Free Life After Life by Jill McCorkle Page B

and a big window over the sink where she hung a finger painting from preschool. She had imagined family vacations to Disney and trips into the city to go to shows; she had even imagined the kids all grown when she would tell them the long and winding road that had brought her to them. They called her Mama and she had tuned her mind to the Parent Channel and was well versed in Mr. Rogers and the Muppets and Raffi. She bought healthy food and drove the nicest, safest car she had ever driven, a used Volvo he insisted she keep; she had gotten her hair shaped and highlighted in a high-end salon, and for the first time since leaving she had been looking forward to returning home, proud of who she had become.
    She assured him that she did understand. She told him that people do a lot of things in the name of grief. And then he asked the very hardest thing of her, that perhaps after a little weaning time, she let the kids go, she let this woman he was in love with be their mother. “I think it will be so much easier on them,” he said. “They’re so young. They’ll forget.” And she nodded mutely, the world thankfully fogged from her view of kids in the next room screaming and laughing. Mommy, Mommy . He promised to send her pictures of them. He promised to send her money. And she promised herself that she would get in the car and drive whatever way the wind blew. She didn’t want his money. There was no one expecting her. Why not just disappear?
    M OMMY, M OMMY, SHE thought there in the cold icy water. I don’t want to go to Europe. Shut up and keep swimming. Mommy, Mommy, I don’t want to see Daddy. Shut up and keep digging. She had never liked those jokes. And yet there they were.
    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.
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