Life After Life (39 page)

“Actually, it was.”

“And then the widower. Talk about a pity party.”

“Must be it. So glad you cared enough to keep up with me.”

“Well, I felt responsible. You see.” He grips her shoulders and forces his forehead against her own. “I made you disappear.”

“You don’t have that power,” she says, voice shaking but determined not to let him get the best of her. “I’m more like Mary Poppins. I go where I’m needed and then the wind shifts and I’m needed elsewhere.”

“Oh yeah. So what brought you back?”

“My dad.”

“I thought maybe it was me. I thought maybe you were once again seeking true love.”

“I gave up on that a long time ago.”

“Ouch. Because of me?”

“You give yourself an awful lot of credit, don’t you?” she says, and he sighs and leans back, one arm hiding his face. “You can come and go like the wind until you have kids and even though they weren’t my blood, they felt like mine. I was helping to raise them. But it didn’t work.”

“Yeah? So where does that leave you other than alone?”

“I don’t know.” She reaches and pulls his arm from his eyes, waits until he is looking at her. “Being with someone isn’t as important as it once was. I’m alone, but I’m never lonely. How’s that? I’ve got a life, people I care about, work I find very satisfying.”

“So, is it too late for us? Are we too old?”

“No, but you are married.”

“Oh yeah.” He laughs, leans back and pulls another bottle he’d obviously stashed in the dark corner, takes a drink and passes it to her. She just sits holding it for a long while, their feet pushing off the floor, the sound of the ocean in the distance. He talks about his marriage and how he really wants to leave. He talks about the disappearing chamber he has spent many weeks building and painting. “The job’s still yours if you want it,” he says. “My loyal assistant and disappearing girl.”

“I
was
the disappearing girl for way too long,” she says, and against her better judgment, hands the bottle back to him when he reaches for it. “And I did disappear, remember? I disappeared for a very long time.”

“Glad you reappeared.”

“Thanks.”

“Sorry I haven’t been much of a friend.”

“Understandable.”

“She hates you.”

“I gathered.”

“But she hates everyone.” He pauses. “Unless of course they have something she needs.” He laughs and rubs his hand on Joanna’s head the way you might a child or a dog. “People really do say you’ve been married too many times to count.”

“I know.”

“So what’s the real story?”

“Does it matter?” She turns to look at him and he leans in to kiss her but she pushes him back.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “Really. I’m just trying to figure out how I got where I am. How did I get here?”

“You’re asking me?” she asks, and moves away. “The physical
here
in the hammock on my front porch or the abstract
here
?”

“Yes, I’m asking you and the latter.”

“Oh, I see. Now I get it. Because I’ve been there so many times before. Thanks so much, speaking of people who only show up when they need something from you.” She goes inside and lifts Kurt from his carrier and then brings him back out with her. He wakes and stirs as she lifts him but then settles right back in against her chest as soon as she sits in one of the rockers.

“So, then, why don’t you tell me how
you
got here.” He stretches full length in the hammock and closes his eyes. “Tell me about the life that didn’t work. The one with the kids you left behind. Tell me why you didn’t live happily ever after.”

“He was grieving when we met and for a while I filled up the empty space and then he fell in love with someone else.”

“Ouch.”

“He couldn’t help that. It was just what happened.”

“And the gay husband?”

“He taught me how to love. He’s the best friend I’ve ever had.”

“Ouch again.”

“Grown-up friend. You’re someone from childhood.”

“You make it sound like another planet,” he says. “I’m still your friend. I’ve always been your friend.” He opens his eyes, but she doesn’t say anything, just breathes in the smell of Kurt’s damp sticky neck. “I am your friend. Why are you being this way?”

“We haven’t seen each other in years, Ben. I don’t know anything about your life. I know a boy who wanted to be the next Houdini—David Copperfield his distant second choice. We were friends—the best of friends. We even had sex once, remember that?”

Ben’s cell phone rings and he can’t find it to turn it off. She stands when Kurt starts to cry and jiggles him on her hip. Seconds pass and it starts ringing again, the shrill sound like an alarm sounding, breaking the strange dark silence.

“Of course I remember that,” he says, and stares into the lit face of his phone. “How could I forget that? And you may not be lonely, but I am.” He slams the phone shut and stuffs it in his pocket. “I’ve got to go. Looks like Abby has run away and Kendra is hysterical. I’m sure she’s next door with Sadie Randolph like she always is, but I have to go before every cop in town is called.”

“I’m sorry, Ben,” she says. “I really am. I hope everything’s okay.”

“Yeah. Me, too.” He hands her the bottle and she puts it down on the table by the hammock. “Can we try this again some time?”

“Okay,” she says, and shifts Kurt up a little higher, presses his sleep dampened cheek against her own. “We can try it again.”

“Don’t go anywhere,” he says. “Don’t leave.”

She watches until his taillights disappear down the road and then takes Kurt inside to change his diaper and give him a bottle and get him all settled in for the night.
The longest and most expensive journey you will ever take is the one to yourself.
She imagines Luke there in his black satin nightshirt, flipping through old albums and his stack of 45s, Tammy on the floor beside him, and she tells him he’s right and that thanks to him, she is now miles and miles from where she began.
Gregory Luke Wishart
and
Willis Hall—keep us close, keep us alive—Mary Grace Robertson and Suzanne Sullivan. The pull, the pull. I am their mirror. You are my little girl.

C.J.

S
HE WALKS OUT INTO
the cemetery, a small flashlight illuminating the ground around her feet, but Andy isn’t there. She shines the light all around to make sure he isn’t hiding and about to jump out at her. He has done that before and she cried for over an hour, ashamed of her fear but still not able to stop.
Esther Cohen devoted wife and mother.
She steps closer and there’s a note tucked into Esther’s urn.
Go home. Dinner is waiting.
She turns and looks all around once more and then starts making her way back to her car, walking quickly now, feeling relieved by the note she clutches, careful not to smudge her white silk blouse. This is the kind of note he always left in the beginning. This is the promise of some kind of good take-out food and maybe like the time he had a hot bubble bath waiting for her and all kinds of candles and lotions. She gets in the car and drives through town as quickly as she can. She could get mad at him for making her drive all the way in and then all the way back out, but right now she is too relieved to even care. She sees Abby’s old magician dad, there at the stoplight, but he doesn’t see her, and if she weren’t afraid of waking Kurt, she would call Joanna to tell her that she passed him on the road from the beach, and that he probably
is
riding by her house all the time. But she’s almost home. There’s a light up in her window and Andy’s car is parked where he always parks, across the street at the far back corner of the Texaco station.

She can’t get there fast enough, running up the rickety steps and into the room where he is sitting and drinking a glass of champagne, one already poured and waiting for her. She puts Kurt’s stuffed dog in the playpen and then throws her arms around him and breathes in, trying to smell what’s for dinner, but all she smells is Andy, and for some reason, for just a second, she is reminded of the smell of Sam Lowe’s shirt—nothing more than detergent and sweat—when he hugged her hello the last time she saw him.

“You scared me!” she says.

“What are you talking about sweetheart?” He kisses her and hands her the glass of champagne. “What’s got you so frazzled?”

“What’s got me frazzled?” She notices there is a little box all wrapped with a bow on the table. “Oh my God, you scared the shit out of me. You acted mad at me and then you sent me out to the cemetery.”

“I see you’re upset.” He clinks glasses and motions for her to drink up. “But I wanted to surprise you. Where’s Kurt?”

“Joanna’s. He’s there for the night.”

“Perfect, even though I really can’t stay long. I have to go out of town tomorrow. A conference in California.”

“I wish I could go.” She drains her glass and takes off her shoes, goes into the kitchen to see what’s in the oven. Nothing. “Hey, you said dinner was waiting.”

“Patience,” he says, and motions for her to come sit beside him. “Patience is a virtue.” He fills her glass and tells her all about his day at the hospital, about the person who really should have died there on the operating table today but, thanks to him, is still alive. “You should have seen the look on his wife’s face. Grateful doesn’t even touch it.” He keeps talking and filling their glasses. “It was nothing short of a miracle.” He unbuttons her blouse and asks where she’d want to go if she could go anywhere in the world and what kind of house does she want to live in and how many kids and what kind of car. “Dream big,” he says.

She carefully hangs the shirt on the back of a chair, telling him that she happens to know it is a
very
expensive item, and then she laughs and answers all the questions—Switzerland and a house like the big brick one on Main Street where Marge Walker used to live with lots of chimneys and a pool. She would love to have at least one more kid, maybe two, and a car that doesn’t overheat all the time, one with air-conditioning and a CD player that works.

“And who is the person who keeps calling here? Last name Lowe on your caller ID.”

“What?” She barely turns, head spinning, and he’s there, leaning hard against her. “I’ve been watching you. And reading you.” He pushes her toward the bedroom where he has all of her papers spread out on her bed. He has taken her journal apart, pages ripped and strewn. “You think somebody wouldn’t figure out who I am? I can figure out all the other weirdos you’ve been with, except of course whoever this kid is you’ve started to mention all the time. The one you can always talk to,” he mimics, “always count on.”

“He’s just a friend,” she says, and he pushes her down in the chair by the window, the only thing in this whole apartment that her mother had owned. Her mother loved that overstuffed chair and Joanna had it reupholstered for C.J.s birthday in a soft blue velvet. She knows he knows that. She knows she told him. “This has all gotten out of hand,” he says. “I’m the one in charge. I call the shots. I leave the notes. I decide how much money when. You’re a risk.” Her head feels heavy and she leans back to catch her breath; her heart is racing. The light from the Dog House sign is still lit even though they closed at eight and in the distance there is heat lightning—flashes of silent light.

Joanna

S
HE KNOWS AS SOON
as she gets to C.J.’s apartment, even before she resorts to using her spare key and cautiously stepping inside. The air is so still. She leaves Kurt in his carrier and turns it so that he is facing outward in the square of sunlight in the open door and then she moves to the bedroom and finds her there, half dressed, a needle in her arm. Her skin is cold, eyes closed. Joanna sinks to her knees beside the chair. Her impulse is to pull the needle from her arm, to dress and cover her, but she knows better and instead just reaches, smoothes back her hair, and lets her hand rest there, the skin of C.J.’s pale neck so cold. “Why?” she keeps asking. “
How
could this happen?” On the bed there is an uncapped pen that has bled into the rumpled sheet and a long handwritten page about her mother’s death and another page with the heading: “If Anything Happens to Me.” The flier about Abby’s lost dog is on the floor beside her chair.
I was just minutes away,
Joanna says.
This never should have happened
. Her mind races, trying to reconstruct everything they said last night. C.J.
was
upset; she
was
worried. But she wouldn’t have done
this.
Joanna goes once more and kneels beside her, closes her eyes as she tries to trace back through everything. She said she had a date to drive Rachel Silverman around town this morning. She said
, I do trust you, I do want to tell you.
She said, she always has something up her sleeve, but not
this.
She couldn’t have meant this. Minutes pass and Joanna just stays there, waiting, breathing, until she hears Kurt stirring and then she gets up and calls 911. She goes to the bathroom to retrieve the journal C.J. had told her about but there’s very little there, loose pages and a silver coil that once had held many more pages. Burned matches are in the toilet and traces of paper ripped from the notebook litter the floor like confetti. Joanna crams what’s there into her purse and then steps into the main room to wait. The white blouse is carefully hung on the back of a chair and the dog she had just given Kurt is placed in the center of his playpen in the corner. She reaches for the dog and when she does finds another scrap of paper:
Go home. Dinner is waiting.
She studies the square neat print, slips it into her purse with the other scraps and goes back once more and kisses the top of her head. “None of this makes sense,” she tells her. “You said you’d never do this.” As soon as she hears the siren, she picks up Kurt and goes downstairs to wait. He’s awake now and babbling, laughing when one of the many stray cats that hang around the Dog House sidles up begging.