Life After Life (15 page)

But now life is simple. Now life is about coffee in the morning. Life is about meals and books and memories and the occasional silly television show she doesn’t enjoy that much and yet finds herself drawn to all the same. She does not give a damn about who can dance and who can’t, and she doesn’t recognize a soul they say is a celebrity except, of course, Cloris Leachman whom Rachel saw in
South Pacific
on Broadway in 1954. Sometimes there’s a good movie showing or some interesting musicians passing through. Sometimes she joins a bridge game or conversation or has that young woman with all the tattoos and piercings give her a pedicure and foot massage. She was never a pedicure type of woman, so resisting what she felt it represented in her own young womanhood—a type of woman who was not an intellectual and not a part of the workforce. And Rachel Silverman was definitely a part of the workforce. She was quite simply a force. People in the firm called her the Shark and at that time the Jewish women she knew who were all into hair and nails were of a different ilk to say the least. She was explaining this to the tattooed pedicurist who sat and listened and followed every word only to then wave a hand and say, “Aww, but that was ages ago. Everybody likes a pedicure now.” The girl’s own nails were charcoal gray, which she says is the latest, but Rachel chose something less corpselike, a pale pink with no frost.

“Oh, come on now, Shark,” the girl said. “You can do better than
that.
” She leaned in close to whisper, her breath like cinnamon and her body soaked in patchouli like Rachel had not encountered in ages. “That’s what Marge Walker always gets. Come on. Where’s the Shark?” Marge is the queen of all the traits that get on Rachel’s nerves, a tight-girdled, self-righteous moron.

The girl persisted and now Rachel has deep burgundy toenails, the color of a nice Bordeaux. “Sexy,” the girl, C.J., told her. “You’re no church lady.” She swatted Rachel with a rolled-up paper as she was leaving. “You’re the shark.”

Rachel got a little way down the hall and decided to go back and tip her a twenty. She is a child herself and raising a baby who is sometimes in there with her. She is probably making minimum wage with nobody there to help her. Rachel has seen her out in the arboretum smoking, a lonely wild-looking girl who could be beautiful by conventional standards but chooses to use dye and studs and cologne in a way that might repel some. Rachel certainly understands the impulse that would lead a person to do such a thing.

“I can’t take this,” the girl said, and Rachel reached and balled her hand over the girl’s so all those others sitting there under the dryers wouldn’t make it their business to know what was going on.

“You can give me a ride some time, take me to see some things in town.”

“This town?” She wrinkled her nose and laughed then extended her hand, gray nails with little pink dots on them, all kinds of rings and bracelets jangling. “Sure, I’ll take you. I might need some legal advice sometime so maybe we could do some swapping.”

“It’s a deal.”

“Oh.” The girl held on to Rachel’s sleeve. “My name is C.J.” She paused before continuing. “I see you sneaking out in the cemetery a lot.”

“Rachel Silverman,” she said in her best attorney voice. “And I’ve seen you out there sneaking cigarettes.”

“Yes.” The girl leaned in and put her forehead near Rachel’s so they were eye to eye. “So we need to be good friends. I totally respect your need to get out of here.”

“And I can’t say I respect your addiction, but I do understand it. God knows, I smoked for twenty years and I loved every puff.”

S
HE AND
A
RT
smoked Kents and Joe smoked Camels, and once when Art went to her purse to look for a cigarette he pulled out a pack of Camels and looked at her in the strangest way. Her mind slowed to mush knowing the nylons she had not taken the time to put back on were in there, too, as well as a ticket stub for
The Godfather
and the pack of Milk Duds Joe had greeted her with there in the darkened theater. “Oh no,” she said, “I took my client’s cigarettes.” She reached for her purse and pulled out the Kents, took the Camels, stuffed them in, and snapped it shut. “I’ll have to confess.” She did not let a beat fall but pointed out the window to the beautiful sunset and asked what he thought about eating out. She said she was starved for Italian food.

You’re one good-looking feminist, Joe had said the first time he ever saw her stripped down to a nylon slip. They were out on Highway 1 near that ridiculous steak house he liked to go where it was like you were in the Wild West waiting for a stagecoach, enormous fake cows littering the grounds. “You are one hot broad canned piece of feminist.” Who would believe that? And though his words made her angry, and though she felt a wave of respect and then guilt for the smart progressive-minded husband she was cheating on, she didn’t say a word and instead gave in to the moment. Truth was she was a little bit flattered and when had she ever had such sex? Never in her life and when had she ever eaten such a steak? Big bloody slab filling her plate and she ate every bite like a starving pig; she was ravenous and in that moment greedy, she could not get enough. The snow was falling in big wet flakes and those fake cows stood there stupidly under the glow of neon lights. She had thought of that place not long after she moved into Pine Haven and C.J. set up a Christmas village in the entryway of the building where there was an enormous decorated tree. Rachel had always had an aversion to the gaudy blinking lights and incessant Christmas music, but she found herself drawn to that little winter street, the diner all lit and warm-looking with a tiny blinking sign asking you to come in and eat.

“Don’t you just want to go in there and order something?” C.J. had asked when she saw Rachel looking. “I’d get a grilled cheese like that one on the sign.” At the time Rachel was not ready to be friendly to anyone and so she said
absolutely not.
She had just arrived and was thinking that this might have been the dumbest decision she had ever made in the eighty years of her life. Occasionally, she still wakes in the middle of the night, confused about where she is, and is shocked with the reality of it all. She woke not long ago and had a second or two when she was back in that first apartment, the morning light so familiar to another time, and it took a while to get her bearings.

And then other times, she thinks, where else would she rather be? Why wouldn’t she want her final home to be here, right next door to where Joe is buried. She goes two times a day—once in the morning and then again late afternoon—and she saves up lots of things to tell him. Of course he is buried alongside his wife, which feels a little awkward; Rachel never met Rosemary and only once glimpsed a tiny snapshot in Joe’s wallet, something he didn’t know she had seen, so out of character for her to snoop and look and yet she had done it. That was when she knew that everything had taken a turn; she felt curious and jealous and demanding, and yet she had her
own
separate life. She knows Joe would have left Rosemary if Rachel had asked him to. Oh, it was all so complicated. You have to be young to even think about such complications and then they age you so quickly. She flew down to see where he was buried, that was all, and then she found this place, and when she inquired, there was one vacant apartment and it faced the arboretum that led right there to the cemetery and his grave. It was one of those rare times in life when it seemed an answer dropped right in her lap and she wrote a check for the deposit on the spot. Her few remaining friends were surprised, to say the least; she told her only real relative, her older brother’s son who looked in on her from time to time but whose life was full and busy in New York, that she was interested in the retirement possibilities of the Carolinas—the good hospitals and all the universities—theater and ballet where you can easily get tickets—no shoveling snow, no fear of crossing the street. What was harder to explain was her venturing an hour east of the golf resorts and two hours south of the universities to a small town no one had ever heard of. It’s near the beach, she had said. I can get there as fast as I could get to the Cape. And the facility is excellent, she explained, and they all trusted her and why wouldn’t they? To their minds, she had never made a false move or stupid decision in her entire life.

Now she is here and ready to explore beyond the cemetery. And she has a date with C.J. for tomorrow afternoon. They will drive to the other side of town and find the house where Joe grew up. She wants to see the river he talked about so much and she wants to see the fields out from town where he worked in tobacco as a boy. The girl has even said that sometime maybe she could take the Pine Haven bus and take a few of them to the beach. Joe loved the beach and had told her she had to see it to believe it, that he couldn’t wait to take her there, that the Cape couldn’t compare.

“You’d have to pay of course,” the girl said, her baby boy strapped to her chest like a little papoose. “But my friend, Joanna, the hospice volunteer—you’ve seen her if you haven’t met her—owns a hot-dog stand and says I can always eat free. I live right above it.” Someday Rachel will explain to Sadie and C.J. what it’s all about, but for now she acts like she has come to claim her husband’s childhood world. Sometimes she tells stories about Joe, things he said and did, a memory of the one-armed man who owned the old ice plant where he worked as a kid, a man known for getting women in compromising positions when he asked for favors. “I really need a hand,” he would say, which came to have all kinds of meanings. Then there was a bridge out in the county said to be haunted—Heartbeat Bridge—where the heart of a woman, murdered by her jealous husband, was thrown and continues to beat. Joe and his friends used to go out there at night and sit and listen, wait for the heartbeats that would send whatever girl was sitting close by into their laps and backseats. She assigns these stories to Art, her husband of forty-five years.

“That Art was a rounder, wasn’t he?” Toby asked. “Every story you tell is sex sex sex. I bet you did some singing of ‘How Great Thou
Art’
or maybe ‘How Great Art Art.’”

“That’s not true.” Rachel sat up straight but knew, even as she fixed her firmest look, that she
had
told quite a few stories that made reference to sex and then the teasing expression on Toby’s face, like a fierce mischievous little gnome with cropped coarse hair, made her laugh. “I don’t know Christian hymns other than ‘Amazing Grace.’”

“You’ve gotta be kidding!” Marge said, hands on hips.

“I say I got you on that one.” Toby laughed. “I see Freudian slips and leaps all the time. Should have been a shrink.”

“Should have
seen
a shrink,” Marge said.

“I did and he said stay away from people like you.”

“I went to Heartbeat Bridge a couple of times myself.” Sadie blushed, put her hand up to her mouth and giggled. Everyone else laughed except Marge who was still stuck on how Toby was sacrilegious for using the title of a hymn in such a way and they should all be ashamed for telling too much and talking about S-E-X.

“This from the one who announces bowel movements like a sporting event,” Toby said, and laughed until her shoulders shook and tears filled her eyes. She said she needed to be excused and would be right back else they’d need a mop. She said she had drunk over a gallon of water that day to purify herself.

“It’ll take more than that,” Marge said, and turned her attention back to Rachel. “When did Art die and why are you here?”

“Art died a year and a half ago,” Rachel said. “And I am here because he thought of this town as home.”

Rachel has Joe’s childhood address and where he went to church; she knows where his parents are buried and where there once was a pavilion over by the river where he loved to go as a child. Sadie has said that the movie theater is still there; it’s the very one that Abby’s daddy got back up and running not too many years ago. The old ice plant where he worked is still there, too, but it’s not an ice plant anymore, just an old empty building, or was last time she was out. But that old pavilion is long gone; it flooded and rotted away years ago. She said what puzzles her is that she never in her life met a boy named Art and she has always prided herself on knowing everyone in town. How could that be? Did he use a different name? Rachel said he visited his relatives and then acted like she couldn’t remember their names. Pleading to have forgotten something here at Pine Haven is well expected and accepted. But she has decided that soon she will tell Sadie that she remembered Art’s cousin’s name. “Art had a cousin by the name of Joe Carlyle.” She practices saying it without doing all those things she has read people do when telling a lie, looking away, swallowing excessively, twisting their hands. “Yes, that’s it. Joe Carlyle. Have you ever known of a Joe Carlyle? Joseph Edward Carlyle.”

This is what she will tell Sadie when most people have filed off to bed and it’s just the two of them there in one sitting room or the other. Sadie is in a wheelchair so she doesn’t venture far. She has a business she has created where she makes old photographs come to life, and she makes things that never happened happen. She said it was a natural progression since she has been doing this in her head her whole life. She is so good at it people often believe her and those with dementia make the leap so beautifully that they sometimes look like they have been to heaven and back after a session with Sadie and what she calls her magic scissors and glue stick.