Life After Life (13 page)

Abby’s best friend, Sadie Randolph, has a beautiful pink granite stone with her husband Horace’s name and dates on one side and hers on the other. “All they’ll have to do is put in that final date,” she has said, which always makes Abby sad to even imagine. When she was still able to come out here, Sadie planted rosemary—for remembrance—and now it is huge and bushy, growing up between their names. Abby always breaks off a little and takes it with her. Sadie likes that.

The arboretum is lush and green, gravel paths and flowers and trees all carefully labeled. There are all kinds of fruit and flowering trees, lots of magnolias blooming. Abby’s favorite part is the long arbor that stretches the full length of the cemetery, built there, her dad had said, so that the people over at Pine Haven wouldn’t have to look out and see the cemetery. Now they just see a screen of Confederate jasmine and cross vines and wisteria. All the plant names are right there to read on little gold-etched tags that remind her of Dollbaby’s name tag that she had made at Petco while her mother still tried to talk her into a different dog—a brand-new teacup-sized this or that puppy with Dollbaby sitting right there to hear every single word. She had said she would take a puppy as well, that it could be Dollbaby’s pet, and with that her stupid mother finally shut up.

Some call the arboretum the tunnel of love, but Abby thinks of it as the tunnel of life from the dark shade of the cemetery, through the labeled vines and then out into the bright sunlight and wide flat asphalt parking lot of Pine Haven—the perfect place for roller skating or skateboarding, which she loves to do. She can skateboard as good as Richie Hendricks and sometimes the two of them do that for hours. He has always liked Dollbaby and she likes him because of that.

Sadie is always waiting for her with a Hershey’s bar or a big Whitman’s Sampler and a crisp dollar bill for the soda machine down the hall. The sodas only cost seventy-five cents so she always gives the returned change to Millie, a plump long-term resident with spiky hair who guards the machine all day long and begs for change. Millie has a pink and white blanket she carries around and calls it her
African.
“Don’t you touch my
African,
” she says, “not unless I say to touch it.” Sadie says she means to say
afghan
but that people who didn’t get enough school often make this mistake. One of the residents called Millie a Mongoloid, and the new woman who lives across from Sadie, Mrs. Silverman, who is from the North said, “Oh my God, where on earth have I landed? Is anyone here educated?”

Abby has been told that Millie is at least forty even though she looks and acts like a big kid and that no one ever comes to see her, that she has kind of been adopted by all the residents and workers just like Harley, the huge orange cat who prowls the grounds and who used to lead Dollbaby on some good chases through the cemetery. Used to everybody loved Harley, but now they’re afraid he will make them die so they scream and throw things when they see him coming. Sadie told Abby that was nonsense, and if they’d let her, she would keep Harley full-time with her so he wouldn’t have to mess with all the others being mean to him. “Harley has been falsely persecuted,” she said, and stroked his big fat head. She also told Abby that grown-ups often say things they don’t mean, like that they hate someone or that they wish someone had never been born, the kind of thing a kid would get in big trouble for at school.

Sadie really does know everyone who has ever lived in this town, even the old shriveled-up Indian woman who reaches and whines and tries to play with Abby’s hair when she passes. “Come heren right now, baby,” the woman says, her tongue moving and twisting like it can’t be still. “Come on come on come on.” Sadie says that Lottie has been off since an accident that gave her a bad hit to the head years before. Lottie lives in the part of the building set aside for those less fortunate with no family and nowhere to go, like Millie. Sadie says that part of the building is the last car on the train—the end of the line.

Sadie knew Abby’s dad when he was a boy in this town. She taught him in third grade as she did most everyone who grew up there, but she had taken a special interest in him when his mother died so young. Her mother had also died young so she said they needed to stick together and now Abby’s dad likes to tell anyone interested that they have done just that for over forty years. Sadie sometimes tells others who live at Pine Haven that Abby is her granddaughter.

Abby was afraid of Sadie’s new neighbor, Rachel Silverman, in the beginning, but now she likes her and spends a lot of afternoons curled up in the big common living room where people sometimes gather to talk. There are only a couple of men living at Pine Haven. Sadie says men just don’t keep very well and Rachel laughed and said Sadie talked about men like they might be a head of lettuce or loaf of bread. “Well, look around,” Sadie said, “only a few here,” and so it would be hard not to notice Mr. Stanley Stone who used to be a lawyer but now spends lots of time watching and reading about wrestling. People say he needs a haircut and a shave, but he says they should mind their own goddamned business. He says he likes to think of what he’d call himself if he ever got in the ring: Stony or Rocky or the Marble Man. “Get it?” he asked and struck a cowboy pose with his legs bowed out and his arm lassoing the air. “I’m mixing me some metaphors for you intellectuals. Marble like stone and Marlboro like a well-hung cowboy stud.” He looked at Mrs. Silverman when he said that, but she ignored him. Toby, who wears winter boots all year long and a fanny pack stashed with all kinds of things she is always eager to share repeated what he said and laughed until she cried. “Well hung,” she repeated. “Don’t listen, Abby.” But of course Abby did listen. She listens to everything they say. Mr. Stone’s son teaches at her school and so it’s weird to see him there with his crazy old dad acting as bad as Todd Reynolds who got in trouble in fifth grade for unzipping his pants and mooning everybody on the field trip bus.

Abby often tells her mother that she is at a friend’s house and that is true. These are her friends and Sadie’s suite is like a house, with her big overstuffed velvet chairs with doilies on the back and lots of needlework filling the walls. It even smells like Sadie’s old house where Abby once visited with her dad.

“Whose house?” her mother always asks. “Which friend? Is it someone you’d like to ask to sleep over?”

It is clear her mother doesn’t believe her. She spends a lot of time pushing Abby to call up or be friends with girls whose mothers Abby’s mom wants to be friends with. That’s what’s really going on. Now that she has lied about all those girls from time to time, there has been no choice but to invite them to her party. She cornered the one nice girl in that group in the bathroom the last week of school and confessed her situation. She figured the worst thing that happened would just be that the girl turned on her and she’d be even more of an unnoticed outcast than she already is. So once an outcast, who cares? It’s like Mrs. Silverman said to someone who wanted to convert her one day. “Surely whoever is in charge, if in fact there is an afterlife, is smart enough to know when people say they believe something at the last minute in hopes of a pass,” she said. “If there is a smart person in charge, then he or she will respect where I stand. And if that’s not the case, then why should I even care?”

“There
is
a heaven,” the woman said. “And there
are
rules for getting in.”

“Do they lobotomize you at the gate?” Mrs. Silverman asked, which made Toby laugh even harder. Sadie explained to Abby what that meant, going in and scrambling part of the brain so people will forget the parts that make them sad. It made Abby cringe.

Mr. Stone said, “I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy,” and Mrs. Silverman said that that joke was so old she was riding a dinosaur the first time she heard it. He turned pink and Abby felt kind of sorry for him until he raised his middle finger, another thing that would get a kid sent to detention for days. If Mr. Stone was in his son’s class, he’d be suspended. Abby could not stop thinking about the lobotomy, though, like the thought made her need to squeeze her eyes shut. It made her picture something like an ice pick. It was a terrible word to think about but one she could definitely use later on her parents or some of the mean kids. “Go get a lobotomy,” she will say, and then, “Oh, I forgot, you already did that.” If those girls turn on her at the party tomorrow she might use it just like she did in elementary school when she told Laurie Monroe, one of the meanest girls of all, that she had
ancestors,
that her
epidermis
was showing, that her mother is a
thespian and performs in public
and that she
slumbered
in her sleep
.
Her dad had taught her all of those; he said they worked when he was a kid and probably still would.

“Of course no such thing happens in heaven,” Mrs. Marge Walker had shouted. “They don’t want you all scarred up in heaven. They want you looking your best.”

“So what about her?” Sadie pointed to Lottie, but Lottie didn’t notice, just kept working that tongue in and out of her mouth like it had a life all its own. “I believe Lottie will be in heaven.”

“We don’t know that for sure,” Mrs. Walker said, a stack of pamphlets on her lap. “We have no idea what the scorecard of her soul looks like or what the rules are in
her
heaven.”

“Ah, segregation,” Mr. Stone said, and that time Mrs. Silverman turned and nodded in his direction like she was with him. He smiled at Mrs. Silverman, but she didn’t look at him, probably afraid he’d be mean again.

“Good, better, best,” Mrs. Walker continued. “I didn’t create the system. That’s just the way it is.”

“Well,” Mrs. Silverman said, “I think that
if
there
is
a heaven, then it has to be a socialist society; otherwise it wouldn’t be
heaven
but just more of the kind of unjust hell you’re always describing.” No one, not even Mr. Stone, said anything after that and Abby decided she would try to use everything she learned from watching Mrs. Silverman—hands on hips, one eyebrow raised, little words like
if
made to sound big and powerful.

A
BBY HAD STARED
out the big bathroom window as she described the situation she was in to the girl at school, Elise Conway, a girl whose dad was a doctor in town and who had more Girl Scout badges than anyone had ever had at her age in their town. The girl was really no better looking than Abby; in fact they kind of looked alike—both a little plump but still not really needing a bra. Elise also had freckles over her nose and her ears stuck out enough that Abby once had heard a boy call her Dumbo. Abby could see the car-pool line already forming and focused on the steeple of the Methodist church while she waited for the girl to respond. She felt that heavy sick feeling as she waited, similar to hearing the news about Dollbaby but not as bad. Nothing is as bad as that, she told herself.

“Is your dad really a magician?” Elise asked. “And can he really let people in the movies anytime he wants like you said?”

“He’s the best magician,” Abby said, scaring herself with the realization that this would soon be put to the test. “And he practically owns the theater. I can go anytime I want day or night and I can just take whatever I want from the candy counter.” That was not an entire lie. She could take stuff, she just had to pay for it.

“And do you really know someone who reads palms and tells the future?”

“Yes,” Abby said, and put her hands on her hips. “And
if
you help me, I can take you to meet them.” And of course she was thinking of that young woman C.J. with all the tattoos and nose and lip rings, who did all the old peoples’ hair and nails. Abby saw her shuffling a deck of tarot cards one day and she also said she loved the Ouija board even if it does only conjure the slowest most stupid spirits. “They deserve to talk, too, right?” C.J. had asked Abby. “Likely my relatives would be there with them, which is why I do it.” She laughed and then looked at Abby’s palm, studied it for a long time and then looked her right in the eyes in a way that was kind of creepy but cool. “You are very lucky,” she said. “You may not see it for a long time, but trust that your good luck will come.” The memory gave Abby a rush of courage so she continued.

“I’ll take you to meet them if you’ll come to my party and act like we’re friends. Maybe get some of the other people to come, too.” She turned from the window and made eye contact. “I have fifty dollars saved and I’ll use it all to buy Girl Scout cookies or whatever it is you’re selling.”

Abby gave most of the cookies to Sadie and some of the others so her parents wouldn’t know what she did. She went door to door, leaving them with a note that said to have a nice day. All the girls accepted the invitation to her party and now all she has to do is show up tomorrow and get it over with, hope it all can just happen and be over, and then she can go back to searching for Dollbaby. That’s the worst thing of all. Even if the party sucks and people have a terrible time and call her lame and stupid, it won’t be nearly as bad as not having Dollbaby. She stands at the end of the arbor and squints out at the bright parking lot. “Here’s to a long and happy cookie-filled life,” Stanley Stone said when she gave him two boxes of Thin Mints, and for just a second he seemed normal, like who you would want to be your grandfather, but then, when he saw Toby and Sadie, added that sex was the real secret to long life. Sadie asked that he please hush and not say such things with Abby present, but he just shrugged and stared at Mrs. Silverman who said puhhleeeze. Then she said that
sanity
was the real secret.