Before and Afterlives (8 page)

I took the picture outside and buried it in my mother’s ga
rden between the rows of sticks that had, just weeks before, marked off the sections of vegetables, keeping carrots carrots and radishes radishes. I patted the dirt softly, inhaled its crisp dirt smell, and whispered, “Don’t you worry. Everything will be all right.”

When my mother started using a wheelchair, she was hopeful, even though the doctors had changed their minds and said she’d never walk again. She told us not to worry. She enjoyed not always having to be on her feet. She figured out how to pop wheelies, and would show off in front of guests. “What a burden legs can be!” she told us. Even so, I sometimes found her wheeled into dark corners, her head in her hands, saying, “No, no, no,” sobbing.

That woman, Lucy, kept calling and asking my mother to forgive her, but my mother told us to say she wasn’t home and that she was contacting lawyers and that they’d have L
ucy so broke within seconds, they’d make her pay real good. I told Lucy, “She isn’t home,” and Lucy said, “My God, tell that poor woman I’m so sorry. Ask her to please forgive me.”

I told my mother Lucy was sorry, and the next time Lucy called, my mother decided to hear her out. Their conversation sounded like when my mom talks to her sister, my Aunt Beth, who lives in California near the ocean, a place I’ve never vi
sited. My mother kept shouting, “No way! You too?! I can’t believe it! Can you believe it?! Oh Lucy, this is too much.”

Two hours later, Lucy pulled into our driveway, blaring her horn. My mother wheeled herself outside, smiling and laug
hing. Lucy was tall and wore red lipstick, and her hair was permed real tight. She wore plastic bracelets and hoop earrings, and stretchy hot pink pants. She bent down and hugged my mother, then helped her into the car. They drove off together, laughing, and when they came home several hours later, I smelled smoke and whiskey on their breath.

“What’s most remarkable,” my mother kept slurring, “is that I was on my way to the bar, sober, and Lucy was driving home, drunk.” They’d both had arguments with their hu
sbands that day; they’d both run out to make their husbands jealous. Learning all this, my mother and Lucy felt destiny had brought them together. “A virtual Big Bang,” said my mother.

Lucy said, “A collision of souls.”

The only thing to regret was that their meeting had been so painful. “But great things are born out of pain,” my mother told me, nodding in a knowing way. “If I had to be in an accident with someone,” she said, patting Lucy’s hand, which rested on one of my mother’s wheels, “I’m glad that someone was Lucy.”

After I buried Jamie’s and my photo, I walked around for a few days bumping into things. Walls, lockers, people. It didn’t matter what, I walked into it. I hadn’t known Jamie all that well, even though we were in the same class. We had different friends. Jamie liked computers; I ran track. Not because I like competition, but because I’m a really good runner, and I like to run, even though my mom always freaks because I was born premature, with undersized lungs. But I remembered Jamie: a small kid with stringy, mouse-colored hair and pale skin. He wore very round glasses and kids sometimes called him Moony. He was supposed to be smart, but I didn’t know about that. I asked a few people at lunch, when the topic was still hot, “What kind of grades did he get? Was he an honors student?” But no one answered. All they did was stare like I’d stepped out of a spaceship.

My brother Andy and his friends enjoyed a period of extreme popularity. After they went to where Jamie had been hidden, everyone thought they were crazy but somehow brave. Girls asked Andy to take them there, to be their protector, and he’d pick out the pretty ones who wore makeup and tight little skirts. “You should go, Adam,” Andy told me. “You could appreciate it.”

“It’s too much of a spectacle,” I said, as if I were above all that.

Andy narrowed his eyes. He spit at my feet. He said I didn’t know what I was talking about, that it wasn’t offensive at all, people were just curious, nothing sick or twisted. He asked if I was implying that his going to see the place was sick or twisted. “Cause if that’s what you’re implying, you are dead wrong.”

“No,” I said, “that’s not what I’m implying. I’m not impl
ying anything at all.”

I didn’t stick around to listen to the story of his adventure. There were too many stories filling my head as it was. At any moment Andy would burst into a monologue of detail, one he’d been rehearsing since seeing the place where they’d hi
dden Jamie, so I turned to go to my room and—bam—walked right into a wall. I put my hand over my aching face and couldn’t stop blinking. Andy snorted and called me a freak. He pushed my shoulder and told me to watch where I’m going, or else one day I’d kill myself. I kept leaving, and Andy said, “Hey! Where are you going? I didn’t get to tell you what it was like.”

Our town was big on ghost stories, and within weeks people started seeing Jamie Marks. He waited at the railroad crossing on Sodom-Hutchins road, pointing farther down the tracks, toward where he’d been hidden. He walked in tight circles outside of Gracie Highsmith’s house with his hands clasped behind his back and his head hanging low and serious. In these stories he was always a transparent figure. Things passed through him. Rain was one example; another was leaves falling off the trees, drifting through his body. Kids in school said, “I saw him!” the same eager way they did when they went out to Hatchet Man Road to see the ghost of that killer from the ’70s, who actually never used hatchets, but a hunting knife.

Gracie Highsmith hadn’t returned to school yet, and ever
yone said she’d gone psycho, so no one could verify the story of Jamie’s ghost standing outside her house. The stories grew anyway, without her approval, which just seemed wrong. I thought if Jamie’s ghost was walking outside Gracie’s house, then no one should tell that story but Gracie. It was hers, and anyone else who told it was a thief.

One day I finally went to the cemetery to visit him. I’d wanted to go to the funeral, just to stand in the back where no one would notice, but the newspaper said it was family only. If
I
wa
s
angry about anything at all, it was this. I mean, how could they just shut everyone out? The whole town had helped in the search parties, had taken over food to Jamie’s family during the time when he was missing. And then no one but family was allowed to be at the funeral? It just felt a little selfish.

I hardly ever went to the cemetery. Only once or twice b
efore, and that was when my Grandma died, and my dad and Andy and I had to be pall bearers. We went once after my mom came home in her wheelchair. She said she needed to talk to my grandma, so we drove her there on a surprisingly warm autumn day, when the leaves were still swinging on their branches. She sat in front of the headstone, and we backed off to give her some private time. She cried and sniffed, you could hear that. The sunlight reflected on the chrome of her wheelchair. When she was done we loaded her back into the van, and she said, “All right, who wants to rent some videos?”

Now the cemetery looked desolate, as if ready to be filmed for some Halloween movie. Headstones leaned toward one another. Moss grew green over the walls of family mausol
eums. I walked along the driveway, gravel crunching beneath my shoes, and looked from side to side at the stone angels and pillars and plain flat slabs decorating the dead, marking out their spaces. I knew a lot of names, or had heard of them, whether they’d been relatives or friends, or friends of relatives, or ancestral family enemies. When you live in a town where you can fit everyone into four churches—two Catholic, two Methodist—you know everyone. Even the dead.

I searched the headstones until I found where Jamie Marks was buried. His grave was still freshly turned earth. No grass had had time to grow there. But people had left little trinkets, tokens or reminders, on the grave, pieces of themselves. A hand print. A piece of rose-colored glass. Two cigarettes standing up like fence posts. A baby rattle. Someone had scrawled a name across the bottom edge of the grave: Gracie Highsmith. A moment later I heard footsteps, and there she was in the flesh, coming toward me.

I was perturbed, but not angry. Besides his family, I thought I’d be the only one to come visit. But here she was, this girl, who’d drawn her name in the dirt with her finger. Her letters looked soft; they curled into each other gently, with little flourishes for decoration. Did she think it mattered if she spelled her name pretty?

I planted my hands on my hips as she approached and said, “Hey, what are you doing here?”

Gracie blinked as if she’d never seen me before in her life. I could tell she wanted to say, “Excuse me? Who are you?” But what she did say was, “Visiting. I’m visiting. What ar
e
yo
u
doing here?”

The wind picked up and blew hair across her face. She tucked it back behind her ears real neatly. I dropped my hands from my hips and nudged the ground with my shoe, not knowing how to answer. Gracie turned back to Jamie’s tom
bstone.

“Visiting,” I said finally, crossing my arms over my chest, annoyed I couldn’t come up with anything but the same a
nswer she’d given.

Gracie nodded without looking at me. She kept her eyes trained on Jamie’s grave, and I started to think maybe she was going to steal it. The headstone, that is. I mean, the girl co
llected rocks. A headstone would complete any collection. I wondered if I should call the police, tell them, Get yourselves to the cemetery, you’ve got a burglary in progress. I imagined them taking Gracie out in handcuffs, making her duck her head as they tucked her into the back seat of the patrol car. I pinched myself to stop daydreaming, and when I woke back up, I found Gracie sobbing over the grave.

I didn’t know how long she’d been crying, but she was g
oing full force. I mean, this girl didn’t care if anyone was around to hear her. She bawled and screamed. I didn’t know what to do, but I thought maybe I should say something to calm her. I finally shouted, “Hey! Don’t do that!”

But Gracie kept crying. She beat her fist in the dirt near her name.

“Hey!” I repeated. “Didn’t you hear me? I said, Don’t do that!”

But she still didn’t listen.

So I started to dance. It was the first idea that came to me.

I kicked my heels in the air and did a two-step. I hummed a tune to keep time. I clasped my hands together behind my back and did a jig, or an imitation of one, and when still none of my clowning distracted her, I started to sing the Hokey Pokey.

I belted it out and kept on dancing. I sung each line like it was poetry. “You put your left foot in/You take your left foot out/You put your left foot in/And you shake it all about/You do the Hokey Pokey and you turn yourself around/That’s what it’s all about! Yeehaw!”

As I sang and danced, I moved toward a freshly dug grave just a few plots down from Jamie’s. The headstone was a
lready up, but there hadn’t been a funeral yet. The grave was waiting for Lola Peterson to fill it, but instead, as I shouted out the next verse, I stumbled in.

I fell in the grave singing, “You put your whole self in—” and about choked on my own tongue when I landed. Even though it was still light out, it was dark in the grave, and muddy. My shoes sunk, and when I tried to pull them out, they made sucking noi
ses. The air smelled stiff and leafy. I started to worry that I’d be stuck in Lola Peterson’s grave all night, because the walls around me were muddy too; I couldn’t get my footing. Finally, though, Gracie’s head appeared over the lip of the grave.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

Her hair fell down toward me like coils of rope.

Gracie helped me out by getting a ladder from the cemetery tool shed. She told me I was a fool, but she laughed when she said it. Her eyes were red from crying, and her cheeks looked wind-chapped. I thanked her for helping me out.

I got her talking after that. She talked a little about Jamie and how she found him, but she didn’t say too much. Really, she only seemed to want to talk about rocks. “So you really do collect rocks?” I asked, and Gracie bobbed her head.

“You should see them,” she told me. “Why don’t you come over to my place tomorrow? My parents will be at marriage counse
ling. Come around five.”

“Sure,” I said. “That’d be great.”

Gracie dipped her head and looked up at me through brown bangs. She turned to go, then stopped a moment later and waved. I waved back.

I waited for her to leave before me. I waited until I heard the squeal and clang of the wrought-iron front gates. Then I knelt down beside Jamie’s grave and wiped Gracie’s name out of the dirt. I wrote my name in place of it, etching into the dirt deeply.

My letters were straight and fierce.

I went home to find I’d missed dinner. My father was already in the living room, watching TV, the Weather Channel. He could watch the weather report for hours listening to the muzak play over and over. He watched it every night for a couple of hours before Andy and I would start groaning for a channel switch. He’d change the channel but never acknowledge us. Usually he never had much to say anyway.