Anna in the Afterlife by Merrill Joan Gerber Page A

done with all that.
    From the freeway her daughters could see the impressive edifice of the Burning Bush Cemetery where Anna’s husband had been buried in 1965. The girls, whenever they were on this freeway, always called out a greeting to their father, who was buried on the slant of a hill coming down almost to the road. The place looked pretty good to Anna, the grass well kept, the neat rows of bronze plaques in lines almost as far as the eye could see. In a couple of days she would finally be lined up right there with all the dead, dug under, covered over, lying beside Abram. If he could see her, he wouldn’t recognize her—a woman of ninety with wild white hair, a face as sunken as a fallen cake, limbs as shapeless as Jell-O. If he remembered even one thing about her it would doubtless be the gorgeous legs of her youth. And if she could see him, God forbid, she’d see a pile of bones in his favorite blue suit. She had to remind herself they were both somewhere else already, cozy in clouds, far from these holes in the ground that would soon house what was left of their mortal remains.
    When the girls arrived in Beverly Hills, Carol said to Janet, “Do you believe we’re really doing this? Coming to see our eightysix-year-old aunt who just slit her wrists? It’s got to be a sick joke.”
    The two woman at the desk in the retirement home looked at them with pity. “They already took your aunt away in the ambulance. We had no idea she was thinking such terrible thoughts. In fact, when the paramedics carried her out on the gurney, she was wearing a red lace nightgown. She looked a little pale, but not so bad.”
    â€œWe’d better go up to her apartment,” Janet said.
    â€œThe police were already up there. They told us they took away her suicide note.”
    In the elevator Janet and Carol clasped one another’s hands and squeezed hard. Anna was filled with a wild fury. She had never given her children this much trouble! Nothing she had ever done had equaled these shenanigans.
    Blood was everywhere in the apartment. Soaking the bed, in a trail of drops across the rug and to the bathroom, on the sink, in the basin, on the bar of soap. A double-edged razor blade lay on the edge of the sink, red over the steely gray.
    â€œShe mined the mattress, the rug, the whole place! We’ll have to pay them a fortune for this.”
    â€œWe should call the hospital and find out where she is, find out if we can see her,” Janet said, but when she reached for the phone, her hand stopped in midair. The phone was covered with blood.
    â€œMy God,” Carol said. “She did this because she was mad at us! Like Bard. He always felt no one was doing enough to make him happy. And it’s clear no one was doing enough to make her happy.”
    â€œHere’s her ring,” Janet said, “right where I told her to hide it, in the cup with the pencils. That’s the thing she was most worried about—that no one should steal it from her.”
    â€œI’ll tell you what that reminds me of,” Carol said. “The day Bard killed himself, you remember this? He left his insurance policy in the house, on the floor, just inside the front door—a little message to me that I wanted the money more than I wanted him.”
    â€œYou think Aunt Gert was telling us the same thing? We wanted her ring more than we wanted her?”
    â€œWho knows what people are thinking when they try to end their lives, Janet. They’re crazy, aren’t they? They decided to kill themselves. Is that sane?”
    â€œIt could be, under some circumstances. Like Mom wanting to die.”
    â€œWell, that’s a different story. Wouldn’t you want to get out of it if you were chained to your bed for so many years?”
    Anna was gratified to know they saw her point. But she was a little put out, all the same, that her girls had kept the truth from her about Gert, had