Life After Life Read Online Free PDF Page B

call it ADD.
    “Worms?” little Abby asked one day when Sadie told this, and Toby had to tell the full tale of how childrens’ bottoms had to get checked at night with a flashlight to see if they had the pinworms.
    “Not in Boston, they didn’t,” Rachel Silverman said, and that tickled everybody good. Someone Sadie worked with in the schools used to say to children right there before the others, You need to have your bottom checked, and you know that child was likely embarrassed to death. Even an overly confident child would have to find that humiliating. Sadie told the woman that she thought that was a very unkind way to handle the problem. She was the same woman who taught what an improper fraction was by first making the smallest boy in the class, Edward Tyner, sit on her lap, and she would say “proper” and then she’d turn and sit on top of him and say “improper.” The children, of course, thought it was hilarious, yet Edward never did do very well in life and Sadie has always thought this was likely a factor in that. Sadie has always tried to observe a code of ethics and manners.
    Mom, her youngest son, Paul, had said years ago, please fart just once so we know you aren’t an alien. They were in the kitchen; he was working on homework and she was frying country-style steak . He was so full of himself and got away with so much because he was the baby. Horace would have been home any minute and she would have heard his car and seen Honey go running. Oh, she would love to see his face and feel him beside her; that is the most wonderful thing that could happen. Sometimes, she can feel him there. Sometimes when she is almost asleep she will feel his head heavy on her shoulder and his breath on her neck.
    Who said aliens don’t also break wind? she asked, and Paul screamed with laughter. They called her Ann Landers because she often referred to some bit of good common sense of advice she had read there. “Wonder if Ann Landers farts,” Paul said. It is hard to believe a boy so obsessed with body sounds and what he could mine in his nose has grown up to be an ophthalmologist, but he has, and she has his picture right there on her dresser with his wife, Phoebe, and their beautiful babies. They live on the West Coast, which is where Phoebe is from, and they always send her lots and lots of pictures. One time they sent a package that got wet, and when she opened it one picture had stuck to another, and when she carefully pulled them apart it was like a double exposure. The picture of her youngest grandson had somehow wound up there in a picture of Paul and Phoebe on their anniversary trip to Europe. He had stayed with her right there in Fulton, North Carolina, but the picture said he was in Paris, France. And there is such power in what you see that way. She said, Look, he’s in Paris with his mom and dad and that is what—all these years later—gave her the whole idea for her business, which she calls Exposure. It was so hard not to believe what she saw right there before her eyes.
    The business was suggested to her by Joanna, who sometimes comes to visit after she has left the nursing wing where she has helped someone cross over. She has told Sadie that some days—especially with those she has grown close to—she has to reenter life slowly, like someone coming up from a deep dive slowly so she won’t get the bends. “I get it,” Sadie was able to say. “I know what you mean.” Lord, the bends. She has learned so much from that crazy Paul that she wouldn’t know otherwise. He loves to scuba dive and he has jumped from a plane, too, which scares her to this minute to imagine so she never thinks about that, and if her mind tries to, she conjures up little Rudy with his scruffy flat face and maybe sings a song in her head. Lots of times all she can think is those instrumental songs from that album Stanley Stone plays all day long each and every day, an album that was popular back when her kids were