Life After Life (7 page)

“And then can we talk?” Abby whispers. She looks like she’s been crying.

“Sure, honey.” She watches Abby walk away, each foot in a tile like hopscotch. They will solve this problem and if she has to place a call to the parents she will. She has done this before when it was clear a child needed more than he or she was getting at home. Sometimes she made the principal aware, but other times she did not and just handled it herself.

“How ’bout this?” Toby is squatted up on the footstool and looks every bit like a little gargoyle. She screws up her brow like she’s concentrating and raises her arm where she says Sadie can draw in the little crop with a Sharpie. “Giddyap.”

“Perfect,” Sadie says, and the camera whirrs and out pops Toby squatting on the stool. “This is going to take a while if you need to go do anything.”

“I always have plenty to do,” Toby says. “Yessir, I am one busy woman.”

“Don’t you ever get tired of this shit?” Stanley had asked her. “Don’t you ever want something for yourself?”

How odd what that made her remember. Once, years ago, she went into Fowler’s Grocery. It got torn down a long time ago and Food Lion has been there ever since. Fowler’s had those old dark green linoleum floor tiles and poles with clamps they used to reach things way up on the top shelves. The back area, where the butcher worked, was exposed with a sloping concrete floor covered in sawdust, the smell of which she always associated with Fowler’s, and there was Grover Fowler whom she had known since childhood—tired butcher with bloody hands and a good kind heart. One kind exchange and the shared memory of how they stood side by side in their fourth-grade chapel program made her heart beat faster and something in it all made him flush a deep red and lean down closer to the work he was doing. He was a sweet boy from a hard, rough home, but there on the stage his hair was slicked back and he wore a nice dress shirt and together they sang “You Are My Sunshine” and got a standing ovation from the school. Sadie told this; she didn’t mean to. But there was Toby wide-eyed and listening and Abby was there and Rachel, too.

“Sadie had an affair in the grocery store,” Toby announced, and Sadie said she did no such thing ever in her entire life.

“We did not do anything,” she said. “He was a good boy with a sweet wife who also was in my class.”

“Lusting in your heart,” Toby said, and Rachel added that Jimmy Carter would be proud of her. “You never had to worry about Horace catting around, did you?” Toby asked. The question surprised Sadie, though it shouldn’t by now. If Toby thinks something, she says it.

“I have never allowed myself to imagine such a thing,” she said, and she hoped there was nothing there. If he ever did go up some stairs or into a room he shouldn’t, she would rather not know, especially now. She had wondered once, but then it seemed to pass and so she just let it go and held on to what was good.

“I was the other woman once,” Rachel whispered, and there was a long pause of silence. She looked directly at Sadie and Sadie didn’t dare look away. It’s no different from the child who finally reaches out to hold your hand.

“I would never cast stones,” Sadie said. “You are a fine person.”

“Well, I cast stones,” Toby said, and there was heavy silence again. “But not at you. And not for that!” She nudged Rachel and laughed. “Marge might now.”

“I hope I have to respond to a higher power,” Rachel said.

“Higher IQ, anyway,” Toby laughed, and put something in her mouth up against her gum, snuff no doubt. “I say bless the stupid.”

Sadie pulled Abby up close and hugged her. There was so much she would need to explain to her when all the others went home. Adults do things—even good adults who do not always show good judgment. Now she opens her eyes and Abby is standing there with a sprig of rosemary from Horace. He is so dear and likely will be calling soon.

“It’s getting worse,” Abby tells her. “And Dollbaby still hasn’t come home.” The child leans into Sadie and then is sobbing, her shoulders jerking while Sadie pats her back and tries to get her to calm down. They sit side by side on the sofa and watch television,
The Price Is Right,
which has been on for centuries, it seems. Her eyes are heavy and now that Abby has calmed down she lets them close for just a minute and then when she wakes, one of those programs where everybody has to endure terrible things—lost babies and evil twins and tuberculosis and such—is on and Abby is gone. It is almost time to go to lunch. Sadie is tired, but she doesn’t have time to stop, not yet; the others need her.
I do not have time to die,
she once heard Lois Flowers say,
not today,
and they all laughed. Abby has left a crumpled piece of paper on the table along with a sprig of rosemary from Horace. It is a note written on the back of a Food Lion receipt. Somebody bought some Budweiser and some trash bags, some milk and some Clorox, paper towels. On the back there is a note:
You better answer me soon!
it says. Terrible penmanship. Cursive, yes, but not done well at all. Sadie never would have allowed such cursive without a slant and the esses so misshapen and there’s Harley, big sweet Harley slinking down the hall. She reaches her hand out and calls to him:
Big sweet kitty, big sweet purr.
Horace and the kids are going to love him. They will be so surprised. Her mother will love him, too.

Joanna

D
O YOU BELIEVE IN
ghosts? Do you believe in the power of magic? Do you believe that a normal ordinary girl can disappear right before your eyes?

Joanna had run the words through her mind many times over the years, picturing her childhood friend Ben waving his wand and directing her in and out of boxes first in his garage and then on the school auditorium stage, pulling from his sleeves coins and lengths of scarves and puny bouquets picked from neighborhood yards when the neighbors weren’t looking. He said they were partners for life, bound by their secrets and knowledge; it was a vow, a pact, a solemn oath of loyalty. Now that she’s back home, thirty years and a million miles and a lot of mistakes and lessons behind her, she’s aware of it all as never before: the ghosts, the magic, all the ways a person might disappear.

The longest and most expensive journey you will ever make is the one to yourself.
This is Joanna’s current mantra, in her head since a day four years ago when Luke stepped in and changed her life. He said it first. He said he would love nothing better than to purchase the ticket that would upgrade and jump-start her trip. He said so many things during the brief time they were together, things that are now dog-eared in her mind so that she thinks of them, repeats them, relies on them every day. Without him she could never have found her way back to this place, back to her father’s side in time to make amends, back to the flat, swampy land that has been home even in the years she spent elsewhere. All those years and miles away, and still she often fell asleep conjuring images of the Saxon River, that cold dark water winding its way through the Green Swamp and on down to the Carolina coast, the wide sandy shore and the white hot light of summer. Her parents had owned a modest cottage there, not on the ocean but with a view of the marsh, and coming back she’d decided it would be worth the forty-minute drive from town to live there, to wake to the briny ocean air she associated with freedom. She loved the glaze of salt that covered the windows, like ice in another lifetime and she had had so many—like a cat and, like a cat, she had returned home.
The Incredible Journey,
Luke called it; he shared her love for all the dog books and movies, would have loved her new business. She’d been left the beach cottage, her parents’ home, which she quickly sold, and the Dog House, a drive-through hot-dog franchise her dad had bought two years before he died, which she kept.

“It was an investment,” he told her. “If I’d known you would ever grace us, well, now just
me,
with a return home, maybe I would have gone in for hair or nails or tans, but I like a good hot dog and your mother liked a good hot dog and they aren’t easy to come by.” He said this before they knew he was dying, and so there was still plenty of time and room for the sarcasm and innuendo that had long forced them apart. And the hot dogs
are
good, no doubt about it, and the place is very popular with the kids from town looking for some place to go on their way to the beach. People love the way they can drive up and order something off the cute menu like, “I’ll have a Puppy, two Old Yellers, and a Chihuahua.”

“Never been much on hair and tans,” she told him, her skin so white from years spent in Chicago and then Maine and New Hampshire, her unruly hair a shaggy cropped cut she often did herself, coloring in the gray of her temples with a Sharpie.

“True,” he had said. He had shown her where everything was within the tiny structure. The young man he’d hired to manage the place was off in the corner chopping onions and filling the sauerkraut bin for the German shepherd, trying to pretend he wasn’t listening. “It would have made your mother so happy if you had ever taken her advice about anything—men, school, clothes, your hair, but no, that was just too hard, wasn’t it?”

“It was if I wanted to have any—hair, that is,” she tried to make a joke, resisting the big barbed hook he kept dangling in front of her. “Mom loved the Twiggy look. Skinny bodies and pixie cuts.” If she were in a therapy session, she might have said,
What was that all about, you guess? Whose hair is it anyway?
But she laughed again and shook her head in that way that said,
No big deal, so long ago.
“Mom wanted a little Jack Russell for a daughter and I was the plump mangy retriever who wanted to be an afghan hound.” She reminded her dad how they had both loved that photograph of a man on a park bench with a long-haired blonde—or so it appeared from behind—only it was really his afghan hound; she had clipped the picture from
Life
magazine and put it on her bulletin board beside the many dandelions magician Ben had pulled from behind her ear and ribbons she had won on the junior high swim team. “But,” she added, “I’ve always been in the Dog House.”

Her dad finally laughed and said her mother had said the same thing. The thought of her mother and the fact they had never made up hung in the air around them, as thick and heavy as she had told Luke it would, and her promise to him to
be
here, to
stay
here, was the only thing holding her in place. “I will haunt you if you break your word to me,” he said, still incredibly handsome and able to smile right up to the end. “I will make your life more miserable than it has ever been.”

“Whoa,” she had said, and stepped back from his bed. “That’s a tall order.” She waited for him to say something else, but he didn’t. “A mean order,” she added, leaning forward with the word
mean
and still nothing.

“Your mother said you
chose
to be in the doghouse,” her dad had said, but he did not add the sentence that had so often come out of one of her parents’ mouths:
You made your bed, now lie in it.
Or when she ran from what appeared to them a perfectly good life with a man she was lucky to marry to a relationship as quick and damaging as an electrical storm:
Lie down with dogs and get up with fleas.
“Yes, you chose the doghouse,” he said, the air reeking of onions. His old white apron—one her mother had once worn—was splotched with condiments, and she noticed how tired he looked and how his hands were smaller than she had remembered. “You did it all by yourself.”

When she was twenty, she would have argued with him; she would have yelled that they were rigid ignorant people who only cared about what everybody else thought—the neighbors, the relatives, the people at church—who gave a damn? Why couldn’t they just care about
her
? Why, when she got ninety-nine out of a hundred correct, were they so quick to study and scrutinize the one little failure, so much attention given to what was wrong instead of what was
right,
and when she was thirty she still would have gotten angry but would have just slammed the door or the phone receiver and taken it out on whatever poor soul was with her at the time, whatever they were doing in that moment—eating a holiday dinner, making love, planting trees—ruined and lost to that cavernous black hole. She would have had an extra drink or two and blamed her parents for the excess, but in her midforties, after life with Luke, she was finally able to see her father for what he was: a worn-out man who had worked very hard and lived the only way he knew how, rigid and unforgiving from his own upbringing, too scared to have ever ventured beyond that knowledge, frightened by the thought of death, ashamed of his weak nakedness, and in need of love with no sense of how to ask for it.

“Those are the ones who will need you the most,” Luke had pointed out, and sure enough, early in her training as a hospice volunteer, this became all too evident. Now it’s a scene she sees often as she sits bedside by those who have reached their final destination. It is a very simple equation that comes at the end, a focus on what they
have
and what they
don’t have
—a glass half full or empty—a weighing of one against the other. Sometimes the focus is just the magnification of what has always been there. But always, they are waiting for something: a face, a word, an apology, permission, a touch. Bics flicking with a frenzied vengeance at the great rock concert of life for just one more. One more song, word, sip of water. Some have many hands reaching from the bedside and others have none, and yet in that final moment, the air heavy and laden as molecules regroup and reshape in preparation for the exit, it is all the same. It is like the moment when a snake enters the yard and the birds fall silent. The silence begs your attention; it’s time to go. The journey is over.