Life After Life Read online

  “But she has a collar and a name tag!” Abby screamed, and her mother said her tag might have gotten lost.

  “But I put pictures of her all over town!”

  Her mother said the people could have come from out of town, that maybe Dollbaby ventured over toward Cracker Barrel off on the service road. “She did that another time, remember?” her mother asked. Abby’s dad was there beside her mother, holding her hand like everything was okay and like she was the one who had lost something. Like Abby wouldn’t remember Dollbaby at the Cracker Barrel? Like she wouldn’t have been terrified to imagine Dollbaby crossing the interstate all by herself. But that time, someone called, a woman from New Jersey and the woman sat right there in a big rocking chair with Dollbaby on her lap until they got there to pick her up. Abby’s dad offered the woman some money, but she said no thanks, she was just happy to have helped and for them to use the money, to buy something for Dollbaby, so they rode all the way out to the Dog House and got her an Old Yeller and sat and watched her lick the waxy paper clean.

  “You are quite the dog, Dollbaby,” Abby’s dad said. “Playing Monopoly, going to the Cracker Barrel, eating at the Dog House.” The mention of Monopoly made them both laugh. Several months before, Dollbaby had eaten the race car and Abby’s dad made it their mission to find the car when it came out the other end. Finally, there it was, not a bit damaged, and they boiled it and then returned it to the box with the top hat and little dog and battleship. Her mother said it was outrageous and that someone with a real job wouldn’t have so much time to spend searching through dog shit. Her dad said it was fascinating and educational to imagine the journey the little race car took, like Jonah in the belly of the whale or Gepetto looking for Pinocchio. He said he had always gotten those two stories mixed up and now was eager to show Pinocchio on the big screen. He had reopened the old movie theater downtown and always ran kid movies on Saturday mornings. There was a time when this alone made people at school want to be friends with her, but those days were long gone.

  Just earlier today, Abby’s mother said that if, and then she paused with the word, if Dollbaby is dead, they may never know. They will only know if someone takes the time to turn in the body. “I have left messages all over town,” her mother said. “So if they take the body to a vet or a shelter, we will hear. But I think for all practical purposes, we should probably assume she is dead.”

  That’s when Abby got madder than she has ever been. “Never,” she screamed. “I will never stop looking for her!” She grabbed another stack of the posters she had made and went outside, slamming the door behind her. If only she had stayed home and helped her mother plan the stupid party, it might not have happened. Dollbaby would never have left if Abby had been out there in the yard or walking through the cemetery to Pine Haven. If only her parents would stop being so stupid. Dollbaby hates yelling and fighting. And Abby’s parents are stupid. Sometimes she hates both of them, something she only has the nerve to tell Dollbaby, who listens to every word. Her parents don’t allow sweets or sodas or TV unless it is educational, which isn’t the reason she hates them but it helps, and it is a big part of the reason why she started spending so many afternoons over at Pine Haven in the first place.

  It is an easy walk through the cemetery and then the arboretum. She loves the cool shadiness of the cemetery, the huge trees, and old headstones to read along the way: Greetings stranger passing by, you are now as once was I; there is where the little playhouse used to be and the tall stone angel—MCKEITHAN—who once was vandalized and now stands with only one wing intact. There is a tiny lamb on top of a dark mossy stone: Thou hast won the victory without fighting the battle, hast gained the cross without having to bear the crown. It was a boy named Isaac Abbott who was born in 1832 and died a year later. She likes the old parts of the cemetery the best, though some of the stones are hard to read. The far corner, which is all overgrown, is where she had been told they buried slaves and suicides and unclaimed bodies like that guy called Spaghetti over in Laurinburg. They called him the Carny Mummy and her dad had once seen him preserved over there in a glass box. She wanted to go to Laurinburg to see him, but now he was buried; they even poured concrete in on top so nobody could dig him back up, that’s how famous he is. Somebody from the North had sent money to bury him sixty years after the fact because he thought it was disrespectful to Italian people. They said his name was Cancetto Farmica and not Carny Mummy and certainly not Spaghetti.

  When she is way back under the dogwoods and pines and willows, she can’t see anything beyond the tip top eaves of her house. There is no street and no Pine Haven, no cars. Sometimes she and Dollbaby pretend that it is 1833 and they have come to bury Isaac. They say what a sweet boy he was and how sad he died so young. Abby has always been able to make herself cry and often she has enjoyed that, but it was a mistake to bring Haley White out here in the fifth grade and let her in on the game. Haley acted like she understood and also really respected and loved these people and then she went to school and announced to the whole class that all Abby’s friends were either really old or dead. Dollbaby growled the first time she saw Haley, and Abby should have paid attention to that. One day Dollbaby was sniffing and chasing something, probably a rabbit, and led Abby to a little section closed in by shrubs at least six feet tall where Stars of David are on the stones and little rocks are left like calling cards. Abby is especially drawn to the grave of Esther Cohen who not only has the most rocks but lately is the one who often has notes neatly folded inside the urn attached to her headstone. Clearly, Esther is the most popular and Abby feels both resentment and admiration since she herself is one of those girls who has always gotten the assigned class number of Valentine’s and none with anything really written to her except the ones she got from Dollbaby, which her dad had made—big loopy words with backward letters—where Dollbaby professed her great love and adoration and promised not to pee on the living room rug anymore.

  “I’M SORRY, HONEY,” her dad had said with the news of Dollbaby’s disappearance. He pulled her close and hugged her. He shook and cried as well, but it seemed he was crying about more than Dollbaby, and she almost screamed out her anger and hatred when she heard them again late that night, their voices filling the house even as they stupidly thought they were being quiet. You have no respect, she wanted to scream. It was what her mother had said to her when she got on that new white spread knowing her Nikes were covered in mud and maybe, hopefully, even some dog shit. You have to have respect, they both had said when she got in trouble for arguing with one of her teachers who mispronounced a lot of words like when he was talking about herbs until she quizzed him on why they were talking about herbs in history class and he said. “Erbs, girl!” he said, and then spelled, “A-R-A-B-S. Erbs!” The same teacher talked about the nigger river and said that evolution was the talk of the devil. Certainly, she didn’t respect that and she doesn’t respect her stupid idiot parents either.

  This morning Esther has a lot of mail. The note that was there yesterday written in sloppy blue ink—See you soon—is still there. It has a smudged blot of lipstick—sealed with a kiss—and someone wrote WHEN? in all capital letters. The when looks angry, like it should be shouted. WHEN? Now there is a new one on the back of a Food Lion receipt. I can’t keep waiting. I deserve something better! Abby often stops to read the notes and then to sit up under the tendrils of the weeping willow growing closeby. Usually Dollbaby joins her and everything is fine, but today, she feels Dollbaby’s absence in a way that makes her feel a little scared, like the person who is writing these notes might be watching her from a tree or the Methodist steeple like that sniper she saw on television. Usually when she is out here, she thinks of all these dead people as neighbors you might call out and speak to, but it’s clear she is not the only person who comes out here. It could be Haley or some of those mean girls trying to play a trick on her and so she isn’t about to say a word to anybody except Dollbaby if she would just come home. Usually she would k
eep moving through the old part where the first family ever buried here—the Wilkins—have their own little iron fence with a gate, or she might climb up into a magnolia tree, lean and sling her leg up and over the big stone horse monument over General Fulton who founded this town and ride along for a while, or go sit on the lap of the lovely Lydia Edwards who died so young and now sits and stares in the direction of the newer graves and the arboretum. People say she once had eyes made of emeralds but somebody stole them and so now she is always watching whoever passes by to recognize the thief. “It’s just me, Lydia,” she used to always say until Haley went to school and told and then everybody started saying it back to her, It’s just me, Lydia, so now she just says it in her head, which Lydia totally gets if she gets anything. But now without Dollbaby, she can’t stand to be there all by herself and she feels like she needs to run as fast as she can. She puts the Food Lion note in her back pocket and takes off. She will collect the others later on her way back. She pats her leg for Dollbaby to follow out of habit and wills herself not to cry. She tries to whistle and sing so it won’t be so quiet. She sings her favorite Lady Gaga song, “Telephone.” She is passing the newer section now—graves without all the trees and vines. Newer stones with fancy-colored photographs of the dead people. Taco Bell in full view in the distance. Her favorite belongs to some people who lived in her house when her dad was a kid—Fred and Cleva Burns and their stone is cut to look like a giant ship: Break, break, break, it reads. Back when she talked aloud to everybody and not just in her head, she told Fred and Cleva how she had found some of their things and kept them in a special box. She has found bobby pins, which her mother would never use, and an old dried-up ink cartridge she didn’t even know what it was. She found a token from the Ferris Beach pavilion wedged in a crack in her windowsill and her dad said that place had been torn down for over twenty years.

  Abby’s best friend, Sadie Randolph, has a beautiful pink granite stone with her husband Horace’s name and dates on one side and hers on the other. “All they’ll have to do is put in that final date,” she has said, which always makes Abby sad to even imagine. When she was still able to come out here, Sadie planted rosemary—for remembrance—and now it is huge and bushy, growing up between their names. Abby always breaks off a little and takes it with her. Sadie likes that.

  The arboretum is lush and green, gravel paths and flowers and trees all carefully labeled. There are all kinds of fruit and flowering trees, lots of magnolias blooming. Abby’s favorite part is the long arbor that stretches the full length of the cemetery, built there, her dad had said, so that the people over at Pine Haven wouldn’t have to look out and see the cemetery. Now they just see a screen of Confederate jasmine and cross vines and wisteria. All the plant names are right there to read on little gold-etched tags that remind her of Dollbaby’s name tag that she had made at Petco while her mother still tried to talk her into a different dog—a brand-new teacup-sized this or that puppy with Dollbaby sitting right there to hear every single word. She had said she would take a puppy as well, that it could be Dollbaby’s pet, and with that her stupid mother finally shut up.

  Some call the arboretum the tunnel of love, but Abby thinks of it as the tunnel of life from the dark shade of the cemetery, through the labeled vines and then out into the bright sunlight and wide flat asphalt parking lot of Pine Haven—the perfect place for roller skating or skateboarding, which she loves to do. She can skateboard as good as Richie Hendricks and sometimes the two of them do that for hours. He has always liked Dollbaby and she likes him because of that.

  Sadie is always waiting for her with a Hershey’s bar or a big Whitman’s Sampler and a crisp dollar bill for the soda machine down the hall. The sodas only cost seventy-five cents so she always gives the returned change to Millie, a plump long-term resident with spiky hair who guards the machine all day long and begs for change. Millie has a pink and white blanket she carries around and calls it her African. “Don’t you touch my African,” she says, “not unless I say to touch it.” Sadie says she means to say afghan but that people who didn’t get enough school often make this mistake. One of the residents called Millie a Mongoloid, and the new woman who lives across from Sadie, Mrs. Silverman, who is from the North said, “Oh my God, where on earth have I landed? Is anyone here educated?”

  Abby has been told that Millie is at least forty even though she looks and acts like a big kid and that no one ever comes to see her, that she has kind of been adopted by all the residents and workers just like Harley, the huge orange cat who prowls the grounds and who used to lead Dollbaby on some good chases through the cemetery. Used to everybody loved Harley, but now they’re afraid he will make them die so they scream and throw things when they see him coming. Sadie told Abby that was nonsense, and if they’d let her, she would keep Harley full-time with her so he wouldn’t have to mess with all the others being mean to him. “Harley has been falsely persecuted,” she said, and stroked his big fat head. She also told Abby that grown-ups often say things they don’t mean, like that they hate someone or that they wish someone had never been born, the kind of thing a kid would get in big trouble for at school.

  Sadie really does know everyone who has ever lived in this town, even the old shriveled-up Indian woman who reaches and whines and tries to play with Abby’s hair when she passes. “Come heren right now, baby,” the woman says, her tongue moving and twisting like it can’t be still. “Come on come on come on.” Sadie says that Lottie has been off since an accident that gave her a bad hit to the head years before. Lottie lives in the part of the building set aside for those less fortunate with no family and nowhere to go, like Millie. Sadie says that part of the building is the last car on the train—the end of the line.

  Sadie knew Abby’s dad when he was a boy in this town. She taught him in third grade as she did most everyone who grew up there, but she had taken a special interest in him when his mother died so young. Her mother had also died young so she said they needed to stick together and now Abby’s dad likes to tell anyone interested that they have done just that for over forty years. Sadie sometimes tells others who live at Pine Haven that Abby is her granddaughter.

  Abby was afraid of Sadie’s new neighbor, Rachel Silverman, in the beginning, but now she likes her and spends a lot of afternoons curled up in the big common living room where people sometimes gather to talk. There are only a couple of men living at Pine Haven. Sadie says men just don’t keep very well and Rachel laughed and said Sadie talked about men like they might be a head of lettuce or loaf of bread. “Well, look around,” Sadie said, “only a few here,” and so it would be hard not to notice Mr. Stanley Stone who used to be a lawyer but now spends lots of time watching and reading about wrestling. People say he needs a haircut and a shave, but he says they should mind their own goddamned business. He says he likes to think of what he’d call himself if he ever got in the ring: Stony or Rocky or the Marble Man. “Get it?” he asked and struck a cowboy pose with his legs bowed out and his arm lassoing the air. “I’m mixing me some metaphors for you intellectuals. Marble like stone and Marlboro like a well-hung cowboy stud.” He looked at Mrs. Silverman when he said that, but she ignored him. Toby, who wears winter boots all year long and a fanny pack stashed with all kinds of things she is always eager to share repeated what he said and laughed until she cried. “Well hung,” she repeated. “Don’t listen, Abby.” But of course Abby did listen. She listens to everything they say. Mr. Stone’s son teaches at her school and so it’s weird to see him there with his crazy old dad acting as bad as Todd Reynolds who got in trouble in fifth grade for unzipping his pants and mooning everybody on the field trip bus.

  Abby often tells her mother that she is at a friend’s house and that is true. These are her friends and Sadie’s suite is like a house, with her big overstuffed velvet chairs with doilies on the back and lots of needlework filling the walls. It even smells like Sadie’s old house where Abby once visited with her dad.

  “Whose house?�
� her mother always asks. “Which friend? Is it someone you’d like to ask to sleep over?”

  It is clear her mother doesn’t believe her. She spends a lot of time pushing Abby to call up or be friends with girls whose mothers Abby’s mom wants to be friends with. That’s what’s really going on. Now that she has lied about all those girls from time to time, there has been no choice but to invite them to her party. She cornered the one nice girl in that group in the bathroom the last week of school and confessed her situation. She figured the worst thing that happened would just be that the girl turned on her and she’d be even more of an unnoticed outcast than she already is. So once an outcast, who cares? It’s like Mrs. Silverman said to someone who wanted to convert her one day. “Surely whoever is in charge, if in fact there is an afterlife, is smart enough to know when people say they believe something at the last minute in hopes of a pass,” she said. “If there is a smart person in charge, then he or she will respect where I stand. And if that’s not the case, then why should I even care?”

  “There is a heaven,” the woman said. “And there are rules for getting in.”