Life After Life Page 3

  Who was her father? It was a mystery. And the only thing her mother left her was a pile of worthless shit and a lot of broken promises. C.J. likes to think she will keep her promises to Kurt and that she’ll be smart enough not to promise things that will never come true. She wants to be a good mother. She wants him to be proud of her.

  Lately—because of all of Joanna’s questions—she has been trying to think of some things she could appreciate about her mom. It was hard at first, but then she was able to get a few. She had a beautiful singing voice and C.J. remembers sitting outside the bathroom door with her ear pressed against the wood to hear. The Supremes and the Jackson 5 were her favorites and sometimes at bedtime her mother would sing “I’ll Be There” or “Can’t Hurry Love.” Kurt’s big brown eyes are shaped like her mother’s eyes and her mother had beautiful handwriting, small and delicate cursive, scraps of which C.J. has saved. Sometimes she writes her mother notes and tells her things. Asks her things. Didn’t anyone ever try to help you? Was there anyone you really loved? In this great big world, did anyone ever give a shit about Perri Loomis? Black chicks and poor white girls go missing or get raped and murdered all the time, but let them be white and blond and beautiful or rich and see where it goes. Once upon a time her mother was beautiful, but that was all. And that was not enough to save her life.

  Sadie

  SADIE RANDOLPH HAS ALWAYS seen the sunnier side of life and she’s not sure why that is, just that it is. People criticize it. A lot of people don’t like looking at a half-full glass, but she has spent her life doing just that and feels now that she is eighty-five and bound to a wheelchair, she wouldn’t have chosen to live any other way. Even now, there are things to be happy about. She was born to good people. She got to go to school and become a schoolteacher when many of the people she grew up with were not so fortunate. She married a nice boy from right there in the county she had known her whole life and he continued to run the hardware store and feed and grain sales, just like his father and grandfather before him. They had three fine children, all college educated and now with families of their own, lived in a two-story brick house across the street from the Methodist church they attended and she taught the third grade for forty years. Horace died young, a sudden heart attack while playing football on Thanksgiving afternoon. It was what he and their sons did every Thanksgiving, a town pickup game known for years as the Giblet Gravy Bowl. He dropped dead and he could not help that. He looked to be in great shape and there was no warning whatsoever. And of course she was angry and scared at first and then so heartbroken and disappointed, but he couldn’t help it; she had to keep going. At the funeral she told people she felt lucky and blessed to have ever had him at all. She feels the same about her mother who also died young; she would never trade a minute she had with them. The pain of losing people you love is the price of the ticket for getting to know them at all. Horace once told her that if something ever happened to him, she should go, find somebody, but she was sure he didn’t really mean that, especially when he added, But they better be every bit as good as I am.

  “Well, then that’s impossible, isn’t it?” she had said. It was eight years before he died, a plain old night in the winter of 1963, the whole world so focused on the young Jackie Kennedy and what on earth she would do now. Sadie almost asked what he would do if she were the one to die young, but she didn’t want to go there. She doesn’t even like to go there now with her eighty-five and him dead nearly forty years. Of course he would have found someone else, but ultimately it was she left behind and she didn’t want to think about any of it. When she doesn’t want to think about something sad or hurtful, she does what she instructed her own children and those she taught to do: Close your eyes and go somewhere safe and good. Picture something good. One child even made up a big sign with what he thought were the rules to being happy: PRETEND YOU AIN’T DIRTY FROM PLAYING EVEN IF YOU ARE, THINK GOOD THOUGHTS, THINK ABOUT AN ANIMAL YOU WOULD LIKE TO HAVE. She hung the rules in the front of her classroom and they stayed there for years. Now the boy who wrote them is very rich and owns a horse farm in Montana. Sadie has gotten a Christmas card from him every single year except the one time he was getting a divorce. He always says his work keeps him very dirty, but it never gets in the way of his happiness. He always tells her thank you.

  Sadie herself had always wanted a little dog that would follow her from room to room like a shadow and that is exactly what she got after Horace died. She loved the big yellow Labradors they had always had as a family: Honey and Goldie and Spitz, after the swimmer who won all those gold medals, but Rudy was all hers, a little Pekingese she misses to this day, but sometimes if she lays her sweater just right at the foot of her bed, it looks just like him, and sometimes she can even get to a place in her mind where she can hear him snore. She loves when Harley comes meowing at her door and spends some time purring on her lap. Bless poor Harley, the way he is treated these days. She wants to tell those who are so mean to him that the one they should really fear coming and sitting beside them is little Joanna Lamb; she’s the one who comes to usher out those ready to go. She is the real sweet angel of death and, Sadie suspects, is very good at what she does. She was always a fine student even though she had some trouble finding her way. She liked to do jobs like beat the erasers or straighten up the cloakroom and Sadie assigned her these things often in hopes it would build some confidence. Her parents were fine hardworking people, but they were hard on her to succeed, maybe too hard. Some children just can’t take that; some just don’t have the makeup and they need to be handled in a gentler way. Joanna was one of those who always looked like she needed a hug and Sadie was big on hugging. Now they have all kinds of rules about hugging and touching. What on earth would you do with the boys like Bennie Palmer who wanted to hug and kiss everybody? Children used to baaaa when Joanna came in the classroom and there were some who wanted to make her always sit beside Bo Henderson, a tiny boy with a terrible stutter, who some of the children who had not grown out of being mean called Bbbbo Ppppeep. He turned out fine, too—went to a school that broke down and rebuilt his voice, grew to be over six feet tall, started selling high end real estate and now could buy and sell most every one of those who were cruel to him. People say Joanna has been married too many times to count, but Sadie does not like idle gossip and never has, besides, what does it really matter. She knows how Joanna treats her and that is all the business of hers it is. Some people struggle harder than others and that has always been true. Take a classroom of eight-year-olds. Some will be good readers and not mind a bit standing and performing. Others cannot put any expression into it because they are having to concentrate so hard on the pronunciation of each and every word. Then some could be fine readers but are so frightened to be looked at and on and on. “Each child moves in his own way,” she often told parents. “My job is to help that child find his natural speed and not to pit him against another.”

  She tried to teach her children to be positive—to dream but to also do it with their feet on the ground. If you let loose that balloon, you will lose sight of it, she said. The best way to enjoy it is to hold tight to the string and plant your feet on a good solid path. She thinks now that maybe part of why she was so happy and positive is because she saw so much that was not good. She got to be quite good at figuring out which children were neglected at home, but then she was never sure what to do with that information except to love them a little more, hold them close whenever the opportunity allowed. Sometimes it was hard to be cordial to parents she suspected of misdeeds, and it was hard not to quiz the children a little too much. People think it’s a problem of economics, but that is not always true at all. There can be just as much neglect and abuse in a big fine house with professional parents as out in the trailer park. Alcohol is alcohol and meanness is meanness. An eight-year-old heart is just an innocent eight-year-old heart—fragile and wanting.

  In the classroom, she often told stories about her own household and she painted pictures of
all that should happen in a home, the good things people should strive to possess. Eight is a good age for this. They are bright-eyed and know so much, but they are still such babies in so many ways. She told how she apologized to her son after falsely accusing him of eating the last cookie. It was eaten by the plumber, who happened to mention it, or she might have forever thought her son was lying and he would have thought she falsely accused him, teaching him a terrible lesson way too young in life. Old-fashioned stories with little morals were great in the classroom. She got tired of all the younger teachers coming through and saying how old-fashioned she was because she still believed in dictionaries and manners. And she didn’t like the shift away from just good old pencils and paper and regular spelling tests. She hated this creative spelling mess. She loved cursive and phonics. For years her favorite thing was the lessons in cursive—taking children from a world of boxy print letters to beautiful script. It was like teaching a language and suddenly notes home and envelopes in their mailboxes didn’t seem so foreign and foreboding. Learning and facing language teaches children to learn and face other things as well, and no, she didn’t learn the computer with only one more year before her retirement. The typewriter and overhead projector were just fine to get her to the finish line of a long and lovely race.

  Of course, who writes anymore? She has a whole box of letters from her husband, each a little masterpiece, at least to her it is. She taught her own children the importance of a handwritten note or tried to. And she loved spending time on manners. Those boys busting to be first in line. Slow down! she would say. There’s no fire! But it was like they couldn’t help themselves, like those jumping-bean bodies were on fire and she was constantly needing to remind them to use their indoor voices as opposed to the outdoor voices. She said that all the time and still does. There are people here at Pine Haven who constantly need to be told to use their indoor voices, not to touch or invade the space of their neighbors and to please slow down. Where is the fire? she asks Stanley Stone all the time when he goes tearing down the hall to be first at the cafeteria. Please, just tell me where’s the fire. Of course, poor Stanley is not the best example since his mind is so far gone. But at least he is on foot. It’s those in wheelchairs, like herself, who are so dangerous when they pick up speed. Please use your manners, she often says. Were you raised in a barn?

  There was a time when a child who squirmed too much in class was thought to have worms, but now they call it ADD.

  “Worms?” little Abby asked one day when Sadie told this, and Toby had to tell the full tale of how childrens’ bottoms had to get checked at night with a flashlight to see if they had the pinworms.

  “Not in Boston, they didn’t,” Rachel Silverman said, and that tickled everybody good. Someone Sadie worked with in the schools used to say to children right there before the others, You need to have your bottom checked, and you know that child was likely embarrassed to death. Even an overly confident child would have to find that humiliating. Sadie told the woman that she thought that was a very unkind way to handle the problem. She was the same woman who taught what an improper fraction was by first making the smallest boy in the class, Edward Tyner, sit on her lap, and she would say “proper” and then she’d turn and sit on top of him and say “improper.” The children, of course, thought it was hilarious, yet Edward never did do very well in life and Sadie has always thought this was likely a factor in that. Sadie has always tried to observe a code of ethics and manners.

  Mom, her youngest son, Paul, had said years ago, please fart just once so we know you aren’t an alien. They were in the kitchen; he was working on homework and she was frying country-style steak. He was so full of himself and got away with so much because he was the baby. Horace would have been home any minute and she would have heard his car and seen Honey go running. Oh, she would love to see his face and feel him beside her; that is the most wonderful thing that could happen. Sometimes, she can feel him there. Sometimes when she is almost asleep she will feel his head heavy on her shoulder and his breath on her neck.

  Who said aliens don’t also break wind? she asked, and Paul screamed with laughter. They called her Ann Landers because she often referred to some bit of good common sense of advice she had read there. “Wonder if Ann Landers farts,” Paul said. It is hard to believe a boy so obsessed with body sounds and what he could mine in his nose has grown up to be an ophthalmologist, but he has, and she has his picture right there on her dresser with his wife, Phoebe, and their beautiful babies. They live on the West Coast, which is where Phoebe is from, and they always send her lots and lots of pictures. One time they sent a package that got wet, and when she opened it one picture had stuck to another, and when she carefully pulled them apart it was like a double exposure. The picture of her youngest grandson had somehow wound up there in a picture of Paul and Phoebe on their anniversary trip to Europe. He had stayed with her right there in Fulton, North Carolina, but the picture said he was in Paris, France. And there is such power in what you see that way. She said, Look, he’s in Paris with his mom and dad and that is what—all these years later—gave her the whole idea for her business, which she calls Exposure. It was so hard not to believe what she saw right there before her eyes.

  The business was suggested to her by Joanna, who sometimes comes to visit after she has left the nursing wing where she has helped someone cross over. She has told Sadie that some days—especially with those she has grown close to—she has to reenter life slowly, like someone coming up from a deep dive slowly so she won’t get the bends. “I get it,” Sadie was able to say. “I know what you mean.” Lord, the bends. She has learned so much from that crazy Paul that she wouldn’t know otherwise. He loves to scuba dive and he has jumped from a plane, too, which scares her to this minute to imagine so she never thinks about that, and if her mind tries to, she conjures up little Rudy with his scruffy flat face and maybe sings a song in her head. Lots of times all she can think is those instrumental songs from that album Stanley Stone plays all day long each and every day, an album that was popular back when her kids were little, Herb somebody or another, loud drum beats and lots of horns. It gets stuck in your head and won’t go away—catchy songs that make her want to sip a highball or smoke a cigarette—things she has only done a couple of times in her whole life.

  Stanley Stone suggested Sadie call her business Indecent Exposure, and of course she politely told him she would do no such thing. It is hard to watch him decline so and she goes the extra mile to be kind and courteous. She has known him her whole adult life—a highly intelligent and respectable man—who now late in his life says all kinds of things—ugly things—the kinds of things you would hear teaching junior high school, which she did once in 1965 and then went running and begging to be placed back with her third graders.

  “There’s a lot in this place that is indecent and needs to be exposed,” Stanley said one day when they heard that one of the Barker sisters had been drugged so she didn’t wake up for eighteen hours. “And I am not talking about old breasts and asses. I’m talking about laziness, negligence, and incompetence.” He sounded just like a lawyer and then all of a sudden he looked at his poor son, Ned, who has had enough troubles of his own, and threatened to expose himself right there in the dining room. The only person who laughed was Toby Tyler, but she laughs at just about everything. Toby taught school her whole adult life, too, so often they talk about the classroom even though Toby taught high school English and coached field hockey as well as drove an activity bus. Toby grew up in South Carolina but chose to retire here because she threw a dart at a map of Georgia and the Carolinas with the idea she would go wherever it said. Her given name was not Toby, but she gave it to herself because she said that as a child she always wished she could just run off and join the circus. She said at first she just pretended she was related to the real Toby Tyler since they shared a last name, but then one day she thought, Why don’t I just be him? She said as soon as she changed her name, she felt so much better.


  Sadie told her that’s what her business is all about. She invites people to bring in their photographs and make a wish, maybe talk about something that might’ve happened but didn’t or a place someone might’ve visited but hadn’t. There is a power in what you see. Seeing is believing. Bennie Palmer, who without a doubt is her very favorite student from all of her years teaching, still comes to see her and they talk about such things. He is a skillful magician and has been since he was a child and he also works as manager of the movie theater even though his wife is eager for him to do otherwise. He was in the same class as Joanna Lamb and he was as loud and cute as a button as she was quiet and kind of lost. Now he seems lost and she is confident, though neither of them fully memorized the opening of the Gettysburg Address as they were supposed to do. Only two children in all her years mastered that whole first part. One is a bank president in Omaha, Nebraska, and came to see her when in town for his mother’s funeral, and the other was a girl who got pregnant and dropped out in the tenth grade, a beautiful girl who just never had a chance coming out of the kind of squalor she lived in. It would break your heart to see and know what some children come from. Bennie, or Ben they call him now, has a daughter, Abby, who also visits all the time. She is an angel, looks just like him and is such a nice girl. It’s hard to say the same for his wife. The wife is that kind of girl who will cheat on a test or steal something from another child’s desk and then act very haughty if she gets caught, no sense of right or wrong or moral guilt. It is clear that Bennie is not very happy and he needs to talk about it more than he does, but that’s a boy for you; a boy will hold in so much bad stuff sometimes until it makes him sick to his stomach, and Sadie believes wholeheartedly that our society is to blame for that. If people would let little boys spend more time with the dress-up clothes and doll babies, it would help, but even Horace was funny about all that, not really enjoying when Paul used to like to wear an apron and rock his sister’s Betsy Wetsy.