Afterlife

by Julia Alvarez

So, how are you? Vivian wants to know, her voice tinged with concern. I’m okay, Antonia replies, a tad too quickly to be totally convincing. But Vivian doesn’t probe further. The landscape of grief is not very inviting. Visitors don’t want to linger. The best thing you can do for the people who love you is to usher them quickly through it. She does not want to become “poor Antonia.”

But either way, the plane is going to crash. So why not tender a little kindness before she, too, is a body in a ditch on the side of the road, availing herself of whatever afterlife will be afforded in somebody else’s head, if that? Unlike Sam, who can enjoy his afterlife romping through her head, Antonia will not have Sam to keep her alive in his imagination.

One of these days is here. Sam has left her, but not in the way she had feared. Don’t be so sure he isn’t getting something out of it, her therapist had said, shaking her head, full of her own certainties. Have you ever asked yourself why he married you? Here’s a thought, the therapist had offered, as if setting a piece of merchandise down on the counter for Antonia to consider buying. Maybe you are the one carrying the doubts in the relationship? Maybe your husband needs the balance of a highly sensitive wife? Maybe Sam isn’t all that sure himself where Burkina Faso lies?

The first rule of sisterhood: Always act pleased to see them.

Sometimes it feels as if only together are they a whole person—referred to reverentially as “the sisterhood.”

Tilly’s role. She is the doer—whether

Apparently, they’ve divvied up the skills in the sisterhood. You need something done, funeral meats and cheeses set out on the table after a memorial service—that’s where Tilly shines. In emotional anguish—you aren’t sure what you want, whether to leave or not leave your philandering husband, throw in the towel on a friendship, call Izzy. For answers of the miscellaneous kind—the perfect breed of dog, the real estate market, the best shampoo for thinning hair, Mona’s your gal.

So, what can Antonia contribute to the sisterhood? Its pundit, with a head full of quotes? Its nervous system, as a highly sensitive person? But all the sisters are nervous types, high strung. Whoever she will be now, she knows better than to trespass into another sister’s domain. Honor thy sister’s turf, another of the rules of the sisterhood.

It’s Antonia’s birthday tomorrow, first one without Sam. You deserve to be spoiled. Deserve, mi-sherve, Antonia scoffs. The verb annoys her—the whole idea that you are entitled to special treatment, a sense of grievance when life doles out to you what it doles out to everybody: mortality, sorrow, loss.

We love each other as we are, Tilly brags. Some people would say that’s a definition of Christianity, Antonia points out to get a rise from her sister. Go to hell, Tilly curses.

Remember at the memorial? Izzy hadn’t appeared, so they started the service without her. When she finally did arrive, she couldn’t sit still, roaming around the church, taking pictures on her cell phone, a closeup of the candles burning, of the flowers, of the minister at the lectern. Mona had to escort Izzy back to their pew, but Izzy broke loose, climbed up to the choir loft in the back of the church to take photos

of the tops of everybody’s head. What Sam sees now, she captioned the photo she texted to her sisters, and then just as the minister was concluding, We all go down to the dust but even at the grave we make our song, alleluia, alleluia—almost as if Izzy had timed it, with that uncanny aptness of the crazed—pings went off on her sisters’ phones in the congregation.

They need to be together and rescue Izzy, get her back on track. Sixty-six and living like a burnt-out hippie in other people’s houses. And now that she might have sold her own, she’ll be even more rootless. She needs grounding, a home, a companion, medication.

Tilly and Antonia are a good team, the two middle-sister workhorses, making

Mona and Tilly gossip on the drive to Happy Valley Road. Tilly has scaled back on her catering. Mona is shifting her therapy practice to just dogs. No, no, no. Not a therapist for dogs, but a therapist using dogs with trauma victims. The kids are fine, Tilly recounts. A big contract. A new house. A hard time juggling motherhood with a full-time job. Promotions, demotions, the stock market of life. The grandkids are incredible, beautiful, bright, destined for glory, as all grandkids are. (Antonia wouldn’t dare say so, but it does seem all her friends who are grandparents and in every other way modest boast unabashedly about their extraordinary grandchildren. Who is having the unremarkable babies anymore? she’d ask Sam after a dinner party in which cell phone videos of little Sophie or Olivia or Timothy made the rounds at the table.) Their only flaw is they do not speak Spanish. What a shame. Or German, Kaspar puts in from the front seat. Monolinguals, he mutters, as if it were a vitamin deficiency that will come back later to haunt them.

Tilly clears the dinner plates, insisting everyone stay put, and after much clattering, and a quiet hiatus in which the side door creaks open—Tilly stepping out for a smoke, no doubt—she returns, bearing a wedding-size cake, blazing with what must be two dozen candles. Feliz cumpleaños, she sings, and Mona and Kaspar join in. Make a wish! they all insist. Antonia closes her eyes, her first birthday without Sam, Izzy missing, the shooting in Christchurch, the dark mood ambushes her again. She lets out the sob she cannot contain, tears streaming down her cheeks. Mona and Tilly swoop to her side, alarmed. ¿Qué te pasa? ¿Qué te pasa? All it takes is one sister, and soon, they are all bawling. Never remain dry-eyed when a sister is crying: another rule of the sisterhood.

The narrow path, the narrow path, she keeps pulling herself back. His burden is his, Mario’s and Estela’s theirs, and hers is hers. But Antonia is having trouble keeping everybody separate. O, that way madness lies; let me shun that, she reminds herself. It has always worked, a guardrail of the best that has been thought and said. Culture is a great help out of our present difficulties; she recalls a discussion over Matthew Arnold’s essay. Her senior seminar looked doubtful. Kids raised on medications for attention deficits, anxiety, mood and behavior disorders. Meanwhile Antonia has read her Arnold; taken daily doses of her favorite poems, novels, plays; practiced meditation on and off for years.

The sisters check in with Officer Morgan or one of his colleagues several times a day. They’ve downloaded the Missing Person Checklist from outpostforhope.org. Made all the recommended phone calls, and then some: to family members, friends, former workplace, though Izzy hasn’t been employed for the past couple of years. It turns out she was fired from the Spanish-language mental health practice she helped start. Something about Izzy not keeping sufficiently clear professional boundaries—at one point even hosting an ad hoc refugee camp in her basement, bereft abuelitas mourning their disappeared children and grandchildren. Izzy did get some sort of severance/disability package, and while they were still alive, a monthly allowance from their parents. She also recently sold her house, so there’s that little stockpile, which is what she must be using to buy abandoned properties in Western Mass. Back in Boston, where she has been living, she seems to have been camping out with one friend or another, but then falling out with them and moving on. Only one friend, Maritza, recently heard from her. Izzy asked her to join the board of the Migrant Centro de Arte. I didn’t have the heart to say no, Maritza explains.

Finally, after clinging to each other for over a week, and still no word from Izzy, the sisters come up with a plan. Mona will fly to Boston, lay over there for a few days, make a report at the local police department, talk to Maritza as well as Izzy’s former neighbors, colleagues, old friends. Meanwhile, Tilly will drive the route their sister might have taken, put up posters at service stations and rest stops along the way. She has already taped one to her car, a shock to see Izzy’s face blazoned on the side of Tilly’s Toyota, as if their sister were running for office or advertising her arts center.

What else to do now before they part? Last on the Missing Person Checklist is: hire a private investigator. They interview several retired detectives whose names keep cropping up on the missing persons websites.

As she drives by the farm, Antonia wonders how the Estela-Mario reunion has gone. On and off, she has thought of them. Did Estela catch the bus east? Who did Mario enlist to pick her up at the Burlington bus station? What is the living situation like? Has Roger relented? Antonia could turn into his place, park in front of the trailer, knock and ask, ¿Cómo están? But this would be to encourage an ongoing dependency, which, like Officer Morgan with his reading, Antonia just doesn’t have the energy for right now.

Remember to take care of the caretaker, Outpost for Hope included on its downloadable checklist for families of missing persons. You’re entitled to a little TLC yourself. Antonia is missing two of the people she most loved in the world. Still, she dislikes these back-patting encouragements, entitled, deserve. You need a little me-time, a former colleague had recommended to Antonia when they bumped into each other in town. It smacks of a privileged mindset that believes itself exempt from the ills the rest of the world has to contend with. Antonia recalls the reporter in front of a devastated neighborhood in post-Katrina New Orleans noting with astonishment: We’re used to scenes like this in Haiti or Africa, but this isn’t supposed to happen here. Antonia played the clip to her

classes. Does suffering hurt less if you’re poor? she asked the room f...

And what good does that do anyone? She imagines Sam dismissing her easy exonerations. And maybe that is how he will keep coming back: periodically breaking through the firewalls of her narrow path with his insights, suggestions, questions.

A girl or maybe a woman, hard to tell. The eyes are luminous pockets in her brown face, the black hair with strands escaping from the long braid. She seems to have been napping, and Antonia’s unexpected arrival has startled her awake.

¿Eres Estela? The girl offers the slightest nod, her voice muffled, so it’s difficult to make out what she is saying. Something about having no one, no place to go. Es que estoy sola.

It’s not a crime to be lonely.

But he doesn’t have the language or know-how to negotiate the medical bureaucracy, which has eluded Antonia herself since she went on Medicare. The entrails of the health care system, a phrase she has come to associate with the whole dysfunctional federal government, a stinky coil of stomach, small intestine, bowel (the three branches), none of them working properly.

Little by little the girl explains the fix she is in. She was not evicted by el patrón. It’s Mario who wants nothing to do with her.

How different her behavior at this moment from her docility in the Illinois station with Officer Morgan. Sam often noted that Antonia got a lot bossier in Spanish. The minute they touched ground in the DR, a more self-assured self took over. But in English, even after years of education and employment, the worm of self-doubt still eats away at the core of her certainties.

We’re going to have to work with a lot of jerks if we want to find our sister, Antonia reminds Mona. She, too, is finding it increasingly difficult to keep up her faith in people, in herself. In the past when her own stash got this low, there was always Sam filling up her cup with his abundant kindness. She has continued to think a lot about the afterlife, especially in the absence of any sign from Sam. What, if anything, does it mean? An afterlife? All she has come up with is that the only way not to let the people she loves die forever is to embody what she loved about them. Otherwise the world is indeed depleted. Sam: always thinking the best of people. Izzy: casting her bread upon the waters. Generosities of which Antonia was often the lucky recipient. But what is she thinking? Izzy is not dead.

What is the right thing to do? An old quandary, and the older she gets, the more she realizes she still hasn’t figured it out. Tolstoy had it right in that story she used to teach about the three questions: What is the best time to do things? Who is the most important one? What is the right thing to do? Funny how Antonia remembers the questions but can’t for the life of her remember if Tolstoy provided any answers.

Later, at her laptop, recalling Estela’s blank look, Antonia Googles the Spanish for giving birth, dar a luz. Is it not used in Mexico? According to one of the websites, aliviarse is the working-class term. Dar a luz was used originally to refer to the Virgin Mary giving birth to the light of the world, a euphemism the upper classes appropriated, a more polite way of referring to a lady’s parturition. Antonia had often bragged to Sam about the poetry of her native language, the beautiful way, for example, that Spanish had of referring to giving birth: dar a luz, “give to the light.” That intense need to get the words right. But even the beauties of language, of words rightly chosen, are riddled with who we are, class and race, and whatever else will keep us—so we think—safe on the narrow path.

The best thing you can give the people who love you is to take care of yourself so you don’t become a burden on them.

So, is this the afterlife? Everything black or white? A heavenly court with St. Peter as judge. Yes or no. No complications.

How much power does Antonia really have? Talk about powerless! She has lost her husband; her sister is missing. And behind these untimely losses, the timely ones, the whole flank of buffering elders, parents, tías, tíos, who have died in the natural progression of things, but still, natural or not, they leave behind holes in the heart, places of leakage where Antonia feels the depletion of spirit, the slow bleed of chronic grieving. Language used to be good at stanching the flow, the intense—call it desperate—need to get the words just right. But more and more words are inadequate . . . a raid on the inarticulate with shabby equipment, the poet wrote about writing, his lines showing no signs of inadequacy.

Go take a warm bath, she instructs the girl. I’ll put together some things for you. Estela nods, the obedient girl who will not be straying from the narrow path again anytime soon.

But they disturb Antonia. The girl, the two boy-men, the world of impending doom in which they and others like them live. Antonia has veered from her narrow path. Looked over the guardrail at the reflection on the water below. As in a dream, faces shift into each other: Izzy’s, Sam’s, the face of the girl she is leaving behind, her own. Who is the most important one?

Rilke has this wonderful insight, the therapist widow is saying. She doesn’t want to mess it up. Give her a second to find the quote. The sound of turning pages and the woman reads, Death does not wound us without, at the same time, lifting us toward a more perfect understanding of this being and of ourselves.

The best thing we can give the people who love us is to take care of ourselves so we don’t become a burden on them.

Antonia is soaking wet. On the narrow path. Every self-help podcast advises her to take care of herself first. But the objects in the mirror come closer.

So did Tilly and Mona when Izzy called them up to complain about your sister Antonia, always raining on our parades.

What’s he supposed to do? He glares at Antonia as if it’s her doing, this Scylla-Charybdis predicament he is in.

Antonia didn’t know what to say: she didn’t want to dismiss Izzy’s need for professional help. But she also didn’t want her sister to feel damaged and diminished in any way. Who can speak to this? she addressed the pack of writers in her head whose work she had studied, taught, treasured, random lines spinning daily through her thoughts. Come on, guys! One of you, step up to the plate now. “Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased? Pluck from the heart a rooted sorrow?”

Beth Trotter’s message flashed on the screen. Estela in labor!

But the temptation lasted only a minute before the reversal set in, and she found herself murmuring a lay form of St. Augustine’s famous prayer, Lord make me chaste, but not yet.

Maybe the time of meaningful synchronicities is over? What happens after the worst that can happen has happened? After the final no there comes a yes—? Shut up! Antonia hollers at Stevens. Where was he when she needed him to convince Izzy to hang on, wait until today’s no became tomorrow’s yes?

Wallace stevens the well dressed man with a beard

All Antonia has to do is fish the boy fallen from the sky out of the water in that Auden poem about suffering. She can do that much, she decides.

Auden muse des beaux arts

And so in mid-May Estela moves in.

What is the right thing to do?