After Life (23 page)

And as the summer wore on, Peter changed. He shoved his history books underneath his bed and began hanging around the library, reading up on spiritualism. A lot of what he read annoyed him.

“Did you know, Naomi, that after the Fox sisters admitted,
admitted,
they were dropping apples and cracking their toes to make the rappings, people refused to believe they were fakes?”

“Well,” I said. “They were only fakes in one sense of the word.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

I explained. It is possible, I told him, to begin with what may seem to you like fraud, but have it acquire truth. As an example, I asked him if he’d ever been in a horrible mood and then gotten out of it by smiling.

“Maybe, I don’t know. But I see what you mean. Go on.”

At first, I said, that smile is a fraud. You’re not in a good mood at all. But then, because you’re smiling, you are. Is that smile still a fraud?

“Hmm,” he said, dubious.

“Plus, most mediums end up fudging a bit, now and then. People pressure you to come up with something, no matter how crummy your day’s been or how rude they are or anything.” I told him about the intercom in our house in New Orleans, and about poor Miss Beryl. A lot of times, I said, what seems most faked to you can turn out to be the most true, and the most helpful. That, anyway, was how I saw it.

But what changed his mind, in the end, I think, was me. He came to message services and Circle Nights and watched me. Once I even had a message for him. It was during the four o’clock meeting at the Forest Temple.

I liked the Forest Temple—it was made of white painted wood, just an archway with a back on it, rather like an oversized shrine, with the words
FOREST TEMPLE
in old-fashioned green lettering—but it was right off Seneca Street. From the platform I could see tourists walking by with their dogs, and the old men coming in and out of Ferd’s grocery. It made it hard to concentrate. Peter sat in the back, the shadows of leaves moving over him.

“Peter. I have your father.”

Did I? I had a presence. I wanted it to be Peter’s father, and it might have been. Sometimes a presence was all I had to work with.

I told him something fairly general: how much he loved Peter, how Peter should study hard but remember there are things more important than school, and that he had to be careful not to become too self-absorbed.

“You know what I mean,” I added.

Afterward, Peter came up to me, furious. “My father would
never
say anything like that,” he said, eyes narrowed. “Fucking
never.
” There was a bright-red splotch on each of his sharp cheekbones.

“How do you know?” I said, just as angry. “Just because he never
did
doesn’t mean he didn’t want to. And what he said was true, wasn’t it?”

He didn’t say anything. “Peter,” I went on. “I don’t have a father, either. I know it’s hard…”

He turned and kicked one of the benches, emptied now of old ladies and impressionable teens. “You never had a father,” he said bitterly. “I had one and lost him. It’s not the same at all.” He took a breath. “Look,” he said, calmer now. “I want to believe this. You don’t know how badly I want to believe this stuff. But I can’t.”

“If you want to, you can.”

He looked at me, anguished. His eyes filled with tears. And then, while I watched, Peter’s face fell apart. It was almost as if the structures that held it together, the jawbones and snooty brow and arching nose bone, had been taken away and replaced with a meltable substance—wax, maybe, or ice. Something was happening to Peter; something in him was breaking down. It didn’t last long. After a few moments he pulled himself together. But that face was never quite the same.

“Fuck,” he said. “I’m in love with you.”

After that, Peter relaxed a little. He took the Kirlian photography workshop that Nelson was teaching and told me he wasn’t even going to bother thinking up a scientific explanation for the strange, bright auras on the film. He met me for lunch after message services, and we discussed the good parts and bad parts, sharing pie and coffee. He even seemed to gain some weight. Everything about him softened; his hair even lay flatter against his head.

The first time we had sex, I didn’t like it much. Peter was thorough and clinical and removed. “It’s like you’re hammering nails into the wall,” I complained. He was good-natured enough to laugh. But the sex changed, too, and before long we were having it up against trees in the woods, and in my rowboat, and in the bathtub on the third floor of the Silverwood. Our times together became charged. I’d slept with boys in high school—a long-haired soccer player named Ryan Forbes, and a boy named Preston Venn, who was obsessed with computers—but it never interested me. Having sex, I thought, was not much different from playing volleyball or swimming laps in the pool: a lot of effort for nothing. I had trouble concentrating on it. But sex with Peter was its own form of concentration, like concentrating with your body and mind and eyes and mouth all at once. I’d never felt so absorbed.

We noticed that the places we’d had sex seemed, every time we came back to them, weirdly haunted. If we passed a spot in the woods where we’d done it, something hummed in our ears, and the air felt thicker. This erotic fog began filling Train Line, rolling off the lake and out of the woods and filling up places we’d never been, let alone had sex in. It rolled out of the Silverwood bathroom and down the stairs and into the lobby, where old women sat crocheting with their purses on their laps and old men read back issues of
Spirit Light Monthly.
Soon we’d barely have time to walk up the wooden porch steps, set foot on the lobby carpet, before we nearly suffocated with the thought of making love. Anything could set us off; the swirly pink-and-yellow spirit art in the cafeteria, the sound of wind blowing through pine branches. Poor Nelson Karp left for Princeton early, as soon as his workshop was over. His missed Diane, he said—she never did come and visit.

As fall loomed, we became more and more preoccupied with each other. My readings and messages were all for Peter, though I had to pretend, most of the time, that they were for someone else. It was only Peter’s mind I was in, and only Peter’s spirits that held any interest for me. And, for Peter, I was the only thing he wanted to look at, see, or touch. His history books were lost somewhere beneath the bed.

It was the end of August when he had to leave. His teaching assistantship at the university was about to start, and he’d been getting letters about his scholarship that he opened, read, and dropped on the floor of his room. We both felt it coming but didn’t say anything, until one afternoon Peter asked me if I’d drive him to the train station the next morning.

“There’s no
train station
around here,” I said. We were in the grocery store, looking for ballpoint pens. Peter hadn’t written a thing all summer, he said, and all of his pens had dried up. He figured he ought to have some when he got to Boston. “They tore up the rails years ago, when I was a little kid. And no trains had run on them, anyway, since I don’t know when.”

He looked at me sadly. “Port Gilbert. I called.”

I spent the night with him. We had mournful, self-conscious sex, then lay awake the rest of the night without talking. At four we staggered up, deeply cold in the dank morning air, and carried his lumpy duffel bags down to my mother’s car. For a spooky town, a town obsessed with death and spirits and trances and clairvoyance, it seemed awfully conventional that morning: all the lights were off, everyone was in bed under blankets, waiting for the sun to come up so they could cook their breakfasts. In the car I turned the heat up to high, and we rumbled down the gravel and potholes of Seneca Street, past the glimmering lake, and out onto the road.

“Good-bye,” whispered Peter. “Good-bye, good-bye.” His thin face was green in the light from the dashboard.

I’d never driven to Port Gilbert before. It was only an hour and a half away but I had no reason to go there, ever. Peter had asked directions from the person at the station, and they were easy to follow, at first. I zipped down the highway. No other cars were out, only semitrucks. They roared past us in the dark.

“Oh, my God,” said Peter. “Did you see that?”

“See what?”

“That semi driver had a clown mask on.”

“Are you kidding?”

He insisted he wasn’t. It was, he said, the creepiest thing he’d ever seen. “A malevolent clown mask, too. It had a huge smile but devilish eyes
.
”

“Maybe it’s a sign.”

“I hate to think of what.”

We got to the Port Gilbert exit of the interstate with plenty of time to spare. “How about a doughnut?” said Peter. A brightly lit cube of glass and plastic beckoned near the off-ramp.
DAYLIGHT DONUTS
said the sign. Beyond it, the sun edged up over the horizon. “Perfect,” I said.

We had two glazed doughnuts and two cups of coffee. Flies landed on the orange countertop, and around us, everyone was weird. The counter boy was so fat you could hardly see his eyes. An old man grumbled incoherently into his mug of tea. And an overdressed woman lounged across the seat of her booth, kicking her high-heeled foot in the air, saying nothing but giving us smoldering looks.

We were glad to leave.

But somehow we’d gotten ourselves turned around. Instead of the main strip, we were on a residential one-way street, rattling over the brick paving. Then we were speeding down a hill, Lake Ontario in the distance ahead of us, spread out like a flag.

“I’ll ask for directions,” said Peter, hopping out and running into a Ha-Ha store. He was back in half a minute. “Follow that bread truck,” he told me, pointing at a big white van. “He told me he was going right past it.”

The bread truck went down alleys filled with pallets and Dumpsters, it cut through parking lots, it made sudden turns without signaling. I had the feeling we were getting farther and farther away from the train station all the time. We passed a house that was on fire; the bread truck drove onto the sidewalk to get around the fire engines. We did the same.

All of a sudden the bread truck stopped, tooted its horn, and a white-clad arm waved at us from the side window.

“This is it, I guess,” said Peter.

We’d stopped at a big square building that had rows of greenish windows and a giant, round, handless clock over the double doors. It looked like a cross between a warehouse and a cathedral.

“Uh-oh,” I said. “The train’s already here.”

I turned off the car and helped him pull the duffel bags out of the back. We had time for a hurried, nervous kiss before he went galloping into the station, laden with luggage. But he’d only just disappeared behind the doors when the whistle blew, and the train slowly began pulling out of the station. I got back out of the car and leaned against the hood.

Three minutes later, Peter came out again. He dropped his bags on the dirty sidewalk. Then he didn’t walk toward me, he ran.

“You missed it,” I told him.

“I don’t know what I was thinking,” he said, over and over again. His arms were tight around my shoulders. “I can’t leave. I don’t think I can ever leave.”

“Never?”

“Never,” he said. “Never ever ever.”

We drove home. Peter left his hand in my lap the whole way. Other cars were out now, families and commuters and school buses, and we listened to the local radio station as we got back onto the interstate. “Good morning, early risers!” said the deejay. “It’s a beautiful day!”

It was. The sky was clear and cloudless, and the sun was up, so bright and glaring we felt like we were driving straight into it.

8
witch

I took the boat out on the lake again. I hadn’t done that much in the last few years—my boat was rusty and had some leaks in the bottom I didn’t know how to fix—but the morning before my mother and I were to go to the forensics lab, I thought it would feel good to be alone for a little while, away from every living soul. In summer the lake was always choked with thick green algae, impossible to row through, but the colder fall weather had brought clear water. I rowed hard for a bit, then stopped and drifted. Now and then I’d have to bail out the water with a yogurt container of Ron’s I’d brought along.

From the lake, Train Line looked like an island. I hunkered down in my boat, windbreaker zipped to my chin, and looked out at it: the pointed rooftops poking out from the trees, empty flagpoles, shuttered windows. There was Winnie Sandox raking leaves; there was old Francis Liggett smoking his pipe in the middle of his lawn. Other times I’d gone out on the lake, I’d seen people taking walks, and going out to their cars, and having cocktail parties on their patios, but they never noticed me. It was as if the lake was a wall to them. I could have waved or even shouted, but they’d look around, look up at the trees, and still never see me. There I was, completely out in the open, but invisible. Spirits must feel like this, I thought.

After a while I stopped rowing and ate some chicken-flavored crackers from a box. My fingers were wet and numb from bailing, and my hair was whipping around. It was too cold to be out, but I liked it there and thought maybe it would be better if I were to lie down in the bottom of the boat, since I’d be out of the wind. I spread the tarp on the bottom and gently lowered myself down, holding on to the oars.

It
was
warmer there, and quiet. The only sound was the clunk of water lapping the metal hull. Without a horizon the sky looked strangely depthless, like a lid. I ate some more crackers, imagining how odd the boat would look from shore, if anyone bothered to notice.

When I stood up again, fifteen or twenty minutes later, I lost my balance. That had never happened before. I must have stepped too close to the left side of the boat, because it tipped sharply, and when I flung myself to the right side I overcorrected. The boat flipped over, and I splashed like a big sack of junk into the water.

It seemed like a long time before I came back up again. Under my windbreaker I was wearing a heavy cotton sweater, my pants were wool, and my shoes were clunky leather loafers. I kicked and struggled against my suddenly weighty clothes for what must have been a whole minute before my face broke the surface. I spat and gasped and pushed my hair out of my eyes. My cracker box bobbed in the waves three feet ahead of me, but the boat was gone. I couldn’t believe it. It took so little to sink the boat; it took nothing, a tiny miscalculation. I swiveled around in the water. There were the oars, but the boat had vanished. And the shore, I realized, was awfully far away.