The Last Life (16 page)

"You must be joking! Don't you want to come into town with me instead? A bunch of us are going to the movies."

"To see what?"

"Dunno yet. Does it matter? Anything would be better than a'séance with a bunch of little kids."

But I had promised, and so I went. Rachel held my hand as we strolled down the road to Elsa's house. Her feet itched to break into a skip; her ponytail jiggled. It was a golden summer evening, and we glided through the buttery air while Becky stalked off downhill, in the opposite direction, to meet her friends at the trolley that would take them to the subway that would carry them into town.

Elsa was a twelve-year-old anorexic with blue veins bulging through her skin. Her face was flushed, and when she spoke or laughed or even breathed I could detail the workings of her joints and muscles beneath her taut cheeks. She had a furious, spooky energy. Elsa's parents waved benignly from the living room as we passed: they were apparently unfazed by their daughter, although she looked like a spectre one of her own'séances might have conjured.

We were not the first to arrive, nor the last. All of us—about six girls besides me, some of whom I'd seen playing with Rachel in the street, and one lone, gentle boy named Sam—were ushered into the basement, into a capacious but tattered playroom. The furniture—a sagging brown plaid sofa, a few straight-backed chairs, a menacing black TV set mounted on a cart—had been pushed back against the walls. Elsa flitted about, drawing the curtains across the high slivers of window to create the requisite gloom, and she hung a red scarf over the shade of the standing lamp in the corner.

"Doesn't it have to be totally dark for the spirits to come?" asked a plump girl whose T-shirt fit like sausage casing, and who seemed inclined to bossiness.

"My mom said no way."

"But it's not going to work otherwise."

A flurry of debate broke out, and the girls seemed automatically to divide behind thin Elsa or her fat rival, whose name was Nan. The boy, Sam, sat on one of the wooden chairs, humming to himself, looking at the dark TV screen. I sat beside him, leaving Rachel in the fray.

"You're the French girl, right?" Sam asked. He had very large, dark eyes and a sparrow's brittle body. "Rachel's cousin?"

"That's right."

"Cool." He thought for a moment. "How come you're here?"

"I promised Rachel." I rolled my eyes.

"I know. I promised Elsa. But this stuff is so dumb. They've been doing it all summer and it's just crap. Elsa thinks it's really grown up."

"You're the only boy."

"So?"

"Don't you mind?"

"Naw. I mean, I mind this, it's so dumb—" he gestured at the squabbling girls. "But I'm used to girls. It's easier to be with them."

We lapsed again into silence and watched the vacant TV.

Eventually we all settled into a circle, cross-legged, holding hands. Elsa intoned, her voice raspy for one so young: "Everybody, concentrate. Close your eyes. We're going deeper, together. Deeper ... deeper. O spirits, we ask you to join us in our meeting, to speak to us and show us you are here."

Somebody giggled. Elsa's voice changed back to its normal pitch. "Who was that? If you're not serious, go home. Just leave. Because it only takes one person to spoil the whole thing."

"Come on, Elsa, lighten up."

"Why should I? You wanted to come. Do you want to speak to ghosts or not? I want to speak to my grandmother, who died last year. I want to find out how she is. This is serious."

Rachel, on my right, squeezed my hand. "You okay?"

I nodded.

Elsa began again in her deep singsong. I peered around at the group, their faces bathed in red light. Their eyes were shut, except for Sam's. I thought he winked at me. Becky, I thought, would be at the cinema by now. My parents, at home, were in bed. I couldn't imagine where Thibaud might be, or what he could be doing. I considered excusing myself, but left my hands where they were, damply linked on either side.

Elsa was baying to her grandmother: Anna, she called her. If there was a spirit world, I thought, it must be overrun with Annas. How would the right one know to come forward? I could hear Elsa's parents moving around overhead. I didn't know if I missed my own parents. I wasn't sure how I felt about anything: any life before the Robertsons seemed dim and far away, images laced around the edges by blackness. I felt as though I'd fallen into a chasm and I clung there, on a ledge in the wall, with no way back and only bottomlessness in front of me. I felt as though I was listening, and waiting, to be saved, just as the girls around me were listening and waiting for ghosts. I didn't know whom I could call: any spirit that could save me would have to be unknown. Tata Christine, perhaps, in her black dress? Or my great-aunt Estelle? But their spirits, if they existed, were in Africa, not in any Boston basement. Elsa's grandmother Anna was conveniently located in the local cemetery; she didn't have far to come.

Elsa claimed to have been visited by her, and Rachel obligingly uttered a few words of endearment in a croaky old-woman voice ("I'm at peace. I love you Elsa. Be good to your mother"), which she later insisted had not been affected but had welled up within her unsought. But Elsa's grandmother had been German, and had carried her accent, apparently, to the grave, and the voice that spoke through Rachel was decidedly American. The little girls—with the stout exception of Nan—wanted so much to believe. Certainly Rachel would not admit doubt for a second. But I knew that if there had been ghosts in the room, one would surely have spoken to me. Even Elsa's grandmother would have told Elsa to eat more.

After "Anna," there were two more attempts, with different girls leading. But patience was wearing thin, and whispers and titters kept erupting mid-séance.

"I'm going home," said Nan, defiant. "This is stupid."

"Wait," cried Rachel. "Don't you want to do levitation?"

Maybe, I thought afterwards, this was why she had invited me along. I was bigger than any of them, a greater weight than any except Nan, whose forthright fatness made her a dodgy prospect for lifting. I was made to lie on my back in the middle of the floor with all the girls and Sam huddled over me on their knees, each with two fingers from either hand wedged under my body. Like Gulliver at the mercy of the Lilliputians, I tried briefly and unsuccessfully to survey my captors without raising my head. I am, I thought, a dead weight: it was rather pleasant. Becky, I thought, might be right about death.

There was a low humming, like bees, and I realized they were chanting, very rapidly, in their little-girl voices (even Sam had a little-girl voice), "light as a feather and stiff as a board, light as a feather and stiff as a board, light as a feather and stiff as a board." Slowly, unevenly, I felt myself rising. I shut my eyes. They were lifting me, it's true, but so lightly I could hardly feel their fingers. I was rocked slightly, and straightened, as one side caught up with the other, but nobody poked or prodded me. I could feel air slip into the space beneath my back, and my spine began to tingle, the way it did when I stood, awed, beneath the massive vaults of Chartres or Notre Dame. It was the physical feeling of relief and excitement that I had always associated with God.

It didn't last long. They let me down with a walloping thump. But in those seconds, with the buzz of voices resonating like a hive, I soared. I wasn't sorry, after all, to have been there. Their hands had carried me, not a ghost's; but that, at least, didn't feel like pretending.

By the time we left for Cape Cod, I was growing used to the Robertsons. I couldn't compare their life to home, but I tried. I made a list:

1. Ron cooks.

2. No maids.

3. No rules.

4. No God.

5. Eleanor never cries.

6. The trees.

7. I am invisible.

I didn't put Etienne on the list, or rather, his absence, but I grew accusatory: it seemed to me that he accounted for a lot. My grandparents did too. Etienne and my grandfather were the reasons that we had maids, and rules, and—for all I knew—God. Between them, they were the source of many of my mothers tears, although just about anything could make her cry. (There was, of course, the additional difficulty that my parents didn't get along, but I would not, then, have seen it that way and hence did not consider it.) As for my undesirable visibility, at home: partly, I recognized, it occurred because it was home, but also because in seeking to avoid the blot that was my brother, all eyes trained on me.

I decided that I loved America. I told myself that I had always known I would. I loved that it was all future, that the furniture of my past (of my present) couldn't follow me there. (What did Algeria mean to the Robertsons? Or the Bellevue, even?) As I grew closer to Becky, the idea that American life was imaginary receded.

Eleanor and Ron were ambivalent about my bond with their eldest, but I was—to them—a good girl, and they trusted my influence would prevail. Moreover, they could see that I was unfurling.

"It's great to hear you laugh," Eleanor said to me one evening, after she had stopped, while pruning the hedge along the porch in her business suit, to watch Becky, Rachel and me chasing a Day-Glo frisbee and falling about on the lawn among the clouds of midges. "You were such a quiet thing when you arrived. I haven't seen Becky and Rachel play together for ages." She gave me one of her spontaneous hugs, brisk and vigorous.

Smoking marijuana was essential to my friendship with Becky. That and drinking, which I had only done in a modest, civilized way at my parents' dinner table. But Becky and her friends drank under porches or in bedrooms or in the cemetery after dark, crouching behind headstones or in the shadows of minor mausolea to evade the probing lamps of patrolling police cars. They drank quietly, purposefully, anything they could get their hands on, in sickly combinations—Vermouth and 7UP, scotch and orange juice, cheap gin and soda water—or they guzzled potent, sweet liqueurs from squat bottles: peppermint schnapps, Bailey's Irish Cream, a foul, sticky green drink purportedly melon-flavored.

I took to it, this clandestine consumption, proud to be able to imbibe impressively and yet seem sober, to drift into the Robertsons' kitchen without visibly weaving and to carry on a plausible conversation with Ron and Eleanor. I hid my fumed breath by rummaging at once in the fridge, or by standing at the sink and drinking glass upon glass of water from the tap. Becky deemed me "incredibly cool."

Even she was excited at the prospect of a long weekend on Cape Cod. This was their annual event, their Bellevue, four days by the grumpy Adantic shore, paddling in its chilly waves, guests of another family, the Spongs, the Mrs., Amity, a friend of Eleanor's since college. Amity, herself of Mayflower stock, had married well: Chuck Spong was an investment banker, son of an investment banker, son, in turn, of the founder of the bank, a lineage endowed with brains as well as breeding, or at least with a keen eye for the markets, so that when I first met them they floated like a hovercraft upon a plump cushion of financial security which would only billow further with the years and carry them noiselessly into the realm of the stupendously (but discreetly) rich.

Amity, unlike Eleanor, was never called upon to don a suit and trail off into the hurly-burly of town, a freedom which she shared with my mother but which sat in her like happiness, a languorous delight in being alive. She painted, and upon occasion sold her paintings, scenes of comfortable lives which hung in almost every room of their summer house: a bowl of lilies by an open window, with the sea rippling in the distance; a broad-stroked couple, faceless, in polo shirts and sun-hats, seated on an evening lawn, pearly cocktail glasses in hand; a nest of sailboats bucking alongside a little girl on a pier, her bathing suit and pail the same exuberant cherry color. Amity did not have a dark side; Eleanor struggled to suppress her own; in this they were joined.

Amity had four bright children, ranging in age from twenty-one to ten. Three of them clustered together in age and the fourth, Isaac, was a beloved afterthought. Of the older three, our interest lay not so much with Lily and Charlotte, at twenty-one and nineteen too far gone into the clutches of adulthood, but with seventeen-year-old Chad, a calm boy with sleepy eyes and tangled dirty-blond hair, who was indulgent of his little brother as Becky almost never was of Rachel.

Their house, all wood and glass, hid just behind the mile-long strip of pure sand that was the beach, cloistered by trees which, toughened by the salt wind, reminded me at last of home. Salt and sand were everywhere within it, too, in the cracks between the floorboards, in the window linings, in the furrows of the scattered rugs. There was nothing fastidious about the Spongs, for all their wealth: they seemed, if anything, more relaxed even than Ron and Eleanor. Peace wafted through their rooms like the moment after a long sigh. This was, of course, only when they were empty.

The evening we arrived, spilled out of the steamy station wagon that had carried us, through Becky and Rachel's bickering and Ron's weird laugher and Eleanor's chirpy commentary, all the way from Boston, the house was bubbling with anticipatory busy-ness. Isaac and Chad were setting the long table on the deck (from which the long-lost ocean was visible, in pieces, through the trees); Amity and her daughters were waltzing evenly through the dinner preparations, their faces unblushed by the hot stove. Chuck greeted us at the door, and with him Anchor, their black Labrador, whose powerful tail thwacked each of us in turn as he spun in excited circles around our wilted group.

Chuck, like Ron, was bluff; but unlike him, was somehow believable, trim in his short-sleeved madras shirt, conservatively handsome, his blond hair not unlike his sons', but groomed and trimmed into agreeable submission.

"They're here!" cried Isaac, with unaccountable glee, running, bare-breasted in his swimsuit, across the living room, navigating the low, peach-toned clumps of furniture, to stop abruptly at his father's elbow and grow suddenly shy. We were immediately surrounded, and embraced, and flattered. I was introduced, all smiles ("What a treat, Sagesse, we've heard so much about you. And what a lovely name! And what a pretty dress!"), my mouth sore at the corners and my teenage self acutely conscious of the film of car sweat on my nose and chin.