Before and Afterlives

  He was not there.

  He was not there. Not anywhere in the house. Sarah finally found me in the kitchen, nibbling a Christmas cookie, one of those that have been cut into a shape. I was eating a Christmas tree trimmed with green frosting. She asked me what was the matter and I shook my head. She knelt beside me and said, “Mommy.” I almost cried. She never called me that. It was always Mother. Never a sign of affection from that girl, but I am proud of her for that. In this way, she is protected.

  I didn’t know what to do, what the procedures were, so I took the bus to the hospital. I went to the ward where Nathan had had tests at one time. There was a nurse at the desk, scribbling on a pad. I said, “My son—”

  “He’s doing well,” she told me. I blinked. “You’re Mrs. Murphy, right?” I nodded, wanting to be Mrs. Murphy instead of Mrs. Livingston right then. “You can go in and see him now,” the nurse said. She pointed to the door behind me. I went in. There he was—Mrs. Murphy’s son—sitting in a chair next to his bed, staring out the window. I looked where he was looking, but the window was filled with light. Light so bright, no one could look at it without going blind. I turned to him again and saw the floral pattern of the wallpaper behind him. I saw itthrough him.

  Sarah and I did not eat much after the memorial service. She lost a lot of weight and I got a new job, cleaning rooms at the Bakersfield Inn. I bought her a new wardrobe as soon as I could, and took her to a dermatologist. She was so happy. She practically danced through the front door after school each day. We tried to put Nathan behind us as best we could, but it was difficult. While we ate supper together one evening, Sarah put her fork down on her plate and said, “He’s still here. I can feel him. He isn’t gone, Mother.”

  We both looked up at the ceiling for some reason, but there was nothing there.

  I should have known she was right, though. She is a smart girl, smarter than I’d ever guessed. She brings home straight A’s. When she said he was still here, I should have believed her.

  Several nights after Sarah and I looked up at the ceiling, I heard someone knocking at my front door. It was very late, after midnight. I immediately suspected trouble, but I gathered my robe around me and went down to see who was there.

  The knocking grew more insistent as I went downstairs. At first it had been a rapping, but now it became forceful, and the door shook a little in its frame. I grabbed at the collar of my robe, as if that could protect me.

  I went to the picture window first, and pulled back the curtain a little. It was snowing outside, the flakes drifting in piles along the windowsill, collecting on the steps of my porch. Under the florescent street lamps, the snow in the front yard, and in my neighbors’ yards, seemed to glow purplish-white under the dark sky. The window was cold. It gave off coldness as a fire will give off heat.

  There was no one on my porch, but I still heard the knocking. I pulled back from the window and looked at the door again. It shook in its frame.

  I dropped the curtain and went to the door. I opened it just a little, in case someone was out there and I needed to close it quickly. It didn’t matter, though. There was no one. I swung the door wide and stepped outside.

  The knocking had stopped as soon as I opened the door. Now I looked around, turning my head quickly one way, then the other, trying to see if any prankster shadows ran off, scurrying down the street, choking on their own laughter. I saw nothing. I looked down, puzzled, and saw the snow piling up on my porch steps, drifting onto the porch itself.

  There were no footprints.

  I stepped back inside and slammed the door. I locked it. I pressed my back against the door, and again the knocking started. The door bucked at my back, lifting under the blows.

  “Stop it, Nathan,” I whispered. “Please stop it.” Sarah was at a friend’s house, spending the night, and I was thankful she was not here right then. The knocking continued.

  I ran upstairs and went into his room. I had tried not to go there since that Christmas morning, only to feed the fish and that was all. The bed still lay on the floor in a jumble, mattress and box springs thrown against opposite walls. The fish tank gurgled, its small light glowing in the dark room. The Siamese fighting fish floated inside, fanning its fins. I closed my eyes, opened them. The knocking would not stop.

  I went over to the fish tank and peered inside. I pressed so close my head bumped against the glass. The fish must have felt my bump against the aquarium was an attack, though, because suddenly it turned on me, a bloated red tumor, and swam at me, fins flying.

  I don’t know what came over me, sir, but I couldn’t help myself. I grew angry too. I couldn’t help it. Perhaps my own face grew bloated and red as well. As the fish charged, I grabbed hold of the edge of the tank and pushed it onto the floor. Glass shattered. Water poured out, and the fish with it. It flipped and flopped on the hardwood floor, next to the diver figurine that had landed nearby.

  Sometime during all of this, the knocking had stopped.

  He is not dead, as I told you. I want you to say that in your book. That night was only the first in a series of visitations. Sarah has been here to witness several others since. He knocks on the door. He turns on the shower. Sometimes he will even cook us a meal. But his favorite is the knocking. He continues to return to that.

  The Widow Parkinson had been right at one time. I suspect that, before she opened her door to the Mourners, her husband had been visiting her as well. But she’s denied what I’ve come to know, down in my bones, deeper even. Sometimes you don’t see things for what they are until they reach a vanishing point.

  But that was the widow’s choice. This is mine. Right now, no matter what anyone tells me, I know Nathan is here. He is here, sir, in this house, in these rooms, breathing along with us. He is entirely alive.

  If you’re very quiet, you may be able to hear him. It’s him you should be talking to anyway.

  Listen closely.

  I think he has a lot to say.

  The Language of Moths

  1. Swallowing Bubbles

  The four of them had been traveling for what seemed like forever, the two in the front seat rattling maps like they did newspapers on Sunday mornings. They rode in the wagon, her favorite car, the one with the wood paneling on its doors. The wagon wound through the twisty backroads of the mountains, leaving behind it clouds of dust through which sunlight passed, making the air shimmer like liquid gold. The girl wanted the wagon to stop so she could jump out and run through the golden light behind her. She climbed halfway over the back seat and pushed her face against the rear window, trying to get a better look.

  The little old man beside her shouted, “No! No! No! Sit down, you’re slobbering all over the glass. Sit down this instant!” He grabbed her around her waist and pulled her back into a sitting position. He pulled a strap across her chest, locking it with a decisive click. The little old man narrowed his eyes; he waved a finger in the girl’s face. He said things at her. But as his words left his lips, they became bubbles. Large silver bubbles that shimmied and wobbled in the air. The bubbles filled the car in mere moments. So many words all at once! The girl laughed delightedly. She popped some of the bubbles between her fingers. Others she plucked from the air and swallowed like grapes. She let them sit sweetly on her tongue for a while, before taking them all the way in for good. When the bubbles reached her stomach, they burst into music. The sound of them echoed through her body, reverberating. She rang like a bell. One day, when she swallowed enough bubbles, she might understand what the little old man beside her was saying. All of the time, not just now and then. Maybe she’d even be able to say things back to him. She wondered if her own words would taste as sweet. Like honey, maybe. Or like flowers.

  2. Being Selfish

  Eliot is watching his mother hang bed sheets from a cord of clothesline she’s tied off at two walls facing opposite of each other in their cabin. “To give us all a sense of personal space,” she explains. Eliot tells his mother that this cabin is so s
mall, hanging up bed sheets to section off rooms is a futile activity. “Where did you learn that word,” his mother asks. “Futile. Who taught you that?”

  “At school,” Eliot says, paging through anX-Men comic book, not bothering to look up.

  His mother makes a face that looks impressed. “Maybe public school isn’t so bad after all,” she says. “Your father was right, as usual.”

  Eliot doesn’t know if his father is right, or even if his father is usually right, as his mother seems to imagine. After all, here they are in the Allegheny Mountains, in Pennsylvania, for God’s sake, hundreds of miles away from home. Away from Boston. And for what? For a figment of his father’s imagination. For a so-called undiscovered moth his father claims to have seen when he was Eliot’s age, fourteen, camping right here in this very cabin. Eliot doesn’t believe his father could remember anything that far back, and even if he could, his memory of the event could be completely fictional at this point, an indulgence in nostalgia for a time when his life still seemed open in all directions, flat as a map, unexplored and waiting for him.

  Eliot’s father is an entomologist. His specialty is lepidoptera, moths and butterflies and what Eliot thinks of as creepy-crawlies, things that spin cocoons around themselves when they’re unhappy with their present circumstances and wait inside their shells until either they’ve changed or the world has, before coming out. Eliot’s father is forty-three years old, a once-celebrated researcher on the mating habits of moths found in the Appalachian Mountains. He is also a liar. He lied to his grant committee at the college, telling them in his proposal that he required the funds for this expedition to research the habits of a certain species of moth with which they were all familiar. He didn’t mention his undiscovered moth, the one that glowed orange and pink, as he once told Eliot during a reverie, with his eyes looking at something unimaginably distant while he spoke of it. Maybe, Eliot thinks, an absurd adventure like this one is a scientist’s version of a mid-life crisis. Instead of chasing after other women, Eliot’s father is chasing after a moth that, let’s face it, he probably imagined.

  “There now, isn’t that better?” Eliot’s mother stands in the center of the cabin, which she has finished sectioning into four rooms. The cabin is a perfect square with clothesline bisecting the center in both directions, like a plus sign. Eliot owns one corner, and Dawn, his sister, has the one next to his: That makes up one half of the cabin. The other half has been divided into the kitchen and his parents’ space. The sheet separating Eliot’s corner from his sister’s is patterned with blue flowers and tiny teacups. These sheets are Dawn’s favorites, and secretly, Eliot’s too.

  Eliot’s mother glances around, smiling vaguely, wiping sweat off of her brow. She’s obviously happy with her achievement. After all, she’s an academic, a philosopher, unaccustomed to cleaning house and rigging up clotheslines and bed linen. The maid back in Boston—back home, Eliot thinks—Marcy, she helps around the house with domestic things like that. Usually Eliot’s mother uses her mind to speculate on how the mind works; not just her own mind—butthe mind—the idea of what a mind is. Now she finds herself using her mental prowess to tidy up a ramshackle cabin. Who would have guessed she’d be so capable? Sopractical? Not Eliot. Certainly not herself.

  The door to the cabin swings open, flooding the room with bright sunlight that makes Eliot squint. He shields his eyes with one hand, like an officer saluting, to witness the shadowy figure of his father’s body filling the doorframe, and his sister Dawn trailing behind.

  Dawn is more excited than usual, which has made this trip something less than a vacation. For Eliot’s father, Dr. Carroll, it was never a vacation; that was a well-known fact. For Dr. Carroll, this was an expedition, possibly his last chance to inscribe his name in History. But the rest of the family was supposed to “take things easy and enjoy themselves.” When Dr. Carroll said that, Eliot had snorted. Dr. Carroll had placed his hands on his hips and glowered. “Why the attitude, Eliot?” he’d asked.

  “Take iteasy?” Eliot repeated in a squeaky-scratchy voice that never failed to surface when he most needed to appear justified and righteous. “How can you expect us to do that with Dawn around?”

  Dr. Carroll had stalked away, not answering, which didn’t surprise Eliot at all. For most of his life, this is what Eliot has seen whenever he questions his father: his father’s back, walking away, leaving a room full of silence.

  Dawn pushes past Dr. Carroll and runs over to Eliot’s cot. She jumps on the mattress, which squeals on old coils, and throws her arms across the moth-eaten pink quilt. The quilt smells of mold and mildew and something a little like mothballs, as if it had been stored in a cedar chest for a long time. Dawn turns to Eliot, her wide blue eyes set in a face as white and smooth as porcelain, and smiles at him, her blonde hair fanning out on the pillow. Eliot considers her over the top of his comic book, pretending not to have noticed her.

  Dawn is autistic. She’s seventeen years old, three years older than Eliot. But when she’s around, Eliot feels as if he’s already an old man, forced into an early maturity, responsible for things no fourteen year old boy should have to think about. He blames this all on his parents, who often encourage him when he pays attention to Dawn, who often scold him when he wants something for himself. “Being selfish,” is what his mother calls that, leaving Eliot dashed to pieces on the rocks of guilt. He feels guilty even now, trying to read the last page of his comic book instead of paying attention to Dawn.

  “I’m leaving,” Dr. Carroll announces. He’s wearing khaki pants with pockets all over them, and a wide-brimmed hat with mosquito netting pulled down over his face. A backpack and sleeping bag are slung on his back. He lifts the mosquito netting and kisses Eliot’s mother on her cheek and calls her Dr. Carroll affectionately, then looks at Eliot and says, “You take care of Dawn while I’m away, Eliot. Stay out of trouble.”

  He walks outside, and all of them—Eliot, Dawn and their mother—move to the doorway. As if magnetized by Dr. Carroll’s absence, they try to fill the space he’s left. They watch him become smaller and smaller, a shadow, until he reaches the trail that will take him farther into the graying mountains, where his moth awaits.

  “Good luck,” Eliot’s mother whispers, waving goodbye to his back, his nets and pockets. She closes her eyes and says, “Please,” to something she cannot name, even though she no longer believes in higher powers, ghosts or gods of any sort.

  3. First Words

  It was strange for the girl in this place; she hadn’t been prepared for it. Suddenly the wagon had come to a stop and they all spilled out. The mother and the father, they seemed so excited. They smiled so hard, their faces split in half. The little old man kept scowling; he was so funny. She patted him on his shoulder and he opened his mouth to make room for one huge silver bubble to escape. She grabbed hold of its silky surface and almost left the ground as it floated upwards, towards the clouds. But it popped, and she rocked back on her heels, laughing. When the bubble popped, it shouted, “Get off!”

  The father left soon after. The girl was a little frightened at first. Like maybe the father would never come back? Did the father still love her? These thoughts frightened her more than anything else. But then she watched the little old man chop wood for the fire, his skinny arms struggling each time he lifted the axe above his head, which made her laugh, sweeping the fear out of her like the mother sweeping dirt off the front porch. Swish! Goodbye, fear! Good riddance! She forgot the father because the little old man made her laugh so much.

  There were so many trees here, the girl thought she’d break her neck from tilting her head back to see their swaying tops. Also, strange sounds burrowed into her skin, and she shivered a lot. Birds singing, crickets creeking. This little thing no bigger than the nail of her pinky—it had transparent wings and hovered by her ear, buzzing a nasty song. She swatted at it, but it kept returning. It followed her wherever she went. Finally the mother saw it and squashed it in a Kleenex. But as i
t died, it told the girl, “You’ve made a horrible mistake. I am not the enemy.” Then it coughed, sputtered, and was dead.

  The girl thought of the wagon. It was still one of her favorite things in the world. But now she was thinking she wasn’t so sure. Maybe there were other things just as special as riding in the wagon with the mother, the father and the little old man. She wished the mother wouldn’t have killed the winged creature so quick. She wanted it to tell her more things, but now it was dead and its last words still rang in her ears. When the winged creature spoke, no bubbles came out of its mouth. Words, pure and clear, like cold water, filled her up. The winged creature had more words for her, she just knew it. She knew this without knowing why, and she didn’t care. She only cared that the bubbles didn’t come between her and the words when the creature spoke to her. One drink of that and she wanted more.

  4. The Scream

  Before Eliot’s father left, he placed him in charge of Dawn, and his mother seems more than willing to follow her husband’s orders to the letter, leaving Eliot to look after Dawn while she sits on the front porch of the cabin, or in the kitchen, and writes. Eliot finds his mother’s loyalty to his father’s declarations an annoying trait, as if she had no say-so about anything when it comes to her children; she simply goes along with whatever his father says. He’s watched Dawn every day since his father left, which has been for an entire week. He’s taken her on the trails that are clearly marked; they’ve stared into the shallow depths of a creek where the water was as dark as tea, where red and blue crayfish skittered for cover under rocks. He’s introduced Dawn to grasshoppers, which she loved immediately and, to Eliot’s amazement, coaxed into a perfect line, making them leap in time together, like figure skaters. He was proud of Dawn for that, and could tell she was too; she looked up at him after the synchronized leap went off without a hitch and clapped her hands for a full minute.