Life After Life

by Jill McCorkle

  “Shut up,” she screamed. “Shut up, shut up, shut the hell damn fuck up.”

  It was right after that she went for her first session with Dr. Owens and that was kind of good. Her mother insisted on taking her, of course, and waiting there the whole time, complimenting the doctor on the decor of the office and the prestige of her degrees and any other bullshit thing that could be said. Abby just liked the white noise and the soft chairs and the knowledge that the next fifty minutes were only about her. Dr. Owens looked like an ordinary person, too, which was good. She could just as easily have been one of the cafeteria women at school or the soft round nurse in her old elementary school. It wasn’t as good as being with Sadie who lives next door at Pine Haven, but it was still worth going because for a little while anyway it had reduced the fighting to those times late at night when they thought she couldn’t hear.

  But still, her mom kept calling Molly if she needed a sitter no matter how many times Abby begged to be left alone or over at Pine Haven where she knew everybody. Or, she had suggested, they could call Dorro from down the street. Dorro was middle-aged and overweight and there wouldn’t have been anything to fight about, but no, she kept hauling in Molly until Molly must have figured it out and stopped coming. The last time she was there, Abby’s mom had insisted that her dad drive Molly home and that, no, Abby could not ride with them. “Don’t worry, Moll,” Abby’s mother said, like the two of them might have been friends. “You can trust him to be a gentleman, and if he isn’t, well, you know who to come to.” She patted her chest and laughed and Abby slipped out of the house and into the cemetery before her dad returned because she knew there would be a fight. Dr. Owens listened, her brow wrinkled. It was clear that if she had a kid she wouldn’t be doing it that way and that was a good thing for Abby to know.

  And as if life isn’t bad enough all the way around, now her mom is planning Abby’s birthday party like it’s her own stupid party. She wants something educational so all the other mothers will say how wonderful she is to “combine fun and education.” She says crap like that all the time, too. In celebration of First Ladies. What a lame and stupid idea from her lame and stupid mother. A party featuring the First Ladies and idiot shitty actors coming in to pretend to be them. The invitation says: Ladies First and then lots of crap about First Ladies, and it will be at the country club, which is a stupid place anyway unless it’s a pool party. Her mother is going to have a little table with knock-off purses for the mothers (who also are invited) to peruse and they all also will get their nails done and have make-overs.

  “If we have to do that, then at least let C.J. be the person,” she had said, and reminded her mother who C.J. is, the woman who does nails and exercise classes over at Pine Haven and has the cute little baby named Kurt.

  “You have got to be kidding,” her mother said. “The slutty mixed-race one with all the tattoos? Your dad might think that’s okay, but I do not. It is certainly not very First Lady–like.” She laughed at her own stupid joke.

  Yeah, Eleanor Roosevelt was all about pedicures, Abby had told her dad later that night. What’s-her-face Carter in the cotton coat and all those designer purses. Her dad had held a finger up to his lips and then shook his head, let his tongue roll out to the side like a strangled victim as if to mime tolerating her mother’s whims.

  “It’s humiliating,” she screamed, near crying, and not caring what her stupid mother heard. “It’s like it’s her party.”

  “She said you love the First Ladies.”

  “I wrote one shitty report last year in sixth grade because I had to. That’s all,” she said. “That was over a year ago. She doesn’t even know me.”

  “It’ll be over soon,” he said, and stretched out across the foot of her bed. He was in the same spot where Dollbaby had slept for the past two years and she knew her dad thought of it, too, because he patted the place as if the dog were still there. Neither of them had gotten over her disappearance. They were only gone for five hours. Her mother said Dollbaby dug her way out of the yard and ran away. Her mother said that she had called every vet and every rescue place in this county and two over and not a trace. “I suspect something bad has happened to her,” her mother said. “Maybe it will be easier to just accept she’s gone.”

  “I don’t even want a party,” she told her dad. “I want Dollbaby.”

  “Me, too,” he said. “But you don’t turn thirteen every day.”

  The only reason Abby was even having a big party was to compete with all the bat and bar mitzvahs she’d attended all through seventh grade. Everything was a competition for her mother, whether Abby felt the desire to compete or not. Her dad had grown up here, but her mother had not and it was very important that she establish herself in her own way and right. People should like and respect her for who she is and not because they remember when cute little Bennie was the fastest kid on the track team or won a prize one Halloween for being the solar system. Abby had heard it all so many times she could recite it back.

  Her mother is like a topsy-turvy doll, one minute funny and happy and the life of the party and the next, somber and bleak and angry. She can’t even enjoy when her mom seems good because she has to get ready for what she knows is coming. Abby has often thought how wonderful it would be to have a sturdy mother who stays the same, dependable and comfortable with some meat on her body. A mother who doesn’t want to wear what is in the junior department at Macy’s, a mother who loves wearing some big stretchy mom pants. Her one friend, Richie Henderson, has been through divorce and predicted as much for Abby’s future, and after many sad and burdened months thinking about it, Abby has come to look forward to the announcement and the life that will follow. Richie says a lot of parents are much better alone. They try harder. They stop lying about everything.

  “They’re all pretty stupid,” Richie said. “Even the smart ones are stupid assholes.” His mother teaches math and science and his dad is a doctor so it makes sense that he would know the truth. “You’ll see, Abby, it’ll be so much better when they’re apart.” And so she is wishing for that, wishing for separate homes and two different bedrooms, clothes for each house, a dog at her dad’s. When she blows out her candles, she’ll wish for Dollbaby to come home and then she’ll wish for a divorce. A big fat divorce.

  If someone asked her what is the best part of her life, she would say first Dollbaby, which she can’t say anymore, and then story time with her dad and then all of her friends at Pine Haven and then Richie who only thinks about skateboards and science things. For as long as she can remember her dad either read or told a story at bedtime and even though she knows she’s too old, she has begged him to continue. He ends his stories with a magic trick from his old days as an amateur street magician. Her best birthday parties have been the ones where he performed tricks and then people just split a piñata and ate lots of candy and ran around the house and yard until someone got hurt or threw up or both and her mother made them calm down and sit out on the porch until their rides came. But those days are gone and she hates the way her mother is constantly wondering if she has started her period. No.

  Her dad has told her that he is only doing one big trick for the party but promises that it will be his best ever. He has worked for weeks on the disappearing chamber, even when her mother begged that he just pull a rabbit out of a hat or something easy. “It’s a masterpiece,” he had told her, and then whispered so her mother couldn’t hear. “I am going to make all the First Ladies disappear.”

  Her favorite tricks are the ones he calls sleight of hand, and even though she knows how he palms things and uses his sleeves to hide things, it is still really amazing.

  Her parents met because of the magic tricks. Her mom was in college and he has said that he was sort of in college and she stopped on the corner with a crowd of sorority sisters to watch him doing magic. They had told Abby the story for as long as she could remember so their lines of dialogue were firmly etched on her mind, the way her mom described him as
“that cute hippie-looking guy” and her dad said that her mom was the prettiest of these very pretty girls all decked out with straw bags and high heels and everything monogrammed, little gold pearl necklaces, which her dad said made them all look like a pack of hunting dogs marked by some lucky owner.

  “Thanks a lot,” her mom would say, inserting correct descriptions like add-a-bead and espadrilles and Capezio, and then go on to describe her dad’s dirty bare feet and near-dead flowers strewn in with the few dollars and bits of change tossed in front of the dove’s cage. He owned Hawk long after his performance days. “He had quite a scene of groupies,” her mom said. “They all looked like girls who did things a good girl wouldn’t be doing.”

  “Like what?” Abby asked numerous times, but clearly the conversation had nothing to do with her except to act as a bit of brain washing. It was more designed as one of those things to remind her dad how lucky he was to meet her when he did. She claimed to have saved him from being a street person, that she was amazed when she discovered he was prelaw. He once confessed in a fight that he was never prelaw and only said that because one of the “dirty girls” had told him that’s all it would take for him to get a date with one of the uppity girls. The promise of a career and good money was all you needed.

  Then when they started dating, he did a trick a day for her. Flowers appearing out of his sleeve; Hawk materializing from his empty hat. Abby once heard her dad tell Sadie that he had a marriage founded on tricks and it changed the way she looked at everything. It is one of those things she plans to ask him about some night soon when he is near dozing at the foot of her bed. She will also ask him about a friend of his from childhood, Joanna, who owns the Dog House and sometimes works at Pine Haven. “Joanna and I were a lot like you and Richie,” he had said. “Best friends all through elementary school.” He said that she had always been a good loyal friend. True blue, he said. “And she could do everything I could do except pee standing up. A real tomboy.”

  “Some would say butch.” Abby’s mother didn’t know she heard her say that, but she did. “Though she’s been married how many times? Four? Five. Clearly there’s something wrong with her. ”

  When Abby outgrew regular bedtime stories, her dad started telling her about what the town used to be like. How once upon a time she might have looked out her bedroom window and seen into the cemetery because the hedge of myrtle wasn’t there and the tall pine trees were just saplings. This was before the retirement home was built on the other side of the cemetery and before the row of modest split-levels across the street from them were plowed down and replaced with gigantic brick homes with cathedral windows, enormous garages, and no yards. A mathematician had once lived in their house and her dad had found all kinds of numbers and scribbles on the wall in what had been his study but now is their guest room. Abby had the girl’s room, roses on the old wallpaper her mother fussed about for weeks, steaming and peeling every little scrap. The girl drove an old Checker cab painted dark green and last he heard was living and teaching somewhere in the Northeast.

  He told how once in the cemetery there was a grave with a playhouse over it, how in 1940—almost twenty years before he was even born—the grief-stricken parents had the ten-year-old’s playhouse moved there, the grave within looking like a little bed, the grave of the baby they had lost in the early 1930s there beside her. And he promised to take her there and show it to her, which he did. The playhouse rotted and fell down years ago, but he could find the grave, and he also showed her the statue of Lydia, a beautiful young woman who was rumored to try to hold on to you if you sat on her stone rose-petal-covered lap. And now Abby goes there every day and speaks to them all by name. When her dad was a child there was a grown-up-sized rocking chair inside the playhouse and he and Joanna had thought that maybe the chair was for the father to come and sit at night so he could cry there by the graves of his children without anyone seeing him. They always hoped they might see him there or hear the rocker. It chills Abby to think about that, especially as she is passing down the path where the playhouse used to be.

  She isn’t supposed to play in the cemetery. Her mother freaks out and says that’s where people go to do drugs and homeless people sleep. One woman’s purse got stolen out of her car while she was putting flowers on her husband’s grave. Those things may be true, but Abby hasn’t seen anything scary. She had been there that very day, in fact, and she finds lots of things but nothing like what her mother says. In the far corner where you can just barely see the brick of Pine Haven through the arboretum, there is a tiny area for Jewish people, rocks left on the various headstones like little notes to the dead. She arranges the rocks in circles and patterns, careful never to step on the graves. She visits Mary Young and her baby brother and Lydia, where there is a little stone off to the left under a bush marked JACK, our loyal friend. She knows that there had once been a statue of a German shepherd to go with the girl, but someone had stolen it years ago. Now there is just the flat stone.

  LATELY AT NIGHT, before his magic trick and when he can’t think of any more town stories, her dad talks about historical events he finds interesting, many of them about disasters and the lessons people could have learned from them. Floods and hurricanes and fires, that amazing molasses story in Boston, people drowned in the hot thick syrup. Cheap and faulty construction and lies told, scrimping on things that would have made all the difference. The Cocoanut Grove fire in Boston and the chicken factory right nearby in Hamlet. Locked doors and bad codes. People locked in. She didn’t want to think about it but she did, and sometimes she couldn’t stop. Out on the interstate where she sometimes bikes on the service road, there is a billboard that says ARE YOU PREPARED TO MEET YOUR MAKER? Her dad always says, Not today, thank you. He says if you could read your life like a book, that you would be able to see what’s coming. Like a well-planned magic trick, it might seem spontaneous and random, but really things line up in a way that is logical. He said that everything has a purpose.

  “So what’s the purpose of you and Mom screaming at each other?” Abby asked. “What is the purpose of Dollbaby getting lost?”

  “And where does survival of the fittest come in?” her mother asked when she overheard that. “Tell me that one, Houdini.”

  “It’s a puzzle,” he said. “A friend of mine has a theory that if survival of the fittest is all about the guys most likely to get to spread the most seed and populate, then the prize would actually go to the sociopaths of the world—those slick player types who bed anything that might breathe. Do you believe that?” They locked down in one of those awful stares that made Abby want to run from the room screaming, made her wish they would drown in hot molasses and shut up.

  “So what friend do you have who actually talks philosophical thoughts? The hot-dog heiress?”

  Her mother thought it was sick to talk about historical tragedies and threatened to take it up with the Abby’s therapist, whom she now refers to often, but her dad said people are most afraid of the unknown. It’s always best to know, he argued. “It’s why I believe in regular check-ups and asking lots of questions.”

  Abby’s mom walked from the room and slammed the door. Her dad once said that she has two channels with no choices in between. There is “The Zany Madcap Adventures of Me” and there is “Nobody Loves Me, Everybody Hates and/or Is Jealous of Me.” He said the common denominator, of course, is me. Me, me, me. “I am so goddamned sick of it I could die,” he said, and now that is what she thinks as she passes through the stones and vines. I am so goddamned sick of it I could die.

  “Everyone needs a mantra,” C.J. had told the residents of Pine Haven when they went to meditation class, which is something Sadie never misses. It is best when you use sounds that blank your mind. Sadie asked if it was okay if she imitated her old Singer sewing machine because it was her greatest meditation device for years. Absolutely, C.J. said, and so Sadie hums and Mr. Stone makes what he calls squirrel chatter, which annoys everyone and most just do the ordi
nary om, which Abby tries to do, but it almost always turns into a curse or what a crash would sound like if there was a twenty-car pileup on the interstate like that one in Tennessee when everyone was suddenly caught in a cloud of fog with no warning whatsoever. Could you see that coming? Her dad would say yes, you could. He would say that the makings of such weather and the traffic conditions could have been predicted. “You have to keep your eyes open at all times,” he said, but looked at her mother as he said it. “You don’t want to be caught unaware.”

  Her favorites of her dad’s tricks are the ones he calls torn-and-restored, where it always ends with him saying, No worry, good as new. Abby wishes he would use it on himself. Good as new, he says. A pony prancing from a pile of crap, the phoenix rising from ashes, Jesus sprung from the tomb, the old dude we saw at the mall slapped with paddles and brought back to life.

  DOLLBABY WAS A stray and though Abby’s mother tried and tried to get her to look at all the pictures in the newspaper from breeders, Abby held firm that this was the one she wanted. It was clear, after all, that Dollbaby had chosen her. Of all the kids, in this whole town, she was the one Dollbaby followed from the school where she had spent several days curled up outside the cafeteria doorway hoping for food. Who knew what Dollbaby actually was—a little of this and a little of that—the vet had said but she most resembled a Sheltie with her sharp little nose and bushy fox tail. The nose of a beagle, her dad had said the first time she ever picked up a scent and took off. She had clearly been abused and cowered at the sight of most adults and brooms and mops. She had the occasional accident in the house, but as Abby often pointed out to her parents, this was a temporary thing and would get better as Dollbaby got older and more used to living there. That was two years ago, when Abby was in fifth grade and before her parents started holding their late-night screaming matches. Now Abby is about to turn thirteen and Dollbaby has left as quickly as she came, likely gone for good, her mother had said because she had looked everywhere with no luck. Her mother said someone probably thought she was a stray and took her home.