Afterlife - Julia Alvarez Page 0,8

Que será, será. Mami again. Will all the dead be resurrecting now?

Back at the house, there’s a message on her machine. Do?ita, por favor, dígale a Mario que el coyote quiere mas dinero para soltarme. The girl’s voice is shaky. Then a man is shouting. You want us to release your girl, you better wire what you owe.

Antonia keeps dialing the number, but no one picks up.

What now? Does she drive back over and tell Mario? Didn’t he say he was all paid up except for the bus ticket? Maybe the coyotes are pissed Mario didn’t buy the door-to-door package? Who knows? Mario, Estela, José—they are all residents of dragon country, no man’s land beyond the gated communities of belonging.

Let sleeping dogs lie for now. Antonia has done all she can. But as she gets into bed, she feels unsettled as well as irritated, above all else with Sam for leaving her alone to do justice to the things they believed in.

You want me to be a better person, then come back and help me out, she addresses the darkness of their bedroom. She watches with hawk eyes for the slightest sign of some kind. The air circulator hums awake. The outdoor floodlights flash on—she can see the glow from her bedroom window. Sam had those movement lights installed, thinking they’d deter deer from getting in his garden. Trigger-happy, they turn on if a squirrel darts by. If the wind is coming strong from the north. Drives her batty. Worrying each time that it might be an intruder. And now, especially. Out in the fields surrounding her house, the coydogs have started up their howling, a haunting sound, but not otherworldly, just a part of the natural world.

Anything else you need? she had asked Mario, a throwaway question in the circles she runs in, but in some parts of the world, among the neediest, what has been thrown away elsewhere gets recycled, put to good use. The lights flash on again and again, then fade away. Tomorrow, which is already today, she will call the electrician who installed them to have them taken down. She wants outdoor lights she can turn off and on. The world is a crazy place. But she doesn’t need to be alerted each time a dragon comes close.

two

Where is Burkina Faso?

She waits until a light comes on in the trailer, Mario and José getting up for the first milking of the day. And to think: this happens before dawn every morning, with or without her insomnia to note it.

Wouldn’t it make a great book? She had mentioned it several times to Sam. Short chapters about the people who keep our world going? Invisible people we don’t even know about?

Invisible to whom? Sam had a way of asking questions that always stopped her short.

It would make a great book, Sam agreed once she explained.

Antonia has a pile of these ideas in a shoebox she used to keep in her office at the college. For students who said they had nothing to write about. Here, pick one, she’d offer. She misses them, her access to the young. Another downside to being childless, which, she read recently, is no longer the politically correct term. Nonparent carries no judgment. Childless mother, a former colleague called herself. Maybe others share her intense need to get the words right. But what if their right words sound wrong to her?

Is this what happens to an imagination in old age, a bag lady of great ideas, a snapped necklace, the beads scattering? Years later, she finds the odd trinket: a shiny blue bead with a hole through it. Where did it come from? A lost piece that has left something else incomplete. Along with the shoebox, Antonia has a tin for such findings. Years from now, the item it was a part of will surface, and she will supply the missing bit, making the thing whole again.

Could that possibly be what the afterlife amounts to: an eternity of re-memberings? Over to you, Sam. She talks to him in her head. You always liked being the one to know. But the afterlife has changed him. He no longer seems interested in having the last word.

* * *

She decides to walk over to her neighbor’s. If she drives, Roger will hear the car, come out, ask questions. He gets a whiff of any trouble and he’ll rescind the week of grace. Last time there were rumors of raids on Vermont farms, Roger dismissed his workers.