“Like this,” she says, turning and accelerating.
“It’s like an instinct,” she says. “You’ll get it, eventually.”
—
SALLY KNOCKS ON THE DOOR to May’s bedroom as she enters and sits down in the chair by the bed. May has never particularly liked this woman: her knee-high boots with the silver studs, like something you’d see on one of those motorcycle ladies; her peculiar sense of humor; her brusque manner; the way her hair is perpetually wet, as if she’s always just stepped out of the shower. May has never understood what her son sees in Sally.
“He doesn’t want you to know what’s going on,” she says. “But I think you should. Because this is not going to end well, May, and you need to be prepared. We need to meet this head-on. Together.”
—
THEY ARE ON THE FLOOR at the foot of the stairs, legs stretched and flat, the soles of their feet pressed together. Houdini wanders back and forth between them, licking at their shins. May will miss having the dog at school with her, but she knows she can’t keep him there. Clara will take good care of him.
“But why is Robert so unhappy?” May asks.
On this, the topic of Robert’s unhappiness, his general moodiness, Clara is so often evasive. She says only that her husband is under a tremendous amount of stress and that he’s doing the best he can under the circumstances.
“But if he’s troubled . . .” May says.
Clara draws back her feet, the diamond broken. There’s a difference, she says, between having troubles and being troubled, and she hopes May can appreciate that.
“Well,” May says, “Daddy has troubles, and I don’t see him moping about with migraines all day.”
Clara looks at her bewildered, and May fears she’s said too much. She doesn’t want to hurt Clara’s feelings, only to help her remember that there is a world outside this house. Clara stands up from the floor and dusts off her hands. She starts to say something, then stops. She shakes her head back and forth, as if in disbelief. Seeing her sister do this, May begins to regret her visit. The little dog leaps at her legs, and she’s tempted to snatch him back up in her arms and take him with her when she goes, all the way back to school. As long as he never barks, maybe she could keep him hidden. Better with her than in this miserable house. But then, as if reading May’s mind, Clara comes over and lifts the cocker spaniel off the floor and clutches him close to her chest.
“Daddy’s a good man,” Clara says. “He really tries. But honestly, May, do you really think it’s Daddy keeping you in school? Do you really think he’s the one keeping us all afloat?”
Keeping them all afloat? Is Clara implying that it’s Robert who’s supporting them all? May can’t imagine that’s the case. If he’s taking money from Robert, surely her father would have mentioned it to her. Surely she’d know about something like that! May wonders if that’s why he preferred to wait outside on the street rather than come in the house with her.
She thinks of Robert up there in his chair, smoking his cigarettes, his headaches. Of course it’s true; of course he’s the rock upon which they all stand. May feels embarrassed that it didn’t dawn on her earlier. She feels sick to her stomach. Because, is she supposed to feel thankful? Is she expected to go up there and rub his dumb temples too? She has no intention of thanking Robert for his help. She never asked for it! Her only option is to quit school. She’ll have to quit and find some other way. But no, she can’t do that, she can’t quit. She has plans, and her plans are predicated on graduation. She’s trapped. She’s no different from Clara. All this time and without even knowing it, May has been living in this house, too.
Clara asks if May would like a cup of tea, but May says she needs to be going. She’s already stayed too long. She only has one day in town, and she promised their parents she’d spend most of it with them. “Of course,” Clara says, as they move toward the door.
They both go out onto the stoop and kiss each other on the cheek. Clara has the dog in her arms, and May tells him goodbye. Before rounding the corner to where her father waits, May glances back for a final view of her sister. Clara waves as the little dog licks and nips, wildly, at the soft underside of her chin.
—
SEVENTY YEARS LATER and the house isn’t even a house; it’s a restaurant. Every so often Sally picks up May at the nursing home and gets her out for a few hours, and today they’ve traveled all the way to Shula, May’s hometown.
“Let’s stop here for lunch,” May says.
“Are you sure?” Sally asks. “Tex-Mex? Chi-chi Mexican slop. Plates of melted cheese.”
May insists, and so Sally finds parking along the street. They walk together up the sidewalk, pass through the metal gate, and climb the porch steps—May grabbing onto Sally’s arm—to the front door, where a hostess in the foyer asks if they’d like to eat inside or out. May would like to be inside, and they follow a girl to a table in what was once a sitting room.
“My sister used to live in this house,” she tells Sally. “Back in the twenties.”
“This one?” Sally asks, looking around. “You’re kidding. For real?”
May nods and tells her the story, briefly—of the Lennox family and Clara, her marriage, the little dog Houdini, the depression, the fire.
Their first appetizer, chicken tacos wrapped in iceberg lettuce, arrives on a small red plate.
“That’s incredible,” Sally says, looking around. “I’ll bet the people who own this place have no idea what happened here. So how did the fire start?”
“We never figured that out for sure, but we all suspected Robert. He had issues. Clara lived another year or so, but she didn’t like to talk about it. It was too painful. From what I could gather though, the fire started upstairs, and she went up after Robert hoping to help him.”
Sally picks up a taco, arches her eyebrows, and says it must be so weird to be sitting in this place again eating food such as this. May agrees that it is, in fact, very odd to be back, though everything that happened here, it’s so distant from her now. It’s been almost seventy years since her sister died, after all. That’s more than twice as long as Clara was alive.
“Funny thing about time though,” Sally says. “We think we live our life along these little points. Little plotted dots. Life on graph paper. Event, event, event. But I think that’s only how our brains make sense of the world. More likely—and I’m speaking as a physicist now—everything that has ever happened and ever will is all being expressed at once. A single event. You’re here right now, May, eating lunch with me, but you’re also there, in that other room, talking with your sister. There’s no such thing as ‘back then.’ No history. No future. No present either, except in the rather limited sense that everything that exists is the present. Everything simply is.”
“I guess so,” May says.
“What I mean,” Sally continues, “is that Lewis is both dead and not dead. So are you, for that matter. So am I. If any part of us continues after death, it’s already continued. Do you follow? Life and afterlife, it’s all the same thing, one being an expression of the other and vice versa. This isn’t entirely conjecture, mind you. The physics supports me. Or at the very least, it doesn’t prove me wrong. We’re here but also not here, and the part of you that’s not here could be, at this very moment, spending time with the part of Lewis that’s also not here. Honestly, some days, that idea is the only thing keeping me sane.”
After the meal, May needs to use the bathroom, and Sally comes over to take her arm. Together they weave through the tables, and a waiter directs them down the hall. They pass the entrance to the kitchen, full of commotion, and a few feet later they come to the bathroom. The door is locked, and so May and Sally wait with their backs against the wall. This bathroom is a more recent addition. All of these walls are new, too. May would hardly recognize the place at all if not for the stairway at the end of the hall
, which used to be visible from the living room. Looking at it, she can remember sitting there, on the floor, with her sister, the little dog Houdini running back and forth between their legs.
She goes over to the stairs and puts her hand on the bannister. Sally follows behind her.
“I just want one quick look,” May says, already ascending. “I’m sure they won’t mind.”
Sally says nothing, only takes May’s other hand and helps her climb. At the top of the stairs, May peers into Clara’s old bedroom, which is empty except for a few towers of unused dining chairs. Without a curtain on the window, sunlight falls hard against the floor.
“Does it look different?” Sally asks.
It does, but May isn’t sure if the differences are in her or in the house itself. Regardless, she doesn’t want to be here anymore. She wishes she hadn’t come at all. Why revisit the past? Grabbing hold of Sally’s arm, they turn and begin their slow descent, May’s left knee, that old troublemaker, throbbing with each step. Distantly she can hear the cooks shouting orders in the kitchen and all those diners chatting, their conversations swirled, and it’s possible to imagine that time is just like Sally says it is, that everything is happening at once, that everyone she ever loved is both dead and not dead simultaneously—all those people, here, in this spot, in this house, all that history compressed into a single moment.
She’s almost at the bottom when she feels a cool charge at her back, like a thousand eyelids fluttering across her skin at once. Only when Sally gives her arm a squeeze and asks if she’s all right does May realize she’s crying.
But anyway, why be here when she can go elsewhere, when she can be with—
—
FRANK OFFERS HER SOME GUM. They’re on their way to an afternoon movie.
“Or how about we skip the movie and go home and take a nap?” she says.
He smiles. Fine by him. It’s Saturday. They’re together—and they can spend the time however they please.
•III•
GRAMMERS
We observed the common rites; we performed the tasks expected of us; we behaved appropriately, meaning we opened the doors to our loss, invited the world to share it with us for two—though no more than three—days.
I was over at my mother’s house constantly in the months after the funeral, mowing the grass, repairing the chimney, which seemed to leak no matter how much I caulked the flashing, and dragging big limbs into the woods after storms. To help my mother inside, Annie and I took it upon ourselves to hire a cleaner, but that plan backfired. After the first clean, my mother came to me, irate, and reported that things were missing: a step stool, a milk glass pitcher, a cookie cutter.
“Who’d steal a cookie cutter?” I asked.
“We don’t know who this woman is. She could be anybody.”
“Her name is Celeste, and she comes highly recommended.”
“This isn’t what I wanted.”
Eventually Annie and I managed to locate each of the missing items: The stool was in the closet; the milk glass pitcher was on top of the fridge but out of sight. Searching for the cookie cutter in one of the kitchen drawers, I found all the condolence cards rubber-banded together, pink and blue, illustrated scenes of beaches and mountains, photographs of flowers and candles. I flipped through them quickly, read a few of the notes written by people I knew—distant relatives, friends of my mother I hadn’t seen in years. A business card slid loose from the stack. A card for a psychic/spiritual counselor. On the back of the card, someone had written: This lady’s the real deal. Whoever had sent this to my mother clearly didn’t know her very well. I showed it to Annie.
“You think she could help us find the cookie cutter?”
“I think we should just buy her a new one.”
“She’d notice. She’d say the old one cut cookies better. She’d say it was a gift from her great-grandmother. Irreplaceable. Or it was rusty and the rust made the cookies taste better.”
Eventually we located the missing cookie cutter inside a mixing bowl, but when we showed my mother, she acted as if she’d known all along that it had been there and we’d been silly to waste so much time looking for it. She somehow managed to be both needy and ungrateful all at once—a terrible combination.
She called me at work after a giant storm. She required my immediate help. It was an emergency; the basement had flooded; the sump pump was broken. An hour later I was there, dutiful son that I was, standing in the dark, fetid water with my pant cuffs rolled up to my knees. Fisher was with me. She sat on the stairs playing with her phone. I was driving her to her bass lessons after this.
We’d been down in the basement for about twenty minutes when Fisher asked about the smell: What was it exactly? I told her I didn’t know and I didn’t want to know.
“This is so gross,” she said.
Fisher stared at her phone for a few minutes and then asked if I was aware of a certain type of mold that grew in wet basements and crawlspaces, a mold that scientists had recently determined was capable, if inhaled, of migrating deep into the brain and altering its chemistry, of changing a personality, of erasing memories. Did I know there were people in the world whose brains had been infested in just such a way and who had been found wandering mindlessly in grocery stores or bathing naked in public fountains with no idea of who they were or what they were doing?
No, I said, I had not been aware of such a mold.
The floorboards above us creaked. Just then, the door at the top of the stairs busted open with a tremendous clatter, the knob striking the wall and knocking loose bits of cement, which crackled down along the wall.
“Any progress?” my mother said, coming down the steps.
She sat down beside Fisher, looking gloomy. Fisher leaned forward and handed me her phone. She’d located an online how-to video that she thought might speed things along.
I thanked her. “How-to videos for everything these days, huh?”
“How to cook crystal meth,” she said. “How to dispose of dead bodies.”
My mother grimaced but said nothing. I tapped the screen to start the video and propped up the phone on a nearby worktable. The man in the video was scrawny with scary neck tattoos—but helpful.
“Don’t worry, we’ll get her fixed up right in no time at all,” he said.
“Your sump pump is a female,” I said to my mother. “Bet you didn’t know that, did you?”
She smiled. I rotated the PVC pipe, slightly, until it connected with the hole in the wall, through which it would spit the water outside the basement into the backyard. Leaning forward, I knocked the worktable upon which Fisher’s phone was precariously balanced, and it tumbled and plunked down into the water. An eerie shriek—like the squeal of a deflating balloon—escaped Fisher’s mouth. She leaped forward to the edge of the stairs as I bent down to grope through the slime.
“Fuck fuck fuck,” she said. “Jim, seriously, what the fuck?”
“I’m so sorry. My fault. I’m sorry.”
“I had everything on that phone!”
“If it’s busted, I’ll get you a new one.”
“I had sound files on there. Song ideas. I hadn’t backed them up anywhere else. Oh my God, I can’t believe this. I honestly can’t believe this.” She was pacing now, back and forth on the step, which was maybe two feet long. “Let me see your phone for a minute.”
I wiped my hand across my pants and gave it to her, thinking maybe she could somehow use it to retrieve her own. A cell phone tractor beam, I don’t know. I was panicked. She snatched mine from me and promptly threw it hard against the wall. It cracked against the concrete and then dropped down into the murky depths. I couldn’t believe she’d done it. I hadn’t thought her capable of such an act.
“Fisher!”
But she was already halfway up the steps. At the top she slammed the door shut.
My mother, who seemed to be coming out of a daze, asked what was happening with an irritating earnestness, and I yelled that I’d lost two fucking phones in this nasty fucking water was what was happening. She got very quiet then. I had pictures on that phone I hadn’t backed up. Pictures of Annie. Of Fisher. Voice mails from my father! Searching with my hands, I was beginning to feel like every terrible shit ever taken in all of human history had squeezed up through the cracks of the foundation in my parents’ basement; all that excrement was sludging around my ankles, digesting me. I was never going to get out of this basement. Maybe there really was mold down here. Why was I subjecting myself to this insanity? Not to mention Fisher and I were apparently enemies now, whatever fragile bond we’d had until now destroyed—or so it seemed to me then. And God, my father’s voice mails. The one where he asked me if I’d meet him at BeanHead on Sunday for a chat. The one where he told me what time he’d be by in the morning to drop off a book. All of them gone, just like that.
Somewhere, far off, my mother’s voice: “Why are you acting like this?”
I had the sudden urge to grab her by the shoulders and fling her down into the mucky water, to stomp on her chest with my foot, but this ugly urge quickly sinkholed down through my body and hollowed me out like a shotgun barrel.
My head was spinning, and suddenly I couldn’t catch my breath. My lungs refused to accept the air. They were squeezed shut, unwilling to do their duty. I stepped forward, toward the worktable, but slipped down into the muck. I fell down onto my knees and caught myself with both hands. I crawled over to the steps and dragged myself onto them.
“Your heart!” my mother screamed, and started up the stairs. “Oh my God!”
“Wait,” I wheezed. “Wait.”
But she was already gone. I closed my eyes and tried to empty my head. When my mother returned a few minutes later, cordless phone in hand, I was already beginning to recover but still wasn’t quite myself.
The Afterlives Page 18