After I'm Gone Read online

  “Do you still drink Shirley Temples?” Victor had asked her after establishing she was one of those Brewers.

  Linda had blushed, then blurted out an order for the most sophisticated drink she could imagine, which happened to be her mother’s drink, a vodka and tonic. The joke was on her. She hated vodka tonics. But she stuck to her original order that night and every night after. She’d rather sip slowly and grimly than admit she had been bluffing.

  At least she never got drunk, which was a good thing, as she had to drive all the way out to Pikesville, where she was living with her mother and her baby sister, Michelle. Rachel had left for college just a few weeks ago, and it surprised Linda how keenly she felt her absence in the house. Had Linda been missed the same way during her year and a half at Duke? She thought not, somehow. Rachel was the family confidante, the keeper of all secrets, even their mother’s. Linda could be trusted to keep secrets, too, but she was bossy, determined to solve problems that no one else wanted solved. Put Daddy’s photos away if they make you feel sad. Don’t spend money you don’t have. If you must have the latest clothes, get a job at a shop where you can buy them at a discount. At least her mother had heeded the last bit of advice.

  Tonight, as Greg and Norman drank themselves into deeper and deeper glooms, Linda found the nerve to turn her vodka tonic back to Victor and say: “Maybe a glass of wine?”

  He didn’t tease or shame her. He didn’t even charge her for the half-drunk vodka tonic she pushed back to him. And she was pretty sure that the white wine he poured was not the house brand. It was far better than any glass of white wine she had tasted before. He poured her a glass of ice water, too, then made a quick call. Within fifteen minutes, he was putting appetizers and sides in front of the famished volunteers.

  “My contribution to the cause,” he said, when Greg stammered that they couldn’t afford any food. Greg and Norman fell on the mozzarella en carrozza like dogs.

  “Do you really remember my father?” Linda asked.

  “Of course,” Victor said. “We talked about him the first time you came in here.”

  “I mean—not just as a customer, or—what he became.” She never said “fugitive,” not out loud. It wasn’t really the right word. “Exile,” her mother said, when she was feeling magnanimous. “Coward,” when she was not. But never fugitive. “Did you have a sense of him?”

  “He was a good guy,” Victor said. “And you know what? He would have preferred Anderson, too.”

  “Really?” Linda was doubtful. Her father was so pragmatic. He was not one to pretend that lost causes were anything but lost causes. Wasn’t that why he had run? He couldn’t win, so he didn’t stay around to lose.

  “I moved to the Lord Baltimore during the 70s, but your dad still came in, talked politics. He disliked Carter. Not so much the positions, but the man. He was talking up Udall right up—” He stopped, clearly not wanting to say: Right up until he left. “He thought Carter was small-time.”

  “Really?” If small-time meant not cheating on your wife, then Linda wouldn’t have minded a small-time father.

  “That’s how I remember it.”

  “What else do you remember?”

  “I remember how pretty you girls all were, the three of you.”

  “The three of us?” Michelle hadn’t been born.

  “You, the little one, your older sister.”

  Linda, blunt within her family, was polite in the world at large, so she did not embarrass him by saying: I don’t have an older sister. And her mother, beautiful as she was, would never pass for Felix’s daughter.

  But Julie Saxony might.

  “He was a good man,” Victor said.

  “Thank you,” she said. It often happened this way. With strangers, friends, even her mother and Rachel. She started down the road toward a memory, toward a vision of her father that she thought would bring her pleasure. Then she would stumble over something unexpected and ugly.

  Now her memory was playing with her again, throwing something else in her path. Five-one-five. Five-one-five.

  “We’re going to say it was a mix-up,” her father told Bert. “Five shots on the fifteenth. Five-one-five. Someone got confused, put out the wrong number. And we’ll substitute out five-oh-five, say it was a typo.”

  “People will get pissed. You could have a fucking riot on your hands.”

  “They can play the state lottery if they don’t like how I run my game. Five-one-five will ruin us.”

  I was sitting at the dining-room table, doing my homework. I would have been eleven, at the end of fifth grade. No, sixth, because Mama sneaked me into school early, the fall I turned four. She wanted Rachel and me to be three grades apart, not two, and with Rachel’s spring birthday, she needed to either hold her back or push me forward, and everyone saw even then that there would be no holding Rachel back. Mama had this weird theory that we would be better friends if we had more distance at school. And we are very close, which is wonderful. But we might have been close anyway. I didn’t understand for years what happened, that Daddy changed the number because too many people had played it and they couldn’t cover the payout.

  So her father’s game was rigged, too.

  Rachel may have been the family intellect, but Linda was no slouch. She had gotten into Duke on scholarship, only to find herself profoundly homesick. She had thought she wanted a new start, but found it wearying, trying to create a history that didn’t invite questions. She transferred to Goucher in the middle of her sophomore year. Bambi had been upset about that, far more upset than Linda could understand, given how much money was saved. Linda was happier at Goucher, too, where people knew just enough not to ask too many questions. Her only problem was that life as a commuter student at an all-girl school didn’t make for the best dating life. She volunteered for the Anderson campaign because some girl said it would be a good way to meet men.

  She had met a lot of men, many of them keen to date the pretty new volunteer, some of them even suitable, if not Greg and Norman. But Linda, who had come looking for dates, ended up caring only about the candidate. Not that she ever got to speak to him or spend time with him. She met him only once, the night of the debate, when he was introduced to all the local volunteers. She was not invited to the dinner afterward, nor did she expect to be. But she was thrilled to wake up the next morning and discover that the received wisdom was that JBA had won the debate. A giddy day or two had followed before she realized how meaningless that victory was.

  She had been so naïve about politics. Lord, she hadn’t even understood how the Electoral College worked, and it still made her angry to see the election called with less than 100 percent of the vote in. She had thought a presidential race was one in which two men—three in this case—came before a nation and explained their positions and then the best man would win. The game was rigged. How could a man like John Anderson not get more votes? Her mother had said Linda was throwing both her vote and her time away, but Linda didn’t feel that way. In fact, she had believed so profoundly in the importance of her vote that she had committed a felony this morning in order to cast it.

  It happened like this. Linda, usually the most organized of the Brewer girls, had registered to vote in North Carolina when she enrolled there in 1977. She had gone to a school meeting in the fall of her freshman year, in which it was explained that the town-and-gown tension in Durham could be improved if more students registered to vote, demonstrated a commitment to the community. So she meant to register there. When she moved back home a year and a half later, it hadn’t been an election year so there was no urgency to register at all. Caught up in the Anderson campaign this summer, she had quite forgotten that she had never registered in her home state. Yes, she saw the irony in forgetting to register when she had been sitting at a card table at the mall, signing up other people.

  Embarrassed, she didn’t dare confide in anyone on th
e campaign. Instead she had asked her uncle Bert, who told her that all she had to do was swear on a form that she was a registered voter at her mother’s address, that she had sent in the application earlier this fall.

  “It is a felony,” he said. “But it’s not like there’s going to be a recount that forces them to go over all the ballots.”

  “It might be closer than you think,” she told Bert. He laughed and ruffled her hair, as if she were still eleven or twelve.

  But this morning, only eighteen hours ago, Linda still believed that anything was possible, that improbable victories could be pulled out in the final moment of any contest. During the Nixon years, people had spoken of a Silent Majority. Reagan had invoked the term during this election. But the true silent majority, in Linda’s mind, were young people like herself. Oh, they made a lot of noise, but they forgot to follow through with the actions that really counted. It almost didn’t seem right for people over the age of sixty-five to vote. They had so little time left. Shouldn’t the policies affecting the future be set by candidates chosen by those who had to live in the world longer? If you were going to weight the importance of certain states, why not weight individual votes? When Linda was eleven, a film called Wild in the Streets had shown up on a second-run bill at the Pikes Theater and it centered on the nation’s first twenty-two-year-old president, made possible when the voting age was lowered to fourteen. Linda had gone to see it three times. (The lead actor was very handsome.) Crazy, yes—but it made more sense to her than the Electoral College. She wanted to pound her fists on the bar, say It’s so unfair.

  Instead, she asked Victor for another white wine.

  A man came into the bar. He glanced around in confusion, taking in the barely audible television, Greg and Norman wolfing down appetizers, Linda staring into her wineglass.

  “Are you still open?” he asked. “Is this a private party?”

  Although the question was addressed to Victor, Linda answered. “It’s clearly not a party,” she said. “As for private, anyone is welcome, but do you really want to be a part of this group?”

  “Did someone die?”

  The man was in his twenties, Linda guessed, with the most amazing eyelashes. He has eyes like a giraffe, she thought. Linda liked giraffes.

  “Just my hopes and dreams.” She meant to sound blithe, devil may care, but her mouth crumpled, ruining the effect. “We all worked on the Anderson campaign.”

  “Well—” He cast around for something to say. “Well,” he repeated. “Good for you. You did something you believe in.”

  “But we didn’t change anything,” she said. “We didn’t even matter.” While it would have been awful to be the spoiler, to be blamed for Carter’s loss, it was worse, she decided now, to have had no effect at all.

  “You don’t topple giants the first time out, despite what Jack and the Beanstalk, or even David and his Goliath, would have you think. It takes years of work.”

  His kindness felt patronizing, as kindness often can. Linda drew herself up haughtily. “Really? Have you climbed any beanstalks lately?”

  “I’m a public defender,” he said. “Which is as close to being Sisyphus as any mortal might ever know.” A sweet smile. “Don’t be mad at me.”

  “Who says I was?”

  “I can’t seem to get on the right foot with you. Should I go out and come back in again?”

  And with that, he walked out of the bar, then returned, hopping on one foot.

  “I’m a unipod,” he said. “I’m here to audition for the role of Tarzan.”

  “You stole that,” Greg said. “Dudley Moore and Peter Cook.”

  But Linda had to laugh. Her father had tried such stunts when Bambi was stewing. No, not stewing, quite the opposite. Bambi had gotten cold when angry with Felix. Very cold and quiet and grim. They called her the Frigidaire when she was angry.

  Linda did a swift, familiar calculation—should she sleep with this man tonight? She had slept with exactly four men since she lost her virginity at seventeen, and she liked to think of herself as progressive, the kind of woman who took what she wanted when she wanted it, although it was a lot trickier since she had moved home.

  No, not tonight. It might not be love at first sight, but she was in for the long haul if he was, she knew that much. Her next campaign, only with a lot more potential. She wondered how he would feel when he found out she was a college senior, living at home. She wondered what he looked like naked.

  “I’m Linda,” she said.

  “Henry,” he said. “Henry Sutton.”

  By three that morning, they were making out in her car. It was hard to say who pulled back that first night. Both would claim later that they were waiting for a more genteel first time. That opportunity presented itself two weeks later, when Bambi went to New York with Michelle, Lorraine, and Lorraine’s daughter, Sydney. It was designed to be a whole Eloise-at-the-Plaza experience for the two girls, although Michelle, at seven, considered herself too sophisticated for both Eloise and five-year-old Sydney. If Linda hadn’t been so anxious to have the house to herself, she might have used Michelle’s antipathy to dissuade Bambi from such an extravagance. Her mother was good, most of the time. But in New York, with Lorraine, she would buy clothes she couldn’t afford, try to keep pace with her old friend, who was privy to Bambi’s difficulties. Maybe that was why it was so important to Bambi to try to hold her own with Lorraine.

  But, for once, Linda forgot about everyone else—her mother, Michelle, Rachel, John Anderson, all the sad men she had to prop up. She even forgot about the phantom sister who had passed through the Lord Baltimore Hotel and may or may not have been Julie Saxony. For one blissful Saturday evening, she thought only of herself and what she wanted, opening the door to long-lashed Henry Sutton, who actually brought her a bouquet of supermarket daisies. She was mindful, as the door swung open, of the story of her parents’ courtship, how they had married less than eleven months after her father had found his way to her mother’s door the day after meeting her. And Linda had long ago deduced that she had attended her parents’ marriage in utero, not the cause of the nuptials, but a happy by-product of a progressive courtship.

  There are worse ways to begin, she thought, lying beneath Henry in her mother’s bed, the only double bed in the house, taking care to cheat her face to the left so she would not be staring into her father’s eyes in the framed photograph on the nightstand.

  Yes, they were very large and brown. She knew that. She knew that. But the man with her—he was gentle, a dreamer and idealist, someone who would never agree that the game was rigged. He probably thought she was a dreamer, too, given the circumstances of their meeting, but even as Linda was abandoning herself in this moment, she was also giving in to the pragmatic person she was meant to be. She would have to take care of both of them, she thought, circling her legs around his waist. She had to take care of everyone. That was okay; she was used to it. She remembered walking up the front walk, after the fireworks at the club. Her mother knew before they crossed the threshold. How had she known? Bert had taken Bambi to the side at the club, but Bert was forever taking her mother to the side over the last few months, since the indictment, then the trial. Bambi had run up the walk, thrown open the door, run from room to room, calling his name. “Felix? Felix?” There was no note, no reason to believe he was gone, yet Linda slowly began to see the details that made the case—the small gap in the closet so packed with suits, a drawer in his valet, opened and emptied of his best cuff links. Michelle was upset by their mother’s tears and shouts, so Linda put her to bed, singing to her as the little one cried, “Tummy hurts, tummy hurts.” She had gorged herself on ice cream and cake at the club. Then Linda and Rachel came into this very room and sat on this very bed with their mother’s arms around them. “He better be alone,” their mother had said, mystifying them. “Will we ever see him again?” Rachel had asked. Linda knew they wo
uld not.

  “What are you thinking about?” Henry asked, tracing her jawline with his finger.

  “The last time I saw fireworks,” she said.

  And he kissed her, believing himself complimented.

  March 13, 2012

  Whenever life took him outside the Beltway, Sandy felt as if he were escaping Earth’s orbit, breaking free of a particularly harsh gravity. As built up as the suburbs got, as bad as the rush-hour traffic was, a drive west on a bright March day lifted his spirits. Maybe he should go for more drives in the country. Did people still do that? Probably not. Most people spent too much time in their cars to consider driving fun, or recreational.

  Sykesville, Andrea Norr had said when she called out of the blue this morning. Go see this guy in Sykesville. Despite five decades in Baltimore, Sandy needed a moment to remember where Sykesville was. Those towns between Baltimore and Frederick kind of blended together for him—Sykesville, Westminster, Clarksville. Sykesville was the closest of the three, it turned out, not even twenty minutes from the Beltway, and Sandy took the exit with something akin to regret. He’d like to keep going, driving on this straight, uneventful highway, past Frederick, into the mountains. And he could. No one would notice, no one would care.