The Dead Husband

by Carter Wilson

  Colin and Meg had rented a house only four blocks from the one he grew up in, and the walk took him less than ten minutes. It was odd being back, smelling the same summer-night air, passing the same houses he did when he walked to school as a boy. With the observational skills he’d honed as a cop, he noted the subtle changes in the old, familiar houses: new paint schemes, reconfigured landscapes, popped-out roofs accommodating new additions. But it wasn’t the little changes he noticed most. Rather, it was a sense that Whitefish Bay seemed a little smaller, more frayed, and less special than Colin remembered. There was a lesson in that, he thought. Maybe the key to living was being continuously on the move, experiencing new things, so the ache of time was never acute; memories and melancholy were inextricably mixed.

  One thing he knew for certain. No way in hell was he going to end up like his mom. Trapped in a house, trapped in a mind, and unwilling to attempt escape from either.

  Colin walked up the path to his old house and tried the door. Locked. He took out his keys and let himself in.

  “Mom?”

  “Upstairs.”

  He exhaled, ever-so-slightly disappointed in hearing her voice. A small part of him (though larger than he’d ever confess to) was anticipating the moment no voice called back. That he’d arrive to find she’d passed on, her heart or liver having finally given out.

  It was a morbid thought, but one he had nonetheless.

  Colin walked around a waist-high stack of newspapers and headed to the stairs, shaking his head at how much of his old house was now brimming with piles of worthless things. The worst part of his mom’s descent into her dark twilight was the hoarding. It had started years ago, but until his father died, it was more like heavy clutter than anything more serious. But in the last year, the piles grew, as if she was trying to leave layers of her life’s sediment behind to be studied by future generations.

  Colin’s mind churned the same thought, over and over, as he navigated the crowded stairs to his mother’s bedroom.

  It’s all just such a goddamned shame.

  Four

  Bury, New Hampshire

  People assume I’m of Irish descent because of my green eyes, reddish-brown hair, and skin that will burn if I as much as look at a postcard of the beach. I’m an anomaly; the rest of my family appears as WASPy as the Yates family name implies. We are a small, Protestant family destined to keep our numbers low and our wealth growing.

  I’m thankful to be the black sheep.

  My mother is dead, a victim of a pulmonary embolism when I was only three. I hardly remember her, but in every photo I have, I see Grace Kelly. Elegant even in her most casual of poses. Lithe, willowy. She was a model, and I have a handful of magazine ads to prove it.

  My father never remarried. All those years, and he never found the right person again. Or perhaps he was thankful to be out of his marriage and vowed never to repeat. But I hate to think that way. Despite all that is cold and calculating about Logan Yates, I like to think he’s capable of love. But unlike with my mother’s magazine ads, I don’t have anything to prove that.

  We had the Disney family, where the mom died young and the dad raised the kids. The deviation from the Disney story was we were raised by nannies and my father slept with as many women as his schedule would allow. This did not exclude the nannies.

  Women buzzed in and out of our lives like mosquitoes over the years, attaching themselves to my father and sucking as much blood as they could until he grew tired and swatted them away. It wasn’t uncommon to find a statuesque blond sipping coffee in our kitchen as my sister and I prepared for school, nor was it rare I’d never see that person again. Dad preferred blonds, but rarely the same one twice.

  As for the rest of my family, there’s only my older sister, Cora. She has my mother’s looks and my father’s venom. Cora still lives in Bury, and as with my father, she’s part of why I left this place without any intention of ever coming back.

  Still, two decades later, here I am in this house. What happened here is why I became a novelist after all.

  I push bad memories away and focus on unpacking the three bags I brought. The rest of our things are in storage back in Wisconsin, hastily crammed in a small unit after I broke the lease on our apartment.

  “This house is too big.”

  I turn and find Max standing in the doorway of my bedroom, which was a guest room when I was growing up.

  “Hey, buddy. I thought you were reading.”

  “I finished it.”

  “You finished the second Harry Potter book?”

  “Third. The Prisoner of Azkaban.”

  “Wow.” Max has never been a great student but the kid is smart as hell. When he was old enough to understand Mommy was a writer, he latched onto reading, working his way quickly past his class level and the level after that. He read A Wrinkle in Time at age eight and The Hobbit at nine. I could never have read Tolkien at nine. He struggles with math and is allergic to tests of any type, but he’ll be devouring Joyce by fifteen. He’s asked to read my books on several occasions, but I always tell him they’re too adult for him right now. A few more years.

  “My room is too far away from yours,” he says.

  “It’s just one floor away,” I say. “There’re three floors in this house, so that’s not so bad.” I unfold a shirt and place it on the bed.

  “I don’t like it here,” he says.

  I nod, knowing how he feels. We could fit six or seven of our old apartments in this house, not even counting all the yard space. “I know. It’s a big change. But you’ll get used to it.”

  Max looks down, as if the world suddenly got just a little too heavy. I walk up to him.

  “Hey,” I say, pulling him in to me. His head fits snug against my chest, and part of me doesn’t want him to grow any more so I can always cradle him just like this. “I know this is hard, but there’s no easy way through this. There are no shortcuts through this kind of pain. It’s not fair, but it’s how it is.”

  He doesn’t answer. Instead, he goes into this kind of fugue state where his mouth hangs a bit open and his eyes focus on some distant world. It scared me when he first started doing this after Riley’s death, but I realized it was all part of him processing a major shift in his life. It happens to me, too, maybe without the complete withdrawal from the present. But that moment of getting stuck on a reality so profound you lose yourself in it. For Max, his typical de-animation lasts ten, twenty seconds.

  Finally, he blinks. Says, “We could have stayed in Milwaukee.”

  “No,” I say. “We needed a new environment. And we need help.”

  “No, we don’t. We can do everything on our own.”

  I shake my head as I squeeze him harder. “No, we can’t. Not yet. That’s the reality of this. Your grandfather’s helping us out, and we need to appreciate that.”

  “He could have just sent us the money.”

  How do I tell my son that Mommy suffers from debilitating nightmares and my only hope for relief is to face my past head-on, right here in this house? I can’t tell him, just as I can’t tell anyone else. So I do what I’m skilled at: changing the subject.

  “He’s even paying for the school you’ll be going to, and it’s a really nice one. Same one your cousin goes to.”

  “I know. You told me that already.”

  I release and look down at him. His gaze moves back to his toes.

  “Look at me,” I say.

  He doesn’t.

  “Max, look at me.”

  He finally looks up and into my eyes for about two seconds before shifting his eyes to the right. Two seconds of eye contact is pretty good for Max.

  “This is probably the hardest thing you’ll ever have to do in your entire life,” I say. “But we’re going to do it together. I’m not going anywhere. You know that, right?”

 
He doesn’t answer at first. Finally, he says, “I see his face sometimes. At night, when I’m trying to fall asleep.”

  “Daddy?”

  He nods.

  I see his face, too. Blank. Dead. One eye a quarter open, pupil dry as bone.

  “Does that feel good?” I ask. “To see him?”

  Not an ounce of expression. “No.”

  His answer tickles the back of my neck, not in a pleasant way.

  “Are you missing him?” I ask.

  He surprises me by not answering. Instead, he turns and plods away, dragging his feet as he leaves the room. My impulse is to go after him, comfort him by saying how much I miss Riley as well. But I can’t do it.

  Maybe later I will, when I build up the proper calluses allowing me to lie to my son with grace and conviction.

  And what a depressing thought that is.

  Five

  Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin

  Colin walked up the stairs inside his mother’s house, stepping with care around endless towers of crap on every riser. His mother would claim each pile to be full of things with which she could never part. To Colin, it was all junk, most of it not even worth donating to the Salvation Army. Some piles were lumps of old clothing, most having belonged to Colin’s father. Three shoes here, a pair of faded corduroys there, a bathrobe and collection of tighty-whities there.

  But most of the piles on the stairs were rectangular and towering just enough that any forceful brush against them would topple them, like a gigantic Jenga game. Stacks of old hardcover books, tabloid magazines dating back to the eighties, shoeboxes with decades-old photos inside, and even empty Tupperware containers. Empty containers. Those puzzled Colin most.

  The upstairs landing was no better. Nor was the hallway, nor any other area in the house. Crap was everywhere. Colin sometimes wondered if his father’s heart attack had been a blessing for him. Easier to die than to untangle this mess.

  “Where are you?”

  “In my room,” his mother replied.

  Colin stubbed his toe on an end table lying on its side in the hallway. He cursed and was tempted to kick it in frustration but decided to let it go. The end table didn’t choose to be there after all.

  He rounded the corner into his mother’s bedroom and saw her at her vanity, a set once owned by his mother’s mother. Mahogany finish, tri-angled mirror, and a delicate, needlepoint-topped stool. His mother was facing the mirror, applying lipstick, a creamy silk robe cinched loosely around her bony frame.

  Her reflected gaze caught his.

  “You have to clean up all your things,” Colin said. It was his usual greeting. “It’s just not safe.”

  “You know I’m not going to have that conversation again.” Her typical reply.

  “At least the stairs,” he said. “You’ll kill yourself. One stumble and gravity will do the rest.”

  “Oh, don’t be so morbid.”

  He noticed the cocktail glass on top of the vanity. Empty. No coaster. His grandmother was undoubtedly cursing from her grave.

  “Why are you putting on makeup? It’s time for bed.”

  She turned and her long, wiry gray hair swept across her shoulders. “Because it makes me happy. When you get to my age, doing things that make one happy is far more important than doing things that make sense.”

  Her crooked lipstick and slurred words didn’t nullify what Colin conceded was a sound argument.

  “You were ranting about some Linda person,” he said. “I don’t remember her.”

  She sighed, turned back to the mirror, and started brushing out her hair. The image that popped into Colin’s head was the tail of a horse being groomed. “Oh, I’m past that,” she said.

  “It was only ten minutes ago.”

  “I suppose it was just something that needed to come out.”

  “How many drinks have you had?”

  “One away from enough.” She picked up her empty glass. “Pour me that last one, will you? The bottle’s in the bathroom.”

  This was the part Colin hated because he always agreed. He’d put up much more of a fight when he and Meg moved back to Whitefish Bay four months ago. Back then, he’d argue with his mother, even hide her booze. Urged her to see a therapist to help with her mood swings, her compulsive hoarding (collecting, she called it), her need to get on some medication. But he learned he couldn’t force her to do anything, much less force himself to ignore her. So they settled into a routine on these nights, the evenings where she’d rant and call him to her side. He’d lightly chastise her about the clutter, ask her how many drinks she’d had, pour her one last one, and see that she got to sleep. Maybe he was nothing more than an enabler, and when he really thought about it, Colin figured he’d become the parent in the relationship, and that was about as bittersweet as something could be.

  He stepped into the bathroom and grabbed the bottle of Plymouth Gin. This was the most clutter-free area of the house, along with a four-foot berth around her vanity set. Colin wondered if it represented some kind of safe zone for her, a place that existed as it always had, a return to her past she held dear while she slowly suffocated herself in the rest of the space.

  He walked back and poured her two fingers.

  “Thank you.”

  “You need to drink less,” he said.

  She lifted the glass, her hand wrinkled, spotted, and quivering in a way Colin thought more typical for a person twenty years older.

  She took a sip and said, “Nights are difficult for me.”

  “I know they are.”

  “I’m not as bad as I seem.”

  “I know, Mom.”

  It was mostly true. She never drank until the sun went down, and during the daytime, she led a fairly normal life. She had a small community of friends that managed to get her out and doing things, and Meg drove her when she needed to go to the store.

  “How’s the baby?” she asked.

  “Fine. Kicking a little.”

  “It’s a girl. I’m sure of it.”

  “We’ll find out in December.” The due date was a week before Christmas.

  Colin sat on the edge of the bed. His mother pivoted in her chair and smiled at him.

  “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

  He shrugged. “I’m not sure I do anything for you at all. We moved here, and I’m just sitting back and watching you crumble.”

  “Everything crumbles eventually,” she said. “That’s how the world makes room for new things.”

  “Maybe we should look into getting you help. Someone who comes by the house for a few hours every day.”

  “You keep suggesting that,” she said. “You keep at it, and I’ll keep saying no. I don’t need a stranger in here milling about my things.” She lifted her glass and drained the rest in a gulp. “Those people are all thieves.”

  “That’s just not true.”

  “Shh, shh,” she scolded him. “No more talk of that tonight. I’m going to sleep.” She rose from her chair and Colin moved off the bed, allowing her to stumble into it. He thought of the lipstick smears sure to accumulate on her pillow throughout the night.

  His mother pulled the covers up to her chin, closed her eyes, and soon became perfectly still, her breaths so shallow as to be unnoticeable. With her eyes closed, hair brushed, lipstick on, and arms at her side, she looked prepped for a casket viewing.

  Colin tried to push the thought away but found it heavy and unyielding. He leaned down and gave his mother a peck on her forehead.

  “Good night,” he whispered.

  As Colin turned to leave the house and return to the comfort of his wife, his mother said, “Good night, Thomas.”

  Colin stilled, unprepared to hear his father’s name, then accepting it as the next phase of his mother’s mental deterioration.

  Everythi
ng crumbles.

  Six

  Bury, New Hampshire

  “Wow, Cora.”

  It’s all I can think to say as my sister lets herself in the front door of my father’s house, followed by Peter and Willow. Nine more years hasn’t aged her. Cora’s beauty is perfectly embalmed.

  “Rose!” Her excited voice sounds forced, and as I move in to hug her, I vow not to be so cynical, that maybe she is happy I’m here. But if she feels how I do, then she’s a wonderful bullshit artist. Nine years is a long time for sisters to go without seeing each other. Now it feels too short.

  Cora’s embrace is delicate, as if there’s a Fabergé egg between us. She smells the way a summer afternoon in the Hamptons must.

  She pulls back but keeps her hands on my shoulders, studying me. She isn’t even preserved—I think she’s aging in reverse. She’s thirty-nine but could be twenty-five and, now that I think of it, reminds me a lot of the blonds my father always favored.

  “Did you dye your hair since I last saw you?” she asks.

  “No.”

  “Oh. It looks less red. More dull, I guess.”

  This is Cora.

  “Well, thanks.”

  “Oh, I didn’t mean it like that, silly. You look beautiful as always, Baby Sister. I can’t believe how long it’s been.”

  Yes, you can, I think. And I’m sure you’re not happy I’m invading your little world now.

  I think about the placement of her hands on my shoulders and how I would react if she were attacking me. I have these thoughts from time to time, about how I would physically control a situation if I had to. I’ve taken enough self-defense classes over the years that my mind can shift into a defensive mode when someone touches me.

  Parry away Cora’s right arm, then seize her left hand and bend it backward toward her wrist. The pain will force her to her knees. Then finish her off with a swift knee to the bridge of her nose.

  I don’t want to think these things. I want to love Cora.