After Life (16 page)

“Hmm.”

“What is it, anyway?” he said, leaning toward me. “I don’t mean this in an offensive way, but are you…you know, uninterested in men? I know a lot of the mediums over there swing that way, and that’s cool.”

“I don’t think I’m a lesbian.”

“I’m sorry, tell me to shut up if it’s none of my business, but have you actually dated anyone since that Peter guy? I’ve asked a few people and no one seems to know.”

“You’ve
asked
people about me?”

“Sorry!” He flushed, looked at his hands. “Just a few questions. I wanted to make sure you were available, that’s all.”

I sat there, chewing on my thumbnail.

“Oh, man,” he said, getting up and crouching next to my chair. “I’m really sorry. I should never have said anything. If you need me to be patient, I can do that. Really.” He smiled a rueful, understanding-man smile.

I thought to myself:
What was I thinking, coming to
dinner?

“I do need that,” I said, trying out a sorrowful smile of my own.

“Hey!” he said. “I’ve got dessert! Do you like chocolate cake?”

“I love chocolate cake,” I lied.

When I got back to Train Line, I parked the car in my mother’s driveway, stuck the keys in her mailbox, and walked home. I wasn’t even the slightest bit drunk anymore. I wished I was. My shoes clattered loudly over the gravel streets, and a cold breeze tangled my hair. Train Line was pitch dark, and silent except for the wind blowing leaves.

I’d hoped Ron and Jenny would be in bed when I got to my house, because I wanted to drink some warm milk without being interrogated about my “date,” but there were lights on downstairs. I sighed and peered in through the narrow window by the front door. Jenny was on the couch, reading, her small head bent in concentration. She looked like a child. I unlocked the door and went inside.

“Hello,” I said, hanging my coat on the rack. Jenny didn’t answer. She had her flannel pajamas on and was wrapped in an old brown afghan, and the cover of her book was hidden by her hand. I took my shoes off. Finally she looked up.

“Snippy died,” she said. Her face was pale and her lips were alarmingly white.

“I know. I’m sorry.”

She didn’t ask me how I knew, but nodded, biting her lips. “I guess I should say
passed over.
” She said this with startling bitterness, which made me uneasy.

“I’m sorry,” I said again.

“
You
didn’t kill him,” said Jenny. Her face, which had always been thin and irritable, looked like it was about to crack in half. Her eyes were rimmed with pink and her white lips quivered. “
God
killed him. It makes no sense at all. Why would God want to kill my bird? Why would he even bother?”

I was just standing there by the coat rack, my arms dangling. Did she want an answer? I didn’t have one.

“Sometimes this place makes me sick,” she said, gulping suddenly and covering her face with her hands. The book fell into her lap, and I saw that it was the latest best seller:
Stories to Warm the
Soul.

Jenny sobbed. For a long moment I stood there, sweat sliding down my back, knowing that I should go to her. Finally I did. I sat next to her on the couch and put my hand on her shoulder. Then I leaned toward her, awkwardly, and put my arms around her body. She was too thin, and she had a hot, stale smell.
Oh, no,
I thought.

I had the terrible impression then that I was holding someone who had already died. And I knew that it was almost true, that she was going to die soon, and she knew it, too, and that’s why she was crying. Spiritualists talk of this kind of knowledge, the kind that comes without voices or visions or manifestations or any glimpse into the spirit world, as “just knowing.” There’s another word for it, one you find in old books about parapsychology:
cryptesthesia.
Sometimes just knowing is the truest kind of mediumship. Perhaps it’s a spirit whispering in your ear, so gently you mistake its words for thoughts, and standing too closely for you to see it. Once I read about a little Italian girl going to bed a few hours before she would die in an earthquake. Her mother was helping her put on the socks she wore to bed, and the little girl asked, “Why are you putting on these death-socks? My death-socks.”

Jenny cried for several minutes, not leaning into me but not pushing me away, either. I could feel her tense muscles loosen and grow tired under my hands.

For some reason I found myself thinking about Peter’s lime- green Datsun, and how we drove that car fast down back roads on dark nights, and how sometimes we turned the headlights off. Dark shapes loomed out at us, and the road, still soft from the hot sun, was like velvet under the wheels. We didn’t care what could happen to us, and nothing ever did. I ached for them, those nights, Peter whisking me safely through the blackness.

Eventually Jenny stopped and I leaned back. She wiped her face with her pajama sleeve and stood up, unsteadily, and walked into the kitchen. I couldn’t help but glance down at her feet. They were blue-white and bare.

6
reconstructed head

A week went by, then another. The story of the bones fell out of the paper right away, and almost as quickly town gossip found new subjects: the wife of the manager of Train Line’s single hotel, the Silverwood, left him for another woman; a famous psychic was said to be trying to get church membership so she could buy a house on the grounds; and so on. I felt less relieved than perplexed by the story’s swift vanishing. Was all news so temporary? It gave me the sense of plots unfolding behind my back, of armies assembling just over the next hill. My mother, even, had little to say about it, though I had not seen much of her in the past weeks. She seemed to be lying low.

And I hadn’t heard from Peter, either. Sometimes I thought I was about to. Walking across the grass to the library, or half-dozing on the sofa, I’d get an impression of him: the smell of his hair, or the feel of his waist under my hands. These would vanish almost before I was aware of them, and left me feeling haunted and bereft.
What do you want from me?
I’d ask, desperate to know, to oblige him, but terrified, too, that he’d answer.

Then, one afternoon two weeks after they’d found the bones, there was a photograph of the skull in the
Observer.
Next to this picture was one of the skull covered with a clay skin. It had fake eyes and hair and was sculpted to look real. It wore a peculiar expression: its mouth was smiling but its eyes were blank and wide open, like a store window mannequin’s. They had it set up on someone’s lab table, no body, just the ragged edge of a neck.
A FAMILIAR FACE?
asked the headline.

But it was Peter. There were his small, sharp cheekbones, his long chin, his high, narrow forehead. I had never noticed those things about him before. If someone had asked me to describe Peter, I’d never have thought to say
small cheekbones, narrow forehead,
but when I saw them I knew them intimately. The hairline was wrong—Peter had a widow’s peak, which I used to envy—and of course, the hair itself wasn’t even close, either. Peter’s was wavy and black and lifted straight up from his forehead, as springy as the outside of a coconut; it didn’t flop over to one side like the hair in the picture. The nose wasn’t small enough. Peter’s nose was pointed and delicate.

I covered the picture of the clay head with my hand and looked for a long time at the bare skull instead. I was in the kitchen, the only one home, my toast getting cold in the toaster. Outside, the sky was full of forbidding purple clouds. I remembered sitting at this same table years before, in the same house, watching Peter eat. He was so skinny, you could see all the different pieces of his jaw move when he chewed. He had pale skin that the veins showed through, and a face that came to a point, as if his head had been pushed into the corner of a room, and sleepy, snobby eyes
.
Somehow, there was more of Peter in the skull picture. Maybe it was the teeth: a tad too long, overlapping a bit in front.

But would anyone recognize him? I couldn’t tell. The clay head clearly belonged to someone very different from Peter: a chunky, slow, poorly groomed person. He looked like a hick from around here, which Peter definitely was not. You’d have to be intimate with Peter’s bones, I decided, to make the connection. You’d have to have felt his face in your hands. You’d have to have rubbed headaches from that forehead and slid your tongue along those teeth. As far as I knew, no one else around here had done those things, least of all my mother.

I found a pair of scissors in the kitchen drawer and snipped the pictures out. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with them, but I wanted them. Unfortunately, the newspaper now had a hole in it, and I wasn’t sure if Jenny and Ron had read it yet. Too bad, I thought, and slid the paper to the bottom of the recycling box. The pictures I took upstairs and put in my underwear drawer.

But then I pulled the drawer open again, took the news clipping out, and stared hard at the clay face. Here he was, back once more, in this strange new physical form. What would this head say to me, if it could talk? Maybe,
You loved me once.
Maybe,
Don’t forget.
Or maybe something else entirely.

The reconstructed head was big news in Train Line. Suddenly, the bones were a hot topic again. Ferd at the Groc-n-Stop cut out the picture and taped it to the cash register. Everyone had a theory.

“Power vacuum salesman,” said one of the old men who hung around there. I listened to them while I shopped for food. “He came right into my house and threw dirt on the wall-to-wall carpeting. This was I don’t know how long ago. Fella wouldn’t leave! I wouldn’t be surprised if he threw dirt on the wrong rug, and it was all over.”

“Nah, nah,” said his friend, the postmaster. “I knew the guy, but fat. Used to drive all over the place on a tractor. He was too fat for a car—remember him? Police pulled him over for drinking and driving, and he hid the beer can down between his big old thighs.”

A teenager named Desmond Wallace was hauled in for questioning. Desmond was a thin, dirty kid whose family lived in a house a little way down Line Drive. Once, he killed someone’s cat and nailed the body to a tree along the path to Illumination Stump. No one saw him do it, but everyone knew it was him. He had dropped out of school and now ran around with a little band of junior-high-school Satanists, who apparently looked up to him. The police caught him snooping around the excavation site, and his friends told the officers that Desmond was obsessed with the bones, talked about them all the time and even hinted that he was responsible. They let him go, though, since it was clear that, at seventeen, he couldn’t have been older than twelve when the body was buried. Some people thought that twelve was plenty old enough, knowing Desmond.

But there was no way it was him, according to my mother. She, too, had cut out the pictures of the skull and the reconstructed head, and pressed them between the pages of her address book. She came by the library the morning after the paper came out and showed me.

“Now, doesn’t he look familiar?” she asked, putting her glasses on and squinting at the piece of newspaper.

“Hmm. As a matter of fact he does. He looks like the mannequins in the Sidey’s window.”

“Come now, use your imagination. Picture him with different hair, or with a beard maybe.”

I thought for a moment. “Well, with a beard, he’s the spitting image of Mr. Shaw, the high school shop teacher.”

“Isn’t he still teaching?”

“I believe so.”

“Then you’re no help at all, are you?” she said, slipping the pictures back into her address book.

“Sorry.”

She took her glasses off and folded her arms, frowning at the stack of uncataloged books on my desk.
Tiny Spirits: Stillborn Children in the Afterlife
was on top. “I don’t know why you’ve been so negative lately. You’re just radiating negativity.”

“I’m sorry,” I said again.

“Oh, it’s probably my fault. I’ve been distracted. I can’t tell you how this thing has taken over my mind!” She rubbed her temples. “It’s all I think about. I dream about it. Do you remember Watergate, how every time we’d turn on the television, there it was? You couldn’t escape it. Well it’s the same thing here. Worse even. I don’t recall that I dreamed about Richard Nixon.”