Life After Life (32 page)

“Hey, what’s the deal?” Stanley Stone grabs her arm and holds on. “I’m sorry if we upset you. Kind of hard to talk about somebody you’ve known your whole life and not be honest.”

“There is no deal.” She pushes him away and feels the tears filling her eyes. “My husband loved him, that’s all. My husband spent years of his life, loving and respecting Joe Carlyle and believing that he was a wonderful man.”

“And maybe he was,” Stanley says. “Maybe he was good to your husband and deserves a little credit for that.”

“It’s a lot to process.” She turns the knob and peeks in to see that Sadie is still napping, Harley curled up under her arm, his big fat head on her chest, so she eases the door back and then turns to go to her own room.

“I’m sure,” he says. “I’m really sorry.” He puts his hand on her shoulder and she lets him. He kneads her collarbone, rubs and pats her, and she lets him. She takes a deep breath and lifts the hem of her shirt to dab at her nose.

“Is there anything I can do?” Stanley asks.

She turns and looks him right in the eye and he doesn’t go off or anything. He pulls her collar back into place and pats her again. “Nobody is all bad. I’m sure there were good things about him.”

“Yes,” she says. “There would have to be.” She takes a deep breath. There would have to be. She was there. She saw and knew the good. She once saw him rush to help an old woman back to her feet, picked up all of her groceries. He gave money to beggars, talked to people in a way that made them feel important. He talked about how much he loved his children and wanted them to be proud of him. He said he had never loved anyone the way he loved her. She hears a door open and sees big floral arrangements being brought in to the chapel where there will be a service for Lois Flowers tomorrow. They announced it right before lunch noting that in the chapel there is a photograph of Lois with a remembrance candle burning and a guest book for all to write notes to her children. She is about to ask Stanley if he grew up with Lois, too, but realizes he is gone, never turning back to his ridiculous statements as he usually does but hurrying way down the hall with his shirttail hanging out and then disappearing around the corner. It is like she’s been robbed, that time has played a trick on her and not a funny one. There is nothing funny about what she just heard, the way that all she believed in has been called into question. It is like believing in the afterlife only to discover there is nothing there.

Joanna

W
HEN
J
OANNA LEAVES
P
INE
Haven, she sees Stanley Stone’s son, Ned, across the parking lot studying the bumper sticker on her car. It’s a sticker C.J. had made after Joanna told her how she hates all those brag stickers about “My child is an honor student” blah blah blah. Her sticker is bright orange with black lettering and says:
MY KID IS AN ASSHOLE AND I BLAME SANDHILLS ELEMENTARY.
Ned is wearing tennis shorts and flip flops and standing with his hands on his hips.

Joanna had waited with Kathryn Flowers until the funeral director and two workers arrived to put Lois on a stretcher and carry her away. Kathryn had continued, the whole time they waited, to reach for her mother’s hand, each time startling, as if surprised to find the lifelessness there. Joanna has seen this many times, the dull quiet of a room after the fact, all the energy raised to such a pitch suddenly gone. Places always feel so empty right after someone dies, the sensation of a whole lifetime of people and memories disappearing with that last breath, all the air sucked right out of the scene. Kathryn was exhausted and said so, the many weeks of watching and waiting closing in on her.

“Thank you,” Kathryn said, “please let’s stay in touch,” and Joanna nodded and said of course, hugged her close as she often had, and as always, she knew that they will not stay in touch at all. It is too hard to stay in touch, too heavily laden to revisit regularly. They will see each other from time to time, brief glimpses and greetings that last only seconds and yet pull in all that has fallen into the past four weeks and the routine they have shared while waiting for Lois to die. Joanna will be at the memorial. She said how much she is going to miss Lois and she will. How could she not? And selfishly she will miss her daily schedule and time spent in a room that allowed her to see Ben’s house while sitting with a woman who seems to her to have been the perfect mother.

“So what have you got against Sandhills? You probably went there yourself once, didn’t you?” Ned asks when she gets close. “And who is your kid? The
asshole
could be in my class.”

“No kids,” she says. “A friend of mine made that as a joke.”

“Funny,” he says without cracking a smile. The silence is painful as is his not making eye contact with her and not making any moves to step away from her car.

“I’m Joanna.” She extends her hand. “I was the volunteer with your mother when she died.”

“I know.”

“She was lovely,” Joanna says. “I always think of her when the roses are blooming. She knew everything there was to know about roses.”

“You saw and heard it all, didn’t you?” he asks. “What did she say about me?”

“She was very private. She showed me all of her little boxes.”

“Her garden is gone now,” he says, and finally looks up, eyes red, a vein along his temple visible. “Paved paradise and put up a parking lot, something like that.”

“I know,” she says. “I was sad to see that.”

“And my dad is now completely demented and can’t even do it quietly like so many do.”

“I know.”

“So what don’t you know?” he asks, eyes the same piercing blue of his dad’s—eyes that most have learned to avoid for fear of getting flashed or cussed out.

“There’s a lot I don’t know,” she says, and moves to open the door.

“Did you know that I would have a kid old enough for elementary school if he’d lived?”

“Yes.”

“And did you know I got a divorce and had a breakdown, nearly drank myself to death and almost went to prison?”

“Yes.”

“And does it even occur to you to politely say you don’t know any of this?”

“Not really. We all have stories.”

“Yeah, like you, for instance. Married how many times? Seven? Eight? Always in love with the town magician who has taken my seat at all the bars in and around the county.”

“Didn’t know any of that,” she says, her face hot with anger and embarrassment and who knows what else. “So you win. Feel good about it.” She gets in and slams the door. She cranks the car and waits for the blast of air from the vents to go from hot to cold. He doesn’t move so she finally inches forward and cuts the wheels enough to get out. His hand is raised, maybe to say something else, but she ignores him, resisting the urge to flip him off and to swing around like she might hit him. At least he makes it easier not to feel sorry for him.

One of the many therapy sessions Luke insisted she take involved unpacking the heart. You close your eyes and take every person and every thing taking up space in your heart out and set them on your make-believe lawn. Every grievance and relationship and project. And then when the space inside is empty and clean, you survey the goods and decide what to put back. It was Luke’s favorite exercise and one that she and C.J. have talked about many times since, laughing over the notion of whole corpses exhumed and expunged, exorcised. Joanna had told Luke that her imagined yard looked like Gettysburg or like that scene in
Gone with the Wind
when the camera pulls back and there are wounded and dead bodies as far as the eye can see—enough emotional carnage to keep the buzzards feasting for centuries. And then how clear so much becomes, like pulling old unrecognizable food from the fridge. Of course you need to throw that away. It’s old. It’s curdled. It smells bad so why in the hell would you keep it? Why in the hell would you want to chew or swallow it?

“Did they give you a mantra to say while you unpacked?” Luke had asked. “Or like did you have a song playing in your head as you cleaned house?”

“Get the fuck away from me,” she told him. “That was my mantra. That’s what I said to ninety-nine percent of what I pulled from my chest. Just get the fuck away from me.”

“Sounds like
Alien,
” Luke said. “You know when Sigourney pulls that awful thing out of herself.”

“Exactly. That’s exactly what it was like.”
Leave me the fuck alone.
That is what she wants to scream at Ned Stone who is still standing there. Just the other day, C.J. told her about how Toby was stretched out on the floor of the exercise room in corpse pose to meditate and yelled at several people who wheeled too close to her head.
Get the hell away,
she said.
I’m doing my
savasana.
It makes Joanna laugh whenever she thinks about it and how one of the sisters put a hand up to her mouth and gasped, clearly thinking
savasana
meant something nasty. She can tell Ned Stone thinks she is laughing at him. Fine. He’s a jerk. A sad jerk but still a jerk. She would have loved nothing better than to befriend him, to take the time to talk about and remember his mother, but who wants to spend time with a jerk? Leave
him
the fuck alone.

She drives and then circles, takes deep breaths. She turns and drives past Ben’s house, a big, beautiful, old house, the front porch crammed with all kinds of folk art and odd chairs. There is a big silver wooden box at one end of the porch and she recognizes it immediately as the disappearing chamber. And the blue Saab in the driveway is definitely the one she has seen these recent nights. C.J. said that Ben’s wife was a total bitch. “Worse than I even thought, I’ll tell you someday.” C.J. was always saying that,
I’ll tell you someday,
and Joanna keeps a running record of all she wants to know: Who are these men who used to call her that she kept notes on and who is Kurt’s father? Who is this guy Sam she has started to mention and where does she go all those nights Kurt sleeps at Joanna’s house? It’s clear that there is a lot C.J. keeps hidden; and it’s clear that there are some very old wounds she’s still nursing. If only the inner wounds really
were
visible to the eye, you’d know better than to depend on those held together with flimsy sutures or you would immediately recognize and avoid those leaking puddles of bitter bile. You would scream and beg for help when you saw someone helplessly bleeding out all over the floor.

C.J. once said that if she can find a person who would never—even at the height of anger—or the lowest low take the pulpiest part of your heart and use it against you, then she could see being in a relationship.
That is the person I want,
she said.
Otherwise, fuck ’em. Accept no subs. I want someone as true blue and faithful as the moon. That’s who I will love. That’s who I will let get close to Kurt.

“Who did you want to be when you were a kid?” C.J. had asked, another game they had played. C.J. had already said that she wanted to be the Little Mermaid, but then, when she realized she was never going to have a father or red hair or a good singing voice, switched over to Judge Judy. She liked the way Judge Judy took charge and told everybody what to do. It didn’t matter who you were, if Judge Judy thought you were wrong and full of shit, she said so.

Joanna had wanted to be the Scottish woman in that movie
The Three Lives of Thomasina
—a beautiful woman who lived alone in the woods and who took in stray hurt animals and was thought to be a witch. Joanna owned a copy and they watched it one night, C.J. fluctuating between saying it was
beyond cheesy
to how much she loved the cat’s voice narrating and the way the cat came back, eventually pulling all of its lives together. “So be her,” C.J. said. “Start taking in some creatures. My friend Sam has tons of dogs and cats nobody wants. Get some warm bodies around here.” Joanna was sitting in a rocking chair with Kurt hugged against her chest while she watched C.J. eat the last of the pizza and thought,
I have.

C.J. had said when she worked as a psychic at the county fair she learned how to look in people’s eyes, noting breath and pulse. It wasn’t hard to read people, wasn’t hard to give the gift of hope. Sometimes when the two of them were sitting there on Joanna’s porch, mini lights and candles and jazz playing, anything was possible. Kurt loved it at Joanna’s house and she loved the nights C.J. left him there to sleep over.

Joanna told C.J. that if she ever marries again (she seriously doubts this but
if
) instead of getting gifts, she wants people to take things. She will throw a big barbecue and say that everyone must take something on the way out—a vase or bowl or glass, a trivet or mug or bookend—candlestick, clock, linens, a book, a plant. In fact, when C.J. comes over later, Joanna will remind her. She will say that since she will likely never remarry, C.J. should just take something now. Part of unpacking the heart is getting rid of things you no longer need. And some things are hard to let go of. For Joanna it was knowing she would never nurse a baby, never greet a partner with the exciting news that she was pregnant. She once dreamed she nursed a baby goat, grateful amber eyes seeking her own as her milk let down and she woke with a feeling of exhilaration, the tingling sensation still in her breasts.