Afterlife Read online

  His breath upon her face.

  Do you want me inside you?

  Part Two

  Chapter Eight

  1

  In the city: blue sky as far as he could see above the towering buildings. The sound of laughter and shouting and even some cussing from kids getting out of school in the city. The harsh words of others, tromping along, up from the subway steam. The shadows were still cool with the very last breath of spring, the sunlight beyond them, warm and fresh. He felt a little bounce in his step as he bounded up from the subway steps into wonderful daylight.

  His name was Terry West, and he’d just gotten out of Harkness’ lecture on the underpinnings of Jacobean Tragedy by accepting the fact that he was going to get a “D” in the survey course, anyway. Terry was feeling damn good, and if that asshole Franklin hadn’t fucked with his head that morning—on the subject of his academic future—it would be the perfect day. He caught a bus uptown to meet Anne for a beer at her little studio apartment. When he arrived, she had on that sweater that was bright yellow that made him just want to pull it off. Beneath it, she wore nothing, and his cold hands trembled as he touched the edge of her nipples—each one, special attention from his fingers while his tongue slipped between her lips, and she giggled when she felt his hardness, and he was thinking: life is better than anyone ever told me it was going to be.

  In the middle of it, when he had just slipped inside her, he whispered to her that he thought he was in love with her, but he wasn’t sure if she’d heard him, and that was cool. After they had sex, he showered solo while Anne flicked on cable and watched the old Match Game show on The Game Show Network. When he got out of the shower, dripping as he went from tiny bathroom to tiny living area, he sat down beside her and stroked her hair. “I have to meet my mother in thirty minutes,” she said. “She can’t know that we’re fucking.”

  “I thought she liked me.”

  “She thinks I’m still a virgin,” Anne said, and squirmed a bit when he tried nuzzling her neck. “She’s living in the 20th century or something.”

  “I guess you’re going shopping?”

  Anne nodded. “That’s all she does. That’s all she ever wants to do.”

  “Gee, your neck tastes good,” he said, trying to kiss her one more time, but she pulled away, and pawed the ends of the sweater arms over her hands like little mitts.

  “Sex isn’t everything.” She shrugged away from him, got off the bed and sauntered to the bathroom. “When I get out of the shower, you need to be gone.”

  “How about tonight? Maybe later?” he asked.

  “Maybe.”

  None of this ruined his good mood. He got outside, and sat on the stoop of the brownstone next to her building, and lit up a cigarette. Had a good smoke, watching people walk by, checking out the pretty girls, feeling a little intimidated by some of the men in suits who looked as if they owned the world, wondering if he himself would ever own much. He grabbed a hot dog down at Gray’s Papaya around two, and chowed down while calling up his buddy Rick who lived in a cool loft in Soho with four roommates (instead of at home with his mom, like Terry still did), and asked if they wanted to go shoot pool at Fat Cats on Christopher Street in about an hour.

  Then, he’d gotten on the subway, and that’s when he thought the man had looked at him funny. He was used to gay guys giving him looks—after all, he was athletic and trim and twenty-two—and it didn’t offend him in the least. He’d always felt complimented, whether it was a girl or a guy. But this guy was looking at him differently.

  It pissed him off. He glared at the man. The man grinned, but then turned away. The man opened a newspaper and began reading it.

  He wouldn’t have thought anything more of this, except when he got off the train and began walking toward the exit, he accidentally dropped his keys, and when he squatted down to pick them up, he glanced back and noticed the guy was practically hovering over him.

  Then, the man passed by. Terry waited for him to continue up the steps to the outside.

  Outside, Terry saw the usual crush of people—and the man he’d seen wasn’t anywhere nearby. He called up Anne and left a message on her machine that he was with Rick and some others playing pool and maybe she might want to meet up after her mother left and they could grab pizza at Ray’s or something. “Or maybe we can do something after Bio tomorrow. Okay? Call me ASAP babay-babay,” he finished, their little injoke. When he dropped the cell phone in the pocket of his denim painter’s pants, he felt around for cash. He counted up about fourteen bucks in single wadded-up bills, and that’d be enough for a couple of hours of pool and air-hockey, and with a few bucks for the kick-ass jukebox at Fat Cats.

  “I’m like four blocks from Fat Cats,” he told Rick via cell phone. “Are you down there?”

  “Yep, me and Joe and Debbie. Deb’s kicking my butt in air hockey. Want to say hi?”

  “Fuck. Anne’ll cut off my dick if she knows Deb’s there. Shit. And I just told her to come down if she wanted.”

  “Maybe she won’t,” Rick said, and then the noise in the background rose as someone was yelling a victory yell and people were laughing. “A lot of cute girls here, dude.”

  “Yeah yeah,” Terry said, and as he turned the corner toward Bleecker—to go get some more cigarettes—there was the man again.

  As Terry passed by him, the man said, “Terry? You’re Terry West?”

  He turned to face the guy, who didn’t look strange or scary, just utterly normal and kind of bland.

  “What’s it to you?” Terry asked, and felt he sounded too wimpy.

  2

  More than an hour later, when Terry awoke, the first thing he did was cough.

  Something about his vision was off. He couldn’t quite see. Things were blurry, and he tried to reach up to wipe his eyes clean, but his hands were tied behind his back.

  He tugged at them, but they wouldn’t budge.

  He didn’t remember a whole hell of a lot since the man had been talking to him, talking about his mother, talking about some emergency, and talking to the point where something within Terry had felt a little tired and too confused to understand everything.

  His breath returned to him, hot.

  It was plastic of some kind over his face.

  Tied around his neck—a cord pressed at his throat.

  He tried to make out the shadowy figure that stood before him, but the light was too dim, and his own breathing had caused a fog within the plastic.

  Soon, the air around his face got warmer, and when he inhaled as deeply as he could, the plastic sucked up against his mouth.

  He tried kicking out, but his legs were tied to the chair.

  Then, it was as if his lungs burned as he used every ounce of his energy to inhale what little air was left to him.

  As he went, as he felt himself sink into unconsciousness, someone—a man’s hands?—grabbed his left arm and held it as if trying to pull him back from the brink of death.

  He sucked in as much air as he could, and kept inhaling, inhaling, inhaling, inhaling.

  Chapter Nine

  1

  Julie arranged a little memorial service in May, just for close family and a few friends.

  2

  They had no body to bury—it had officially been stolen, according to McGuane, and they suspected the killer himself had some access to the morgue that they’d been trying to pinpoint.

  Julie felt for the children’s sake, at least, there needed to be a service. She got Father Joe from Mel’s church, St. Andrew’s, to run through a liturgy just because Mel insisted on something religious, and Hut’s parents had made it for the weekend, and her mother had brought her boyfriend, and even two of Livy’s teachers had shown up.

  Hut’s mother and father flew in, and when Julie had a moment alone with Joanne Hutchinson, she asked her about Hut being an orphan ’til he was in his mid-teens.

  “Steve wanted a son badly,” she said. “I can’t tell you what it was like for us.
We had tried to have children for years. And then when our son died. Our first boy. Before Jeff.” She called him “Jeff,” not the nickname, “Hut,” that Julie had only known him by. Even hearing the word, “Jeff,” sounded like a different person. She could imagine him as a sweet kid. Helpful. Generous. “Well,” Joanne said, “when the opportunity to take him in—Steve had been working with Big Brothers, and then got a call from a friend about some group home for kids who had been orphans all their lives…well, something got in us. It was like a gift from God, we thought. Steve loved working with teenage boys. He loved teaching them, and guiding them. He’s a man’s man, I guess, and he loves camping out and woodworking, and getting out with a football. Well, when he heard about Jeff’s situation—about having lived as an orphan his entire life—he insisted we adopt him. Steve was raised in foster care. He knew the routine. When they met, they bonded immediately. You couldn’t keep them apart.” As she said this, Julie felt that Joanne Hutchinson was leaving something out. But it wasn’t the time or place to ask. Yet, Julie got the distinct sense that Joanne had something more to say about Jeff.

  Before they left on Sunday, Julie managed to get a few minutes with Joanne alone, while her husband was showering in their hotel room.

  “I’m sorry to even bring this up,” Julie said. “But there’s so much about Hut I didn’t know.”

  “He was quiet about his life, wasn’t he?” Joanne said.

  “I know this is a strange thing to bring up now, but when you adopted him, did you know much about where he’d been?”

  “Somewhat. He had been in a group home for a year or so at that point,” and then the tone of her voice changed—as if Joanne had guessed what this was about. “You mean the fire.”

  “Fire?”

  “He never told you,” she said.

  “No.” But even as she said this, Julie remembered his nightmares. He didn’t have them often, but he had woken up more than once, early on, in the middle of the night, soaking the sheets with sweat. All he would tell her was that he had dreamed of something that happened when he was a boy, but he had never let her beyond that wall.

  “I can’t say I’m surprised. It must have been awful. He had been trapped in a building when a fire broke out—that another student had set—perhaps a year before we adopted him. He got out in time, but some of his classmates died. He wasn’t burned, but had to spend time in the hospital for smoke inhalation.”

  “His asthma,” Julie said.

  “Yes, that and those night fears he had.”

  The mention of “night fears,” reminded her of Hut, waking up in the middle of the night as if he were a Viet Nam vet experiencing post-traumatic stress syndrome. He’d nearly leap out of bed, and not be sure where he was. But it had only happened once or twice.

  “Was it some kind of government program he was in, as a boy? Some special school that tested him?”

  “I’m not really sure. He got a good education, though. He was smart as a whip, and was a lot smarter than either of us,” Joanne said. “Sometimes, well, sometimes it was like he knew what I was thinking. He was perceptive. My goodness, he probably told you more than he ever told us. He never talked about those years. We loved him so much, Julie. More than was probably healthy for Steve. When our son turned away from us…well, it’s all in the past. None of it really matters, does it? He was our son, we loved him. Please, let’s not lose touch.”

  Julie hesitated asking the next question, but felt she had to, even though it seemed a betrayal of trust with Hut. “Can I ask you something that might be painful?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Did your husband beat Hut?”

  Silence on the line. Then, Joanne said, “Julie, why would you ever get that idea?”

  “Hut said…”

  “That’s disgusting,” Joanne said. “That’s the most obscene thing you could say to me. And now. Now. With Hut dead. No, his father never laid a finger on him. That man loved him to distraction. Even when Hut did bad things—boy things, I suppose. Even when Hut…well, that’s all in the past. But my husband gave him everything he had and then some. His father is the kindest, gentlest soul on earth, Julie. How…dare… you.”

  3

  The Hutchinsons were only in for the service and the weekend, and they were on a flight back home before Julie could talk to either of them again.

  Julie let some things go. She just couldn’t deal with housework, and she had the cleaning service come through that Mel had recommended, although every now and then, she let a week slip by and the laundry piled up and she’d see Matt wearing the same T-shirt for four days in a row and it wouldn’t bother her one bit and it didn’t seem to bother him, either. Sometimes, she forgot to load the dishwasher, and too many nights, they ordered from Domino’s or went to McDonald’s or called up Chinese Gardens for carry-out. Sometimes she cooked eggs for breakfast and left the pan on the stove and forgot about it. She accepted these minor infractions. Post-traumatic stress, she told herself. Shock. Death. Murder. The news of war overseas made her depressed, so she stopped watching anything but The Simpsons reruns and Judge Judy, as well as the collection of DVDs that they’d amassed—mainly rewatching screwball comedies from the 1930s and forgetting that there were too many half-used glasses of milk and soda and water sitting around in the rec room because the kids forgot to take them up and wash them out. She didn’t let it bother her, even when she noticed. The cleaning service might take care of it. Or they might not. Her mind was elsewhere. She did gain a great sense of accomplishment from working through two entire New York Times crossword puzzle books before June first, a record for her. She had avoided putting Hut’s things into storage or even sorting through all of his clothes that month. Sometimes, she just sat with his Burberry’s raincoat and looked at it as if trying to find him there. Livy now had her own therapist and felt completely like a princess because of it. Julie began wondering if Livy liked having her night frights just so she’d have something to talk about. But she’d been making a lot of progress since seeing Dr. Fishbain over in Ramapo Cliffs once a week. Mel had split up with her boyfriend and was thinking of buying her first house—at forty-one—not far away. Matt had kept to himself and refused the offer of therapy, and Eleanor had suggested that Julie just not push him on anything yet.

  Between days back at work (three days on, ten-hour shifts, with Laura Reynen and Mel both helping with the kids), her three hours per week with her current therapist (because she needed three hours or more to get out everything that was going on in her mind), she had managed to keep moving, although somewhere in there she’d gained twelve pounds and so had started the Atkins Diet (lasted two weeks, but cheated the whole time), then the South Beach diet (maybe three weeks, against sneaking forbidden foods at two a.m. when thoughts of life and death sent her to the fridge) and settled into a modified version of those two diets with a little Weight Watchers and Dr. Phil on the side, and then a two mile walk every morning, and a jog twice a week with her sister. For some reason, giving a damn about the quick weight gain had gotten her out of the house and focused on something other than sorrow. She was moving forward, intentionally, away from death and Hut and murder and the ideas forming in her head about what life was about and why it should be lived at all. But the night fears continued— the dreams, the wakings, the sense that someone was there with her. She accepted a degree of insomnia, and afternoons turned into evenings too quickly, and she had to work to notice her children because it was as if her mind were clouding over real life and pushing her into the territory of dreams.

  McGuane drove over to the house once or twice, for more questions, but Ben, her lawyer, suggested that she not answer much until he could explain how a body got lost or stolen in the morgue. Once, she saw McGuane sitting out in his car, on the street, looking as if he couldn’t decide whether to get out or not. Finally, he drove away.

  4

  One afternoon, by herself, Julie drove over to the break in the woods where the gravel path w
ent up to the place where Hut had been murdered.

  She felt a little scared, but parked the car, got out and went up the path. It was a beautiful day, and the birds were making a racket in the trees. She felt as if she were walking to his true grave.

  When she reached the plateau with its clearing, she glanced about. It was just land. It was just nature. There was no sign that someone had been murdered there.

  No marker.

  “Goodbye, Hut,” she said out loud. “I’m sorry this happened to you. I’m sorry I couldn’t protect you. I’m sorry we couldn’t die together someday when we were old and ready for it. I’ll take care of Matt and Livy and make sure they never forget their father. I know I never will.”

  And then, she walked back down the path to the car.

  5

  “You look good,” Mel said as they jogged the perimeter road along the lake.

  “It’s all the dirty dreams,” Julie said, huffing and puffing as she tried to forget the slight pain in her left shin.

  “That usually does it for me.”

  “I dreamed the other night that three strange men were just licking my toes. I felt kind of dirty, but I woke up laughing.”

  “That’s so filthy it sounds almost clean,” Mel laughed. “They call that a shrimp job.”

  “What?”

  “Toe sucking.”

  “Shiver me timbers,” Julie said. “I’ll never order a shrimp cocktail again. I never had dreams like this before. It’s a little disturbing.” They came to a stop when they reached the small strip of brown beach at the lakefront along the dip in the road.

  Mel lit up a cigarette. “Better toe-licking dreams than the kind where you’re falling off a cliff, sez me.”