After Life (7 page)

See that woman? That’s Naomi
Ash.

Oh, she’s
good.

I sat at the kitchen table, drinking my coffee and trying to formulate a plan. What I needed, I decided, was a newspaper. I poked around the house, checked in the recycling box: no dice. Ron and Jenny must have taken it with them to the psychic fair. Jenny would want to do the crossword between customers; Ron would be combing the classifieds for a new waterbed. I sat down again, drummed my fingers on the tabletop. Through the small kitchen window the sun was high: it must be almost noon. The Groc-n-Stop, I knew, didn’t carry the morning paper, which was from Rochester, and the
Wallamee Evening Observer
wouldn’t be out until three o’clock or so. Hmm.

My mind wandered. I let it. I thought of the coming fall, then the winter, how icicles would grow from roof edges clear to the ground, how snow would pile as high as cottage windows. I thought of it longingly. In the middle of winter I would hate it, but picturing it now, it seemed beautiful and safe, with the lake frozen solid as a table and everything hidden under blankets and blankets of snow.

I closed my eyes and put my head down, forehead to the Formica. It was cool.

I should have buried him deeper.

After Peter died, I thought for a long time I would have to kill myself. I was terrified. I was frightened of being caught, of course, but that was not the only thing. I was frightened of
him.
I had never been afraid of a spirit before. I wasn’t afraid of my grandparents, who came to me occasionally with kind if vague words, and I wasn’t even afraid of the angry, confused spirits I sometimes came across. But I had never had a spirit who hated me. I was sure Peter hated me. For two or three years I suppressed my mediumship, scared to conjure him up by mistake, or to allow him a way back. But I missed him, too. After all, I had loved him, and once he had loved me. And if I killed myself, I could be with him, and surely he would forgive me. Or would he? I fantasized about it all the time, the various methods: eating poison, walking into the lake, rope, razor, car crash. In the end I didn’t do it, of course, and instead chose to live with what had happened.

Those were terrible, dark months. I worked at the Ha-Ha, a convenience store in Wallamee, during the day, and plotted my suicide at night. Every morning I rode my bike the five and a half miles around the north end of the lake, past groups of kids with lunch boxes waiting for the school bus, and past flocks of ducks flapping through cattails, and past gas stations and real estate offices opening for the day. I rode through most of the winters, too, though when there was a lot of snow I got a ride from Teeny Lawrence, my neighbor, who worked similar hours as I did at a doctor’s office not far from the convenience store. I preferred to ride my bike, though. I wasn’t very good at small talk.

I didn’t mind working at the Ha-Ha. In a way I liked it, or at least I took a desperate pleasure in the sameness of it. Every day I wore the same orange smock, rang up the same items—cigarettes and colas and overpriced groceries and lottery tickets—and said the same things to the same people. From my place behind the counter I could see the front door of a biker bar across the street. I watched couples stand in the parking lot arguing, sobbing drunkenly on each other’s shoulders, riding off too quickly with no helmets. Often they came into the Ha-Ha to buy a snack or a smoke before roaring away. I remember watching them, filled with incomprehension, completely unable to imagine their lives.

Though Wallamee was not a big town by any means, and I never worked any night shifts, I managed to be on duty twice when the store was held up at gunpoint. Maybe something about me invited it. Or maybe criminals found it appealing to rob a store called Ha-Ha. The first time, the gunman lurked in back by the ice-cream freezer until everyone else was out of the store, then ran up to the cash register and pointed a snub-nosed pistol at me so fast that at first I didn’t even recognize the thing as a gun. I just looked at him, trying to figure out what was going on, then slowly backed away and let him take the money from the register himself. When it happened again, there were two of them. One stood by the door and made the other customers lie on the floor—just like in a Western movie—while the other held his gun to the side of my head. The right side of my head, just over my ear. I couldn’t move. The man was shouting at me, over and over,
I want the money! I want the goddamn money!
Finally, in slow motion, I punched in the code and the cash drawer shot out, and I gave the man everything that was in it, even the video game tokens and the food stamps and the credit card receipts.
Thanks, you fat bitch,
he said as he left.

This was not as frightening as it sounds. I rode my bicycle home after it happened and tried to figure out how I felt. The answer was
exhilarated.
It was early spring and the air had lost its edge, and the long, bare branches of the willows along the lakeshore had turned yellow. Dirty piles of snow still lined the road. It seemed quite beautiful to me. I could still feel the place on my head that the man pressed the barrel of his gun to. For that moment, I had been able to imagine something besides Peter and what had happened to him. I could imagine my brains flying out the side of my head, obliterating every memory I had. For some reason, this made me feel better.

I quit the Ha-Ha after that, with my boss’s blessing.

Sometime during my stint at the convenience store, Vivian was born. I knew her mother. Elaine came in several times a week to buy a huge thirty-two-ounce cup of cola and sometimes a microwave burrito, and I’d chat with her while she dug through her enormous purse for money. She was cheerful in a relentlessly stupid, exasperating way. She dyed her hair bronze and wore floppy pantsuits over her chunky, then pregnant, body, and told me things I didn’t really want to know about her personal life. She took a leave of absence from her job a few weeks before the baby was born and didn’t come in anymore. Then, of course, the store was held up, and held up again, and I didn’t come in anymore, either.

But when I answered an ad in the
Observer
for a babysitter, and it turned out to be Elaine, she gave me a big hug and kiss and said she missed me, and of course I could be her babysitter. We met at her house, a low brick one-story with an array of pillars across the front.

“I’d heard you got shot,” she told me as I stepped inside. “I’d heard you almost died.”

“No, no. I’m fine.”

“Well, good!”

I followed her through the house. It was decorated in a country style—there were wooden ducks and faceless dolls and watering cans painted with American flags, all piled apparently randomly in corners and on shelves. The impression it gave was of madness. Then again, I hadn’t gone into many houses other than my own; perhaps this was typical. We went into the kitchen and sat down.

“I don’t really like my baby,” Elaine told me over a cup of herbal tea. “I hate to say it, but it’s true, and I believe in being honest with myself.” Elaine had changed since I’d seen her last. The bronze dye was half grown out, and the only jewelry she had on was a lumpy rock on a black cord.
New Age,
I thought to myself. The country decor was probably on its way out.

“I should never have named her after my mother-in-law,” she went on, “but I thought, you know, Vivien Leigh, Vivian…aren’t there other Vivians? I thought it could be romantic. Huh. Anyway, it seems to suit her.”

The baby was about ten months old, large-headed, with a tiny pair of eyeglasses. She had straight, dark eyebrows that shot out each side of her glasses, like pot handles. She was an odd-looking baby. She sat calmly in her high chair, gazing at the tail of the cat clock that swung back and forth on the wall.

Elaine put her chin in her hands and leaned toward her. “My little egghead. Baby professor. Huh? My little professor. Actually,” she said, sitting back, “she’s not that smart.”

“Oh,” I said, startled. “Well. She’s still a baby.”

Elaine looked at me glumly. The wind had been taken out of her. “You know what I mean. I’m terrible, I know.”

She told me how she was going back to work and didn’t want to put the baby in day care—“all those diseases and pedophiles and who knows what! I mean, I’m not a
bad
mother”—and hoped it would be okay if she brought Vivian to my house, instead of my coming there. Her husband had a home office, she said apologetically, and it had been hard for him these last months, with both her and the baby there. I nodded, said it was fine. I was still imagining, on and off, the feel of the gun barrel on my head—over my ear, at my temple, between my eyes, in my mouth.

“I
need
to get back to work!” she said, gripping her mug. “And with you looking after Vivian, instead of some stranger, well, that’ll be a load off my mind.”

Funny, I thought, how she could think she knew someone after less than a year of small talk, and most of that small talk having come from her.

When I told her where I lived, her face lit up. “Really! I’ve been meaning to get over there. Is it true there’s a herb shop, and a crystal shop?”

I told her it was.

“Neat!” She wrote down the address and telephone number on a yellow, duck-shaped pad. “Does that mean you’re a medium, then?”

I said yes, but that was something of a lie. It had been two years since Peter, and I was still giving very few readings, and mostly faking those.

“That is
so
interesting! You’ll have to give me a reading sometime.”

“Certainly,” I said, smiling.

Elaine shook her head. “I should get into that. Really. I mean, real estate is just a dead end around here.” She folded her arms and looked at her baby, who was sucking its fingers and rocking back and forth, back and forth, looking at nothing.

So then I had Vivian. Apparently real estate wasn’t such a dead end, because Elaine worked longer and longer hours, and got happier and happier. Vivian and I spent whole days with each other: taking naps together in my apartment, watching ants in the grass. I fed her from little glass jars of puree I bought at the Groc-n-Stop. She said her first word to me:
Mama.
I didn’t tell Elaine. There were times when she felt like my child, and I realized why people got married, took jobs, had children. She was a reason to get up in the morning.