Rather than having a traditional ceremony—it was her second, after all—we’d said our vows in the sheriff’s office at the courthouse. The only people in attendance, other than the sheriff, were Fisher and our parents. To celebrate, Annie and I had flown to the Dominican Republic for a long weekend and stayed in a beach resort where they delivered breakfast on a tray each morning to our cabana.
I sold my ramshackle country house, and together we bought a two-story colonial within walking distance of her parents’ place. The neighborhood was a relatively new one—two rows of homes on a southeast-facing hillside. Our yard was partly wooded, full of rhododendron and mountain laurel, the soil rocky and rooted. At the bottom of our driveway was a small stone koi pond, though by the end of our third month there, hawks had eaten all the fish and I hadn’t bothered to restock it again.
We’d picked this particular neighborhood in case Fisher ever wanted to visit with her grandparents after school, though she hardly ever availed herself of the opportunity. She preferred the solitude of her own bedroom—her post-apocalyptic young adult novels, her crystal-growing kits, her new electric bass. We hadn’t suggested the instrument to her because, really, what parent suggests the electric bass over the guitar or violin? I initially feared her choice indicated some deficit in her character: a self-confidence gap, an inferiority complex, but when we asked her why she’d picked it, she explained that her new best friend, a girl named C-Mac (whom Annie and I didn’t care for) had already taken up the guitar and together they were going to form an all-girl band, an idea that seemed reasonable enough to me and so I bought her a Fender.
Annie had settled into her new job as the outreach coordinator—and sometime director—at Thrill Arts!, a small but determined theater in Shula. Six weeks out of the year her life revolved around rehearsals, and the rest of the time she incubated (her word) arts-based programs in homeless shelters, detention centers, and prisons. The first program she created was a playwriting workshop for mostly well-behaved inmates at the Department of Corrections forty-five minutes outside of town.
In many ways, she was ideally suited for such a job. Annie was in no way a diminutive or meek woman. Brassy, her mother called her, not always affectionately. At times, it was true, she could be loud and overbearing. Brutally honest, too. I once heard her tell a friend, over the phone, to dump a guy because the way he’d behaved after missing just about every Trivial Pursuit question strongly indicated to her that he was not only an idiot but also a sore loser. After staking out a position on something, Annie didn’t tend to back down. But she was also thoughtful and patient and lived according to a very simple maxim—that she treat all people fairly and with compassion. And so it was that, twice a week, she’d drive out to the prison and help prisoners work through their problems by writing and table-reading one-acts.
The White Hairs were big supporters of the arts, generally, but when it came to theater, they mostly craved the typical fare—somewhat stale but eager productions of Our Town, Rent, My Fair Lady, and Oklahoma! (or any other play that ends with an exclamation point)—but Annie was committed to pushing back against that trend and staging more challenging and controversial works.
The first show she decided to direct she picked as a response to what was happening in the news. When the state legislature introduced an anti-abortion bill, Annie decided to stage a play called Sky Writers, which, despite its la-la title, is a gritty drama about a young girl’s decision whether to have an abortion after being raped by her second cousin. Her life unfolds in both scenarios—the one in which she goes through with the abortion and the one in which she doesn’t—each playing out in alternating scenes, and suffice it to say, the life in which she keeps the baby is far more difficult and degrading for all parties, baby included.
The politics of the play were fairly transparent, though its production set off far less controversy than Annie had hoped it might. Attendance was low, and the local paper didn’t even pick up on the fact that she’d chosen the play as a direct provocation to the state legislature. Annie was disappointed. Short of taking to the stage and setting herself on fire, she wasn’t sure what would agitate people enough to care about theater or politics. Her job, as she saw it, was to improve a world that didn’t necessarily want to be improved.
The first year of our marriage was a happy and chaotic blur: new sheets, paint crews, bass lessons, shared calendars. There were meetings to attend, grocery store runs to make, emails to answer, emails to ignore. There was a trip to Atlanta for a friend’s wedding, a day on a motorboat on the lake with friends, an afternoon at the hospital with my mother as she waited for a biopsy, a jaunt to the outlet mall to buy three new pairs of unpleated khakis in slightly different shades. There was bronchitis, then a stomach bug, an appointment with the doctor, a weekend of bedrest, a round of antibiotics, a round of probiotics, diminishment, replenishment. There was personal grooming to consider: nails to clip, teeth to brush, weight to lose, abs to define, new regimens, diets, pills with curious side effects, shampoos that promised thicker, more lustrous hair. There were firsts: Nutella banana waffles (Fisher’s favorite), tractor pulls, cocktails with orange peel swirls, holographic whirling dervishes swirling through an old Masonic Temple repurposed as a church.
Business was the broom that helped sweep away any concerns or questions too grand or alarming. I buried myself in the everyday, in its many wonderful, stupid demands and distractions.
Annie and I were grateful to have found one another. We told each other this constantly. Reconnecting with Annie had given my life—that is to say, the story of my life—a pleasing symmetry. Life doesn’t require or encourage such neatness, I realize, but we can only remember so much about ourselves and our stories.
We sat down on a large rock below the vista parking area to chat and sip. The champagne bottle, almost empty, was in a crook of the rock a few feet below us.
“What are you thinking about right now?” she asked me.
“I’m thinking how badly I need to pee.”
“Just pee down there. Over the side.”
“I can wait.”
“I’m too drunk to drive,” she said. “What about you?”
“Another twenty minutes, I should be fine.”
“We didn’t plan this out very well. We should have come in a taxi.”
Someone cleared his throat above us, and we both turned to look up. A police officer was standing there, haloed in sunlight, his face so shadowed I couldn’t distinguish any of his features.
“Hello,” Annie said. “Can we help you?”
“You can’t be drinking here,” he said nasally.
Annie shook the orange juice at him. “This?”
The officer said nothing. I think he was sizing us up.
“We’re not bothering anyone,” Annie said.
“I could write you both tickets.”
“For drinking orange juice?” Annie said.
I could see the top of the green champagne bottle below my feet—but could the officer? He asked us to please step up into the parking area, and once we did that, he requested our licenses. Annie groaned audibly.
“We haven’t done anything wrong,” she said.
The officer said nothing, only waited.
I pulled my license from my wallet and gave it to him. He clipped it to the top of his pad and wrote me a ticket on the spot. Annie didn’t have her license with her, and for a moment the officer seemed uncertain of what he wanted to do. Then he let her off with a warning.
Twenty yards away, the White Hairs were pretending not to watch us as they fumbled with their binoculars and camera-phones. Probably they were the ones who’d called us in. Didn’t they have anything better to do? After the officer was gone, we got into our car and sat there quietly for a few minutes. I started the car. I had the ticket in my hand. Annie grabbed it from me and dug around for a pen from the center console.
>
“It’s paper,” she said.
“Yes it is.”
“First anniversaries are paper gifts.” She smiled and drew a giant heart on the ticket. “I’m going to frame this and put it on my wall at work.”
“Well, happy anniversary, I guess.”
I merged the car onto the highway. I was fully sober now, and though our earlier giddiness was draining out of me, I was still in a fine mood. Annie was so proud of the ticket, and her enthusiasm was contagious.
Still, too much happiness could be dangerous. Because whenever I felt too happy, inevitably I would begin to wonder if the happiness was real. If any of this was real. I would begin to wonder if maybe I wasn’t still sprawled in the parking garage, a gash in my forehead, my heart unable to sustain me, my thoughts, my very being. Instead of being resuscitated, I’d simply died. There’d been no surgery, no HeartNet, and everything that had happened to me since then had occurred in the space of a millisecond, my last, a fireworks finale of synapses. All that I’d shared with Annie, with my parents, with Fisher, all of it was a very odd though mostly pleasant dream—a heaven, perhaps—a farewell gift from my oxygen-starved brain, a movie of my own creation that was playing out before I tumbled away into oblivion.
The expansion to Su Casa Siempre had never happened. The restaurant had not renovated its second floor. Despite my having approved the loan, Ruth had dropped the project altogether. She wrote me an email, a few weeks later, to thank me for my efforts but offered little explanation for the change of heart, except to say that she was feeling overworked and ready for a change of pace.
The restaurant closed its doors soon thereafter, and the place sat empty for a number of months. I’d drive by on my way to work some mornings and wonder about the staircase, about the Lennoxes, about what had happened to my father. Then, one morning, a large white sign appeared in the front window:
THE BIZBY GROUP
BUILDING FOR LEASE
The Bizby Group was the parent company for Bizby Development and Bizby Property Management, both of which were helmed by Wilson Bizby. King White Hair, we called him, as his company was responsible for at least half of the gated retirement communities in Shula. They also owned and managed about a dozen commercial properties. I’d worked with Mr. Bizby on a number of projects over the years. He was a smart investor, a trustee on a dozen boards, a man accustomed to people’s undivided attention and respect. The round, stylish glasses on his face were the frames of an eccentric architect, frames that served sartorially, it seemed to me, to offset the more traditional brass-buttoned blazers and pleated khakis he often wore. He spoke to people as if everything he said might somehow wind up in a Wall Street Journal profile of his genius and financial acumen. He’d once told me, at a lunch, that with enough money you could be a hundred times more effective than any dumbass saint. Dumbass saints, he said, were the ones handing out ice cream at the hospital.
“Call me crazy,” he’d said, “but I’d rather build my own hospital and stick my name on it. If you want to do any good in this world, if you want to make any real difference, you’ve got to do some bad first. That’s just how it works. Anyone with enough power and money to do long-lasting good has most definitely had some—shall we say—less meritorious dealings to get where he is. Or if he hasn’t done them personally, somebody else has for him. It’s as simple as that.
“When I die, I intend to leave my kids an incredible amount of money. They’ll be able to do whatever they want. If they want to spend their whole lives working with cleft palate babies, then so be it, that’s their right and they’ll be able to do that because they’ll have security. Or maybe they’ll be developers, but developers with real vision and sway, and they’ll improve Shula and make everyone’s lives better. Or they’ll start their own businesses and bring more jobs to town, which really is the best kind of good you can do. And if I’ve given them the opportunity to do all that good, then doesn’t that reflect back on me? Haven’t I, by extension, also done some good myself? Am I not investing a little equity of my own in those future good works?”
I’d understood his logic but also sensed that, fundamentally, he was wrong. There was no such thing as an equity stake in goodness, was there? He was an imposing man, born into his money, not the sort of person you wanted to argue with in a town as small as ours.
I ran into him at a meeting a few weeks after seeing his sign in the restaurant window and remarked to him that I’d noticed it. At first he didn’t seem to understand which property I was referring to. Twice he asked me to repeat the address.
“The restaurant on Graham Street,” he said finally. “That old, ugly house, sure. What about it?”
I couldn’t really imagine mentioning a ghost to a man such as him, so all I said was, “That property has an interesting history.”
“Yes, well, most of them do,” he said dismissively.
Later that night, when I reported this encounter to Annie, she puffed her cheeks and jutted out her chin in imitation of Wilson Bizby. “‘Most of them do, Mr. Byrd, most of them do. Most of them do.’”
Bizby was on the board at Thrill Arts!, and Annie had butted heads with him near the beginning of her tenure when he’d tried (and failed) to mandate that all future productions first be approved by the board itself.
“That guy still hates me,” she said now. “If I was a man and I’d stood up to him, he’d respect me. But I’m a woman so I open my mouth, and I’m automatically a bitch. He thinks I don’t know my place. How dare I raise my tiny woman’s voice to the great Wilson Bizby, you know?”
“His CFO is a woman.”
“That means nothing, Jim.”
She was right, of course, and I regretted mentioning it. I had no desire to defend Mr. Bizby—to her or to anyone else.
Annie was removing her makeup in the mirror over the dresser. She glanced back at me with a wry expression. “I hope he chokes on a chicken bone.”
I nodded and continued stripping the socks from my feet.
“If you told him there was a ghost on the property,” she said, “do you think he’d then be obligated—legally, I mean—to disclose that to any potential leasers?”
She was joking, mostly, but then again it did seem like a piece of information worthy of disclosure. After all, the ghost was sort of a liability.
Annie and I hadn’t talked much about the house or the Lennoxes in the year since our wedding, though not because we’d lost interest. We’d simply been too distracted with each other, with the merger of our lives and families.
Annie’s parents were not particularly warm or expressive people. Annie assured me that they were grateful to have me as a son-in-law, though I never would have known it. Conversations around their dinner table were safe, uninteresting, and uneventful. In the beginning I suspected this as a performance for my sake—don’t scare off the new guy—but after a year I’d yet to hear anyone raise their voice or say anything of much consequence. It was only in the car, after our get-togethers, that Annie would decode the banter for me.
“Did you notice how mad Mom was at me?” she’d ask.
“She was mad?”
“Seething. She didn’t make eye contact with me once the whole meal.”
“I missed that. Why is she upset?”
“The way Fisher dresses.” Annie rolled her eyes. “The way I let her dress.”
“Does she dress provocatively?”
“According to Mom, she does.”
Lee Anne Creel, Annie’s mother, was a retired special education teacher, a very mannered Southern lady with drooping cheeks and dark red lipstick that crossed the border of her lips by a mile. Her idea of a fun afternoon was a trip to the Stein Mart for new jewelry and flower vases and giant shoe baskets. She practically worshipped Annie’s older brother, Kurt, who lived in New York and hardly ever came home. Always Lee Anne was telling me about something profound
Kurt had once said or something amazing he’d done or planned to do one day. Her love for Kurt, I came to see, had prevented her from developing a real relationship with Annie. Distracted by her son, Lee Anne didn’t appreciate what Annie had to offer. The way she talked about Annie sometimes gave me the impression that she considered her daughter as a bit of a screwup, as a not-very-serious person. Presumably this had something to do with Annie having been pregnant at nineteen years old, though Annie’s interest in the theater might have also contributed to this sentiment. This blindness toward Annie’s good qualities predisposed me to not liking Lee Anne very much, though this wasn’t a subject I ever would have tried to discuss openly with my mother-in-law. We lived in the South, after all.
Charlie Creel, on the other hand, was a very protective father—and very adoring, too. Abbott, he called Annie, as in Abbott and Costello. He owned three gas stations in town. He was a quiet man, who preferred the solitude of his recliner chair to any after-dinner conversation. The only books he’d ever read, or so he proudly claimed, were the Bible and a biography of Ben Hogan, the golfer. The two of us were friendly with each other, but I had no illusion that we’d ever truly be close.
As for my parents, Annie liked my father, generally, even though he’d given her a B-plus in trigonometry when what she’d really deserved was “at least an A-minus.” This she’d once offered to him as a joke, not long after the wedding, but my father, misinterpreting the spirit of the remark, had failed to laugh or even shrug amicably and had instead offered a very solemn apology before explaining that, if given the choice, he would have done away with the alphabetical grading scale altogether and adopted a pass/fail system. Later Annie told me she found my father a tad too self-serious, a little goofy, but basically sweet-natured, which I realized even then described me about as well as him.
The Afterlives Page 10