Afterlife Page 7

  11

  Julie dreamed of:

  The day she met Hut. On the subway. He, on his way to his residency, she, with a day off, thinking about going to buy an air conditioner for her steamy apartment. The train was packed, and he gave up his seat to her. She could not stop looking at him. He was handsome in ways she’d never seen—not a pretty man at all, nor one that had a natural beauty to his face. He just had what seemed to be a chalk outline around him, for her, an aura of something that made her want to know him. He had glanced at her a few times on the train, and then had leaned over and said, “You’d think the carnival was in town,” which made her smile, as she glanced around at others on the train.

  When they’d come up into a muggy afternoon, he said to her, “You know, you look like someone I’d want to get to know.”

  She had laughed. “That’s the worst pick-up line I’ve ever heard.”

  “It can’t be,” he said. “Surely it’s only in the top ten of the worst. It can’t be the worst of all.”

  From there, they’d made a casual date—to meet at the Empire State Building like Sleepless in Seattle. “That way, if I scare you, you can have the safety of all those people, plus you can throw me off the roof if you decide I’m the wrong one. You can even give me a fake name if you want so I can’t stalk you later. I’ll buy the hot dogs.”

  “I’ll bring a parachute,” she’d told him.

  And then, she dreamed of:

  The face of the dead man in the morgue. It had not been Hut, even though it had been him. What was Hut had fled, and left the empty husk of flesh behind.

  The face of the dead man with closed eyes.

  In her dream, his eyes opened.

  Chapter Seven

  1

  After a week, Julie felt herself rise, a waking sleeper, from some dark place. She spent less time in bed. She began enjoying the taste of food again. Just a little. Less time avoiding phone calls from the detective. Less time avoiding her mother and sister and even her children. Livy started having bad dreams, but weirdly Matt was handling himself okay, and her therapist, Eleanor Swanson, said it was completely normal, everything that was going on. Normal, normal, normal.

  Within a few days, her mother went back to Pennsylvania, and Mel came and went, and it wasn’t normal yet, and she felt as if she were hiding something, keeping a secret about how she wanted to scream and cry and yell and break things and kick walls in.

  But she let some autopilot within her switch on, and focused on Matt and Livy, helping them navigate the slender canals of grief.

  2

  “Mommy!” Livy cried out from the backyard.

  Some instinct kicked in, and Julie thought of the trowel she had left in the flowerbed, and all she could think of was that her baby was hurt.

  “Mommy hurry!” Livy screeched.

  Julie nearly flew out the kitchen door, out to the patio.

  Livy stood next to the low weeping willow tree at the edge of the lawn.

  “Honey? You okay?”

  Livy had a glow to her face—as if she’d been sunburned, almost. She had her hands to her ears. “It’s Daddy!” she shouted. “It’s him!”

  Julie went to her and squatted down in front of her so they were eye-level with each other.

  “He’s on my brain radio,” Livy grinned. “He’s telling me he’s okay.”

  “Oh, baby,” Julie said, and felt herself get all weepy as she lifted Livy up. Livy wrapped her legs around her mother’s waist. “He’s in heaven. He’s with God now.”

  “No he’s not,” Livy said. Then, whispering in her mother’s ear as if it were a big secret that nobody was supposed to hear. “Gramma was wrong. He didn’t go upstairs. He’s with us. Right now.”

  3

  On the phone:

  “Eleanor. It’s Julie. I think maybe I’d like to ask you to talk with Livy.”

  4

  Eleanor made an exception that afternoon. Livy clutched her mother’s hand as they stepped into the waiting room. Julie went to the assistant, a young man named Vincent who handled three of the psychologists in the suite of offices. Then, Eleanor came out, and gave Livy a warm smile. “It’s good to finally meet you,” she said. “I know your mom and brother Matt well. I’ve heard so much about you for so long, I feel we’re practically neighbors.”

  Then, Eleanor asked Julie to stay in the waiting area so that she and Livy could talk for a bit. Livy looked back at her, eyes wide, mouth a small tight o, and for a second, Julie felt as if she were giving her daughter away to a stranger.

  5

  Afterward, Livy came out, a grin on her face, and tapped her mother on the knee.

  “How’d it go?” Julie asked, setting a magazine down on the chair next to hers.

  Livy looked up at her, and for just a moment Julie felt a chill as if her daughter contained some unknown well of anger and fury, and it was all in that glance.

  “She’s a nice lady,” Livy said.

  When Julie called to ask about Livy, Eleanor told her, “She thinks she sees her father. She told me that he started coming through her dreams, but that one night, she saw him standing over her in her bedroom and he told her he’d come for her. Now, how are you doing?”

  “Me? Okay.”

  “No,” Eleanor said. “Not okay. Livy told me that you aren’t talking to her as much. She said that you let things pile up.”

  “Well, it’s been a little soon. It’s not like I’m completely recovered.”

  “Julie, this is not something to take lightly. You are experiencing post-traumatic stress. Your husband was violently killed. It’s a major shock, to all of you. You can’t mask it. I want you to expect that your mind will be spinning around. I want you to expect that you’re going to have nights when you’re afraid of the dark. All of you will. I want you to come see me as often as you want. And I suggest that you try and get Matt in for sessions, too.”

  6

  Late one night, Matt was in the den watching one of his homemade digital videos on the family computer.

  Julie stood behind his chair. The video had been made six months before, around Thanksgiving, and Matt’s voice on the videotape was generally happy as he narrated the world as he went through it. “Christmas shopping for Julie and Livy is nearly over,” he said, with a beaming exuberance that Julie hadn’t heard from him in a while. He was in the city with his dad—there was Hut, oh my God, so close she could nearly touch him by tapping the computer monitor—and they had just emerged from the Chelsea Market, Hut with a white cup of coffee, and Matt with a Snapple that he waved in front of the camera as he turned the camcorder on himself. He looked so happy. There were a few people on the street, and it looked like Matt might walk right into them if he didn’t put the camcorder down.

  His father said, “Let’s turn it off for a bit, Matty.”

  Matt filmed his father’s face, then, a close-up, and then the video went to darkness.

  Julie leaned over to Matt and kissed the top of his head.

  He reached up toward her, without turning around, and laid the palm of his hand against her cheek. “We can see him anytime we want,” Matt said. “That’s what movies do. They keep people alive.”

  7

  She slipped into the bathrobe that Mel had picked up for her at Bed, Bath & Beyond, made some chamomile tea and felt a little better. Julie sat up that night, late, after the kids were asleep and after Mel was asleep, and played Matt’s videos on the computer, one after another. They were funny, or silly, and usually involved Matt after school with his friends, or Matt and Hut and Julie and Livy—ordinary happiness, as they all made supper together on a rare Saturday when everyone was free, Livy shredding Romaine lettuce for the salad, Hut chopping tomatoes and onions, and Julie sautéing the chicken in the round wide pan. Hut joked about crying over onions, and that got Livy giggling. Matt now and then said, “Now just act natural. Just act natural,” and that got them all acting a little silly for the camera. Sometimes Matt turned the camer
a on himself, having watched too many episodes of The Real World on MTV, and talked about what he felt like, what he was going through. Nothing startling came through in any of this. Something within Julie ached for the normalcy of it all.

  And then, there were several Boys’ Day Out, as they had called the Saturdays or Sundays when Hut would spend several hours exclusively with Matt. They’d go to a Yankees game, or fishing out on one of the local lakes, or doing what Livy called, “boy things,” which she demanded that her father take her on sometimes. Matt holding a big bass up to the camcorder and saying, “Julie, get ready to fry this up for supper!” or at the baseball game, Matt cursing as he videoed the game, and Hut’s voice saying, “Now, Matt, let’s not use those words again, all right?”

  And then, a video of an area of cobblestone streets, where half the block was sunlit and half in shadows. The city. Hut looking a little tense. Matt swinging the camcorder to the street and just videotaping his Reeboks as he walked along. “That thing doesn’t always have to be on,” Hut said, a bit curtly.

  Matt swung the camcorder up: a shot of his father’s face, neither looking happy nor solemn. Looking like he was angry at Matt. “Let’s just turn it off, Matt. All right?”

  Matt lied. “Okay, dad. It’s off. I just like looking through the lens.”

  A woman walked along the sidewalk opposite them, and then crossed the street as if coming right toward them. She was pretty, wearing sunglasses, and had pale, freckled skin and shoulder-cut red hair that gleamed as she walked from shadow to sunlight in the street.

  “Put it down,” Hut said, and then the video went dark.

  Julie stared at the computer monitor.

  Then, she heard a piercing scream.

  8

  It was Livy’s high-pitched squeal, and Julie instinctively leapt out of the chair in the den and went running upstairs to her daughter’s bedroom.

  Matt was already standing in the doorway with the light on.

  Julie looked over his shoulder—her daughter stood up on her bed, her back against the wall, shivering.

  “What happened?”

  Matt mumbled something, but Julie passed by him and went to Livy. “Did Matty scare you?” she asked, and then felt her face go red as she looked at Matt.

  He glared at her. “She had a nightmare, Julie. I’m not running around scaring my baby sister. Jesus.”

  “I didn’t mean that,” Julie said. “I didn’t. I thought maybe she saw you in the dark.”

  “Something’s wrong with you if you think that,” Matt said, and turned and went back to his room.

  “Honey, what is it? What was wrong?”

  “I saw a man,” Livy said. “In here.”

  “Was it Matt? Maybe he was going down the hall?”

  “No, Mommy. It was like a ghost. It was like a big shadow,” Livy whispered. And then, as if it had just occurred to her, “Maybe it’s Daddy. Maybe he came downstairs again. Maybe he was tired of being upstairs.”

  “Livy, there’s nobody. But I think you were having a bad dream. That’s all. It’s not real. If you want, I’ll go check all the windows and doors.”

  “Ghosts get through doors,” Livy told her.

  9

  Feeling a little spooked herself, Julie poured herself the last of the Sterling Vineyards Merlot in the kitchen, into a Dixie Cup, and sipped it as she walked around checking the windows and doors to make sure there really wasn’t the possibility of an intruder.

  10

  In her dreams that night, the man on the table. Eyes opened wide. They were milky white. No pupils, no iris’. It was Hut, but not Hut. His skin was translucent alabaster interrupted by blotches of bluish bruises. He rose up and reached for her. He had drawings all over his body—tattoos.

  She couldn’t move.

  He leaned over and kissed the edge of her neck. His lips were ragged and dry and he kissed again, with a gentle suction against her skin.

  His fingers crawled down her belly, lingering just above her pubic region, and then twirling the soft hair as his hand pressed down against her, and all the while he kissed up her chin, to her mouth. She felt as if she couldn’t move, push him off her. She wanted to get away from him, but his tongue parted her lips and flickered just over her tongue and teeth.

  And then she felt aroused and excited in the dream.

  Ready.

  “Do you want me?” his voice came to her, but not from his mouth. “Do you want me inside you?”

  She awoke, jerked from the dream too suddenly so that when she opened her eyes she wasn’t sure if she was still dreaming or in her bed, but a man stood there, a dark man against the darkness, and for half a second, she thought it was Hut. Her sleepiness was like a pillow smothering her, so that she didn’t have the energy to flick on the light. Didn’t even have the energy to stay awake for more than a few seconds. She felt the narcotic heaviness of deep sleep draw her back from fuzzy consciousness. She slipped back into sleep, and when she awoke well before dawn, she began shivering, feeling as if she had a fever. She kept looking at the doorway as if half expecting someone to be there.

  She remembered what her therapist had told her. About her mind at night. Night fears. Thoughts that would keep her up. Even hallucinations? Even thinking someone was in the house? Some stranger? Or that Hut would come home, just open the door and walk back in one day as if it had all been a dream?

  Then, she remembered a detail about the dream: the dead man in them, who she could not completely think of as Hut, had those carvings on him.

  11

  Julie flicked up the light in Matt’s room. He rolled over, pushing back the sheet. The bedroom window was open wide. The room smelled like dirty gym clothes. Poster over his bed of Eminem. The place was a dump, but she never pushed him on it. “I’ll have to handle him,” Hut had told her after an early battle of wills between Matt and Julie. “He’s always going to be like this, and it’s up to me to do this. It’s his mind, Julie. He has some kind of block that won’t allow him to handle conflict well. You shouldn’t be in the middle of this.” Hut had even told her just to let Matt do what he wanted sometimes. She was the stepmother, and she had never felt completely comfortable stepping in and making him do things—even as simple as picking up the clothes he dropped on his bedroom floor.

  “Julie?” he asked, shielding his eyes from the overhead light at first.

  Julie went to sit on the edge of his bed. “Tell me about the drawings you made. On your skin.”

  He squinted at her. “I’m sleepy.”

  “It can’t wait.”

  He looked over at his clock-radio. “It’s four a.m.”

  “You’re not going to school. You can sleep in.”

  He turned back over, his arms covering the back of his head as if defending himself. “Just let me go to sleep.”

  “I’ve been up half the night,” she said. “It’s important, Matt.”

  “Why?” he turned around violently, shooting her a nasty look, his face a scowl. “Why is it so goddamn important?”

  “Do not use that kind of language with me, young man,” she said, feeling infinitely old as she heard the words come out of her mouth.

  “You think I go around scaring Liv, and you wake me up when it’s still dark out. God. You just go around sticking your nose in places where you shouldn’t, Julie. You’re not my mother. You want to see the drawings? Okay. Okay, Julie,” he said, sitting up. He drew the longsleeved T-shirt up over his head. His chest seemed scrawny and inward-turning as if he had been emotionally beaten into submission. She winced when she thought of his mother—Amanda—and how she’d hurt him badly. How she’d tried to do terrible things to him.

  She wondered if she was like Amanda now. If she was going to do something terrible.

  He showed her his arm, his chest. The carvings had faded, leaving only slight striations on his arm and shoulder.

  “Seen enough?” he asked.

  She tried to remember the patterns carved into the dead
person’s back from the photograph the detective had shown her.

  She didn’t know what to say. She felt like crying but worked to hold back her tears. “I guess I’m a wreck right now,” she said.

  When he spoke again, after nearly a minute had passed, his voice was gentler than it had been. “Poor you. You think I’m like my mother and I’m going to end up going crazy and hurting Livy or something.”

  “Matty,” she whispered, touching his arm. “I don’t think that.”

  “I’m not stupid,” he said. “She’s where they send crazy people. And I’ll end up there, too, because I see things sometimes. I just don’t tell you about them. You’ll never understand.”

  “Do you want to visit your mother?” Julie asked, grasping for something hopeful to say. “I can drive you down there.”

  Then he turned over, facing the wall, drawing the sheet back up to cover himself. “Turn out the light,” he said, his voice a monotone. “Go to bed. I’m sorry Dad’s dead. I’m sorry you’re stuck with me. I wish you weren’t falling apart every five minutes. I wish everything was different. But it’s not. And no, I don’t want to see my mother. Ever.”

  She left his bedroom, soon after, and sat on the stairs in the hall, wondering if the pain and the pressure she felt in her head would ever go away.

  12

  Some nights, she stared at the wall of her bedroom and began imagining things, thinking that she heard Hut in the hallway. Livy had put the idea in her head—her bad dream about a ghost of a man.

  His footsteps, heavy, coming toward her.

  The bedroom door, open. Darkness in the hall beyond it.

  Darkness seeping in to her room.