Read Online Life After Life by Jill McCorkle - Free Book Online Page B

with him she had the desire to keep him just a little bit longer. She had never given up the idea that he might say he loved her. Each time she had said the words, he only smiled. This time he said, You are my little girl. They were in the house where she had grown up, a small brick ranch on a corner lot, flat yard full of spindly pine trees and bee-filled azaleas. The hospital bed filled what had once been her bedroom, his choice. He wanted to die where his wife had died, and she—in her illness—had chosen that room in order to keep their room intact, so that he could go to bed in a normal way as she lay dying at the other end of the house. “It worked for a while,” he had told Joanna. “There were some mornings I woke and for just a second would not remember. I would just think she had gotten up early like she always did and was washing clothes or something.”
    Joanna held his hand and resisted asking the question she had asked so many times before: Why didn’t you call me? He always said she should have called them and then it all happened so fast. Her mother had back pain, that was all, and then they were told nothing could be done and she was dead in a month. “If she had asked me to call you, I would have,” he said. “But she didn’t and I didn’t want to cause her any more pain than she was already in.”
    Joanna allowed herself to imagine that her mother had wanted to see her, that if she had been able, she would have said something, sent a message. Luke had told her she had to let it go, let it go along with her realization that the night her mother died coincided with her own one-night stand with someone whose name she could not even remember, a journalist from somewhere in the Midwest who had a passion for Russian literature and talked about his ex-wife all night, just another lonely heart who stayed at a boring party too long. Why don’t I just go throw myself in front of a train? she said when she woke up in his strange hotel bed to hear him leaving sloppy messages on his wife’s answering machine. Let it go.
    She stared out the high narrow windows of what had once been her bedroom; as a child she had needed to stand on her bed or a chair to see out. Cars were passing the way they would on any normal Tuesday morning and the azaleas were blooming as they did every spring. A row of daffodils lining the concrete walk came up just as they had since she planted them at age five, her mother addressing the bulbs by their formal name—King Alfred—as she oversaw Joanna’s work, the depth of the hole, the teaspoon of bonemeal in each one. The years had left them spindly and bloomless, but there they were; in spite of everything, there they were. And that was when he died. She was thinking of those daffodils—King Alfred withered to a pauper—and the air in the room changed as it always does–sparked, clear, sudden—and with a last long sigh, he was gone.
    The longest and most expensive journey is the one to yourself. Luke liked to add that some people never even purchase a ticket, some only get halfway, some stand like Moses glimpsing the Promised Land, which he maintained was, for all practical purposes, about as good as getting there. Clear vision, he said, and then added, “like Visine or Vaseline or Clearasil,” so pumped with morphine by the end that his language was like some haystack of non sequiturs filled with golden needles, fragile bits of truth and wisdom she needed to collect. For a long time her mantra had been Fuck you from the bottom of my fucked-up heart, so clearly she had come some distance. California, New York, Chicago, New England. She did it all, but what she learned is that sooner or later you have to stop running, and when you do, the baggage comes slamming into you at freight train speed. She stopped running in New Hampshire four years ago, when she fell asleep assuming she’d be dead within the hour and then woke to the warm hand of a stranger and the distant wail of a