalist who’d been an atheist until the events predicted—or at least hinted at—in the Book of Revelation began to actually happen: war, famine, disease. The production value was terrible, but its intended message was clear: the end times looked a lot like the world as it was today. Repent, the movie counseled, while there’s still time.
We were watching this in our sleeping bags, and I was stretched out behind Annie, pressed to her back. In the darkness, it seemed unlikely anyone would notice. I remember breathing hard into her neck, my arm draped over her side, a position she’d encouraged, as we watched the female journalist in the movie do battle with the devil, who was disguised as a world leader advocating unity and peace.
Then the lights popped on, and we all slid away from each other, blinking heavy in the brightness. The youth minister had us all circle up at the center of the gym. He sat on a stool in the center and talked to us about Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, in which Paul said that he would become all things to all men in order to save them. If a man was weak, Paul would be weak. If a man was Jewish, Paul would be Jewish. If a man was a Gentile, Paul would be a Gentile. Whatever it took to bring that man to Christ . . .
“If a man was a pothead,” some kid said, which got us all laughing.
“Hey, well, good point,” the youth minister said, smiling big, and pretended to take a toke of an imaginary joint. “Some people would say that’s exactly right. That if you really want to help a man—or woman—you need to walk in that dude’s shoes for a little bit. Do y’all think that’s true?”
The Afterlives Page 4