Life After Life (25 page)

“I promise and swear that I will,” Abby says, and raises her pure sweet hand. It makes Toby feel like she might cry and she is already running short on breath and needs to pee like a racehorse.

“Thank you sweetheart,” she says. “You can save this world, Abby. You can make a difference.” She heads off to her room before anybody can see her cry. She waves her hand over her head, a signal that it ain’t over. She hears Marge say
good riddance.
She hears Stanley say,
I love a woman with a good set of horns.

“Parents have also questioned your
character,
” the boy principal said that day in his office. He chose his word very carefully and he could not make eye contact.

“Oh really.”

“Yes.”

“And what is it they question? All these years and this is what I come to?” She stood still, waiting, and he still did not look up at her. She could hear students jumping up to peek in the high window of the door; she could hear bus duty announcements on the PA system and still he did not look up, his hand resting on a typewritten letter, a file folder with her name on it.

“A student reported you looked at her inappropriately.”

“Who said that?”

“I’d rather not say just yet,” he said to the blotter on his desk. “Does anything come to mind you’d like to say?”

“Sure. I say a lot of things and give them a lot of looks and who wouldn’t? Bare butt cracks with underwear that’s nothing more than a piece of floss running through. You want me to act like it’s okay for a young educated woman to squat and give a show? Is that what you would do? Sit there and watch while the young men are so torn, some looking away in embarrassment and others filling their eyeballs and then their pockets. All I did was say,
Where is your self-respect, honey?
Is it because I said
honey
? Was I wrong to call her
honey
? If so, let’s blame the South; let’s blame generations of sweet talk and euphemism.”

PEOPLE LIKE YOU,
Marge had said.
People like you.
Like anyone even knows who she really is. No, the only thing she agrees with Marge about is the business about living as long as you can. Sometimes your only chance to beat out a prejudice is to outlive it. And she may not be able to live long enough for everything to be fixed and accepted, but she has already lived to see so much good change. And when all is said and done, that’s all that really matters, that’s all that is really important. She was a good teacher. She was a good daughter. She has some good friends and once upon a time she even knew real love. She drinks lots of water every day and she can recite important literature at the drop of a hat. She can climb the stairs of her head and give a recitation at any time of day or night
.
She has a good strong pulse and a heart like a V-8 engine. She has found the secret to living underwater. She has found her own Little Chicken Farm and if she had the chance to do it all over again, she would not ask for a different life at all. She has loved her life. But what she would ask is to be born into a different world; she would ask for an honest and accepting world.
This is my letter to the world / That never wrote to me.
Damn right, Emily, damn right.

Notes about:
Suzanne O’Toole Sullivan

Born:
June 09, 1966
Died:
April 29, 2007 5:22 pm

Holderness, New Hampshire

Her house was filled with pink—ribbons and hats and sashes—and she faithfully wore the Red Sox cap her son gave her when she first got sick. She talked nonstop—telling stories and laughing or belting out a song—so that everyone in the room was put at ease. She had two young children and her bedroom was filled with their cards and drawings. She said that her husband didn’t know what to do, was not able to talk to her, and could only hold her hand in the most courteous way. He kissed her head as he did those of their children. They had not made love since her diagnosis and she suspected they never would again. Instead he brought her flowers every day and her first request when I arrived was that I please remove the dead and wilted ones. “I wish he could be himself again,” she said.

She grew up just an hour away and was a speech pathologist. She said she loved her work and had missed it. She grew up in a big family—the baby of six—and so she was used to lots of noise. Noise and sound were a comfort to her, but every now and then she liked to be all alone. She liked to be underwater—loved to scuba dive—and as a kid she had loved to hop bareback on her horse, Charlie, and ride and ride until all she was hearing was hooves and her own heart. She said her own children have no speech problems that she had heard but that her husband was someone who always tripped on
R
s with a
W
sound if he talked too fast, which lately—ever since she got sick—he had done constantly.

On this day, as soon as Michael (four) and Clarissa (seven) left the room, she began to let go. I reached for the phone to call her husband—it was time for him to get home—but she put her hand on mine and shook her head no. We could hear Bugs Bunny in the next room and she smiled when Elmer Fudd said “you wascal wabbit.” Her eyebrows lifted as she listened, the cartoon, the laughter, and finally there was the sound of the front door and a chorus of the kids running to greet her husband.

“I’m home,” he called. “I’m here,” and with the sound of him rushing to her, and the shrill laughter of their children, she let go.

And I let go in a way we are not supposed to do. I was so aware of myself as an outsider as I watched the three of them hover beside her, the children studying me the way they might an animal at the zoo. I was so aware of how this experience separated them from the rest of the world in a way that could not be touched. It just had to be sealed and, when possible, set aside in a very safe place. And heaven help the bighearted soul in their future who might be able to come in and fill the space and be a part of their lives. That’s what I was thinking. I was thinking too much about myself and so I failed the assignment. I broke so many rules. I got personal. I got attached. And what’s more, Suzanne Sullivan knew this; she was the person in control the whole while. She was the one protecting the rest of us. Bugs Bunny will always remind me. Bugs Bunny and red roosters and the high-pitched squeals of excited children, and if I ever again make love in a way that means something to me, I will be so grateful. I will not take it for granted.

[from Joanna’s notebook]

Suzanne Sullivan

Eh, what’s up, Doc? You wotten wabbit you. She doesn’t want to go. She does not want to go. She thinks of the sound waves words and laughter out of the television, through the doorway and down the hall, bending around the corner and into her room where the woman sits so fearfully you can smell her anxiety, you can hear it, a dull dreading, a dull thumping, rhythmic and deep like music. She hears the Beatles and Vivaldi and the
Sesame Street
song, jump rope rhymes and hymns and wind against the chimes hanging on their porch. Their porch. This is their house and they have children and a dog and Bugs Bunny has been there her whole life, never aging, never letting Elmer win, always fading out in that circle at the end of the show. The red rooster ran down the road. The wed woosta wan and wan and wan, birds and wings and keys and hooves, thumping and pounding, Charlie’s body wet beneath her as she races home, that glorious horse smell rising up, lingering when she leans forward and hugs his big strong neck, and all she can see is the green of the fields and the wide open sky and all she can hear is the pounding of hooves, galloping and galloping and galloping.

Rachel

R
ACHEL
S
ILVERMAN HIT A
point in her marriage when she knew that it was her only chance to leave. It was that clear to her, a passageway closing like an artery constricting or a door swinging and locking in place. It was only a matter of time before age and retirement, illness and diagnosis and necessary care, would shift the whole world like those here at Pine Haven who get moved into another building or wing—from living to assisted living to nursing care or the memory unit where they wander within the safety of a confined space. All of life builds and grows and then you hit the peak—often unaware that you have reached it—and then you start thinking about downsizing, down down down. One day you are independent and thriving and then you are bedridden and surrounded by the smells and sounds of those who will never venture outside again and all that falls between the two blurs like the view from a passing train. It’s why she wanders down the halls of the nursing unit every day, responding to the hands that reach for her, the cloudy tearful eyes, the cries and murmurs of nonsense, the stench of what’s left in a body and the sounds of medical equipment, bells and buzzers. This is also life. She comes and walks these halls to remind herself. This is life.

One day she was leaning out that apartment window, smooth young arms waving to acquaintances on the street below, and then there was an emptiness that she filled with Joe—years when she felt on the verge of leaving, changing, starting over—but then didn’t. She had missed her chance; one minute it seemed like there was plenty of time to decide and then there wasn’t.

She and Art were in the city, picking up groceries, getting things from the cleaners, chores they had done together for years and she saw it there in his stooped profile and sluggish turn. It was coming—something was coming—and her thoughts of how she would someday slip away and into another life were gone. Joe was already in her past; life had taken him back to his wife and children and there was no room for her. They had promised that they would keep meeting, stay in touch, but of course that was not possible.

But that day in the grocery, she glimpsed the end. It was one of those times in life when everything comes clear like a spotlight turning on. Art was not healthy, and though they had not made love in years, she did love him as a friend and as a human. She was a lot of things, but unkind was not one of them, and how could you leave someone in a weakened state. And sure enough she was right and then she was there—the doctors’ appointments and procedures and medicines, a long slow decline into those final days when it occurred to her that the window was about to fly open again. She had forgotten it could or that it ever would again and as people came to tell Art good-bye, cars lining the blocks surrounding their home in Lexington, the thought started to burn and glow every time someone whispered, “What will she do? Where will she go?” Interesting what feels like home. Nothing had felt right since that very first apartment in the city, and when Sadie suggests that they imagine themselves back in a place they used to inhabit, this is where Rachel goes first. She opens the windows of that front bay, hears the noises in the street, smells the river.

So the window was about to fly open again and then she knew. When Art died, she would leave and move as close to Joe as she could get. She wouldn’t care what anyone chose to do with her body or ashes at the other end, it was now that mattered, and when Art died, it was already decided what she would do next. He told her she had been a good wife and of course she resisted the urge to confess all the ways she had not. He told her he was sorry they never had children, sorry to leave her alone with no family whatsoever, and she didn’t scream about adoption as she had so many times through the years, didn’t remind him that
he
was the one who prevented a child coming into their lives. The fights and resentments of their whole marriage went away then, as if dissolving in the air around her, and she did feel the air change, just as the young woman who often sits bedside with the dying told her it does. Though Rachel would never tell a living soul, she booked her flight to North Carolina that very same day.

She went out for coffee and all the rest she would need to sit shiva and while she was out walked right into a travel agent’s office and made a reservation. It was a crazy thing and it made her feel both guilty and wonderful, but she’s sure to this day that was when her spine began shifting and dissolving, osteoporosis settling in. Punishment for her hurry? Punishment for not waiting until after his burial when she had carried out his last requests? He had told her very specifically what he wanted—the briefest time of shiva but within that time full observance of those rituals his parents and grandparents had honored. She draped the mirrors and removed her shoes. She left the door unlocked for friends and neighbors to come and go without knocking. Art had talked about how historically the death of someone presented a new way of telling time, a before and after; it was a time to catalog that life and ponder emotions like
guilt or shame or regret or anger.
It had been hard to look him in the eye as he said those words and it was even hard to recall them without flinching because already everything had shifted even though she cautioned and reminded herself how foolish it was to feel this way. After all, Joe was dead, too, yet in her mind it was like he would be there to greet her, that somehow the light and air of his childhood world would once again let her see and touch him. And though she also would hate to cave to superstition, it was hard for her not to believe that some foul joke had been played on her, weakening her spine in such a way that in a few more years she would likely be misshapen like so many others, left bent and staring into her own heart. All her life she was independent and proud of it, standing tall with her head held up high, and now she is rapidly being forced inward. For all of her outspokenness she had lived a lie and still is.