Life After Life (17 page)

“Definitely you should,” Sadie said. “Maybe it will help me remember him. I’ll roll over there with you, too, but first I have to finish Toby’s picture.” She waved at the door where Toby was waiting, hands on hips, boots turned outward. Her fanny pack was full, pieces of cellophane sticking out of the zipper. “Look, Toby,” Sadie said. “Here you are at the Taj Mahal.”

“Wow, would you look at that.” Toby shook her head in awe and motioned for Rachel to look. “Thanks to Sadie here, I have been just about goddamn everywhere. “

“Everywhere,” Sadie echoed, and laughed. Rachel has figured out that Sadie is someone who never curses but loves to hear others do it. The two of them were waiting for her response,
here
at Pine Haven. Pine Haven, North Carolina, right beside Whispering Pines Cemetery where the love of her life is buried and where in a little bit she will slip away without anyone taking note and sit on a stump nearby and tell him all about her day. There is no snow outside. It is summer and the sun is shining and she has left the life she always knew to come here to Pine Haven. Sugar-filled tea and long, slow syllables and Jesus every way you can get him.

“See?” Toby tapped the toe of her boot waiting. “That’s me at the Taj Mahal. Sadie is such a good artist, nobody would ever see the glue that put me there. See?”

“Yes,” Rachel said, and stepped closer, feeling more like a schoolgirl than she ever did when she was one. “It’s the most incredible thing I have seen in years.” She paused, feeling for a moment like she might cry, which she has not done since leaving Boston, looking down from the plane with the knowledge that most likely she would never see that place again. “Really, Sadie, you are a beautiful genius.”

“Ha, told you,” Toby said, and Sadie blushed and shook her head.

“I am so flattered. Thank you so much,” she said. “I know there are people doing it all with computers. There is better work than mine, I am sure, but when I pick up my scissors and glue, I am transported to another place. It always happens to children that way. Just give them some glue and paper and crayons and they can make a whole wonderful world.” Sadie said she needed a little rest after all the work and excitement and she would see them at lunch.

Now Rachel pulls her door shut to My Apartment and makes her way down the hall. She will slip out the side door and then cross the parking lot. It’s earlier than usual, but whatever just stirred in her has left her feeling restless and anxious and a little bit sad. She passes the soda machine where Millie sits all day, guarding the machine and begging money. She gives her all the change in the pocket of her skirt and keeps walking. She hears the music long before she gets to Hell in a Cell. Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. He plays it nonstop and it puts her in a time warp each and every time. The door is half open and she can see him sitting in his chair and staring out the window; it’s unusual to see him so quiet, looking so handsome and pensive and
normal
in a way you don’t notice when he’s flexing his arms and talking about wrestling or acting hateful and rude. She walks fast so he won’t see her and call out something obscene.

“A Taste of Honey,” “Whipped Cream,” “Tangerine,” “Ladyfingers”—“Is this an album or a menu?” Art had asked. It was 1965 and they played that album to death. She pushes open the door and steps into the sunlight. There is a hearse parked and hidden in the shade of the tall wax-myrtle hedge; it seems there almost always is, someone leaving in a bag. It’s the kind of thing Rachel never mentions to anyone else. Why mention that elephant in the room. A gangly boy with long auburn hair is on a skateboard, and their little friend, the one that terrible girl called a loser, is sitting on the curb watching him. The children don’t see her and she walks quickly; she feels beckoned by the shade and damp moist undergrowth as she makes her way through the arboretum, the trumpet and cross vines in full bloom, jasmine, wisteria. It was 1965 and she and Art had attended Norman Thomas’s big birthday celebration the year before. They had sent him money for his presidential campaign. Art shook his hand and told him that his book,
Is Conscience a Crime?
, was a masterpiece. They applauded his stance on birth control, ironically since nature had taken care of that for her. They admired the way he stood against segregation long before it was even something in the news. They protested Vietnam. It was 1965, and she wore short dresses and leather boots and she had a shoulder-length fall that she clipped onto her own hair and then tied a long scarf up at her hairline. She was never into high fashion, but she did latch onto what suited her and then wore it in a way that made it all her own. Like the way she now likes to roll up her slacks in neat pedal-pusher cuffs. She did it so she wouldn’t pick up twigs and burrs in the cemetery, but then she got so many compliments from people like that young pedicure girl that she kept doing it and now others are copying her. Even Marge has rolled her pants up a couple of times, which says there may be hope for everyone.

“Green Peppers.” “Butterball.” “Lollipops and Roses.” It was 1965 and she had never even heard of Joe Carlyle. It was 1965 and life seemed easier. Her parents were alive and so was her brother; her bones were hard and strong and her vision perfect. She was a young married woman with a professional career and she thought that one day she would have it all, a career and a baby and a house on the Cape. It was 1965 and she was filled with hope, lush pots of ivy spilling from her window boxes as she leaned out late in the day to see the sunset, to smell the river, to watch her husband turn the corner as he headed home. She was so alive.

Kendra

K
ENDRA HAS SPENT MUCH
of the day putting little white stickers on what she plans to keep, carefully placing them up under the furniture where they can’t be seen. Each one has her initials and a number that makes it look like she has cataloged everything in the house. What she has cataloged, of course, are the things worth having—the expensive things—some of them things they bought from the woman who sold them the house but most from a local estate auction where the pitiful old guy was clueless about everything. “That belonged to my wife’s grandmother,” he would say, and then cried in a way that was shameless. Kendra tried to be kind, but it was hard the way he looked, his face all red and twisted and unattractive, and besides, she was so excited about what she was getting for practically nothing. Persian rugs and massive antique sideboards and wardrobes. The man had no idea what his belongings were worth and she was just grateful that the son he kept referring to had remained in Chicago and not come to oversee everything, unlike, of course, the daughter of the woman they bought this house from. She was all business and knew just what she was doing and of course she was someone who remembered Ben from school even though she was a little older. Everyone in the whole dump town knows who he is. “He wanted to be a magician, right?” the woman asked, and laughed. She had one of those big blotchy birthmarks on the side of her face and Kendra spent the whole time wondering why in the hell she wouldn’t at least put some makeup on it to try to hide it. Who cares if she lives in Cambridge and teaches at Harvard? She was the kind of woman Kendra has a hard time being around and she certainly did not enjoy the time mother and daughter spent roaming the house and reminiscing. The daughter had paused and stood for a long time in what had been a hideous dark study and stared out the window where an old split-level used to be. Now there’s a giant contemporary with a three-car garage, which is a huge improvement, though Kendra didn’t say that. “We had some good times here,” the woman said, her fingertips pressing the big glass window. She looked like she might cry and Kendra was relieved as hell that she didn’t. She should go see a dermatologist and move on. Kendra was ready for them to get out of her house. It was that very afternoon she went to the estate sale and cleaned up. Kendra has always been lucky about being in the right place at the right time. Of course you make your luck and this is what she is in the process of doing. She is making her luck, making her own fortune happen.

She’s not quite ready to drop the bomb on her husband, but this way she will be prepared when the right time comes. She likes knowing the stickers are there; she likes the secrecy of her other life and the way that it is taking root and blossoming. It makes her feel powerful. She will keep the house, of course, she’d be a fool not to, and if she could get away with it, she’d go ahead and change the locks before Ben even knows what is coming. How can he
not
know what’s coming? And yet it seems he doesn’t. She will keep the house and she will keep the child, though of course she is hoping he will also want her for huge chunks of time like the weekends so she can have the time she needs to herself. The judges almost always go with the mother on this and she has made sure that she has met and had some kind of witty conversation with every judge in town. Her plan is to keep this as an investment, a little B&B oasis in the rundown middle of this dried-up boring town. And then she will live in a newer place like the Meadows, where she will have access to tennis courts and golf course and pool, not that she would use them, but that’s the traffic she likes to see. Of course, she does love the old Brendle mansion on the outskirts of town—a real plantation. But that will be after the more public evolution of her life with Andrew Porter once he is also divorced. Andrew is a heart surgeon. She loves to think that sentence, to say it when she is all by herself like in the shower:
And this is Andrew, Andrew is a heart surgeon.
“He brings people
back
after they really
do
disappear,” she told Benjamin right after they met him. “He really
is
brilliant and really
does
have a profession.” Everyone else calls him Andy but she prefers he go by Andrew. Names are important. Like she has always called Ben “Benjamin” and told him a million times how much better he would be received in the community if he went by his full name instead of Ben or, God forbid, the Bennie that some of his old redneck friends fall back on. Bennie and the Jets—that was what his pony league football team called themselves because he was the quarterback and unfortunately there are still enough of those guys hanging around this godforsaken place that they see him and call out his name. He has so many stupid nicknames she doesn’t even pay attention, who cares? Kendra grew up in Charlottesville, Virginia, and she has often wished she had stayed there or ventured northward. She is someone who should be in DC or New York and always thought she would be.

Kendra Burleigh Baker. The Burleigh, of course, a play on the tobacco her family was once famous for. She has even thought lately that once she is established in her brand-new life, she might go by Burleigh or even B. Leigh, which would also be real cute. Then she would always have a reason to tell about her family history. A name is important. She called herself Kenni all through college and flirted with calling herself Dra just to go for something really different, until Ben, who then was just one of the many boys asking her out, said it would be hard not to add “ma,” Dra Ma, and the whole hallway of girls in the dorm started laughing. Probably the only reason she even looked at him twice is because everybody else had a crush on him. That’s how immature she was, as hard as that is to believe. All the girls were attracted to how different he was at their school, a lone kind of hippie type in a sea of starched drunken preppie boys, and he
said
he was in law school. All she really wanted was someone affluent who could whisk her off to a fine plantation and treat her like a queen.

If she had known that all Ben really was was a dopey amateur magician and a film projectionist, well, who would ever choose that? He thinks of himself as an artist but she is
so
much more the artist. Anything he has ever done, it’s because she said it was a good idea. If there is a real artist in the house, she is it. It was
her
idea, after all, to have big murals painted on the dining room and living room walls, hills and sun like you might be in Tuscany, but anytime they have had a party and someone compliments how beautiful it looks, he just says, “Thanks,” like it was his goddamned idea and not hers. “How hard is it to just say, ‘Kenni is the artist around here.’ How hard is that?” she has asked a million and one times, but of course he never hears a word she says. If it was something said by that crazy woman who was his friend a hundred years ago and now sells hot dogs and helps people die, he would listen.

“How dare you,” she recently said to him after overhearing him tell Abby how much he admires the freak. “What is there to admire about her? She is plain and unattractive in all ways. People talk like it’s amazing she’s been married so many times, but the amazing part is that anybody ever wanted her. Who would even want to marry such a loser?” She was about to comment on her hair and how if she were sick in the bed and had to look at that mess, she would just as soon die, too, but he was out the door and in his car, saying he was going to
work.
Work, her ass. Redoing an old movie theater and getting senior citizens in once a week is hardly real work. For all she knows he spends time with that crazy woman even though she has told him that he better not. “How embarrassing would that be?” she asked, and got right up in his face. Several times she has wanted him to hit her because then she could photograph it and have some good ammo for when they get down to the real business of splitting everything up.