Life After Life (10 page)

“There’s something I’ve never heard said.”

“So I’ll say it again. You are a gift—a messenger from God.”

“I’m a doped-up suicidal woman who is never wanted by the people she wants. What does any of that have to do with God?”

“Redemption,” Luke said, and reached for David’s hand. “We are witnessing redemption. She’s our project—our own little fucked-up Eliza Doolittle.”

“Better than a smokehouse, I think,” David said. He was handsome and outdoorsy, his hair thinning at his temples the only indication that he was older than twenty. He was a local New Hampshire boy who had grown up ten miles away and was always delivering the commentary of his life: My school bus stopped there. That’s where I played Little League. That’s where a man ran a stop sign and totaled my Nova. He often rode by where his dad was buried in a small church cemetery and the house where he had grown up. His mother still lived there, but he only saw her at Christmas when she announced to all the relatives visiting from elsewhere that he was going to locate the perfect wife any day now. He was someone content in that small parcel of the world, even as an outsider within his own family, and she admired and aspired to his level of comfort.

“Better than a smokehouse,” Luke said. “Our final project. We will make her
reappear,
” he said the word very carefully. He told her how she had mumbled
disappear
over and over in the ambulance ride.
Where did Ben go?
She had asked the question so many times that Luke worried in the beginning that someone else had been there when she fell in the hot tub.

“Repeat the mantra.” Luke said. “I will reappear.”

Do you believe in ghosts?

Do you believe in the power of magic?

Do you believe this girl, this normal ordinary girl, can disappear?

I do, I do, I do.

Now the day Tammy saved her seems light years away, many many miles behind her, and yet she wakes to it and falls asleep to it. The touchstone. Tammy’s portrait, which David insisted she take, hangs over the mantel in her cottage, and several times a year she sends Tammy a gift and something for David, too—bones and CDs and a heavy wool scarf she knitted sitting bedside at Pine Haven. Tammy is getting old for her breed so David is talking about getting a puppy. “The big ones like Tammy don’t live long,” Luke had told her. “They have to cram a lot in.” David has been seeing someone who came to work at one of the resorts over the summer and then never left. He says he is happy and that he’s surprised by that. He thought he never would be again. And to think that now he could get married if he chose to do so.

In the summer when Joanna is wearing something sleeveless, some unknowing, kind person will often rush forward to ask what happened, hands held a safe distance from the big purple dog bite.

“It’s a tattoo,” she says, and sometimes she adds, without explanation, that it is meant to simulate a great big dog bite. It’s Tammy’s Teeth—something akin to Rosebud or Zuzu’s petals or whatever it is in life that reminds you that you are alive.

Notes about my Dad:
Curtis Edward Lamb

Born:
February 28, 1920
Died:
March 15, 2008, 8:10 a.m.

Fulton, North Carolina

He loved the ocean and fishing and hot dogs.

It was a sunny spring day, daffodils blooming—some so old they were only green sprigs. King Alfred gone to a pauper. It was normal traffic for a normal morning. We were in the room where I had spent my childhood, the crack in the ceiling I used to trace in the near darkness still there, and it seemed in that moment that it might all crash in. I held my hand out to the crack, shocked at how like my mother’s hand it was. He said it first years ago,
You have your mother’s hands and you have your mother’s eyes,
and I couldn’t help but wonder all these years later if that changed the way I saw things, changed the way I touched things
.
“You are my little girl,” he said. These were his last words. I told him that I was sorry, but he seemed not to hear. I held his hand until the very end and with that last breath, the world lightened in a way that left me feeling sadder than I have ever felt.

“I’m so sorry,” I said, and I was. I was so sorry not to have done things differently, so sorry I couldn’t be the one to blink and break the stubborn stance that kept me from my mother. And for the first time I saw him for what he really was, a bridge between two places—the past and the present—the before and the after. The world I shared with my parents and the one I have all alone. I kept thinking of the draw bridge that used to separate Ferris Beach from the mainland, an old rough-hewn bridge that a single man, alone in a little tower, swung outward when a boat was too large to pass under. It swung and creaked and took forever. It was not ideal, but it was all there was.

[from Joanna’s notebook]

Curtis Edward Lamb

Doris is at the other end of the house and he has to move that way to find her, but when he gets there it is his daughter’s room and Doris isn’t there, nobody is there, just walls in need of paint and a closet full of Joanna’s old board games and rag dolls nobody has touched in years. So throw them out, he told Doris, but she couldn’t, she said she could not bear to throw them out. So call her, let’s call her, but no, she said, no. Joanna made her bed and she needs to lie in it. After all the sacrifices we made for her, the least she can do is lead a decent life. We do not owe her. She owes us. But she is our little girl, he said, and he says it again when he holds her hand. You are my little girl, and she squeezes tight while they wait in the hot-dog line. The Ferris wheel is all she can talk about and he has promised her that he will go with her, turning and turning and turning, the lights so bright and buzzing in the distance he has to look away.

Abby

A
BBY
P
ALMER BELIEVES THAT
you should never have to wear church clothes on a weekday, especially in the summer, and that really you should never have to go to church, especially if your parents don’t go themselves but just drop you off on the curb, which is what hers usually do. Her dad said he did his time years ago. Her mom says an Episcopalian is a good thing to be. You should never have to do chores or any kind of work on your birthday and you shouldn’t
have
to have a birthday party if you don’t want one, especially a stupid suck-hole party like what her mom has planned: impersonators of famous First Ladies telling their stupid stories while the girls make bracelets out of stupid junk like old mahjongg and Scrabble tiles—when what you really want is a magic show and tarot card and palm readings. You should always be allowed to keep an animal who turns up on your doorstep looking for a home and that animal should never get lost or leave you. You should pick your own friends and not the ones your mother thinks are the right friends for you, and if you want friends who are a hundred years old, that is
your
business. Liking Lady Gaga is
your
business and so is eating a Slim Jim and some Yodels if that is what
you
want to eat. You should not have to listen to your parents fighting night after night or pretend the next morning that you didn’t hear anything so they can feel good about their own stinking selves. You should never leave home because bad things happen when you do, like the way her bedroom got redone while she was at camp last summer, turning a perfectly nice place into something white and starched and frilly in a way she is
not
or, worse, the way her dog, Dollbaby, vanished when she went with her dad to Wilmington to buy all the materials for their magic act. He is building a disappearing chamber for her party because that is what
she
wants even though her mom screamed and pitched a bitch and said that was a terrible idea and that her dad was doing it just for spite and to compete with her. “He is jealous of everything I do,” she yelled, which, looking at her stupid painting of Hillary Clinton, is hard to believe. Who would be jealous of
that
? Hillary Clinton should sue her for that.

Abby’s dad keeps telling her that there is no connection between their plan to have a disappearing chamber and Dollbaby being missing, but that is hard to believe, too. She can’t help but feel like she made it happen and now she would do anything to get her back.

Dollbaby is her best friend; she is the baby sister she has begged for and never gotten. Dollbaby has brown eyes and a bushy fox tail and a nose that often leads her away for hours. But still she has always come home and Abby’s dad always tells funny stories about where she has been: the dentist to get her teeth sharpened, the Dog House for a “Puppy to go,” the cemetery to look for bones. It’s like Dollbaby has a whole other life. She is on several mailing lists and has gotten free panty hose, tampons, toothpaste, and once was even asked to sign up for her own Visa card. No one is sure how Dollbaby got on the lists in the first place but she did, and Abby takes great care keeping up with it all; she has put all of Dollbaby’s mail inside the same jewelry box where she keeps the notes she has started finding in the cemetery next door:
The time has come
and
Better late than never
and
I am with you even when you think I’m not.
Creepy.

A
BBY WISHES HER
mother would wear mom pants, some nice high-waisted stretch denim mom pants. But no, her mom wears low rise. Her mom wears whatever the seventeen year old sitter wears. Molly once left her swimsuit at their house and Abby saw her mom trying it on, turning from side to side and sucking in so that her ribs stuck out. She didn’t see Abby see her, but she did later accuse Abby’s dad of looking at the babysitter in a way he shouldn’t. “You were flirting with a child,” her mother said, which was just gross-out gross and left Abby feeling sick. She liked Molly, too; she was nice enough and, most important, was actually nice to Abby and took an interest in Dollbaby and all that Abby knows about the cemetery next door and who is buried where, but now her parents had ruined it all. Molly would never be able to babysit again without her mother saying all those things. I
saw how you looked at her little butt cheeks,
and there was more but Abby started screaming so she couldn’t hear any more of it.

“Shut up,” she screamed. “Shut up, shut up, shut the hell damn fuck up.”

It was right after that she went for her first session with Dr. Owens and that was kind of good. Her mother insisted on taking her, of course, and waiting there the whole time, complimenting the doctor on the
decor
of the office and the
prestige
of her degrees and any other bullshit thing that could be said. Abby just liked the white noise and the soft chairs and the knowledge that the next fifty minutes were only about her. Dr. Owens looked like an ordinary person, too, which was good. She could just as easily have been one of the cafeteria women at school or the soft round nurse in her old elementary school. It wasn’t as good as being with Sadie who lives next door at Pine Haven, but it was still worth going because for a little while anyway it had reduced the fighting to those times late at night when they thought she couldn’t hear.

But still, her mom kept calling Molly if she needed a sitter no matter how many times Abby begged to be left alone or over at Pine Haven where she knew everybody. Or, she had suggested, they could call Dorro from down the street. Dorro was middle-aged and overweight and there wouldn’t have been anything to fight about, but no, she kept hauling in Molly until Molly must have figured it out and stopped coming. The last time she was there, Abby’s mom had insisted that her dad drive Molly home and that, no, Abby could not ride with them. “Don’t worry, Moll,” Abby’s mother said, like the two of them might have been friends. “You can trust him to be a gentleman, and if he isn’t, well, you know who to come to.” She patted her chest and laughed and Abby slipped out of the house and into the cemetery before her dad returned because she knew there would be a fight. Dr. Owens listened, her brow wrinkled. It was clear that if she had a kid
she
wouldn’t be doing it that way and that was a good thing for Abby to know.

And as if life isn’t bad enough all the way around, now her mom is planning Abby’s birthday party like it’s her own stupid party. She wants something educational so all the other mothers will say how wonderful she is to “combine fun and education.” She says crap like that all the time, too. In celebration of First Ladies. What a lame and stupid idea from her lame and stupid mother. A party featuring the First Ladies and idiot shitty actors coming in to pretend to be them. The invitation says:
Ladies First
and then lots of crap about First Ladies, and it will be at the country club, which is a stupid place anyway unless it’s a pool party. Her mother is going to have a little table with knock-off purses for the mothers (who also are invited) to peruse and they all also will get their nails done and have make-overs.