Life After Life

by Jill McCorkle

Genres: Family Life; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

"Gorgeously written . . . McCorkle's greatest gift is in illuminating the countless tiny moments that make up our time on Earth."—O: The Oprah Magazine

Award-winning author Jill McCorkle takes us on a splendid journey through time and memory in this, her tenth work of fiction. Life After Life is filled with a sense of wonder at our capacity for self-discovery at any age. And the residents, staff, and neighbors of the Pine Haven retirement center (from twelve-year-old Abby to eighty-five-year-old Sadie) share some of life’s most profound discoveries and are some of the most true-to-life characters that you are ever likely to meet in fiction. Delivered with her trademark wit, Jill McCorkle’s constantly surprising novel illuminates the possibilities of second chances, hope, and rediscovering life right up to the very end. She has conjured an entire community that reminds us that grace and magic can—and do—appear when we least expect it. 

Jill McCorkle’s new novel, Hieroglyphics, is on sale June 9, 2020.

Release date: November 5, 2013

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Print pages: 368

Sample

Joanna

NOW JOANNA IS HOLDING the hand of someone waiting for her daughter to arrive. Only months ago, this woman—Lois Flowers—was one of the regulars in Pine Haven’s dining room where the residents often linger long after the meal for some form of entertainment or another. She was a woman who kept her hair dyed black and never left her room without her hair and makeup and outfit just right. She had her color chart done in 1981 and kept the little swatches like paint chips in the zippered section of her purse. She told Joanna that having your colors done was one of the best investments a woman could ever make. “I’m a winter,” she said. “It’s why turquoise looks so good on me.” She loved to sing and some nights she could convince several people to join in; other nights she simply stood in one corner and swayed back and forth like she might have been in Las Vegas singing everything she knew of Doris Day and Rosemary Clooney and Judy Garland. She loved anything Irving Berlin had ever written. Now she has forgotten everything except the face of her daughter, random lyrics, and that your shoes and purse should always match. Joanna has watched the daughter night after night leaning into her mother’s ear to sing—first upbeat (clang, clang, clang went the trolley). She always ends with one of her very favorites like “It Could Happen to You” or “Over the Rainbow” or “What’ll I Do?” Joanna—as ordered by Luke’s many rules—keeps a notebook with an entry on each of the people she sits with. She has to do an official one to turn over to the nurse who oversees her work, but this is a different, personal notebook she writes just after someone has died. It’s a notebook she bought and showed Luke to prove to him that she was taking his assignments seriously—a bright yellow college-ruled spiral-bound notebook, which was all she could find at the Thrifty Market there close to Luke’s house. It was near the end for him so she didn’t venture far. “This is my page,” he told her. “Everybody should get at least a page.” She writes what she knows: their names and birthplaces and favorite things. Sometimes she asks questions: What is your first memory? Your favorite time of day or holiday or teacher or article of clothing? How would you describe your marriage? Was there something you learned in your life that surprised you? She records the weather and season and last words if there are any. Luke said that this would be her religion, the last words and memories of the dying her litany. She should read and reread the entries regularly like devotionals. Keep us close, he said. Keep us alive. Don’t ever let us disappear.

THE LONGEST AND most expensive journey you will ever make is the one to yourself. Joanna’s life is blip blip blip like images on an old film projector that keeps sticking and burning. She’s been spliced a lot of times over the years, but finally she feels free—not perfect, not problem free, just free. No one likes to talk about the positive parts of getting older and aging into orphanhood, how with your parents you often bury a lot of things you were never able to confront or fix or let go of.

She has spent long hours discussing this with C.J., a girl most likely not to be Joanna’s best friend, and yet she is. C.J. is half her age, punk and pierced and tattooed with a baby boy whose father she won’t discuss—not yet at least. C.J. is beautiful and so unaware of it, long legs and hazel eyes and a beautiful dark complexion that leaves people perplexed and wondering about her ethnicity. It seems she might even be perplexed herself and camouflages herself with tattoos and loose clothing and colors of hair dyes that are not natural to any race.

C.J. claims to have lots of secrets, lots of ghosts, and she says she writes down all the bad stuff in her journal, which she calls Pandora’s Box, and hides it there in the best security safe of all. She said she made a special trip to Costco to buy her “safe deposit box”—a mega-sized box of Kotex, which she then positioned at the back of her linen closet with “the sentry” placed in front: Monistat and Vagisil and all kinds of douches. She said it was a security system easily tested in the checkout line, the man next to her going from way too warm to icy cold in minutes. She said if there were any doubt, a good scratch in the right place would really get rid of someone you weren’t interested in.

“If something ever happens to me,” she once told Joanna, “everything you need to know is in the journal in the giant Kotex box at the back of the linen closet and you can have everything I own, even Kurt—especially Kurt.” Joanna told her that if anything ever happened to her, she had a fake book, Darwin’s Descent of Man, that opens and holds important papers. She also has a fake can of Campbell’s tomato soup. The bottom screws off and someday when she makes lots of money, that’s where she plans to keep some for security. “You can have that and the Dog House,” Joanna told her.

Like Joanna, C.J. has done a lot of different things. She has cleaned houses and read palms and groomed dogs and now grooms the elderly—hair, hands, toes—at Pine Haven and leads them in a few activities and exercises. She rents the little apartment over the Dog House and in exchange for sometimes opening or closing, Joanna babysits her son, Kurt. Joanna’s only rule as a landlord is no candles since she herself has had a couple of house fires as a result of purification rituals. “That would do it,” C.J. said, and laughed when the rule was explained and adjusted her lip ring, which she always removes before going to work. “I’ll come up with another way to purify.”

Joanna wasn’t there for her mother, but she was there for her dad and seeing him through those last days allowed her to let go herself. Being there may prove to be the greatest gift of her life. And of course none of that would have happened without Luke and Tammy.

In her work, Joanna has learned the importance of making peace. She sees it all the time, the stubborn child who won’t come to the bedside and so the parent lasts far longer than should be asked of anyone. It is painful to watch, and for this reason she feels lucky to have journeyed her way back to this place. Her dad wanted her to promise to keep the the Dog House running and now she is doing her best, opening and closing and hiring responsible people to work the place, so she can devote herself to the volunteer hospice hours she gives over in Pine Haven’s nursing wing.

“Make their exits as gentle and loving as possible,” Luke had said. “Tell them how good it will be, even if you don’t believe it yourself. You’re southern, you know how to do that.” And now family members greet and embrace her like she is one of them. Lung. Brain. Breast. Uterus. Pancreas. Bone. The families discuss and explain the symptoms and diagnoses for her as if they have never been heard of before, have never happened to anyone else, and she listens. Mistakes are made in the telling and she does not correct them. It is important to remain separate, to allow them to claim the disease, claim their grief. It is important not to get too attached or personally involved. Sometimes, when family members are naming the tests and the symptoms and prognosis, she allows herself to imagine her mother, getting the news and then driving home. Actively deciding what to do next but not calling her. But Joanna can go only so far with that or she’ll undermine her purpose in the present. She is there, compassionate and listening, guiding the patients to talk and tell their stories if inclined but knowing when to step back into the shadows of the drapes or a closet door so family members get their time. She knows how to disappear.

Relatives show her all the old photos and letters; they tell her of accomplishments and regrets and then afterward, they drift away, her presence like something from an old dream, a reminder of their grief and loss. Sometimes they see her in the grocery or hardware store or when they drive up to the Dog House, and they can’t help themselves, their eyes well up and words get choked. Like Pavlov’s dogs, they react to her presence. It makes her think of poor Harley, the docile old orange cat at Pine Haven with enough poundage to warm even the coldest circulation-free feet, only now all of the residents are terrified of him because of the story in a recent news broadcast about a cat who chose to curl up beside whoever was most likely to die. The reports speculated how the cat knew. Did he sense something? Did he smell some chemical release of a body shutting down? His track record was convincing enough that the people who worked in that particular place paid attention to where he spent his time and the story told was convincing enough to ruin poor Harley’s life there at Pine Haven. Once he was the most beloved and coveted creature in the place, and now he is greeted by shrieks and screams—slippers and plastic cups tossed his way. He is just a reminder of what is coming, a feline representation of Joanna herself, the one who appears bedside at the end and massages their cold darkening feet.

Now Lois Flowers’s daughter, Kathryn, comes rushing into the room, a look of relief to find her mother still there. She is wearing her name tag from Bank of America where she is a teller. She nods at Joanna, no need for words. Joanna has already told her there isn’t much time. Lois Flowers has not opened her eyes in eighteen hours, but her breathing does change when Kathryn’s cheek is pressed against hers. “She’s listening,” Joanna says. “She knows you’re here.”

Before Lois stopped talking, she always asked Kathryn how school was and did she have homework. Joanna offers her seat and goes to stand by the window. It is important to be present and also allow people space and privacy. Outside the sun is shining and the roses are in full bloom. Mr. Stanley Stone and his son, Ned, are sitting on a bench talking. They were the first family Joanna worked with when she moved back. Mrs. Stone was dying and everyone in the family remained separate and distant. They lived up to the family name, though these days, the son, Ned, always says hello and acts like he wants to say more to her. Ned was several years ahead of her in school and then went to military school so she never really knew him. She’s heard all the sad stories people think of when they see him, though, and now add his father’s dementia on top of everything else. Mr. Stone walks the halls of Pine Haven, often insulting those who make eye contact. Now Ned Stone is leaning forward, his head in his hands while his dad stands in front of him shaking his fist.

“Mama? Mama, it’s me,” Kathryn says. “It’s Kathryn.”

Kathryn strokes the hair back from her mother’s face and leans in close. She tells her mother how much she loves her and what a good mother she has been. She tells her about a new pair of shoes she just bought and how she got them for half price and what a beautiful June day it is. “Clang, clang, clang went the trolley,” she sings, and then stops, closes her eyes, and presses her cheek against her mother’s. She sits smoothing her mother’s hair, shaking her head in disbelief that she is here in this moment. How can it be? her expression seems to ask. It’s an ordinary Friday morning and Joanna cannot help but imagine what it would have been like if she had had the chance to be with her own mother, to lean in close and whisper good-bye, and in that moment there is a change in the air, and in that moment, they all come back to her, all the last days and last words and last breaths. Kathryn whispers the words, What’ll I do—when—you . . . and then it is time; without a word, everything changes and they know that it is time.

Notes about: Lois Elizabeth Malcolm Flowers

Born: July 14, 1929 Died: Friday, June 7, 2010, at approximately 10:35 a.m. Pine Haven Retirement Facility Fulton, North Carolina

It was a warm sunny day, drapes fully opened to let all the light in, just as Lois Flowers always requested. The room was comfortable; somehow in spite of all the stark nursing apparatus, the room was as warm and welcoming as Lois herself. On the very first day, she invited me in and told me how lovely it was to have me there. Not the ideal situation, she said, but still lovely to see you. She said she had not known my parents well but sure did like those hot dogs my dad made, especially the Chihuahua because whoever heard of putting hot salsa on a plain old hot dog? Lois Flowers loved music and she loved fashion. She had a subscription to Vogue that had never lapsed in over forty years. “You could never get away with outfits like that here in Fulton,” she said. “But it is important to know what folks are wearing elsewhere.” She loved turquoise and the way people complimented her when she wore it. “I’m a winter,” she liked to say, and referred often to a folder labeled “Personal Color Harmony” and all the little color samples within. She never went shopping for clothes or lipstick without it. Her favorite holiday was Halloween because she loved to see children having so much fun, but mainly because she liked a good excuse to wear orange even though her chart said that winters do not wear orange well. She decided that even if she looked horrid, so what? It was Halloween, but, she said, I looked quite striking in an orange alpaca sweater and black gabardine slacks. It’s the one time the chart got it wrong. She still had the orange sweater and insisted that I take it and promise to wear it every October 31. She gave her daughter, Kathryn, the newer Halloween sweater, a honey-colored cashmere with black cat and witch hat buttons. Kathryn is a true autumn and that sweater is perfect for her, she said. You can see why I want everything perfect for her. She suggested I rethink the way I wear my hair and then put a hand to her mouth and apologized for such a rude remark. “This is all new,” she told me. “This way I say things I don’t mean to say,” and I was able to assure her that I completely understood and that I am reconsidering what to do with my hair. She smiled and blew me a kiss. She said, how about some golden highlights and something layered to give body?

She had matchbooks from every nice restaurant she had ever gone to. Her favorites were Tavern on the Green and Windows on the World. She said she loved eating in New York City. She said her husband teased her that all it took for her to love a restaurant was for it to be in New York City and have lots of windows and a preposition in the name. She told Kathryn she needed to get back there, that they should take a trip and see a show. When told that both restaurants were gone, she held a firm position that she still needed to go there. “And so do you!” she said, always pulling me into the conversation. “And if there’s not a young man in your life” (she asked me often if I had met anyone interesting), she said that I should just go alone. “Women do that now,” she said. “A woman can go wherever she wants right by herself.”

Once, while her husband and Kathryn were out at the County Fair, Lois Flowers burned her Maidenform bra in a hibachi in their backyard. When her husband asked what’s that smell? she said she had no earthly idea. She said it made her feel connected to something big and important, that she stood there in the backyard and pretended she was at a rally in New York City. She never told him what she had done, even when she saw him studying the ashes and what looked like a scrap of nylon. She had never even told anyone about it until that day; she said, I have always felt liberated.

Her last words were to Kathryn, spoken two days before she died. “Honey, do you have homework?” She had asked that question hundreds of times over the years and if Kathryn did not have homework, the two of them went shopping. Lois Flowers loved her daughter and she loved to shop. Kathryn said that all of their important conversations took place during those little shopping trips. What to expect when you start your period. Why you got that bad grade. Why a sassy mouth is not a good thing. How your reputation is your most prized possession. Why you should always do your best. Why good hygiene is a must. What boys do and do not have good sense about or control over. These topics were often whispered over the lunch counter at Wood’s Dimestore where Kathryn got a cherry Coke or a milkshake and Lois got a cup of black coffee, her red lipstick staining the fat lip of the heavy white mug. Sometimes they ate pie or got a hot dog and always they were flanked with a bag or two of things they had found to buy over at Belk or the Fashion Bar or Smart Shop. “I can’t wait to get home and see what all we got,” Lois would say many times, and Kathryn said that once home, her mother kept the excitement going for many more hours with a fashion show and then talk of all the places Kathryn would go to wear the new things and all the wonderful things that would happen as a result. “Her predictions were not often right,” Kathryn said. “But she was sincere.”

I hugged my orange alpaca sweater close as I waited there with Kathryn. I wanted to tell her how lucky she was to have had such a relationship with her mother, but it was clear that she knew this. She held firmly to her mother’s hand for as long as she was able, and then when the men came to take her mother away, she reached for my hand as we followed them out. I will miss them both very much.

[from Joanna’s notebook]

C.J.

(Carolina Jessamine)

SPEAKING OF THINGS NEVER to tell your kids: How about where you were fucking at the time of conception? How about that? Or how about what everything costs? It costs this to feed you and that to clothe you. I wish I could send you to summer camp, but it costs too much and so does a bike and so does a house that looks worth a shit. Even the best intentions (the shitty day camp through the recreation department and the jeans that are the copy of what everybody else is wearing) still leaves you feeling like an undesirable—an unwanted thing to be put in the next room while all the Mr. Wrongs come and go, like anybody even believes there is a Mr. Right. Her mom once had a date with a Mr. Wright and what a joke that was. Yeah, whatever. Fuck your brains out. She didn’t say it but that’s what she was thinking.

Her name is Carolina Jessamine, named for a native vine—close kin to Confederate jasmine, both hardy thriving plants that will take over a structure in no time at all. You want to hide something ugly, just plant jasmine and then watch the ugly thing disappear. Her name is beautiful or so people say but maybe they wouldn’t say that or think it if they knew how she got it—one of those things she shouldn’t know, but her mother was too stupid or too unaware or something to know better. Her mother was fucking in the arboretum, right over there where C.J. goes out to smoke every day on her break. Her mother is buried just beyond the very spot—talk about never going anywhere, talk about a really small and limited life. Her mother told her that the whole time she was making love in the arboretum, she was staring up at that beautiful lush vine and the little silver tag that named it: Carolina Jessamine.

Wow, thanks, Mom. If her father—unknown creature that he is—had only flipped her over and fucked her from behind, C.J. might be named Splitbeard Bluestem or Hairgrass or Common Phlox. Talk about too much information. And did her mother even tell her about the plants beyond that? The purpose the splitbeard bluestem serves to control erosion, the silvery seed heads bursting to hold on and take root and never leave or the brackish-loving hairgrass on underground runners, popping up unexpectedly like a bad nosy neighbor. It made her think of what it must look like down below, the moles and voles tunneling along; it made her think of learning all about the Underground Railroad, people escaping, disappearing, resurfacing into a whole new place and life. It makes her inhale a long deep breath just to even imagine it. Now the crossvine is in bloom, orange and red trumpets straining for sunlight. She takes one of those good cleansing breaths Toby talks about when they try to get people to do yoga and it is peaceful, a whole roomful of old folks breathing deeply and chanting—one sounding like a sewing machine and another a squirrel.

One billion angels could come and save her soul. She loves that song and might have it tattooed around her wrist when she saves some money. Then later she could add: Please, don’t leave me here around her ankle.

But her mother did leave her. She didn’t give a shit. And the longer C.J. lives, the more amazed she is at how little of a shit so many people really give beyond their own little orbits. It makes her laugh to think of Stanley Stone who just the other day suggested to Marge Walker that she give everybody a break and come stare into his navel for a while instead of her own. These old guys are crazy, but there are some good ones. Better than what she had in a mother.

And Joanna is a good friend for sure. There’s somebody who lived to tell the tale, turned it all around. Her mother could have done that, too, but of course she didn’t. She didn’t have the courage. It is hard to even think about her mother, to picture her. Once upon a time she was beautiful and the pictures of her as a young girl would have surpassed anyone in this town, but it doesn’t take long to age when you’re poor and abuse your body. You can go from young and beautiful to looking like shit, like that dried-up potato chip Toby is always talking about. That was C.J.’s mom, the dried-up undesirable chip at the bottom of the bag, and by killing herself she made sure C.J. wouldn’t have it any better or would have to work like hell to even get a chance. And now here she is, twenty-six years old, and she has done just about everything there is you can do without any college education. She has waited tables and scrubbed houses and washed the old flaky, filthy hair of the elderly. She cuts their old hard nails and doesn’t say a word about skin so dry and hard it could cut you and old yellowed nails you need a chainsaw to get through. “Does that feel good, sweetie?” she will ask while rubbing lotion into their old worn-out feet. Some call them Pat and Mike. Some call them the old dogs. One calls them her little tootsies.

“Does that feel good?” She has asked that question often enough. An easy thing to do, and there was a time when she did it to get what she needed and wanted. Some people might call it prostitution or whoring, but she figured it was no different from what a lot of women are doing right there in their little married houses. Hmmmm, I really want to go on that trip, so let’s fuck him good and hard tomorrow night between Lost and the late news. That’ll be good for something. She has worked as assistant to a local caterer and so she has heard plenty. The girls in the black pants and white tops are invisible as they reach and fill the glasses, especially a girl like her whose skin color is questionable. What are you? people want to ask. Are you part Indian? Are you Hispanic? Her tattoos don’t show in the long sleeves and she wore no earrings or bracelets to those events, her hair pulled back in a tight ponytail. After a few passes of the glasses on silver trays, she was totally invisible, nothing more than a hand there to serve.

“What did you have to do to get him to buy you that?” one woman asked, her voice shrill and girlish and they all leaned in close.

“He gets a blow job on his birthday and that’s it.” Giggles. Acknowledgment. Amen.

“What about Valentine’s? I do birthday and Valentine’s Day.”

And what they don’t know is how the men do notice when you fill the glasses. Some mumble so you have to step close, but take note. They don’t mumble with other men. They don’t mumble with their wives. One followed her to the kitchen and down the basement stairs where the wine was kept. “I’ve never made love in a wine cellar to a beautiful young woman,” he slurred, and she told him that today wasn’t looking so fucking good either and she pushed him aside and got herself back into daylight and fresh air as quickly as possible.

Sometimes at cleaning jobs, she turned on the TV for company. This was before she got pregnant with Kurt and she was all alone. She liked the Spanish channel. She doesn’t know a word of Spanish other than hola, but it was easy to know what was happening. You’d be an idiot not to get it. She was taking a break and watching that Spanish soap opera, the man meeting his mistress while the wife was in a coma in the hospital. And then the real man was right there in the real house looking at her, and his wife was not in a coma at the hospital but shopping for their upcoming tropical vacation. And she could see right through that window. She had felt him watching her before and finally she ended up saying, I don’t do windows, but I can do you. The beginning. And actually it was a good beginning, or it seemed good. It felt good, and she even let herself imagine such a life, to imagine the safe draping warmth of someone who gives a shit, a suitcase packed for a tropical vacation.

She worked for a living. She worked to live. And what scrutiny of her performance. Her performance was discussed openly, her name and number passed along from hand to hand, the same hands holding their glasses out for a refill from the faceless no name with the bottle. She’s real good, they say. Who’s your girl? they ask. Who do you use? The key word is use, isn’t it? So often that’s the key word. But once they decide a girl is good, then she is invisible and she can scrutinize them. They sit at their computers or in front of their mirrors and leave little notes before dashing off to the next stop.

And then the girl is left to look and plunder their things. How open their lives are. The box of condoms that never gets touched, week after week after week there in his top drawer, which is always left open for you to close. The thousands of tubes of things that promise to make her look better. The shoes heaped in the closet and invitations crowding the fridge—so many addresses she recognized where she had also knelt before the great porcelain altar and scrubbed their shit and piss and vomit, swept free all those loose hairs.

Real clean people are often overcompensating for some really bad shit and really dirty people just don’t care. Which is worse? Flip a coin.

One thing she learned is that there are a lot of men who made it a point to swing by the house while she was there. Some of them remembered her mother. Some of them complimented her. They said how she knew their houses better than their wives did. One said how she knew his body much better than his wife did. She knew their secrets. It wasn’t hard. On that soap opera, the mistress was scorned. That was not hard to do at all and it was also not smart to do. Now that man was scared. He was thinking: I can’t win. Ding, ding, ding—you are absolutely correct, Bob, you can’t fucking win. He won when his wife hired her. He won the first time he ever ripped her clothes off and threw her there on the master bedroom bed and fucked the living daylights out of her. Oh yes, does that feel good? He never had it so good. She was a tool—his favorite tool—right in there with his putter and Weed Eater and espresso maker, the high-tech blender for the margaritas she never got offered. So sure, go ahead, bring your scrawny white ass on and fuck me; it won’t mean one goddamned thing.

The perfect affair is kind of like the perfect murder. Unlikely. There are always telltale signs. There are always bread crumbs—even the most minuscule—leading to the main event. Sometimes she cleaned everything up and sometimes she didn’t. Or doesn’t. Sometimes she doesn’t.

Nothing is free. That’s what she likes to say and truth is she is a real good deal compared to what they’ve got and are paying for. She watched one woman coming and going, so curious as to how she could be so unaware, slinking about in leggings designed for a teenager—a woman way too old to be sporting camel toe—but there she was doing it and maybe that was what first hooked him, cheap pussy, though not cheap for long. Get that ring and slip of pape. . .