Before and Afterlives Read Online Free PDF Page B

was the last family that — House would take, we decided at that very moment. Never again would we allow anyone to go near it.
     
    If walls could talk
    And they do talk, if you know how to listen. If you know how to pay attention to the way a roof sighs, or a window slides open with relief, or a step creaks its complaints out. If you know how to hear what those walls are saying, you will hear unbearable stories, stories you would never imagine possible, stories we would rather turn away from. But we cannot turn away, for they will only follow us. They will find us, one by one, alone and frightened, and tear us apart if we try to stop our ears up.
    The Blank family is still with us. The Olivers too. And those poor dead girls from Pittsburgh still linger, howling through the night as we try to sleep. And Jonas’s father, the gun cracking his life open like a pocket watch, to let all of the time spill out of him. And now Jonas, too. Wherever he is, we hope he’s restful. And Rose. Poor Rose. We don’t hear from Rose, though. She never talked to us. She only listened.
     

The Drowned Mermaid
     
    On the morning after the storm the body of a drowned me rmaid was washed ashore. She was curled in an almost S shape, her arms thrown over her head as if to block out the glare of the sun. Her skin was pale, rubbery and white. The kind of pale that comes from living either beneath the earth or beneath the sea. Her black hair was twisted with ropes of seaweed, and a bruise, golden brown and purple, stained the skin of her right cheek.
    Helena found her. She had woken that morning from anot her dream of her daughter Jordan, from another night of terror and mystery in which she played the lead role. She’d been in a casino this time, after receiving instructions on how to win Jordan back: “Go to the roulette table, place your bet on black thirty-one, walk away from the wheel without collecting your winnings, and believe me,” a disembodied voice told her, “you’ll win. Walk toward the nearest restroom, but don’t go in. A man in a dark suit will meet you by the door. Take his arm. He’ll bring you to me.”
    She’d done as instructed, but as usual, never found her daughter. Never won her, never opened the locked safe wit hout tripping the alarm. Or in another situation, she might be fooled into thinking Jordan was behind a certain door. But upon opening it, she would find nothing but a dark, empty room. As in the shell game, Helena could never pick the one under which the con man had hidden the ping-pong ball.
    So she had come down to the beach after waking, leaving Paul asleep in bed. The sun had just risen, dappling the waves with light, and gulls screed in the air, circling and diving over the w ater.
    From a distance the mermaid’s body looked like driftwood, smooth and round, silhouetted by the morning light. It was only when Helena came closer that she noticed the scales glinting in the light; the thickly muscled tail; and after mo ving one of the mermaid’s arms off of her face, the bulbous eyes, black and damp as olives.
    She knelt beside the body and rested her ear against the chilled skin. A sluggish pulse still pumped through those e merald veins: a slow, locomotive beat. Unconscious then, Helena decided. She stood again, turning her head one way, then the other, scanning the beach to see if anyone else had ventured down this way yet. There was no one around at this hour. But that would change soon enough. It was the end of summer. Within an hour the beach would be strewn with bodies laid out for the sun to take. A ritual sacrifice.
    Working quickly, she lifted the mermaid’s arms and shou lders from underneath and started to drag her. She pulled her away from the hissing waves that collapsed under their own weight, turning to foam as they reached the shore. She dragged, then paused to catch her breath, then picked the mermaid up once more to go a little farther. And all the while the mermaid’s head lolled on