Lydia's Party: A Novel (21 page)

January again. Two years had passed since Lydia’s last party and the six women were together for the first time since the funeral, for what some of them had taken to calling the Lydia Fallows and Maxine the Dog Bleak Midwinter Memorial Bash.

The first year, no one had felt like giving a party. January had come and gone, and finally, as the anniversary of Lydia’s death approached, Celia sent an e-mail, to everyone except Norris, suggesting they meet for dinner at some gloomy Mexican place someone thought Lydia once had liked. But no one had time for dinner and the plan devolved into drinks and even then only Celia and Elaine showed up. The evening ended abruptly when Elaine spotted an oversized cockroach disappearing into the vinyl upholstery on her side of the booth, in possession of a large crumb.

The following year, they swore they’d do better. They discussed the plan at length, via group e-mail, excluding Norris by mutual, unspoken agreement until the very end. They discussed decamping to the Caribbean, imagined themselves sitting around an oceanside table in sarongs and sunglasses, drinking a variety of rum drinks in Lydia’s honor. They even imagined the drinks—mojitos, piña coladas, Cuba libres, margaritas—but the trip proved impractical. Jayne didn’t have time. Celia, who’d lost her job at the hospital library, had time but couldn’t afford it. Elaine didn’t feel up to flying. When Norris’s e-mail appeared, inviting them all to her place in Michigan, to see the finished work for her new show before she shipped it to New York, Celia, to everyone’s surprise, insisted they go.

So there they sat, around Norris’s enormous steel-and-glass table, as Betsy told how she and Ted had finally parted ways. “It’s all good,” she said. “We’re friends now. Lyd would approve. In fact, it was her idea.”

Everyone laughed at Betsy as usual, although she was different now, they’d have to admit if they stopped to discuss it. She was dating, she said. And she looked less clownish, in almost no makeup and not much jewelry, except for a pair of Lydia’s earrings. She seemed like an adult finally at the age of fifty-four.

They could see she was right. Breaking up with Ted had been good for her. Everyone was laughing because Betsy had claimed that Lydia appeared to her in a dream and said,
Ted needs to go
.

“You mean she told you in a dream that you needed to kick him out?” Jayne said, in that lawyerly way of hers. “Or that he wanted to leave?”

Betsy shrugged. “Both, maybe. Who knows? That’s the beauty part.”

“That’s Lydia for you,” Maura said. “Diplomatic even from the grave.”

“I took it to mean we should sell the house and split the money,” Betsy said. “After that, it was easy. He was waiting for me to bring it up.”

Even Betsy was laughing now, at the idea that she’d conjured a visitation from the dead to allow herself to do something everyone agreed was so obviously overdue. Most of them did not believe that Lydia’s spirit had made an actual appearance in Betsy’s dream life, although some of them would concede later in a group e-mail that excluded Betsy and to which Norris did not reply that maybe Betsy needed
to think so. Everyone was laughing now except for Norris, who was in the kitchen, and Celia, who had an even stranger claim to make and was now considering whether this was the right time to make it. Maybe she should keep it to herself, she thought. The fact was she and Lydia talked all the time.

•   •   •

“This barrier between life and death,” she’d said, to Peter, a few days after the first time it happened. “Maybe it’s not as definite as we’ve been led to believe.”

They’d been sitting at the kitchen table on a Sunday morning, reading the newspaper and eating soft-boiled eggs on toast. She’d been testing Peter’s reaction, wasn’t sure she wanted to tell him the whole story yet. She wasn’t sure he’d take it seriously, was afraid he’d only pretend to, and that the resulting conversation would leave her feeling childish.

Peter had looked up and glanced at Griffin, but he was oblivious, deep in the sports section. “What do you mean?” Peter had said.

“Maybe it’s, I don’t know.” She looked down at her egg, poked it. “Porous.” She looked up. “Or gradual?”

Peter frowned. “Sounds like wishful thinking to me,” he’d said, rattling his newspaper. Then, seeing her face, he got up and went to stand behind her chair. He put his arms around her.

“Thanks,” she’d said, feeling a little suffocated by his pajamas, which were covering her face. He smelled like toast.

A hug was always nice but the truth was it wasn’t what she’d wanted. She’d wanted to discuss the possibility of an afterlife. But she could see he thought she was still a little deranged. And she had been—first from the effort of the deathbed vigil, then from grief—until Lydia showed up in the kitchen one morning and asked to be taken for a drive.

“Are you—a ghost?” Celia had said, to the fairly solid-seeming same old Lydia who sat at her kitchen table, after she’d recovered from the shock of seeing her, the first time it happened.

“Technically, no,” Lydia had said. “I think that’s something different.” She looked thoughtful, as usual, and nearly as substantial, though substantiality had never been her strong suit. “I just thought I’d drop in to say hi,” Lydia said. “I miss this.” She gestured vaguely.

“You don’t mean you miss this,” Celia said, making a face. She glanced around her crumb-littered kitchen, taking in the breakfast dishes in the sink, the overflowing recycling bin, Griffin’s hockey gear.

“Yes,” Lydia said, looking around Celia’s kitchen. “I do. I miss the beauty of the physical world. I miss you.”

Celia’s face crumbled.

“Do you suppose we could go for a drive?” Lydia said then.

Celia said of course and turned her back on Lydia, for just a second, to rinse her hands, but when she turned around Lydia was gone.

The next time Lydia appeared—she showed up only when Celia was alone—they continued their conversation. “You can’t mean you miss
this particular
physical world,” Celia said, snatching a dirty dish towel off the counter.

“I do,” Lydia said. “Or most of it. Not my body.” She looked down at her purple yoga T-shirt, the one that said
Embrace Change
in pink cursive across the front. “But I miss all this . . .” She searched for the word. “Corporeality. I miss weather, how it smells. I miss how Maxine smelled. Though most of the rest of her is here. There. Wherever.” Lydia looked sad for a minute. “I miss looking at things. You have no idea how this all looks from here, I mean from where I am.” She gazed at the kitchen counter, toward an open box of saltine crackers. “I have to tell you. I really miss food.”

“I’ll make you something!” Celia said, feeling a little crazy but relieved to have a task. “How about a sandwich? I have some nice New Zealand cheddar. I think I even have romaine lettuce. Or wait! How about a cheese omelet?”

“No, thanks. I couldn’t. I mean, I can’t. We don’t,” Lydia said. “What I’d really like is to go for a drive.”

It took a few more visits before they made it all the way to the car. By then the novelty of Lydia’s appearances had begun to wear off and Celia was having a bad day. “You should have picked someone to haunt who had a better car if all you wanted was to be driven around,” she’d said, looking over her shoulder as she backed out of the garage and into a dead lilac bush. The brakes needed work. She’d thrown a towel over the split upholstery on the passenger’s seat, before they got in, but Lydia had waved her hand.

“Really, don’t bother,” Lydia had said. “I don’t feel much. This,” she gestured at her body, “it’s mostly for your benefit. Though I feel the air a little,” she said, rolling down the window. “It’s lovely.”

Celia drove north on Milwaukee Avenue with all the windows down so Lydia could feel the breeze even though it was 33 degrees and sleeting. Lydia hung her head out the window like a dog. They passed a strip mall. Filthy half-melted snowdrifts revealed coffee-stained foam cups and patches of bare muddy ground. Half-frozen dog turds lay along the curb. An angry woman in a flapping coat stormed out of a currency exchange. A man exploded out the door behind her, shouting insults.

“Nice,” Lydia said.

“Sorry,” Celia replied, assuming sarcasm. “We’ll be past all this in a few minutes.” She glanced at Lydia. “I thought we could get out of town, to the dog park, maybe. Or up into Wisconsin? If you have time.”

Lydia smiled.

“Or would you rather go west—Bull Valley?”

“This is fine,” Lydia said. “Really, it’s beautiful.”

Celia glanced over and sped up. “I’m driving you somewhere beautiful but we’re not there yet.”

“You have no idea,” Lydia said. Then, at the next stoplight, between a Burger King and a gas station, she disappeared.

The most recent visit had been just weeks earlier. Lydia and Maxine, who had started to come along on these visits, had shown up on an especially bleak winter afternoon. Celia had been standing at the kitchen sink, looking out the window at a bare mulberry tree, wondering what to do next. She’d been fighting the urge to go lie down when she’d seen a little movement over her shoulder.

“Boo,” Lydia said, sitting down next to Maxine on a pile of newspapers. Between them, they hardly made a dent. Celia thought she seemed fuzzier this time.

“Long time, no haunt,” Celia said. It had been months since Lydia’s last visit.

“Sorry.”

“So where do you want to go this time?” Celia said.

“Would you mind cruising around my old neighborhood?”

•   •   •

They rode in silence for a while, Maxine on the seat between them. “You’re not going to disappear again in the middle of traffic, are you?”

“I’ll try not to. Cel?”

“What?” Celia was distracted, making her way down a narrow one-way street, trying to weave through an obstacle course of gaping potholes.

“I need to tell you something.”

“OK. Should I pull over?”

“No, keep driving. It’s about Norris.”

“Oh, no.”

“Try to be calm about this,” Lydia said. “I want you to know that she helped me.”

Celia was trying to fit between a double-parked delivery truck and a particularly large pothole that threatened her back left tire. It took her a few seconds to reply.

“Helped you what?”

“You know. Die.”

Celia swerved toward the truck, swerved back. Her back tire dropped into the pothole with a sickening clank. She banged the steering wheel. “I knew it!” she said. “I knew it, I knew it, I knew. I knew it wasn’t time!”

“Stop. Stop being so dramatic,” Lydia said. “And keep your eyes on the road.”

“I knew it,” Celia said again, under her breath this time, racing through a stop sign. “That murderous bitch. I knew she was up to something nefarious in there.” Celia was speeding down the little side street now.

“Would you please just slow down and listen? I’m running out of light here.”

“Sorry. Continue.”

“I’m trying to tell you that I asked Norris to do it.”

“Killer bitch.”

“She wouldn’t at first, Cel. I had to talk her into it.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“What do you mean? I’m telling you that I did.”

“I don’t care what you’re telling me. I don’t believe you.”

“You think I’d come all the way back to lie to you.”

“I think you’re protecting her. You always protected her and you’re still doing it. How could you have talked her into anything? You were out of it.” Celia sniffed. “I was there, too. Remember?”

“Oh, Cel,” Lydia said. “Of course I remember.” Here was one thing Lydia did not miss—Celia’s histrionics, and having to console her. “You have to understand,” Lydia said. “I was in and out of it. It’s hard to describe.”

Celia didn’t say anything. She was staring intently at the road now, pretending to watch for potholes.

“I’m just saying, stop ganging up on her. She feels bad enough.”

“She feels bad?” Celia was yelling again. “Can I disagree here? Or do you get to control the conversation because you’re dead?”

“I get to control it because I’m running out of light,” Lydia said. “But what?”

Celia didn’t answer.

“What?”

“For one thing, just because someone asks you to kill them doesn’t make it right.”

“OK. What’s the other thing?”

Celia went silent.

“Hurry up, Cel. This corporeal thing I’ve got going is not going to last much longer.”

Tears spilled onto the steering wheel. Celia’s voice quavered. “Why didn’t you ask me?”

“Ask you what?”

“To do it!”

“Oh, Cel.” Lydia was losing patience. These ridiculous emotions of Celia’s were exhausting. Envy, desire, hate, love, even loyalty—Lydia had felt them all, too, intensely. Her life had been nothing but. Now they just seemed childish. “Oh, Cel,” she said. “I couldn’t have asked you. You know that.”

“Why not?”

“Because you wouldn’t have.”

A few seconds passed before Celia replied.

“Yes, I would. I might have.”

“No, you wouldn’t. Besides, she owed me.”

Celia glanced over. It was the first thing Lydia had said that made any sense. Celia began to feel a little better.

They drove in silence until Celia finally said, “Maxine, too?”