Before and Afterlives (9 page)

When I got home, though, he wanted to talk. It took him only a few minutes after I sat down with a plate of meatloaf before he changed the channel, and I about choked. There was a news brief on about the search for Jamie’s murderers. I wondered why the anchorman called them “Jamie’s murde
rers”, the same way you might say, “Jamie’s dogs” or “Jamie’s Boy Scout honors”. My dad stretched out on his reclining chair and started muttering about what he’d do with the killers if it had been his boy. His face was red and splotchy.

I stopped eating, set my fork down on my plate.

“What would you do?” I asked. “What would you do if it had been me?”

My dad looked at me and said, “I’d tie a rope around those ba
stard’s armpits and lower them inch by inch into a vat of piranhas, slowly, to let the little suckers have at their flesh.”

He looked back at the TV.

“But what if the police got them first?” I said. “What would you do then?”

Dad looked at me again and said, “I’d smuggle a gun into the courtroom, and when they had those bastards up there on the stand, I’d jump out of my seat and shoot their God-damned heads off.” He jumped out of his recliner and made his hands i
nto a gun shape, pointing it at me. He pulled the fake trigger once, twice, a third time. Bam! Bam! Bam!

I nodded with approval. I felt really loved, like I was my dad’s favorite. I ate up all this great attention and kept asking, “What if?” again and again, making up different situations. He was so cool, the best dad in the world. I wanted to buy him a hat: Best Dad in the World! printed on it. We were rea
lly close, I felt, for the first time in a long time.

Gracie Highsmith’s house was nestled in a bend of the railroad tracks where she found Jamie. She’d been out walking the tracks looking for odd pieces of coal and nickel when she found him. All of this she told me in her bedroom, on the second floor of her house. She held out a fist-sized rock that was brown with black speckles embedded in it. The brown parts felt like sandpaper, but the black specks were smooth as glass. Gracie said she’d found it in the streambed at the bottom of Marrow’s Ravine. I said, “It’s something special all right,” and she beamed like someone’s mother.

“That’s nothing,” she said. “Wait till you see the rest.”

She showed me a chunk of clear quartz and a piece of hardened blue clay; a broken-open geode filled with pyramids of pink crystal; a seashell that she found, mysteriously, in the woods behind her house, nowhere near water; and a flat rock with a skeletal fish fossil imprinted on it. I was excited to see them all. I hadn’t realized how beautiful rocks could be. It made me want to collect rocks too, but it was already Gracie’s territory. I’d have to find something of my own.

We sat on her bed and listened to music by some group from Cleveland that I’d never heard of, but who Gracie loved because she set the CD player to replay the same song over and over. It sounded real punk. They sang about growing up angry and how they would take over the world and make people pay for being stupid idiots. Gracie nodded and gritted her teeth as she listened.

I liked being alone in the house with her, listening to music and looking at rocks. I felt eccentric and mature. I told Gracie this, and she knew what I meant. “They all think we’re children,” she said. “They don’t know a God-damned thing, do they?”

We talked about growing old for a while, imagining ou
rselves in college, then in mid-life careers, then we were so old we couldn’t walk without a walker. Pretty soon we were so old we both clutched our chests like we were having heart attacks, fell back on the bed, and choked on our own laughter.

“What sort of funeral will you have?” she wondered.

“I don’t know, what about you? Aren’t they all the same?”

“Funerals are all different,” she said. “For instance, Mex
ican cemeteries have all these bright, beautifully colored decorations for their dead; they’re not all serious like ours.” I asked her where she had learned that. She said, “Social Studies. Last year.”

“Social Studies?” I asked. “Last year?” I repeated. “I don’t r
emember reading about funerals or cemeteries last year in Social Studies.” Last year I hadn’t cared about funerals. I was fourteen and watched TV and played video games a lot. What else had I missed while lost in the fog of sitcoms and fantasy adventures?

I bet Mexicans never would have had a private funeral. Too bad Jamie wasn’t Mexican.

“I see graves all the time now,” Gracie told me. She lay flat on her back, head on her pillow, and stared at the ceiling. “They’re everywhere,” Gracie said. “Ever since—”

She stopped and sighed, as if it was some huge confession she’d just told me. I worried that she might expect something in r
eturn, a confession of my own. I murmured a little noise I hoped sounded supportive.

“They’re everywhere,” she repeated. “The town cemetery, the Wilkinson family plot, that old place out by the ravine, where Fuck-You Francis is supposed to be buried. And now the railroad tracks. I mean, where does it end?”

I said, “Beds are like graves, too,” and she turned to me with this puzzled look. “No,” I said, “really.” And I told her about the time when my grandmother came to live with us, after my grandfather’s death. And how, one morning my mother sent me into her room to wake her for breakfast—I remember, because I smelled bacon frying when I woke up—and so I went into my grandma’s room and told her to wake up. She didn’t, so I repeated myself. But she still didn’t wake up. Finally I shook her shoulders, and her head lolled on her neck. I grabbed one of her hands, and it was cold to the touch.

“Oh,” said Gracie. “I see what you mean.” She stared at me hard, her eyes glistening. Gracie rolled on top of me, pinning her knees on both sides of my hips. Her hair fell around my face, and the room grew dimmer as her hair brushed over my eyes, shu
tting out the light.

She kissed me on my lips, and she kissed me on my neck. She started rocking against my penis, so I rocked back. The coils in her bed creaked. “You’re so cold, Adam,” Gracie whispered, over and over. “You’re so cold, you’re so cold.” She smelled like clay and dust. As she rocked on me, she looked up at the ceiling and bared the hollow of her throat. After a while, she let out several little gasps, then collapsed on my chest. I kept rubbing against her, but stopped when I realized she wasn’t going to get back into it.

Gracie slid off me. She knelt in front of her window, looking out at something.

“Are you angry?” I asked.

“No, Adam. I’m not angry. Why would I be angry?”

“Just asking,” I said. “What are you doing now?” I said.

“He’s down there again,” she whispered. I heard the tears in her voice already and went to her. I didn’t look out the window. I wrapped my arms around her, my hands meeting under her breasts, and hugged her. I didn’t look out the window.

“Why won’t he go away?” she said. “I found him, yeah. So fuc
king what. He doesn’t need to fucking follow me around forever.”

“Tell him to leave,” I told her.

She didn’t respond.

“Tell him you don’t want to see him anymore,” I told her.

She moved my hands off her and turned her face to mine. She leaned in and kissed me, her tongue searching out mine. When she pulled back, she said, “I can’t. I hate him, but I love him, too. He seems to, I don’t know, understand me, maybe. We’re on the same wavelength, you know? As much as he annoys me, I love him. He should have been loved, you know. He never got that. Not how everyone deserves.”

“Just give him up,” I said.

Gracie wrinkled her nose. She stood and paced to her doorway, opened it, said, “I think you should go now. My parents will be home soon.”

I craned my neck to glance out the window, but her voice cracked like a whip.

“Leave, Adam.”

I shrugged into my coat and elbowed past her.

“You don’t deserve him,” I said on my way out.

I walked home through wind, and soon rain started up. It landed on my face cold and trickled down my cheeks into my collar. Jamie hadn’t been outside when I left Gracie’s house, and I began to suspect she’d been making him up, like the rest of them, to make me jealous. Bitch, I thought. I thought she was different.

At home I walked in through the kitchen, and my mother was waiting by the doorway. She said, “Where have you been? Two nights in a row. You’re acting all secretive. Where have you been, Adam?”

Lucy sat at the dinner table, smoking a cigarette. When I looked at her, she looked away. Smoke curled up into the lamp above her.

“What is this?” I said. “An inquisition?”

“We’re just worried, is all,” said my mother.

“Don’t worry.”

“I can’t help it.”

“Your mother loves you very much,” said Lucy.

“Stay out of this, paralyzer.”

Both of them gasped.

“Adam!” My mother sounded shocked. “That’s not nice. You know Lucy didn’t mean that to happen. Apologize right now.”

I mumbled an apology.

My mother started wheeling around the kitchen. She reached up to cupboards and pulled out cans of tomatoes and kidney beans. She opened the freezer and pulled out ground beef. “Chili,” she said, just that. “It’s chilly outside, so you need some warm chili for your stomach. Chili will warm you up.” She sounded like a commercial.

Then she started in again. “My miracle child,” she said, pr
etending to talk to herself. “My baby boy, my gift. Did you know, Lucy, that Adam was born premature, with underdeveloped lungs and a murmur in his heart?”

“No, dear,” said Lucy. “How terrible!”

“He was a fighter, though,” said my mother. “He always fought. He wanted to live so much. Oh, Adam,” she said. “Why don’t you tell me where you’ve been? Your running coach said you’ve been missing practice a lot.”

“I haven’t been anywhere,” I said. “Give it a rest.”

“It’s everything happening at once, isn’t it?” Lucy asked. “Poor kid. You should send him to see Dr. Phelps, Linda. Stuff like what happened to the Marks boy is hard on kids.”

“That’s an idea,” said my mother.

“Would you stop talking about me in front of me?” I said. “God, you two are ridiculous. You don’t have a God-damned clue about anything.”

My father came into the kitchen and said, “What’s all the rac
ket?”

I said, “Why don’t you just go kill someone!” and ran ou
tside again.

At first I didn’t know where I was going, but by the time I reached the edge of the woods, I figured it out. The rain still fell steadily, and the wind crooned through the branches of trees. Leaves shook and fell around me. It was dusk, and I pushed my way through the brambles and roots back to the old railroad tracks.

His breath was on my neck before I even reached the spot, though. I knew he was behind me before he even said a thing. I felt his breath on my neck, and then he placed his arms around my stomach, just like I had with Gracie. “Keep going,” he said. And I did. He held onto me, and I carried him on my back all the way to the place where Gracie found him.

That section of the railroad had been marked out in yellow police tape. But something was wrong. Something didn’t match up with what I expected. The railroad ties—they hadn’t been pulled up. And the hole where Jamie had been buried—it was there all right, bu
t
nex
t
to the railroad tracks. He’d never been under those railroad tracks, I realized. Something dropped in my stomach. A pang of disappointment.

Stories change. They change too easily and too often.

“What are you waiting for?” Jamie asked, sliding off my back. I stood at the edge of the hole and he said, “Go on. Try it on.”

I turned around and there he was, naked, with mud smudged on his pale white skin. His hair was all messed up, and one lens of his glasses was shattered. He smiled. His teeth were filled with grit.

I stepped backward into the hole. It wasn’t very deep, not like Lola Peterson’s grave in the cemetery. Just a few feet down. I stood at eye level with Jamie’s crotch. He reached down and touched himself.

“Take off your clothes,” he told me.

I took them off.

“Lay down,” he told me.

I lay down.

He climbed in on top of me, and he was so cold, so cold. He said there was room for two of us in here and that I should call him Moony.

I said, “I never liked that name.”

He said, “Neither did I.”

“Then I won’t call you that.”

“Thank you,” he said, and hugged me. I let him. He said she never let him hug her. She didn’t understand him. I told him I knew. She was being selfish.

I said, “Don’t worry. I’ve found you now. You don’t have to worry. I understand. I found you.”

“I foun
d
yo
u
,” he said. “Remember?”

“Let’s not argue,” I said.

He rested his cheek against my chest, and the rain washed over us. After a while I heard voices, faraway but growing closer. I stood up and saw the swathes of light from their flashlights getting bigger. My dad and Andy and Lucy. All of them moved toward me. I imagined my mother wheeling in worried circles back in the kitchen.