Free Life After Life by Jill McCorkle Page A

twirling the ropes over his head.
    He had been Houdini and she was his loyal assistant.
    Ladies and gentlemen. Now I will make this normal ordinary girl disappear.
    To disappear was her wish that night in New Hampshire. The night in Ben’s dorm room had meant nothing to him; it vanished into thin air and yet it haunted and weighed her down like a concrete sack of shit slung around her neck. She lay awake so many nights revisiting his hands on her body, his mouth grazing her skin, the words he half mumbled as he came and then collapsed, the warm wet weight of his body on hers. The haunting continued even as he ran ahead and never looked back.
    So she got married. It was just that easy to set off in the wrong direction. It was like finding a seat on the train—leg room and a place for your baggage—the comfort of knowing a stranger wouldn’t plop down beside you. Done. Finis. One door slammed. And the china and flowers are all a great distraction, the best sleight of hand.
    “Escape by matrimony,” Luke had said. “A very common vehicle in our society.” But the same can be accomplished with a job or a religion or a hobby, he added, and those things are easier to leave and change. People marry to change class, geography, luck, but when they stretch out at the end of the day, it’s still the same heavy hearts thudding along at their centers.
    She was such a liar—a bad liar—and a bad friend, not to mention a horrible wife, and when that felt too wrong to think about anymore she left their home near Stanford where he was a graduate student. She had never fit in in California and she had never been good at breaking up with people. She couldn’t even change her hairstylist or mechanic for fear of hurting their feelings. So she just left, the kind of abandonment that makes those left relieved to be done with her, and once the pattern was established it was easy to continue: a sociopathic actor who burned himself out before he even got started, like a dud firework smoldering in its base, temp jobs and temp relationships, whatever blew her way. She got a divorce by proxy and told him to keep all the things since it was such bad luck that he had married her in the first place. Enjoy the fondue pot and wok; hock the silver. Then she got the call that her mother died and everything really spiraled out of control. Someone she worked with talked her into attending a grief circle and that’s when, like magic, she met a real person—a really great guy—widowed with a two-year-old daughter and a newborn. She wasn’t in love with him, either, but by then she believed she was someone who would never be in love—what did that even mean?—and should just hope for the best; she trusted him and he was certainly the kind of person you should love—easy to love, in fact—and wouldn’t she grow to fall in love with him, and if not, wasn’t just plain old love enough? It worked for a while, too, long enough that she had begun to relax with it all, long enough that she called her dad and said she couldn’t wait to see him. “Grandkids,” she told him. “Poof! You have grandkids!” He listened, and it seemed the sealed tomb was starting to open only for her to then have to slam it closed again. She made a mistake that had hurt someone and now someone else’s mistake would hurt her. It was logical enough, but it didn’t feel very logical that afternoon in late October when he sat, head in hands and crying the same way he had done in those earliest meetings when he talked about his wife. Joanna knew what was coming even before she heard the words. She could smell the end. He said that she had been so wonderful, such a good friend and lifesaver to them all. He said he knew that she couldn’t possibly understand and yet she did. She stood there in the center of that kitchen they had just redone and pressed her palms against the cool granite island top. She had always wanted a kitchen like this, new appliances and yellow walls