After Life (22 page)

“It was his first paranormal experience,” said Nelson. He took his glasses off and polished them with a small cloth he got from his shirt pocket. Sweet, serious Nelson.

“Well, Peter Morton,” I said, leaning onto the table and looking him straight in the eyes. “I’m going to tell you something, and I want you to promise me you won’t forget it the entire time you’re here. Do you promise?”

He flickered his eyelashes, looked down at his hands, then back up at me. The skin beneath his eyebrows grew pink. This, I realized, was how he blushed. “Sure. Yes. I promise.”

“Spiritualism,” I said, holding the edge of the table, “is our answer to death. It’s not a joke. It’s not even close to a joke.”

He glanced at Nelson. Nelson’s mouth was shut tight.

“Okay,” said Peter, nodding slowly. “Okay, Miss Naomi Ash. I’ll remember that.”

That summer, I was a big, suntanned, lazy girl, with a lot of black hair I pinned to the back of my head. I’d mostly gotten over the incessant clairaudience and headaches of the year before, though I still sometimes spent whole days with the shades pulled down, wet towels over my face. I scheduled readings for the afternoon and evening, so I could spend the mornings at the beach in Wallamee. At first I went with Teeny Lawrence. She wore bikini bathing suits in blinding colors and ate potato chips from a can. Children galloped past us, spraying our towels with sand, and Teeny screamed blue murder after them. It wasn’t long before I was going to the beach with Peter Morton. Nelson knew enough to leave us alone.

Peter didn’t seem to like the beach, though. He didn’t have any shorts, so he rolled his pants up around his knees, and refused to take his T-shirt off. The brightness of the sun on the lake made his eyes water. But he wouldn’t admit that he’d rather be somewhere else, so we kept going; he spent the time lying on his side on the beach blanket, reading. Sometimes he’d sit up, his elbows on his knees, and watch me sunbathe. I pretended not to notice, but I could feel his eyes move over me.

One day we dumped the sand out of our shoes, rolled up our towels, and walked to the Ha-Ha for sandwiches. We’d known each other for almost two weeks by this time, and we saw each other every day, but he still hadn’t made any moves. He walked several feet away from me, his hands in his pockets. Once in a while he would stop, pick up a pebble, and wing it at a tree.

We were crossing the bridge at Wallamee Creek when he asked me a question. “Naomi. Why didn’t you go to college?”

I shrugged. “I didn’t want to. I never felt the urge. Why?”

“No particular reason. It’s just that everyone I know goes to college, or will go, or has gone. Everyone does, that’s all.”

“Not everyone.”

“I guess not.

We leaned over the railing and watched water tumble over rocks.

“I mean,” he said after a minute or two, “it’s not like you’re dumb.”

“No,” I said. “It’s not.”

The deli section of the Ha-Ha was in the back, past the racks of candy and fishing supplies. We got in line. Peter looked uncomfortable.

“Have you noticed,” he said under his breath, “that there are
deer heads
on the walls in here?”

“Yes,” I said. Of course there were; there’d always been deer heads in the Ha-Ha. I told him how once, a few years ago, my mother ran into a deer with her car out on Vining Road. Instead of leaving the carcass there to rot, she brought it to the Ha-Ha and had it cut up. We ate venison burger and venison stew and venison everything for months. We had no idea what they did with the head. It might well have been the one hanging above the cashier stand.

This stunned Peter into silence.

For the first time, I found myself looking around at the Ha-Ha and actually seeing it. Flies buzzed and died against the windows, and their tiny corpses littered the sills. Whole squares of linoleum were missing from the floor, revealing the patchy concrete beneath. Some of the cans and boxes on the shelves, with their crushed corners and faded labels, could have been twenty years old. This was the gift Peter gave me: the ability to escape myself. Though it might not have been a gift at all, but a curse.

We got our egg salad sandwiches. They were wrapped in white paper and accompanied by a little sack of chips. From the glum look on Peter’s face I knew what he was thinking:
hepatitis
B.

“I’ve eaten sandwiches here a thousand times,” I told him. “I promise it won’t kill you.”

He looked at me dubiously. “If I die, you can have my books.”

“Thank you,” I said.

We ate on the tiny square of lawn that passed for Wallamee’s War Memorial Park. Peter leaned up against a skinny maple tree, relieved to be out of the sun. I asked him what, exactly, he was doing in Train Line.

“Nothing,” he said. “I’m here to do as close to nothing as possible.”

He’d finished his history degree at Princeton in the spring, he said, and was going to graduate school in Boston in the fall. He had a scholarship and a teaching assistantship waiting for him. “But I almost can’t stand the idea, I’m so burned out. I don’t want to work, I don’t want to travel. I want to do nothing. Nelson told me Train Line was a good place for that.”

“I guess that depends.” I talked about my own last year, getting my registration and doing endless message services and being laid up with headaches half the time. I’d never spoken to him about my mediumship before, and after a few minutes I began to feel self-conscious. I stopped and prodded my sandwich.

“Go on,” he said. “Please.” And he took my hand.

It was hard to speak with my hand clamped between his, so I just shook my head.

“Please?” he said again.

“No. That’s all.” I waited a moment, struggling to get a hold of myself. “You think we’re wackos, don’t you?”

He looked at me for a long time, then frowned and looked away. “No. I have to admit I thought that before I got here. And for a little while afterward. But I don’t now.”

“Hmm,” I said.

“I mean it.” He gave my hand a squeeze and rolled away across the grass, staring up at the tree branches.

Soon we were kissing in the woods, holding hands under tables, lying for hours on the narrow, lumpy bed in Peter’s hotel room. The room was tiny, with a sink and a chair but no desk or table. Books and clothes covered the floor. Through the window floated the voices of the people on the porch below, chatting and complaining and cracking themselves up.

“This place disturbs me,” Peter said one afternoon. We were lying half-dressed in front of an oscillating fan, trying and failing to get cool. The temperature was in the nineties outside, even hotter in here, and stuffy.

“The point is to disturb you, I suspect.”

“Not how you think,” he said. He pulled a T-shirt on and crouched next to the window, looking out. “I haven’t seen anything I couldn’t explain. The messages at services are pretty general, you know. And there’ve been no materializations, nothing like that.”

“What’s so disturbing, then?”

“The people here. Some are a bit odd, but no one’s downright crazy. And, for the most part, no one’s stupid.”

“‘For the most part,’”
I said. “I like that.”

“You know what I mean. These people are smart and nice, and about the most earnest people I’ve ever met. They’re not trying to trick anyone or make a lot of money. Which means—”

Below us, the gang on the porch erupted in laughter. Someone had a deep, honking laugh, like a foghorn.

“Which means what?” I asked, when the noise died down again.

“They really believe in it.”

“Duh.”

“You’re not listening to me,” he said grumpily.

“Sorry.”

I stood up and buttoned my skirt. I didn’t have much patience for this sort of thing. Believe it or don’t believe it, I wanted to tell him, but don’t make me listen to you muddle through it.

“Naomi!” He turned to me, desperate. “I’m sorry. It’s just that there’s something here I’m not getting.” His hair was flattened on one side of his head and stuck out on the other.

I wasn’t very nice. I put my sandals on and tied my hair up. “Give me a call when you figure it out,” I told him, and walked right out the door.

He didn’t call for almost a week, but I thought about him the entire time.

Though I would never have admitted it to Peter, there was a part of me that was falling in love with the idea of going to college. I had no idea what Princeton looked like, but I imagined buildings with Gothic windows and towers and an observatory, one that would open up on clear nights and poke its telescopes at the moon. The library would have green reading lights and the kind of book stacks that reached so high you had to climb ladders to get to the top. I would write with fountain pens if I went to college, I thought, and I’d study my textbooks for hours and hours, until I was kicked out of the library or my eyes went bad, whichever came first.

Naomi Ash, College Student, was a very different person from me. I knew that, dropped suddenly from an airplane into a college campus, I would not be able to do it. I’d go to my room and want to sleep the whole time. At parties I’d spill drinks on my dress and have to flee, stained and mortified. In classes I’d be so afraid of not understanding what the professor was saying that I’d spend the whole time staring out the window at the beautiful campus or else drawing tiny pictures in my notebook. But I wanted to be someone else. I’d never felt this way before, but something about Peter brought it out in me. I wanted to be like him: quiet, studious, and full of information. I wanted to know things.

Actually, Peter never did call. I’d turned off my bedside lamp one night, and had just pulled the sheet over my shoulder, when something hit my window screen and bounced away into the night. It happened again, then again, so I stood up and squinted out into the dark.

“But soft, what light through yonder window
breaks?”

I knew that from high school.

Peter was wearing a white shirt and his pale-blue pants. Standing there out in the street, he practically glowed.
“It is the east,”
he said, and went on to recite the whole damn soliloquy.

I pushed the screen up and leaned out on my elbows to watch him. He was making a fool of himself. Anyone watching from a porch or window or yard all up and down Seneca Street could hear him. Even I knew it was a cheesy thing to do: clichéd, sentimental, silly. It seemed out of character for Peter, who was such an intellectual, and so serious. But it knocked me for a loop.

“Naomi?” he called when he was through. I didn’t answer. “Naomi? Am I going to have to repeat it?”

I fell in love that fast.