Afterlife - Julia Alvarez

Prologue

Broken English

She is to meet him / a place they often choose for special occasions / to celebrate her retirement from the college / a favorite restaurant / and the new life awaiting her / a half-hour drive from their home / a mountain town / twenty if she speeds in the thirty-mile zone / Tonight it makes more sense / a midway point / to arrive separately / as she will be driving down from her doctor’s appointment / she gets there first / as he will be driving from home / he should have been there before her / she starts calling his cell / after waiting ten, twenty minutes / he doesn’t answer / irritation turns to worry / no surprise there / always leaves it behind in his work-jeans pocket / the hospital, 911, the police / Have you seen him? / or turns off the sound at the movies and then forgets to turn it back on / Can you please help me find him? / Even now, months later / about six feet, thinning hair, a boy’s blue eyes / when she knows good and well / dusk deepening / how he had been driving up the mountain / he feels a stab of pain / already thinking of what he might order / coming from his left side but radiating out / wondering about her state of mind / the special, if it is special / if she would be excited or terrified / or his default favorite, salmon with a lemon dill sauce / like a sword piercing his left side / substituting mashed potatoes for the fries—they’re very good about substitutions / though how would he know what it feels like to have a sword piercing his left side? / because of his medical training understanding what is happening / not wanting to cause more harm / pronounced dead on arrival / he forgets to charge it and it runs out of juice / Even now, three months shy of a year later / pulling his car off the road, rolling gently to a stop / when she knows exactly what happened / a ditch that might as well be his grave / discovered by a passing cyclist, rushed to the ER / why he was late / a ruptured aortic aneurysm / as he is to be cremated and therefore have no grave, per se / neither he nor she could have foreseen / even now / a boy’s blue eyes / and cannot comprehend how someone she loved / she keeps running and rerunning that night in her head / Can you please help me find him? / can be nothing but dust / unread emails, fragments, unpaid bills, memories / broken glass, dented bumper / a new life awaiting her / both terrified and excited / how can it be? / Can you help me find him? / a new life awaiting her / Can you help me find him? / a mystery she cannot by any means solve / nevertheless, she keeps asking / Where are you? / as this is the only way she knows / Can you help me find him? / how to create an afterlife for him /

one

Here there be dragons

Today, the magnet on her fridge proves prophetic: Even creatures of habit can sometimes be forgetful.

You said it, Antonia agrees. She has just poured orange juice into the coffee in the mug she brought back from one of the fancier hotels. Must have been a special occasion for Sam to have chosen to stay there and for her to have allowed the expense.

You’d think you were born with money in your family, she liked to tease him.

I never had it to begin with, so I’m not afraid to spend it, Sam responded. He was always quick with a comeback. Used to get him in trouble with his dad growing up. Being fresh, it was called back then. Oh, the stories he told her.

Sam spoiled her, or tried to, and got scolded as his thanks—but it was the kind of scolding that must’ve made him suspect she liked being made something of.

There’ll be no more of that now.

She is keeping to her routines, walking a narrow path through the loss—not allowing her thoughts to stray. Occasionally, she takes sips of sorrow, afraid the big wave might wash her away. Widows leaping into a husband’s pyre, mothers jumping into a child’s grave. She has taught those