After Life (24 page)

I nudged my shoes off with my toes and floated, trying not to panic. Though I’d never been much of a swimmer, I could do the back float all day, I thought. But the water was choppier than I’d expected, and waves kept washing over my face, and the current—what there was of one on Wallamee Lake, anyway—seemed to be pushing me in the wrong direction. I had to roll over and dog paddle until I got tired, then rest and float, then dog paddle again. Swimming in a full set of winter clothes was harder than I could have imagined. I got myself out of my jacket and sweater, but left my pants and undershirt on. Ten, fifteen minutes went by, and the shore didn’t seem any closer. I kicked and flailed, fluttered my feet as fast as I could.

While I was swimming, I calmed myself down by trying to imagine the bottom of the lake. Was it smooth and sandy, or rocky and muddy and littered with rowboat hulls? I knew of a few boats that had gone down in Wallamee Lake. Eighty or ninety years before, a boat full of teenaged girls from Train Line sank, and in their long dresses and lace-up boots they didn’t have a chance of swimming to shore. There were seven of them, and every one drowned. I didn’t know if they found any of the bodies or not, or if they all sank. When I was a little girl, a retarded boy from Wallamee stole his father’s rubber raft, took it out on the lake, and was never seen again. Was the bottom of the lake covered with bodies? I wondered how far down the bottom was. I imagined a cross-section, me dog-paddling on top, yards and yards of cold brown water beneath me, then the lake floor, with its mud and sunken boats and dead things.

Fish bumped me with their cold snouts. Bits of algae clung to my hair.

I wasn’t going to make it. The cold became a suffocating blanket that wrapped my head and face until I could hardly see and could hear nothing but the sound of my own breathing. Let go, I thought. Just sink.

I couldn’t.

If your faith is so strong, I told myself, why not let go?

There would be a funeral, closed casket, whether they found my body or not. Lots of people would come, many of my customers, unless the weather was bad and then they wouldn’t bother coming out; they were mostly old, after all. My mother would be devastated, Troy and Dave the Alien and Ron and Jenny stoic. Elaine wouldn’t allow Vivian to come, and would tell her some lie about how I’d moved out of town, or something. After a little while someone new would rent my rooms. Well, that might take some time, months even, since it was winter. But next summer I’d be a distant sad memory, my rooms cleaned out and my furniture given to the Ladies’ Rummage Shed, and a cheerful new person would be living there, someone who’d get along wonderfully with Ron and Jenny, and they’d stay up late drinking herb elixirs and laughing. My mother would get over it. I’d come to her séances. Or would I? Maybe I’d go to hell. Or maybe I’d just be gone, utterly and completely vanished, even more gone than Peter, whose mystery, at least, was keeping him vital.

Then my feet touched bottom, and, somehow, my head was still above water.

Washing ashore I felt as huge and slow as a sea monster, my hair and clothes dragging like plates of armor. Miraculously, I was only a few yards from where I’d put out. I lay on the bank with my face in the soggy grass, so cold I could hardly feel it. But then I could feel it, so I sat up and wrapped my arms around my knees, teeth chattering.

Across the lawn of the Silverwood, Jenny walked by, wrapped up in a heavy wool coat and with a scarf around her head. Her hands were deep in her pockets. I thought about yelling for her, but suddenly felt embarrassed at my state: my undershirt clung like plastic wrap to my breasts, and you could see right through it to my safety-pinned bra. Anyway, she was on her way back from her reincarnation group, and I didn’t want to hear about it. I’d heard enough already. Tony K. and Winnie Sandox were in it and had recently revealed that they had been, respectively, T. S. Eliot and Ptolemy Epiphanes, ancient king of Egypt. Reincarnation was a touchy subject in Train Line, and had been for a long time; officially, it is not a part of spiritualism, but few spiritualists are particularly doctrinaire. Many of the newer, and New Agey, mediums are all for it, but I’d always felt reincarnation raises a few more questions than it answers. Once, when I was just starting out, I told a woman at a message service that I had her father’s father here, but she just shook her head emphatically. “Impossible!” she declared. “He reincarnated twenty years ago!” What can you say to that? Not much.

But Jenny liked the group and claimed that she’d been animals for most of her former lives, which caused a heated debate. There’d been some discussion, too, of where Jenny was headed next. Would she be rewarded for living a good life this time around with a better one? How soon would she reincarnate, and if she did, how would they be able to contact her? Would she have any say in the matter?

“I want to live this same life over,” she’d told me that morning. “But more happily.”

Something about that depressed me. I wondered, would I be in that life, too? I hoped not. Imagine living your life over and over again, making new mistakes each time and fixing them, your soul like a page of homework rubbed thin with your eraser. It was exhausting to think about. But perhaps less exhausting than the idea of spending an infinity in the spirit world, at the beck and call of the living.

Jenny turned up Fox Street, her head scarf fluttering in the breeze. The wind had picked up and changed direction, and now it came off the lake, turning the water coarse. I lumbered to my feet. When I slapped myself my cold flesh rang like a copper bowl, and I smelled like the lake. How odd to be alive! It felt like a mistake.

My mother picked me up at one o’clock. I’d taken a very long bath and washed my hair twice, but I couldn’t get rid of the lake smell, so I’d tried to disguise it with Jenny’s lemon-scented bath powder. The combination was unfortunate: sweet and fetid. My mother didn’t mention it, but as she drove down the interstate toward Hollington her nose twitched, and she gave me some curious glances.

“Are you taking care of yourself, Naomi?”

I told her I was.

The forensics lab was hidden behind a hill just off the highway. Like everything else in Wallamee County built since the fifties, it was low and uninspired. We parked near some police cars and hobbled across the gravel parking lot in our high heels. I had dressed up and my mother had dressed down, and consequently we met somewhere in the middle, both in sober navy blue. Still, as we stood in the cramped lobby waiting for Officer Peterson, surrounded by slim, uniformed people, I felt huge and overblown. I felt like my mother. She was examining her makeup in a little, tiny mirror, oblivious to the fact that no matter where in the lobby we stood, people had to go around us. I kept blushing, apologizing, shuffling out of the way.

Officer Peterson appeared from behind a cubicle wall, his hand extended toward us. His hair was freshly cut, as upright and stiff-looking as the bristles of a toothbrush, and his eyes gave nothing away. “Glad you could make it,” he said. He seemed more polite than he had on the phone; perhaps my mother reminded him of his own.

He led us back through the catacomb of cubicles, past file cabinets and computer screens and people working at jobs I would never in a million years be hired to do, through a swinging door that opened to a wide, hospital-like hallway. Our shoes clicked and echoed, and the air smelled like the high school biology lab, like the preserved crayfish I dissected sophomore year. Formaldehyde. I remembered how hard it was to get that smell off your hands. It would get in your hair, taint your sandwich at lunch.

Peterson stopped outside a door with a glass mesh window and pushed it open for us. We entered a bright room full of sinks and drawers and metal tables, and a short man in a white coat eating from a small bag of chips. Peterson introduced him as Dr. Freeze.

“That’s F-R-I-E-S,” said the man, crumpling his empty chip bag.

“Oh,” I said.

“They’re the ladies I told you about,” said Peterson. “Here to see John Doe.”

“Right, right.” He stuffed the bag into one of his pockets and rubbed his hands together, then pulled what looked like a handful of white balloons from another pocket. “You’ll want gloves,” he said, handing us each a pair.

We snapped them on. It was at this point that I began to feel a little dizzy, as if the hard tile floor had suddenly acquired some give. I reached for one of the metal tables.

“Don’t!” cried Dr. Fries. “Don’t touch anything yet. We don’t want any cross-contamination.”

I took some deep breaths.

We followed Dr. Fries to the back of the room, where there was a whole wall of wooden drawers. He pulled one out and extracted a plastic bag full of small brownish things. “Now, does it matter what bones you look at? This is a hand. Skull’s down the hall.” He reached in again and pulled out another bag. “This is, um, looks like another hand. Let’s see…foot…” He put the bags on a table and opened a new drawer. “Here are the big bones…ribs, legs…” He looked up at us inquiringly.

My mother cleared her throat. “I was hoping to see the back bones. There’s a lot of power in the spine.”

Dr. Fries shook his head. “Sorry, no can do on that. There was some flesh preserved there, and we’ve got it refrigerated across the hall.”

“All right then. These will do.” She indicated the bags on the table. “Let’s try a hand.”

He nodded, put the other bags away, and brought the hand bones to a glass tray on the counter. He carefully shook the bones from the bag and pulled a gooseneck lamp over the tray, then flicked it on. The bones looked like nothing so much as a few pieces of dog kibble.

“No squeezing or scratching, please,” said Dr. Fries. Then he gave Officer Peterson an ironic salute and wandered back across the lab.

My mother picked up one of the small brownish lumps and cupped it in her hand, then closed her eyes. She stood there, swaying, for a minute or so. While Peterson and I watched, she made a fist of the hand with the bone in it, and brought the fist to her forehead. She exhaled deeply.

“Hunhhhhhh,”
she said, opening her eyes. “Well. Aren’t you going to try, Naomi?”

I reached for a bone. Close up, it actually did look like a bone, a tiny one. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do, so I held it in my gloved fist and gazed out into space, frowning. Peter’s hand! I’d loved his hands. Square, broad, fine black hairs, scraggly cuticles. It seemed impossible that this was all that was left of them; in fact, it seemed impossible that they could be Peter’s, and that he was dead. Obviously I’d been fooled, somehow. The lab slipped out of focus.

“…left-handed, they think,” Peterson was saying, and my mother said, “How on earth can they tell that?” and Peterson said, “Dominant hand’s usually bigger,” and I was on my knees on the hard floor.

“Whoop,” said Peterson. He slid his hand under my arm and steadied me.

“Sorry…I…um.”

“What’s wrong? What’s wrong?” cried my mother. She knelt down and looked me in the face.

“Lost my balance,” I said. “Here.” I handed her the bone, hauled myself up—with Peterson’s fingers digging into the soft flesh under my arm—and made a controlled lunge toward the nearest sink. I vomited hugely into it.

“Did you see something? She saw something,” my mother said.

Would an innocent person have vomited in this situation? I wasn’t sure. I hung over the sink, coughing and running water, in order to give myself some time to think. Had I reacted too strongly? Maybe. Maybe I had. The bones weren’t disgusting, weren’t scary at all.

“Naomi…?” My mother put her hand on my back.

“He was buried facedown,” I said.

Though at the time I could not have said why I revealed this, why I chose a detail so telling and possibly dangerous, it was clear to me later. A good medium will always tell you something true before telling you something less than true—it only takes one true sail to float your ship of lies around the world. If you tell someone his grandmother’s maiden name, he will listen to the rest of your message with an open heart, even if it’s unmitigated nonsense. A medium ought to be a mistress of timing, a duchess of pill-sugaring, a queen of liars.

“I had a vision,” I said. “He was face down.”

My mother handed me some Kleenex from her purse, then turned to Officer Peterson. “Is this true?”

“Well, I’m not sure I can disclose that information.” He scratched his bristly head. My vomiting seemed to have impressed him. “I mean, I don’t know offhand. That might be privileged information.”

“Write it down, then,” said my mother. “We might be getting somewhere.”

Peterson dutifully scribbled something on his pad, then asked, “All right. Anything else?”

“Well…” said my mother. “I had a vague impression of—I know this sounds strange—a sort of feeling of
money.
Perhaps a lot of money passed through this man’s hands? Or maybe he was killed for money. He might have been a rich man, or a bookie. Or deep in debt.”

“That wouldn’t surprise me,” said Peterson.

I washed my face with cold water. What had I done? Perhaps nothing. Perhaps those earthmovers tumbled the bones over and over before dragging them out of the soil. Perhaps no one knew whether he was face down or up or sideways or anything. I dried my face on my sleeve and smiled at Officer Peterson. It was all I could do to wrench the muscles of my mouth into position. I did not feel well at all.