Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [24]
But suddenly there was a woman’s face framed in the glass panel of the door. A white face, indistinct in the murkiness, in the cloudy air. Charis turned away from the stove and caught sight of it, and the back of her neck bristled.
It was only Augusta, but that’s not what Charis thought. She thought it was Zenia. Zenia, with her dark hair sleeked down by the rain, wet and shivering, standing on the back step as she had done once before, long ago. Zenia, who had been dead for five years.
The worst thing, thinks Charis, was that she’d confused Zenia with her own daughter, who is nothing like Zenia at all. What a terrible thing for her to have done.
No. The worst thing was that she hadn’t really been all that surprised.
8
Not surprised, because people don’t die. Or so Charis believes. Tony asked her once what she meant by die, and Charis – who is made nervous by Tony’s way of pinning her down, and frequently gets out of it by pretending she hasn’t heard the question – had to admit that they did go through a process that everyone was in the habit of calling death. Certainly some fairly terminal things happened to the body, things that Charis would rather not dwell on because she hasn’t decided whether it would be better to mingle with the earth, or – through cremation – with the air. Each of these possibilities is appealing as a sort of general idea, but when it comes right down to it, to particulars such as her own fingers, toes, and mouth, then less.
But death was just a stage, she tried to say. It was just a sort of state, a transition; it was – well, a learning experience.
She isn’t very good at explaining things to Tony. She usually stutters to a halt, especially with Tony’s huge and slightly chilly eyes fixed on her, magnified by those glasses, and with Tony’s little pearly-toothed mouth slightly open. It’s as if Tony is amazed by everything Charis says. But amazement is not – she suspects – what is really going on in that delicate head of Tony’s. Though Tony never laughs at her, not up front.
“What do you learn?” said Tony.
“Well, you learn – how to be better, next time. You join the light,” said Charis. Tony leaned forward, looking interested, so Charis fumbled on. “People have after-death experiences, and that’s what they say, that’s how we know. When they come back to life again.”
“They come back to life?” said Tony, her eyes enormous.
“People pound their chests. And breathe into them, and warm them up, and, and, bring them back,” said Charis.
“She means near-death,” said Roz, who often tells Tony what Charis means. “You must have read those articles! It’s a number lately. You’re supposed to get a sort of son et lumière. Tunnels and fireworks and baroque music. My father had one, when he had the first heart attack. His old bank manager showed up, lit like a Christmas tree, and told my father he couldn’t die yet because he had unfinished business.”
“Ah,” said Tony. “Unfinished business.”
Charis wanted to say that this wasn’t what she meant, she did mean after death. “Some people don’t get as far as the light,” she said. “They get lost. In the tunnel. Some of them don’t even know they’re dead.” She did not go on to say that these sorts of people could be quite dangerous because they could get into your own body, more or less move into it, like squatters, and then it could be difficult to get them out again. She didn’t go on to say this, because it would have been futile: Tony was a proof addict.
“Right,” said Roz, who was made very uncomfortable by this sort of conversation. “I know