Life After Life (9 page)

T
HE LAST GUY,
always good for his word, had sent her a letter with photos just last year after she wrote to tell him where she was living and what she was doing, that if he ever headed southeast and wanted a really good hot dog to give her a call. It was the least she could do—unhook any regret he might feel. He, after all, had done her a favor; he had given her a glimpse of what a good life could look like. But she threw away the photos without looking, too hard, though she did like to think there might be a day in the future when some slight memory might come to the little daughter, materializing out of a smell or a fabric, perhaps something like her pink cashmere scarf the child loved to finger and rub against her cheek as she dozed off. She was wearing the scarf that night in New Hampshire, fingering the wet weight around her throat, and all she could think about is how worthless she felt and how she wondered what it would feel like to know you had lost two mothers. She had one photo in her wallet, one of those awful department store photos with the baby boy propped up like a sack of potatoes, his sister’s arms around him. She also had a photo she had carried in her wallet since junior high. It looks like a screen door—old-timey with crisscrossed panels—a broom propped in the corner near the latch. Ben is behind the door. She was waiting for him to practice their show and he paused before coming back out into daylight and she snapped it; all you can see is the shadow of someone, darkness beyond the door, but she knew he was there all the same.

“A
ND NOW
I will make this normal ordinary girl disappear,” he said, and gestured to where she sat in the school auditorium. She came up on the stage wearing the clothes he had told her to wear, a navy scooter skirt and white Hang Ten T-shirt and plain Keds; her hair was in braided pigtails.
Nothing loose that might snag,
he had said. She was aware of all the students watching and waiting as she walked over to the chamber—a box in a box, one side cut away but carefully hidden. He turned it just right. He always knew how to turn it just right. He winked at her and she felt the great power of their friendship, the secrecy of their act.
Abracadabra. Now you see her, now you don’t.

The water was cold and her clothes heavy, boots filling; there was a crack along the bottom of the hot tub like a broken highway to nowhere. Ben’s best trick had always been to make her disappear and that’s what she had done. He even tried to get in touch with her a few times, saying he wanted her to meet his wife, he had a baby daughter, he was so sorry her mother died, but she had already long disappeared. She was old news, bits of gossip her parents and then her dad had attempted to sweep from the stoop. She was reaching her hand out to trace that crack, no ropes, no cuffs, letting the key to the cottage drop from her hand, when something grabbed her hard; there was a sharp pain in her shoulder, deep and throbbing, and her mouth filled with water and that was all she remembered.

Later she would get a tattoo to remind her. A big purple blob of a tattoo—horseshoe-shaped—to replicate the bite of a huge dog. She later kept thinking of that old hymn, “Love Lifted Me,” love in the monstrous form of Tammy, 150 pounds of fur and jowls and drool. She would later learn that Tammy didn’t like for anyone to be in the water, always assuming they needed to be saved. Luke had taken her in when the young family she belonged to couldn’t break her of pulling their kids from the lake every time they tried to learn how to swim. The kids, bruised and tormented, got agitated when they saw her coming, and she read their agitation as trouble and fear and got to work, her big webbed paws propelling her to their rescue. Those kids had named her Nana after the dog in Peter Pan, but Luke decided to rename her in case she had any problems connected to all the times her name had been shrieked in anger. They were in the emergency room, and he told Joanna he had named her after a song he loved as a kid, “Tammy,” by Debbie Reynolds. He said that he played his old 45 every night and sang along in a way he hoped would soothe her.

“You have a turntable?” she asked, clearly impressed, or so he told her later.

“Tammy has a real missionary complex,” Luke said. “She wants to save everyone.” He was bone thin with a shaved head and big dark eyes, either a manic runner or a cancer patient. She didn’t mean to say that aloud, but she did because he told her he was both—not cancer per se, but he
was
dying and he had been a runner since the late seventies when he discovered that a good hard run could just about always make you feel better. She nodded. She knew this as well. She said
run run fast as you can.
He stood by her gurney and extended an equally bony hand—no ring, no watch. “Tammy and I have a lot of the same problems,” he said. “Fortunately she’s not dying and I don’t shit in the front yard.”

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.

T
HE 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 everyone 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.”