Life After Life (19 page)

And the child doesn’t appreciate anything either, like this party for instance. She will go on and on about a stupid fucking disappearing chamber and doesn’t even notice all the time Kendra has spent researching First Ladies and planning the party. Well, someday it will all be behind her. In fact, just the other side of the birthday party is the meeting she has been waiting for so patiently for months and after that everything else will fall right into place. Something is definitely about to happen. Tomorrow night will mark the beginning of a brand-new life.

She’ll likely have to give up her gym membership so as not to run into Liz anymore, but that’s okay; it has gotten so hard these days to continue being nice to her, smiling and acting like they are actually friends. Liz even whispered about what she was planning for their anniversary, and oh, won’t Kendra have some fun with that one? She plans to buy the exact same nightgown and robe set that she watched Liz buy—talk about compare and contrast. Andrew won’t know what hit him. As for Abby, she will come around someday, and she will see why her mother had no choice but to run away with Andrew Porter. They will probably move northward; why wouldn’t they? His children are old enough to get on a plane if they want to visit, and even though they are quite a bit older, she can imagine they will make room for Abby someday. A few years of private school and personal trainers and the child will look back and think
thank God.
Then she will finally see Kendra for who she really is, a good mother and a smart woman with a plan. The one thing Kendra will not ever let her know about is the disappearance of Dollbaby and what really happened. Kendra likes to think that Abby will grow into the kind of woman who could laugh about it someday, that she will be the kind of woman who would understand why her mother had no choice but to do what she did, but that’s a little trickier. It will be hard enough to successfully convince the kid her dad is a total loser (without saying a word of course). Very few people are skilled enough to handle such subtle trickery, but Kendra considers herself a professional. Ben thinks he’s a magician? Oh my, just watch her make him disappear. Just watch him stand and wonder what in the hell hit him. You want to see what’s up
her
sleeve? You want to see what’s in
her
hat? She reaches and plants another sticker under the bench of the baby grand.

“I suspect you’re someone with quite a bag of tricks,” Andrew Porter whispered in her ear that very first night they met and she told him that she was indeed and that if he was very good, she just might let him see what’s up her sleeve.

“I’d rather see what’s up your skirt,” he whispered, a little drunk for sure but not too drunk to know what he was doing. And then Liz walked up and asked if Kendra wanted to go with her to the little girls’ room. Oh, the stupid little girls’ room and all the stupid little girls in there. Kendra has never liked other girls but learned early to pretend that she did so she could get closer to the boys she was interested in. She has always thought of herself as a Scarlett O’Hara type and does believe that the end always justifies the means.

She puts a sticker under the art deco lamp in the hall and nearly trips on the dog bowl that Abby has left there in hopes Dollbaby will be home any day now. Impossible, of course, and now on top of everything else, she has to deal with that. She will make up something, tell all about the phone call she got—so so sad—Dollbaby wandering way out in the county, hit by a car. If she had known the child was going to be this torn up and spend days searching, she would have just said right up front something like
Dollbaby got hit by a car.
But then it would have potentially been
her
fault instead of the way she planned it, which was to say Dollbaby got out of the fence Ben built for her. How’s that for a disappearing chamber? How’s that for some fucking magic?

Notes about:
Willis Morgan Hall

Born:
March 13, 1921
Died:
March 14, 2007, 5:20 p.m.

Holderness, New Hampshire

Willis Hall died of throat cancer in the old farmhouse where he had spent his whole life, where every room smelled of the sweet cherry pipe tobacco he smoked for years along with cigars and, ten years prior, cigarettes. He was known in his handsome early years as the boy who would imitate the Philip Morris ads or say “Hey, good looking, got a cigarette?” and had met two of his three wives with that line. All three of his ex-wives were with him at the end. He joked that he and the king Yul Brynner played had a lot in common. They both should have quit smoking sooner and they both had lots of wives gathered at the deathbed. The only time he was ever away from home was when he was in the service. He was at the Battle of the Bulge, which he liked to say was indeed just as bad as it sounded.
Bulge is not a nice word,
he said.
Used most often for what is unattractive—eyes and stomachs—or what is pornographic, you know?
Every year some schoolchildren would pop up with questions for a history project and he gave them just enough for a story, just what they needed. The cold and the filthy conditions, the way that battle hit them worst just when they thought they were almost out of the woods.

The ground was still covered in snow though the days were just enough longer that it felt like spring was coming. One wife noted that he always said he loved this time of year when everything was thawing and muddy, the plants starting to stir and break the soil. He said he felt so sexy in the spring. “He told you that, too?” another wife asked, the youngest of the three, though they all looked about the same age and could have been sisters, and they all laughed.

“How can you not love him?” the other wife said. “Who wouldn’t fall for him? Sweet as sugar, aren’t you?”

“Easy to fall, but hard to keep him,” another said. They all were remarried, and though he had girlfriends, two who had brought casseroles, only the wives were present that day at dusk. It was his favorite time of day, they said. He liked dusk and he liked well-made shoes and he loved Angie Dickinson especially as Pepper the Police Woman; he liked Martini and Rossi, which Angie advertised and of course she was the reason he also started eating avocados, which were often not easy to find in New Hampshire. All three wives said—at different private times—how they had wanted life with him to work but that he was stuck there, not even willing to take a vacation. Not willing for his wife to work and be gone all day. In the summer he might venture out a little bit, eat out locally, go to the occasional movie, but once the snow fell, that was it, he stayed put. “And,” the third of the three had said, sadly shaking her head, “there is a lot of snow in New Hampshire in the winter.”

The only photograph in the room is one of himself as a child, his mother and father on either side lifting him by the arms up and over a mound of snow as tall as he was. When asked about his parents, he said they were wonderful to him. His mother once told him that everyone loved him so much, all the girls in town loved him, how would he ever choose a wife? “It was hard,” he said, and laughed. “I would love for my mother to know how wonderfully difficult that choice proved to be.”

When asked to tell about the charm he seemed to have over everyone, how he had managed to have three ex-wives who love him dearly, he said his favorite power tool had always been silence. “I’m their mirror,” he said. “And they always come back for one more look.” Toward the end, when in and out of a deep drugged sleep, he gripped my hand with a strength that surprised me and said
stay.

I will think of him every time I smell tobacco or peel an avocado or hear mention of Angie Dickinson or the word
bulge.
I will continue to marvel at his ability to reflect back to people what they need to see and how it seemed he needed nothing. I asked permission to take one of his many empty tobacco tins, thinking I would keep things in it, earrings, loose change, but the smell is still so powerful I keep it capped like a genie for a time I might need to conjure the memory of Willis Hall, a good-humored selfless spirit I didn’t really know at all beyond what he reflected back on whoever was talking to him at the time.

[from Joanna’s notebook]

Willis Hall

Smoke and snow and snow and snow. Sometimes a cigarette can keep you warm—that tiny bit of light, red glow, smoke breath warm within, or you can pretend it does. The Ardennes are not unlike the White Mountains or the Green Mountains, or you can pretend that—snow, rock, trees—but so far from home. And cold. Cold hands, warm heart, his mother said, and she said one, two, three, jump, and he was up and over a mound of snow—a mound, a bulge, a hill of heavy falling snow, and a forest so dense, too dense to see, and snowing, breath smoking. The young man beside him can’t go anymore—Stay, he says—his wounded feet torn and raw so he sinks down into a burrow of roots and waits and waits and smokes when it is safe to smoke, breathes in and breathes out, and now he’s cold, ice cold to the touch. Breathe in and breathe out and sometimes don’t breathe at all, stay and hold his hand, wrap his feet, this identical boy in age and uniform. The safest choice is not to move but to breathe in and breathe out, breathe in and breathe out and sometimes don’t breathe at all. Sweet as sugar, his mother says. Cold hands, warm heart. Cold hands, warm heart.

Stanley

S
TANLEY
S
TONE CAN’T COMPLAIN.
He lives in a little apartment with a good bed and good light. The windows of his bedroom face west so he sees the sun setting over the woods near the interstate. He’s got two sons, one a successful software salesman in the Midwest and the younger one, Ned, a health and PE teacher at the local elementary school. Ned does a little acting with the community theater and he leases a field just outside of town and now is known for having the best pumpkin patch in the county. And it’s good that he is finally known as the best in something because that is a long time coming. He was a kid who was always in trouble but had finally graduated and seemed to have gotten it all together. Once upon a time, he had a nice smart wife and was the assistant principal of a high school over in South Carolina, and then next thing they knew, she left him and he had to pay her a lot of money, got a DUI, and on and on and on, everything in his life falling apart like a house made of limp worthless cards.

He also slept in Stanley’s bed for three weeks after Martha died, and even though Stanley protested and cussed and said some pretty awful things, he found that hearing Ned’s breath those nights was maybe the greatest comfort he has ever known. Stanley couldn’t sleep with the emptiness, the cool sheets, the way the clock face wasn’t blocked by her silhouette and glared out at him with its old glowing green face. He could not sleep with all the thoughts of all he had not done in their life together.

Not only did Ned stay, carefully turning off the lamp by the chair where Martha always read and then climbing in when he thought Stanley was already asleep, but he never told, never mentioned it, not even these times recently when Stanley has been hard on him and once again said harsh and judgmental things he doesn’t really
mean
to say, an old habit that is dying hard. After his wife left him, Ned was a spiral out of control. “So you lost a baby,” Stanley had said to him. “A lot of people do. You get over it.” But Ned could not get over it. He was worse off than his wife and she was having a hard time of it, too. Stanley told how Martha had a miscarriage between the two boys. Such a common thing. He didn’t say,
Stand up and take it like a man,
but he wanted to say that. There was a part of him thinking that was the right thing.

“It’s not the same, Stanley,” Martha had said, her hand on his arm feeling like the weight of a big stinking dead albatross. “Their baby was born. Their baby had a name.”

“And their baby had an awful genetic disease that would have been miserable to live with and cost them more than they could ever have afforded.” He tried to make her see his reason, but she wouldn’t even look at him at that point. “It’s called survival of the fittest. It was not meant to live.”

“
It
was your grandson.
It
was your namesake.”

“Foolish to name it. What were they thinking?”

“They were hoping, that’s all. Hoping.” Martha stood her ground on that one, and even though he told her that she needed to stay out of their lives and let them tend to it themselves, she was right there, buying the casket and arranging for the service, and yes, he felt like a shit to think it, but all he could think is how he wished it had been born dead or born too early or any number of other scenarios than what they had, a scene at a hospital where the two grown-up parents fell apart and were no better than children themselves. The girl’s parents showed up and Ned let them do all the comforting and then it was done—over. The marriage was over and he was stuck with a mortgage and alimony until she got on her feet. And all that time Ned kept himself functioning just above a stupor. When confronted, he said it was the one thing he knew how to do until he slammed into a station wagon full of high school girls on their way to a pep rally. He didn’t kill anyone, but he could have; everyone kept saying it was an absolute miracle that he didn’t given how fast he was going. People who saw him tossed through the windshield said he seemed to bounce like rubber off onto the shoulder, that the drugs and liquor that were killing him had actually, in that moment, saved his life.