Before and Afterlives (34 page)

We ate exotic foods, Thai and Indian curries. We ground our own spices in the coffee grinder. Also we had a peculiar taste for Ethiopian, and Sarah and I would sometimes joke about this. You know, how starving those people are and how we craved their recipes. What a laugh! It was a laugh then, I tell you. I had my own boy starving. Starving for solidity. Sometimes he could bar
ely move off of his bed.

Do you know those movies where a person suddenly a
cquires the ability to walk through walls? The ones where someone becomes transparent to the point that no one else can see them unless looked at very hard
?
The Invisible Ma
n
? Movies like that? Let me tell you, they’re a pack of lies. Those people never seem to have problems. They move through life more easily in fact. Now they can walk through moving traffic and never have to wait for the light. Now they can strip off their clothes and sneak into shower rooms to watch people, bodies, drifting through steam, larger than life, without ever getting caught.

There were days when Nathan couldn’t bring himself to go to the bathroom on his own. There were days when Sarah and I tried to help him into the shower, but he fell through our hands, through the hardwood floor, down into the living room. We’d find him lying under the coffee table, his arms threaded through the table legs. Or, once, splayed out in the middle of the broken plants and pottery he’d landed on. I was always frightened. Someday, I thought, he will fall and fall forever, and then where will he go? I remembered how, when we were little, we thought if a person dug a deep enough hole in the ground, they’d fall through to China. Our parents frightened us with thoughts like that. Why was it they wanted to frighten us?

Nathan never fell to China. Or if he did, he fell back in time for me not to notice. I don’t think this is possible. I don’t think this ever happened. Still, though, I’ll leave it open. I have learned to leave things open, sir. Have you?

It was a Friday last September the school called me. The school nurse said, “I think you need to come down.” I told her that I had to work, and she said, “I really think you should come down, Miss Livingston.” She said my name real tough-like, like she was gritting her teeth.

“All right,” I said. “All right. I’ll come down.”

Nathan was waiting for me in the nurse’s office. He was lying on a table, like in a doctor’s exam room, with the crackling paper rolled over its top. Only that paper didn’t crackle. It didn’t make any noise at all. Now being a doctor yourself, sir, you know you can’t shut that paper up. Even though you are up there at the university studying “the social implications of phenomena”, as you put it in your letter, and are in great need of “personal narratives” and “statistics” so that the research will be “pure”, and are not a real doctor, practicing medicine and such, I’m sure you have been on one of those tables before. Not even staying completely still, which is impossible if you ask me, will shut that paper up. I asked, “What’s wrong? What’s happened here?” And the nurse, a woman who was not as severe as I had expected, a woman who wore a fuzzy blue sweater and did not have her hair up in a bun but let it fall over her shoulders like dark cream, she said, “I’m so sorry.”

I went over to Nathan and looked at his eyes. His eyes were open, but he didn’t seem to see me. They were blue eyes, w
atery eyes, my father’s eyes. When he was born, how happy I was to see those eyes! Not my husband’s, who was a drunkard and a cheater, not his eyes. I said, “Nathan? Honey, what’s wrong?” His lips trembled. I thought, What am I going to do? Already I knew without knowing what afflicted him that things were going to change.

The nurse put her arm around me and said, “Be calm.” She u
nbuttoned Nathan’s shirt, one button at a time, her fingers were so deft, and pulled back each side of his shirt like a curtain. If you could see what I saw that day. It was not always like that, I assure you. Nathan: his chest, only his chest, had gone translucent. I saw those lungs filling and expelling air, two brownish, soggy sacs going up and down, up and down. And his heart, it throbbed beneath them. The blood slid through his veins and I thought of blue rivers winding on a map. The nurse covered him over again and began buttoning his tiny buttons. And look here, I thought, even those buttons are clear.

Perhaps I am exaggerating this all a bit. I don’t know. This is how I remember it: his lungs, his heart, the blood in his veins and arteries, the webbing of his nerves. Sir, I know you are a not a real doctor and all, but let me ask you something. Have you ever seen anything like this? Have you ever seen your own child like this? Sir, do you have children?

I took my son home and, while we drove in the car, neither of us said anything. Nathan looked out the window at the passing mills and factories, the ones that all closed down years ago. Their smokeless stacks loomed above us, gray against the gray sky. I live on the south side of town, not the best place to raise children, Lord knows, but I did the best I could.

The factories we passed were tattooed with graffiti. The gridwork of their windows was busted out. Kids used to come down to the mills to paint their names, to spray-paint their useless childhood loves, to mark down their childhood en
emies as though they were making hit lists. They threw rocks, pieces of broken concrete, at the gridded windows high overhead. The glass would shatter and rain down at their feet, onto the factory floors, and oh, how we laughed and gripped each other’s shoulders at these small victories. It felt good to bust up those places that broke first our parents’ backs, and then, after shutting down, their spirits.

I think Nathan and his friends did this, too. To let out fru
stration. I don’t know. I’m only guessing. It’s something I’ve learned to do.

For the first few months, things were not so bad. Not as bad as some of the others I’ve heard of. Nathan was not quick to disperse and he did it quietly. He lingered, and Sarah and I began to eat.

I will say here that I do not blame Sarah for what she did. She was only sixteen. She was jealous of her little brother. Nathan had been popular at school. After he started to disa
ppear, I think she expected that popularity to wane a little. Instead, six other students started to disappear as well. Several of them girls who I hear had crushes on Nathan. He was a good-looking boy. He could turn heads, just like a pretty girl.

I had phone calls, let me tell you. Muffled voices in the middle of the night, hoarse voices threatening to burn down my house, to cut my brake lines, to put a bomb in my mai
lbox
.
Just keep your kid away from mine
!
But we both know, sir, this disease is not catching. I’m glad to see the new commercials and ads informing people of this.

Sarah—well, she was unhappy. She sulked in her bedroom and listened to sulky music, and sometimes she’d come into whatever room I was in and she’d sulk there. I made her doughnuts to perk her up, fried them myself, and then she’d be a happy girl for se
veral hours. It was worth it to see her smiling around a cinnamon doughnut, her favorite, even though she did gain an awful lot of weight. Acne, too. Little red bumps spread over her cheeks and on her chin, cranberry-colored. She always complained because they were the kind you couldn’t pop, you had to wait until they decided to go away on their own, there were no white heads on them to pinch. They took so long to go away. I was sorry I couldn’t afford a dermatologist for her then.

As I mentioned, I don’t blame her for what she did.

One day I came home from shopping to find two women in my living room. They were dressed in elegant black dresses, wore black high heels, and one of them covered her face with a veil. My living room smelled of lilies, thick and sweet.

They were Mourners. I could tell that from the start. They had knocked on my door before, usually on Sundays, and S
arah and I had hid behind the curtains of the picture window, sneaking glances out, waiting for them to leave. I don’t know how they knew about Nathan. I assume they had an informant at the hospital, even though those records of Nathan’s visits are supposed to be private.

Sarah sat in a chair opposite them on the couch. She’d set out a tray of sugar cookies on the coffee table between them. When I saw those cookies, the sugar glittering like grains of powdered glass on top, I almost ran over to snatch them away from those women. I said, “What’s all this?” I still held the grocery bags in my hands.

One of the ladies stood up and extended her hand. She was the one without the veil. She said, “Hello, Mrs. Livingston. I’m Hilary Love. So pleased to meet you.”

I looked at the hand for a moment. She wasn’t taking it back. It floated there between us, so finally I set down my bags and shook it.

The other lady was a widow. Her name was Sally Parkinson. Her husband had disappeared last year. She said, “We’ve been having a wonderful talk with your daughter.”

I said, “Go to your room, Sarah.” I gave her a look and she didn’t say anything, but went straight up the stairs, her feet thumping unpleasantly all the way up.

“Now Mrs. Livingston,” said the Widow Parkinson. ”There’s no need to be angry with her. She’s a delightful girl, full o
f
lif
e
.”

I said, “Don’t talk to me of life.” I asked, “Why are you here and what have you said to my daughter?”

“Nothing,” they swore.
“
Nothing
,
Mrs. Livingston.”

Now that’s the last time I allowed that. I corrected them. “It’
s
Mis
s
Livingston, thank you very much,” I said.

They said, “Oh, I’m so sorry.”

“No need to be sorry,” I said. “He was a worthless drunk. He used to hit me. I threw him out.”

“We want to talk to you about Nathan,“ they explained. But I already knew that.

I told them, “Take your pamphlets and yourselves out of my house. He is not dead.”

“Oh, but Miss Livingston,” said the Widow Parkinson. “You don’t realize it yet. You’re in denial. You just wait, one day you will understand.”

Hilary Love patted the widow’s leg when she said this, then squeezed her knee. She left her hand there and her fingers spread over the widow’s knee like the jointed legs of a spider. The widow, you see, she thought the same as me at first. She thought maybe her husband’s not really dead, maybe he’s not really disappearing. Maybe, she thought, he is simply shifting over to a different kind of life. I nodded. I agreed with that. She said, “Miss Livingston, I was wrong. He was dead from the day he started to vanish, and we are here to help you deal with that. You must understand, Nathan is gone and you are neglecting a very much alive daughter. Let us take what’s left of him to a center, where he can continue this final process in private. You must get on with your life. It can take so long, such a long time for him to go. In fact, he is already gone. Only the body is remaining, such as it is.”

That threw me, so I stood and asked them to leave. I waved my hand in the direction of the front door. They hesitated, blinking dumbly at each other, so I asked them not to make me call the police. They nodded. “Yes,” they said. “Of course,” they said. I escorted them to the door and left them out in the cold of that autumn day, with the wind blowing red and gold leaves onto the steps of my porch. Later, when I passed by the door, I found a pamphlet one of them had stuffed in the jamb. On the cover, in large letters, it said: LET THE DEAD BURY THE DEAD. I wri
nkled my nose. What did they know about being dead anyway? I threw the pamphlet in the trash.

I didn’t yell at Sarah. I didn’t carry on and tell her how much she’d hurt me. We were supposed to be a team in this, and here she was, letting in the enemy. I grilled a steak and sautéed onions for her that night.

Nathan—he continued to grow in his absence. Almost every day was different. Some days I’d find him quite substantial, with sweat beaded on his forehead. Sweat I could touch and wipe away, as though he were simply a fevered child. Believe me, though, this was not a regular event. Most days he was gone as much as a ghost. I could pass my hands right through him. His body would seal around my hands as if I had plunged them into water. Lord, I even expected him to wash away sometimes! But somehow he pulled himself together. He was a fighter—he always fought—up till the end.

In the middle of all this I lost my job at the paper. I’d been inserting advertisements and coupons into the local newsp
aper for a little over minimum wage. You know, on the assembly line with several other women, catching the papers as they came down our row, folding the ads into them quick as you can. I came home with my fingers inked black. If I didn’t wash my hands straight away, I’d leave prints all over the house. Cupboard doors, drinking glasses, the handle of the refrigerator. Ink smudges everywhere. You could always tell where I’d been.

I lost the job because I called off too much. I had to take care of Nathan, and some days I couldn’t bear to leave him alone in that big old house, with only Sarah’s sulky presence.

Some days he looked so frightened. I can’t remember his eyes ever closing for more than a few hours at a time. And when he did close them, it didn’t matter. Those eyelids were clear, and I could see his blue eyes behind them, as if I’d bent down to look through a keyhole, to find him staring back at me from the other side.