After Life (32 page)

Train Line. All around, the same things. The houses looked sleepy and surprised. Ragged blue chicory flowers grew around the telephone poles and in weedy places, and some kind of small, hairy, orange flower poked out of lawns. I took a walk and soon found myself in the Violet Woods. The air was heady, the woods tangled with jewelweed. The clearing around Illumination Stump was deserted. I sat on a bench. Crows hopped along the ground. Leaning forward, my head resting on the bench in front of me, I prayed very long and very hard for an explanation for what was happening.

I sat until evening, when fireflies flashed their cold lights in the trees around us.
There is no Death, and there are no Dead.
I told it to myself over and over until it felt true. Faith could be the rope that pulled me out of this chasm.
There is no Death, and there are no Dead.
And Peter was still Peter, my mother would still love me, and I could go on.

Back at my mother’s house, I cleared up Peter’s things, turned off the lights, locked the door. I went back to my apartment and took a warm shower, then lay in bed, thinking how I would get Peter down the stairs, into the boat, and across the lake. My mother, far away at her retreat in Ohio, was asleep in a rented bed. She would be home soon, and I couldn’t wait. I missed her terribly.

10
sisters

Every religion has at its source a person confronted with the inexplicable. Spiritualism has Kate and Maggie Fox, two stern-faced young women who lived in the small town of Hydesville, New York, in the 1840s. Their portraits hung in Train Line’s main office, and in the library, and in the lobby of the Silverwood Hotel. I remember seeing their stubborn, unbeautiful faces when I was a child, with their thin lips and heavy hair, and asking my mother who they were. She didn’t want to say. “They were the first mediums,” she said, pulling me along, “but not really. Jesus Christ was the first medium.” But they were everywhere, so I knew they were important, and bit by bit I pieced together their story.

In the spring of 1848, the Fox family—Mr. and Mrs. Fox and their daughters, who were twelve and fifteen at the time—began to be disturbed by weird noises echoing through their tiny rented house: knocks and crashes and bangs that were sometimes so loud it seemed as if someone must be throwing objects against the walls, or pounding the floors with his fists. It was terrifying, at least at first. But after a couple of weeks of this, of sleepless nights and restless haunted days, one of the girls had had enough. Snapping her fingers, the twelve-year-old, Katie, cried out, “Mr. Splitfoot! Do as I do!”
And he
did.

Maggie tried it, too, clapping three times. Three raps echoed hers. When the girls’ mother asked the spirit to tell the ages of her children, he did it, including those of the four grown ones and a baby who died. Suddenly they were bubbling with questions: Are you alive? No answer. Are you dead? Two affirmative raps. Did someone hurt you? Yes. Did someone kill you? Is the killer living? Are you buried beneath this house? Yes, yes, and yes.

Neighbors were summoned. They heard the raps and were thunderstruck. One of them came up with the idea of reciting the alphabet and asking the spirit to rap when the correct letter was reached—a kind of oral Ouija. The spirit then told them more: his name, Charles B. Rosma—or was it Ross? Or something else? No one was sure—and that he had been a traveling peddler, killed and robbed by a previous occupant of the Fox house named John Bell. Mrs. Fox and her daughters went to stay with a relative, and the next day, investigative committees were formed among townspeople, and the Foxes’ cellar floor was dug up, but the hole kept filling with water and nothing was found. Much later, someone claimed to find some bits of teeth and bone, but this was never proved.

Then, a former servant of the Bells came forward. She told a story of a peddler who showed up one day and vanished suddenly, leaving behind some new thimbles and an old coat that Mrs. Bell took to wearing. The servant remembered stumbling over freshly mounded soil in the cellar not long afterward. She, too, had heard ghostly raps. Someone else said that the summer the peddler went missing, the Bells had bad, evil-smelling water for months.

Mr. John Bell, the accused, was outraged. He denied everything—there was no peddler, he said, and no murder and no secret burial. And no evidence, either, at least nothing from this world, the only world that counted in a court of law.

At any rate, the Fox sisters were caught in the uproar. After a few months, they moved to Rochester, but the knocks followed them, and they discovered they could communicate with spirits other than the murdered Mr. Rosma. They began to tour the country, charging lots of money and drawing enormous crowds, and so Spiritualism was born.

But that, unfortunately, is not the end of the story.

People began accusing them of fraud. The girls were examined by a group of professors of medicine, who discovered that Maggie could not produce any raps when her legs were being held. Many years later, she confessed: it
was
all a fraud, they’d made the raps by cracking their toe and knee joints. Her sister confirmed it. But by that time it was too late. Spiritualism had spread across the world, there were thousands of mediums, hundreds of spiritualist churches. Train Line was a bustling town with dozens of buildings and a two-hundred-year charter. There was nothing to be done with the Fox sisters’ bit of information. When they recanted their confession a few years later, they found that few people paid attention to that, either.

Old Charles B. Rosma was forgotten; he disappeared into the slippery space between the knowable and the unknowable. Everything we forget goes there, eventually; the dreams we don’t bother to recall, the people we meet once but whose names escape us. I thought Peter would stay there, too.

When the police had gone, that morning after the Halloween party, I sat for a while on the sofa in my living room. The sofa was the only piece of furniture from the days of Welchie Pratt that Ron hadn’t yet replaced. It was a musty orange thing, sunk in the middle, springs poking through. I wanted to take my hooker dress off, but I could not make myself get up and do it. Behind me a window was open, and a cold draft blew against the back of my head.

My mother sat down three feet away from me, staring raptly at a poster Jenny had hung above the television. It was of a polar bear moving across some tundra, white on white, only its black nose marring the landscape. Jenny told me once that polar bears cover their noses with their paws when they sneak up on seals, in order to make themselves more completely invisible.

“It’s not him,” I said at last. My voice was steady and did not shake. “Peterson said it couldn’t be him.”

“It fits, though,” said my mother. She swept her hand across her face, as if brushing away spiderwebs.

“No, it doesn’t fit at all.” I said this firmly, then got up and walked around the room, touching things. Almost nothing in this room was mine. There were Jenny’s little figurines, Ron’s candlesticks and magazines and cassette tapes:
Frog Talk
said one, and
Rain Dances
another. I was always uncomfortable leaving my things where other people would have to look at them, possibly disliking them and wondering why I had to fill rooms with evidence of myself. Dust clung to everything. The road out front was unpaved; dust got everywhere if you didn’t stay on top of it.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“There’s nothing to be sorry for,” I said. “It’s not Peter.”

“Oh,” said my mother. She looked sick and confused.

“Anyway, even if it is, what’s that got to do with us?” Somehow, my face relaxed, and I managed a small smile. “He left here. I even got a postcard from him.”

“You did?” she asked, hopefully.

“Yes. From Cape Cod. It had a clam kind of thing on it. A cartoon. He said he was going to Mexico.”

“You never told me that.” She searched my face. “Do you still have it? That would be evidence.”

“Of course I don’t have it! That was years ago. I threw it away.”

She sighed and picked at some threads poking out of the sofa. She was wearing a loose cotton housedress covered with pink flowers, and I pictured her cleaning her house, dusting and obliviously singing to herself, when the police came to the door.

“Mama,” I said. “What is it?”

“Oh,” she said. Her face was strained, like the face of someone carrying a load almost too heavy to bear. “I found things.”

“You found things?”

She nodded slowly. “In the house, when I got back from Ohio. Things he left.”

“What things?”

“Underwear!” she said, as if the thought of it was surprising to her still. “Three pairs of boxer shorts. And some maps and some keys in a drawer. I thought it was strange, but you know, the things you forget when you move in a hurry.”

“Well, then, so what?”

“He also left his diaries.”

The word
diaries
made me think of the one I kept for a sporadic year when I was nine, the five-and-dime diary with the shiny orange cover and the cheap lock, which I had to open with the tip of a ballpoint pen because I lost the key. Girls kept diaries, hid them under their pillows, tied them with ribbons, and at first I did not connect them with the blue-bound lab notebooks Peter kept his journals in. I stared blankly at my mother, unable to believe that Peter had a
diary,
and then, when the memory of those journals washed over me, unable to believe I had forgotten about them.

“They were under the sink, wrapped in a paper bag. It just never made sense to me that he would leave them here, even by accident. It was so odd…” She rubbed her face hard with both hands.

“Did you read them?”

“No. Not really. Enough to know what they were. I sent him a note through his mother asking where I should send them, but I never got an answer. So I hung on to them.”

“You never said anything to me about it.”

“Well,” said my mother. “You made it pretty clear you didn’t want to talk about him, if I remember.”

I left the room, went into the kitchen. I began to clean up frantically, piling dishes into the sink, throwing the scattered sections of newspaper into the recycling box. What I had to do, I decided, was get the journals away from my mother. I had to get them out of my mother’s house and burn them, or pour acid over them, or destroy them in some other way. How much had she read? Who had she told? That they existed was intolerable.

She came up behind me, wrapped her arms tight around my chest. “It’s all right, it’s all right if it’s him,” she whispered. “Anything could have happened when he left here. It’s all right…”

I got out of her arms and pushed her away. “I want you to give me those diaries,” I told her.

She backed away from me, shutting her eyes and putting her hands over her ears.

“Please, Mama!”

But it was clear she did not want to hear me doing this; I was implicating myself, and though a tiny part of me knew it, I couldn’t stop. I turned and ran out the back door. Halfway across the lawn I slipped and fell—the stupid hooker dress was as tight as a sausage casing, nearly impossible to run in—but I got up and kept running, down Fox Street, over to Rochester Street, up to my mother’s house. I pounded across the porch and tried to open the door. Locked! She never locked the door, never since I could remember, I didn’t even have a key. I ran around the house to the back door—locked, too. The windows were shut tight. I tore at a screen with my fingernails, tried to pry it up so I could get at the real window and break it maybe.

“Naomi! Stop it!”

It was my mother, gasping and red in the face, leaning against the porch railing.

“Please, stop it! People are watching!”

I wheeled around. Rochester Street was empty, all the houses up and down were Sunday-morning quiet, shades down, curtains drawn. The sky was a blank gray void.

“Who?” I cried. “Who?”

She didn’t answer.

I understood, then, the true horror of the world: it is that once a thing is done, it can never be undone. A universe of wishing can’t uncrush a bug, or unspeak a word, or erase even the tiniest action from the past’s ledger. The past is fixed and unalterable, a tyrant, and none of us has any power against it. How can we do anything, how can we live, knowing this? My mother came to where I stood among the trampled ivy that grew around her house. This time, when she pulled me into her arms, I did not resist. Her heart thudded hard through her pink-flowered dress.

“Please don’t read them,” I said into her hair.

“I won’t,” she said.