Life After Life Page 7

  Joanna learned so much about him in the hours he sat there with her. He had grown up near Boston but spent his summers on Lake Winnipesaukee. He preferred the politics of Massachusetts and Vermont, but New Hampshire was backdrop for the best memories of his childhood, and he was convinced that if he claimed all the parts he really loved he would be able to make peace with everything else. “Too many people throw the baby out with the bath water,” he said, and she nodded, yes, the forgotten baby. She knew where that saying came from, too, though she felt too heavy to answer, the part about when spring came and the family needed to be clean and fresh, so the man bathed first and then the wife and then the children from oldest on down and by the time the baby got there the water was dark and filthy, the baby too hard to see. It was hard for her to see, too hard to open her eyes so she listened to all that he loved about New Hampshire. He loved Clark’s Trading Post, a family operation with trained bears and a photo shop where you could have your picture taken in old timey clothes. He loved the Flume and the Old Man of the Mountain; he had even helped raise money when there was still hope of saving the stone structure. He loved the mountains and he loved the lakes. He had once as a teenager worked part-time at Story Land where he ran the Polar Coaster. He came from a very conservative family who never accepted who he was even though his wild years in San Francisco were long behind him and he was in love for real for the first time in his whole life. Then he talked about David and she knew as she lay there listening that that is what love is supposed to sound like. She couldn’t see it, but she recognized it. It was all so clear.

  After it was all over, she thanked him for saving her and he said that really Tammy saved her. All he did was let the giant dog out to pee. He said there were two kinds of creatures in the world—there are those in dresses fighting for the lifeboats and there are those making sure that others are okay, like the man in the footage of that plane crash in the Potomac who passed the life rope so many times he didn’t make it himself. “No doubt,” Luke said, “I love the feel of a skirt, especially something in crepe or silk, but the honest truth is that I really want to be a rope passer. I like to believe that’s what I’d do.” He pulled Tammy in close and kissed her big head. “Tammy is a rope passer. Tammy is a big voluptuous angel from heaven.”

  Luke believed in a lot of things Joanna had always thought were bullshit—angels and spirits—and yet how could she doubt him there at the end when he reached his hand forward to those he said were waiting for him. “They’re here,” he said, and pointed to the darkened hallway. “They’re here.” He told her that there was a time when he believed nothing; the older he got, the less he believed and then the less he believed the more capable he was of believing. “Such a cool paradox,” he said.

  “What?” she had asked, needing to hold on to his every word, and that’s when he talked about clarity and how it is impossible to see in the midst of chaos.

  “Cool and calm,” he said, and pointed again. “It’s very calm over there in the hallway.”

  After the rescue, Luke made her go to classes and to therapy. He said the price of a saved life was educating herself, healing herself, loving herself. It was impossible to get too angry once she knew the situation of his life. He really was dying and she felt foolish to have wanted to throw away what he wanted so desperately. “It’s always the way,” he said. “If you’ve got curly hair, you want it straight.”

  She tried to explain that it was all an accident. She didn’t want to hurt anyone. She just wanted it all to be a quiet accident, just another mistake; that’s what she imagined her dad or Ben and others back home would say—so unlucky in love and in life, such a fuckup, an accident waiting to happen. All she had wanted was to slip from the earth with as little trace as possible. She wanted to disappear. She had thought there could be something at the bottom of the hot tub luring her to lean in close and look—what could she toss in? She thought of her wedding band and engagement ring, something to flash and glitter against the cracked blue bottom, but she knew that would be wrong, placing too much weight on the loss behind her. Her recent husband would never have gotten over that. Her rolling in needed to be an accident—a necessary accident. The keys to the cottage would be good. She would have wandered onto the deck to see this giant ten-man hot tub and accidentally tripped and dropped her keys, leaned and reached and fallen in, maybe she hit her head, so many possibilities.

  Luke said that this was exactly why she had needed to live. “There is a need for detail people like you,” he said. “A need for those with one eye on minutiae and one eye on the big picture. Besides,” he added, “we need you.” And then he made the offer. He wanted David to get everything he owned and he knew that his family would not let that happen. So, Joanna would marry him. She would nurse him while taking classes and getting some good therapy so she would be fit to go out into the world with a practical satisfying skill and start over. She would be his project and he would be hers. He said she would be their Eliza Doolittle. He said he and David would continue life as they had for almost two years and she would share the guest room with Tammy. “By the time I die,” he told her, “you are going to be a whole new person.” Ever the lawyer, he typed it all up, how at his death she would receive enough to begin her new life and she would sign everything else, including big Tammy, over to David.

  THE FIRST NIGHT after the hospital, she sat on his couch wrapped in an old worn-out quilt like a washed-out ghost. That’s how he described her on the phone to David as he unwrapped a beef bone the size of her thigh for Tammy. You owe her, he said, and pointed to the massive furry beast with the large kind eyes. In the old Eastern tradition, you owe her your life. Tammy sat and drooled on her leg while waiting for the reward, the weight and warmth of her big heavy head a wonderful comfort. Hard to believe she was also responsible for the tight soreness through her shoulder, the sutures and doses of antibiotics.

  “She bit the hell out of me.”

  “Tammy doesn’t have hands,” he said. “If she did, she wouldn’t have needed to use her teeth.” He paused and laughed, waved the magic wand of a bone. “Of course, if she had hands, she wouldn’t have to rely on me at all and likely wouldn’t be living here. She would have her own apartment and job and drive a car.”

  “And she wouldn’t give a shit.”

  “Oh, I think she would.” He roughed up the fur along her big neck and delivered the bone to that cavernous mouth. “Tammy is all about love, aren’t you, girl? Tammy is a rope passer. Tammy is Love. There’s a sampler I’d like to embroider except I don’t think I have enough time, so we’re going to have her portrait painted instead.” He had slipped into a higher singsong voice reserved for Tammy. “Yes we are. Oh, yes we are.” The portrait was already commissioned and there were several times in weeks to come where Joanna wore a big fake fur coat that made her the right bulk and heft and sat in for Tammy while the artist worked on the backdrop of what Luke loved so much—the White Mountains and Lake Winnipesaukee. When the portrait was finished, they had a special unveiling and Tammy ate a ribeye, and when Luke and Joanna got married Tammy was there with a pink tulle collar and a bone even bigger than the one of the rescue night.

  “What number husband will I be?” Luke asked. “Three? Four?”

  “I think I’m up to five in my hometown,” she told him. “I hear they call me the Liz Taylor of Fulton only without the money, talent, and looks.” It surprised her that she was finally able to start laughing at things she had never imagined she could. Luke and Tammy were magic.

  As they spoke their vows out on the deck, the hot tub next door in full view, Luke’s face was flushed, his eyes never leaving those of David who stood right behind Joanna with Tammy beside him. Then they ate and danced with a handful of locals down at Cleary’s, a local spot known for their clam rolls and homemade beer. That night, Joanna lay with big Tammy snoring beside her and fell asleep to the excited whispers of David and Luke in the next room. Legally, she was the bride, but spiritually ever
yone present knew otherwise. Spiritually, she had never had such a feeling of peace. “Who wears the garter in this family?” she had asked before going to bed. “Because I do not want to catch it.”

  “You owe her big-time,” Luke said that first night, and pointed to Tammy. “We never would have heard a thing, just found you frozen and floating.” And this was when he began hatching the plan of what she would do with her life. If she didn’t value her life any more than that, then he would value it for her and tell her exactly what to do. “You are a gift to us!” he said. “You are our gift from God.”

  “There’s something I’ve never heard said.”

  “So I’ll say it again. You are a gift—a messenger from God.”

  “I’m a doped-up suicidal woman who is never wanted by the people she wants. What does any of that have to do with God?”

  “Redemption,” Luke said, and reached for David’s hand. “We are witnessing redemption. She’s our project—our own little fucked-up Eliza Doolittle.”

  “Better than a smokehouse, I think,” David said. He was handsome and outdoorsy, his hair thinning at his temples the only indication that he was older than twenty. He was a local New Hampshire boy who had grown up ten miles away and was always delivering the commentary of his life: My school bus stopped there. That’s where I played Little League. That’s where a man ran a stop sign and totaled my Nova. He often rode by where his dad was buried in a small church cemetery and the house where he had grown up. His mother still lived there, but he only saw her at Christmas when she announced to all the relatives visiting from elsewhere that he was going to locate the perfect wife any day now. He was someone content in that small parcel of the world, even as an outsider within his own family, and she admired and aspired to his level of comfort.

  “Better than a smokehouse,” Luke said. “Our final project. We will make her reappear,” he said the word very carefully. He told her how she had mumbled disappear over and over in the ambulance ride. Where did Ben go? She had asked the question so many times that Luke worried in the beginning that someone else had been there when she fell in the hot tub.

  “Repeat the mantra.” Luke said. “I will reappear.”

  Do you believe in ghosts?

  Do you believe in the power of magic?

  Do you believe this girl, this normal ordinary girl, can disappear?

  I do, I do, I do.

  Now the day Tammy saved her seems light years away, many many miles behind her, and yet she wakes to it and falls asleep to it. The touchstone. Tammy’s portrait, which David insisted she take, hangs over the mantel in her cottage, and several times a year she sends Tammy a gift and something for David, too—bones and CDs and a heavy wool scarf she knitted sitting bedside at Pine Haven. Tammy is getting old for her breed so David is talking about getting a puppy. “The big ones like Tammy don’t live long,” Luke had told her. “They have to cram a lot in.” David has been seeing someone who came to work at one of the resorts over the summer and then never left. He says he is happy and that he’s surprised by that. He thought he never would be again. And to think that now he could get married if he chose to do so.

  In the summer when Joanna is wearing something sleeveless, some unknowing, kind person will often rush forward to ask what happened, hands held a safe distance from the big purple dog bite.

  “It’s a tattoo,” she says, and sometimes she adds, without explanation, that it is meant to simulate a great big dog bite. It’s Tammy’s Teeth—something akin to Rosebud or Zuzu’s petals or whatever it is in life that reminds you that you are alive.

  Notes about my Dad: Curtis Edward Lamb

  Born: February 28, 1920 Died: March 15, 2008, 8:10 a.m.

  Fulton, North Carolina

  He loved the ocean and fishing and hot dogs.

  It was a sunny spring day, daffodils blooming—some so old they were only green sprigs. King Alfred gone to a pauper. It was normal traffic for a normal morning. We were in the room where I had spent my childhood, the crack in the ceiling I used to trace in the near darkness still there, and it seemed in that moment that it might all crash in. I held my hand out to the crack, shocked at how like my mother’s hand it was. He said it first years ago, You have your mother’s hands and you have your mother’s eyes, and I couldn’t help but wonder all these years later if that changed the way I saw things, changed the way I touched things. “You are my little girl,” he said. These were his last words. I told him that I was sorry, but he seemed not to hear. I held his hand until the very end and with that last breath, the world lightened in a way that left me feeling sadder than I have ever felt.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said, and I was. I was so sorry not to have done things differently, so sorry I couldn’t be the one to blink and break the stubborn stance that kept me from my mother. And for the first time I saw him for what he really was, a bridge between two places—the past and the present—the before and the after. The world I shared with my parents and the one I have all alone. I kept thinking of the draw bridge that used to separate Ferris Beach from the mainland, an old rough-hewn bridge that a single man, alone in a little tower, swung outward when a boat was too large to pass under. It swung and creaked and took forever. It was not ideal, but it was all there was.

  [from Joanna’s notebook]

  Curtis Edward Lamb

  Doris is at the other end of the house and he has to move that way to find her, but when he gets there it is his daughter’s room and Doris isn’t there, nobody is there, just walls in need of paint and a closet full of Joanna’s old board games and rag dolls nobody has touched in years. So throw them out, he told Doris, but she couldn’t, she said she could not bear to throw them out. So call her, let’s call her, but no, she said, no. Joanna made her bed and she needs to lie in it. After all the sacrifices we made for her, the least she can do is lead a decent life. We do not owe her. She owes us. But she is our little girl, he said, and he says it again when he holds her hand. You are my little girl, and she squeezes tight while they wait in the hot-dog line. The Ferris wheel is all she can talk about and he has promised her that he will go with her, turning and turning and turning, the lights so bright and buzzing in the distance he has to look away.

  Abby

  ABBY PALMER BELIEVES THAT you should never have to wear church clothes on a weekday, especially in the summer, and that really you should never have to go to church, especially if your parents don’t go themselves but just drop you off on the curb, which is what hers usually do. Her dad said he did his time years ago. Her mom says an Episcopalian is a good thing to be. You should never have to do chores or any kind of work on your birthday and you shouldn’t have to have a birthday party if you don’t want one, especially a stupid suck-hole party like what her mom has planned: impersonators of famous First Ladies telling their stupid stories while the girls make bracelets out of stupid junk like old mahjongg and Scrabble tiles—when what you really want is a magic show and tarot card and palm readings. You should always be allowed to keep an animal who turns up on your doorstep looking for a home and that animal should never get lost or leave you. You should pick your own friends and not the ones your mother thinks are the right friends for you, and if you want friends who are a hundred years old, that is your business. Liking Lady Gaga is your business and so is eating a Slim Jim and some Yodels if that is what you want to eat. You should not have to listen to your parents fighting night after night or pretend the next morning that you didn’t hear anything so they can feel good about their own stinking selves. You should never leave home because bad things happen when you do, like the way her bedroom got redone while she was at camp last summer, turning a perfectly nice place into something white and starched and frilly in a way she is not or, worse, the way her dog, Dollbaby, vanished when she went with her dad to Wilmington to buy all the materials for their magic act. He is building a disappearing chamber for her party because that is what she wants even though her mom screamed and pitched a bitch and said that was a t
errible idea and that her dad was doing it just for spite and to compete with her. “He is jealous of everything I do,” she yelled, which, looking at her stupid painting of Hillary Clinton, is hard to believe. Who would be jealous of that? Hillary Clinton should sue her for that.

  Abby’s dad keeps telling her that there is no connection between their plan to have a disappearing chamber and Dollbaby being missing, but that is hard to believe, too. She can’t help but feel like she made it happen and now she would do anything to get her back.

  Dollbaby is her best friend; she is the baby sister she has begged for and never gotten. Dollbaby has brown eyes and a bushy fox tail and a nose that often leads her away for hours. But still she has always come home and Abby’s dad always tells funny stories about where she has been: the dentist to get her teeth sharpened, the Dog House for a “Puppy to go,” the cemetery to look for bones. It’s like Dollbaby has a whole other life. She is on several mailing lists and has gotten free panty hose, tampons, toothpaste, and once was even asked to sign up for her own Visa card. No one is sure how Dollbaby got on the lists in the first place but she did, and Abby takes great care keeping up with it all; she has put all of Dollbaby’s mail inside the same jewelry box where she keeps the notes she has started finding in the cemetery next door: The time has come and Better late than never and I am with you even when you think I’m not. Creepy.

  ABBY WISHES HER mother would wear mom pants, some nice high-waisted stretch denim mom pants. But no, her mom wears low rise. Her mom wears whatever the seventeen year old sitter wears. Molly once left her swimsuit at their house and Abby saw her mom trying it on, turning from side to side and sucking in so that her ribs stuck out. She didn’t see Abby see her, but she did later accuse Abby’s dad of looking at the babysitter in a way he shouldn’t. “You were flirting with a child,” her mother said, which was just gross-out gross and left Abby feeling sick. She liked Molly, too; she was nice enough and, most important, was actually nice to Abby and took an interest in Dollbaby and all that Abby knows about the cemetery next door and who is buried where, but now her parents had ruined it all. Molly would never be able to babysit again without her mother saying all those things. I saw how you looked at her little butt cheeks, and there was more but Abby started screaming so she couldn’t hear any more of it.