Afterlife (18 page)

When the show began, Michael Diamond came out onto the stage. He was tall, and looked something like a gawky high school kid who had just hit his mid-40s. His hair was a little too long, and he had the sheen of one who has just been made up to look fantastic—but Julie was unimpressed. He looked slick and sort of comfortably geeky at the same time—not her type at all, although Mel raised her eyebrows a bit, her signal that she thought he was cute.

He spoke more to the cameras than to the audience, but within several minutes had stepped off the stage, and went into the audience. He asked about someone who had lost a child, and a woman in the back raised her hand.

He jogged up the steps to where the woman now stood. The woman was short and stout, and had a mullet-style hairdo, and wore a sweatshirt and jeans. Diamond went to her, and took her hand. One of the cameramen followed, trailing thick electrical cords up the steps.

“What’s she saying?” Julie’s mother asked.

“Quiet,” Mel whispered.

“Here’s what I’m getting,” Michael Diamond said. “You have been beating yourself up for years about the event. Do you have an item?”

The woman nodded, producing a small shoe from a wadded-up brown paper bag.

On the monitors that hung over the stage, the cameras went in close up on the small red sneaker in Michael Diamond’s hand.

Diamond closed his eyes. He said, “His name was Jimmy. He was four. No, five. You lived on a…cul de sac. In…somewhere in Connecticut.”

“New London,” the woman nodded.

Diamond opened his eyes. “Please, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. Let me tell you, and you can tell me if I’m wrong.”

He closed his eyes again, pressing the shoe against his left ear as if the sneaker were a seashell and he was listening to the ocean. With his free hand, he pressed his fingers into the corners of his eyes, rubbing at his eyelids.

Then, he opened his eyes and passed the shoe back. “I’m sorry. His name was Dennis. You lived separately from his father. A woman with the name of M. Mary? The name Miranda is somewhere in there. Or a name like that. Mary Anne? Marianna. That’s it. Is it?”

The woman nodded.

“You need to forgive her,” Diamond said. “She’s not at fault. It was an accident.”

The woman took the sneaker back, staring at it.

“If he were here, he’d want you to forgive her. That’s really all I can say,” Diamond said, touching her gently on the shoulder.

The woman’s head slumped against his chest.

“You need to get some rest. You can’t put yourself through this. You’ve relived that car accident for two years. Dennis wouldn’t want it.”

“I hate her,” the woman whispered, her voice barely audible in the microphone that hung suspended on a boom one of the TV crew held overhead.

Michael Diamond pulled sharply away from her, and put both his hands on her shoulders—more to separate himself from her than to console. “You need to look in the mirror, Alice. You need to see what role you played in this. Accidents happen. You need to forgive Marianna. She was only a girl herself. She had just gotten her driver’s license. You could as easily blame yourself. But Dennis would not want you to do that. Dennis is gone.”

Julie touched the top of Mel’s hand. Mel looked over at her, a question forming on her face.

Julie whispered, “He seems a little harsh.”

2

After two more readings, Michael Diamond went to the stage and said, “Someone is here who recently lost a husband. Someone named Jewel?”

“Julie!” her mother called out, pointing to her daughter.

3

“I’d like to do a one-on-one this time,” Diamond said. His face was enormous on the monitor screen that Julie watched. She felt she could count every pore in his skin. She saw flecks of yellow in his brown eyes.

Then she looked from the screen down to the man in front of her. He half smiled, and for some stupid reason, she felt comfortable with him, as if she’d known him all her life.

“Okay,” she said, and just before she got out of her chair, Mel leaned over and whispered, “sit on his lap.”

4

The one-on-one was a segment of the television show where the subject sat with Michael Diamond on the low-backed curved sofa at the back of the stage.

“You’re still grieving,” he said.

“Yes,” Julie said. She was about to say:
And I don’t believe in psychics, thank you.

“It doesn’t matter if you don’t believe in me,” Michael Diamond said. His words sent a shock through her. “Belief has nothing to do with it.”

5

“Tell me about the brain radio,” he said.

“That what?”

“The brain radio,” Michael Diamond grinned. He

kept his hand on her forehead. She felt a warm gentle pressure from it, but the headache she’d had began to dissolve.

“It’s what Livy—Olivia—my daughter—calls it when she hears things.” Then, Julie realized that was inadequate as an explanation. “She thinks she talks to people with it. Or hears songs on the radio even when the radio isn’t on.”

“She talks to your husband. Sometimes.”

“When he was alive. They had a pretend game like that.”

“Do you listen to what your daughter says about it?”

“It’s usually silly, fun stuff.”

“Your husband was murdered.”

Julie gasped. She glanced toward her mother and sister, who sat at the far end of the couch. The bright lights and the anonymous eye of the camera seemed to wall her in. “Yes. He was.”

“It’s terrible,” Michael Diamond said. “You’ve been fumbling through things since then. You’ve seen movies? Movies of some kind. There’s a place. A place in the city. A number and a letter. You won’t face what others want you to face. You…you haven’t listened. No. No, that’s not true. You’ve tried to listen. You just don’t know what it is you’re hearing. Your daughter. Your daughter needs you. She needs you. Someone else needs you. Needs her. Someone needs both of you. Someone desperately wants you. Male. Someone male. Someone wants you to understand. Badly. But death is all around you. Fear of death is inside you. Ah,” he said this last part as if catching his breath upon seeing something— something that left him awestruck.

And then, she felt it.

No longer in the studio, no longer with lights and camera and mother and sister and audience and sofa—

She felt as if he had pressed his warm hand beneath her breast, and rested it just along the thumping halo of blood encircling her heart—as if he had reached within her, and emanated a strange warmth that took her back to her dreams of Hut:

Making love to Hut in the warm bath, candles glowing all around the tub, Hut pressing into her, as she gasped and felt love in a way she had not thought possible—

Giving birth to Livy, the way Hut had clutched her hand tightly, had breathed with her, and kissed her on the forehead as Livy arrived into the world—

Holding Livy for the first time, a bloody, hideous baby that was the most beautiful human being she had ever seen, and Hut there, his happiness extreme as he laughed with her, with the exhaustion at the end of labor, with the surrender that childbirth demanded—

And then, a moment in time that had been long forgotten—but it came to sudden life within her mind as she felt an electric shock—seeing Hut in the shower, water cascading over his body, his muscles taut, drawing back the shower curtain and seeing the look on his face, the seething anger, and he turned to face the tile wall, and then, seeing the scratches along his back, and wondering if he had been in an accident, and then she realized it was something else—something about why Hut hadn’t been home in three days—

And then, her vision turned red, and Hut, not vibrant Hut, but the dead man from the metal table, milky eyes, shiny maggoty skin, his arms around her, pummeling her with his hips, driving himself into her, turning her over onto her stomach, taking her like that—and she felt ecstasy as he whispered filthy things, his lips pressed into her earlobe, his tongue etching fire as he said things she’d never heard a man say.

Julie felt as if her consciousness were shot out of the barrel of a gun—it hurt to open her eyes. She had to force them open, feeling as if heavy weights kept them closed, kept her in the darkness of her own mind.

Open. She saw the others there. The watchers. The audience.

She flushed with embarrassment. She felt shame the likes of which she hadn’t felt since she’d been a child, caught naked with a little boy, playing doctor. She felt as if all her secrets had been announced on loudspeakers, and the people in the audience had used what was in her mind as entertainment, something for their amusement: her shame.

Her breathing felt labored. It was as if she’d been running and had suddenly stopped, unable to catch her breath.

She was in the television studio. On the sofa.

Michael Diamond’s palm was warm and moist against her forehead, and he was whispering something to her…no, not to her. To the others. The audience. To the world.

Some secret about her. Something she had harbored.

“You want him to be alive,” Diamond said. “You feel guilty because you stopped loving him. And then, when he was killed, you wanted more than anything for him to be alive because…because it meant that you could leave him. But now, you are stuck remembering only love. You’ve forgotten the winter that settled between you both. The fighting. The arguments. The dislike. The indifference. The lack of trust. You were in love with him for two years, and then you caught him in too many lies. You stopped trusting him. You were planning on leaving him. One day. One day soon.”

Michael Diamond’s face shone with sweat. His eyes had gone from a beautiful deep blue to gray, and the whites seemed bloodshot. It looked as if—in the few minutes he’d been doing the reading of her, that he’d been up for nights. “I’m sorry,” he said, under his breath. Then, more loudly, “Love and Death are strange companions. Those whom we were conflicted about in Life, we now are tied to in Death.”

Julie felt as if she had been invaded. As if someone had crawled inside her, and taken, forcibly, things from her. She felt icy inside, and burning on the surface of her skin. “What the
hell
did you just do to me?”

She pushed herself up from the sofa, but felt the room—the watchers—the cameras—spin around her.

Her knees buckled beneath her, and she collapsed.

6

Julie lay on the couch in the Green Room—which was not green at all, she noticed, glancing around at the pale walls—and finally took a sip of the orange juice that had been offered by the assistant who had rushed in after they’d helped her out of the studio’s auditorium.

She looked up at her mother, who stood nearby. “Why did you set this up?”

“Honey, I didn’t. I really didn’t. I’m sorry,” Toni said. Her mother’s eyes were red from crying.

Julie closed her eyes and tried to push away the conscious world. She had to force herself to breathe more slowly. Counting to four seconds in, four seconds out. For the first time in her life, she understood what a panic attack might be.

7

After her mother left to go sit in the car, Mel sat with her awhile, once Julie felt strong enough to sit up in a chair. They brought some sandwiches in, and Mel cajoled her sister into taking a bit, “for energy.”

“I can’t believe he’d…he’d lie like that,” Julie said. “That’s show biz,” Mel said. “Don’t worry. I don’t believe a word of it. He’s a con-artist. Cute, but still a con-artist.”

“Did mom set this all up?” Julie asked. “
Did sh
e
?”

Mel shot her a harsh, unforgiving look, as if Julie had just said something terrible.

8

When she was feeling better, she demanded to see Michael Diamond, and Diamond’s assistant rushed her into his office, which was a suite of rooms down the long corridor.

He looked different to her than he had in the studio. He seemed older, and perhaps exhausted, as if he’d been up for several nights in a row. His hair was slicked back and his forehead had speckles of sweat. Something about his face reminded her of a hawk. She remembered the cover of his book, where his face seemed geeky-sexy. Now, it just seemed tired. He sat on the edge of his desk, his arm extended for her to shake.

She kept her arms crossed.

“If you’re so psychic, tell me what I’m thinking,” she said.

“I’m sorry that was so harsh,” Michael said. “I know you’re in pain. Look, we’ll cut the segment. Don’t worry. It won’t be televised.”

She said, “What did you do to me in there?”

“You don’t believe in psychic ability, Julie. I’m not here to change your mind. I’m sorry what I said hurt you in some way. I can’t take it back. It happened. It’s what I picked up from you,” he said. “You know, sometimes, I feel things that are terrible. I pick up images and words from someone—on the show—that I couldn’t possibly verbalize. It would be too awful. It would be too painful for the person to hear. But something inside you wanted it to come out. What I said, what I saw inside you, Julie, wanted to come out.”

While he’d been speaking, she felt as if she were being drawn to him. As if he had a level of charisma that went beyond normal charm or attraction. She felt she trusted him the way she trusted her therapist. When she took a deep breath, she tried to analyze the feeling, but could not.

“What was inside me?” Julie asked. “What did you see?”

“Just a glimpse,” he said. “Of something terrible. I…I don’t know what to tell you.”

“If you’re psychic, read my mind.”

“It’s not like that,” he said. “Mrs. Hutchinson, you’ve got an aura of death around you. I’m sorry to say this. You’ve been touched by someone who died.”

“That’s easy enough to figure out,” she said, feeling a bit harsh but happy to throw it back at him. “My husband died in April. That’s what you were so glib about in front of your audience.”

“No, this is a woman,” he said. “Somehow, she’s connected to you. She had answers for you but couldn’t let them out.”

9

She went out and got in the car. Mel was in the front seat, her mother in the back. “Don’t talk to me,” she said. “Just drive. I want to go home.”