Life After Life (36 page)

“Until now.”

“Yes, until now.”

“I had something similar, I think,” he says, so aware of not glancing at Martha’s portrait.

She leans her head back and closes her eyes. “Thank you for listening.” She pauses and he squeezes her hand in response, so aware of every particle in the room, the filigreed doily under her fingertips, the crack of the bedroom door where he can see the foot of his bed where one of Martha’s prize quilts is spread.

“I went back to my room after lunch,” she says, “and I thought of all the things I might do, everything from heading back to Boston to closing my eyes and pointing at a map, but then I started thinking that maybe there’s something good to find in it all. In the school of Sadie, we’d start looking for the positive things that might have led me here.”

“Did you come up with anything?” he asks. “You know, other than Jesus and lard and the Confederate statue and the fact that our winters are so much easier than those in MassaTOOsetts.”

“Meeting Sadie and Toby,” she says, and then adds “and you” as what seems an afterthought. “Watching someone like Lois leave the earth with such great style and grace.”

“Let’s go back to the part about me.”

“Okay. Meeting you here, and working so hard to figure you out. You’ve made me furious and you’ve made me laugh at ridiculous asinine things I couldn’t imagine laughing at and the process has sharpened and renewed all of my senses.”

“Nothing dull about you, that’s for sure. You’re the sharpest tool I’ve met here.”

“Thanks,” she says. “Though not the world’s greatest feat in this particular establishment.”

“You know,” he says, “I’ve got to tell you that I’m really feeling the need to put some better clothes on. Let you see how I’m supposed to look. You know I’m really capable of driving and doing all sorts of things. I still have my license and a car. If I tell Ned the truth, I can get my keys back. I can, hell, I can go and do anything I want. I’m only seventy-nine. They say my heart is that of a sixty-year-old.”

“You do have a good heart,” she says. “I would not have thought so a month—even a day—ago, but I think you do. And I think your son deserves to know that.”

“I hope so,” he says, and automatically switches channels as he has done for so long. “The heart is a tough old organ, you know? Like the liver, the kidneys, the lungs, the brain . . .”

“I think I see where this is going.”

“Really?” He pauses. “I’d love to know what you’re thinking. I was going to say
spleen
and
thyroid,
but here’s what I’ll tell you instead. I ain’t dead. I clearly ain’t what I used to be, but I also am not dead.”

“I see.”

“I’m putting on good clothes and shaving so you can see what I’m supposed to look like.” He pats her hand and rushes to his bedroom door. “Promise me you won’t leave.”

“I promise,” she says, and raises her hand. “Besides, where would I go?”

“Wherever you go every day. I watch you.” He raises his voice as he dashes to his closet to pull out a pair of pressed khakis and a starched pale blue dress shirt. “I see you going off into the woods twice a day.”

There is silence and at first he’s afraid she left without telling him. He waits, staring in the mirror, smoothing back his hair. “I go talk to Joe,” she says. “And Rosemary. I talk to her, too.”

“How about you talk to the living for a while? How about you talk to me? Come see me instead and we can talk. We can dance. I’m an excellent dancer, or used to be.” He slathers up and shaves, looks in the mirror once more, then checks his breath. He is old, but he’s not dead. She is standing and staring at Martha’s portrait when he comes out.

“Your wife was beautiful,” she says, and he nods, uncomfortable with the way she has conjured Martha into the room, disrupting what he thought might be a romantic moment.

“She was a good person, too,” he says. “I don’t think I ever realized how good either.”

“Yes, same with Art,” she says. “And Joe. You know I really don’t want to let go of what I had with Joe.”

“So don’t. Besides, he probably was different with you. Don’t beat yourself up about it. Do like Sadie, cut out the part you like and stick it elsewhere.”

She laughs. “I’m too much of a realist for that, always have been. I’ll get it all put in perspective. I’m very good at that sort of thing. It just takes time.”

“Yeah, I’m a realist, too,” he says, and she mouths
right
and lifts up a wrestling magazine from the coffee table.

“So tell me about Art,” he says, and she does. Practical and hardworking lawyer. Liberal thinker. Active in local politics.

“My God,” he says. “I think you were married to me.”

“I left my whole life behind me,” she says as if shocked by the realization.

“So did I. Except for Ned, of course.”

“And I’m supposed to go see everything tomorrow. The house where Joe grew up and the place on the river he loved so much. The road through the thick piney marshland where there are herons and mosquitoes almost as big.” She laughs. Joe always said they had two kinds of mosquitoes where he was from: the no-see-ums that can eat you alive without ever being seen and those big enough to open the door and walk on in. He told her that when they were stretched out on the sand and he kept wiggling his fingers in between the buttons of her blouse to give her a pinch.

“It’s a beautiful drive through there,” Stanley says. “And you can stop and get a hot dog right there at the halfway point. It’s just about all there is.”

“That’s what the girl told me. The girl who does hair and nails is taking me.”

“The one with all the metal in her ears and nose?”

“Yes. I like her,” Rachel says, and again lifts the magazine from the coffee table and opens it to a centerfold of the one they call the Undertaker. “She uses her metal and tattoos like
some
people use other things.”

“Tough life she’s had,” Stanley says. “She’s done pretty well given the hand she was dealt. A lot of sadness.” He lets his arm drop around her shoulders and is surprised at how easily she relaxes and leans into him. “I can drive you all those places,” he says, and without allowing himself a moment to think or reconsider, he leans in close with the idea he wants to kiss Rachel Silverman right on the lips, but she sees him coming and raises a hand between them.

“Isn’t this a little fast?” she asks.

“Maybe, but I’m thinking we’d be foolish to wait.”

“That may be.”

“In fact, I don’t think we should waste a minute, do you?”

“No. No, I suppose you’re right.”

He goes to pull the blinds and sees that strange little girl from next door running across the parking lot. He doesn’t know how Sadie can stand the way she runs in and out all day long, but it doesn’t seem to bother her. The sun has dropped out of sight, and there are just a few lingering streaks of violet light out there near the cemetery. He turns on the stereo—Herb Alpert. “A Taste of Honey.” “We can listen to something else,” he says. “But I can promise that when this is on, no one comes to visit.”

“So, then, leave it,” she says and walks over to him. “We can dance to this one. We can pretend it’s 1965.”

Rosemary Sewell Carlyle

Born:
December 3, 1933
Died:
September 15, 2008, 2:20 p.m.

Fulton, North Carolina

The small brick ranch baked in the treeless yard, dried overgrown azaleas the only adornment. A rotten canoe with her name in white stenciled letters leaned against the chain-link fence along with an assortment of paddles and a rusty bike. Inside, the drapes were pulled and stacks of magazines covered every surface of the bedroom where she lay in bed. The house was drenched in tobacco residue, the smell so strong that I never wore anything that couldn’t immediately be put in the washing machine; I often stripped my clothes off on the back porch as soon as I got home. When I asked about the photo on her dresser, she said it was the day she wed down in Dillon, South Carolina—
not but fifteen.
She was going to have a baby and had decided that might be okay because how else would a girl like her get a man like Joe Carlyle.
Live and learn,
she said
. Live and learn.
She dozed, in and out with the rhythmic flow of the mechanical breaths that prolonged her life. What to take? What to save from this one? Loss? Sadness? Her children were rarely in touch; she didn’t even know where her son lived. “They’ll be here when they think there’s something they can take,” she said. “They’ll all show up when I’m gone to get this little bit of nothing.”

When I asked if she had always lived in this county, she nodded. “I went to the North one time for a visit,” she said. “I rode a train and was so scared I didn’t get out of my seat for nearly fifteen hours.” She closed her eyes as if trying to see herself there, shuddered. “I was scared to death.”

When I asked about the canoe with her name on it, she said
happier times.
She said when she was a young girl the river was the place to be. Long ago that was the place to be—music and dancing on a summer night—but now who even remembered and who cared.
That was a lifetime ago.
She was quiet most of the time. She liked for the television to be on and turned up loud. She said she watched
All My Children
and the one that came on right before it even though she didn’t care about any of them or what happened to them. When I asked if there was anything I could do for her, she showed me her address book and asked that I make sure the people with red checks by their names get the news of her death. There were about a dozen addresses, all women in other towns, half in other states. She died during a commercial break while I was rubbing her feet, that address book open and on her lap.

[from Joanna’s notebook]

Rosemary Carlyle

She found all kinds of things in his pockets. Who goes to a movie right by himself in the middle of the day? And what business did he have traveling to work in places so far off anyway? Collecting addresses like you might collect green stamps. She hated getting hauled around and wouldn’t have gone even if he’d wanted her to. She never trusted him once they were married and why would she? She felt sorry for him there at the end—paralyzed and unable to talk—diapers and everything he would have hated to know. He never even changed a diaper for their children and then he had to wear them. He deserved that. She thought it served him right. She had come to hate him by then and hate will eat you up. It’s why she can’t open her eyes even as she feels the sun moving across the room. The river was nice but so long ago. What is a favorite day? that girl asks. Questions and questions she don’t know the answer to. Is there one? Can you go there? Think about it, but if there was one she forgot it. If there was one, it was a hundred miles away because her wedding day was hot and sticky and she felt sick as a dog and it was downhill from there on. But that lotion on her feet feels good. It smells good. Maybe this is the best day. Maybe this is it.

Sadie

I
T IS HARD TO
stay awake with Harley there purring like a fat little motorbike. He is so darling. Sadie loves him too good to talk about and she loves sweet little snorting Rudy and she loves Abby so much. Oh, and she loves her children and they are all so wonderful about calling and checking in on her. Paul wants her to come live closer to him, Lynnette wants that, too, but of course she has told them that she likes living right there where she has always lived. Horace is right next door and she has so many friends. She has too many friends to name and of course she has her own mother to think about. She has spent some time today cutting out a picture of herself that someone took just recently and now she and her mother are going up to New Hampshire where someone was talking about some time yesterday or today. Toby, maybe. Toby is so funny; it is like it is her job to make everybody laugh. And that Benjamin, she is so upset about him it makes her chest ache, what he is doing to that precious sweet child of his. A child is to be treasured. A child should always come before everything else.

Abby was here just a minute ago and she said something about her mother’s pants. She said she wished her mother would wear pants like other mothers. “High-waisted stretch pants and not cut to her crack like what a teenager would wear.” Sadie told her she couldn’t even imagine that and Toby said well she could. “And underwear up the crack like dental floss.” That Toby is something and it made Sadie laugh even though she didn’t want Abby to see her laugh. She told Toby she needed some time alone with Abby and that’s when they just sat side by side and watched some television.

“My sweet mother,” she told Abby. “I could have taught her so much.” She held Abby’s hand and squeezed it. She loves the feel of a child’s hand in her own; there is nothing better than that. “You might have to teach your mother,” she said, but then when Abby asked
how
she realized she had no idea at all.