The Young Widower's Handbook

by Tom McAllister

  On the walk toward the cable cars, they pass a group clustered around a street magician. The magician guesses that the dupe’s card is the ace of spades, but he is wrong—the dupe is actually holding the king of hearts. Still, the crowd expectantly leans in toward him as if this is all part of the setup, an intentional incorrect guess as prelude to an even greater trick. The magician shuffles his deck and announces, “My apologies, ladies and gentlemen. I have failed you all.” Staring down into his top hat as if searching for answers, he walks away from the dumbfounded audience, never turns back to look at them.

  Hunter and the others are here to ride the cable cars and to take photos of Lombard Street, carved into the hill like a regrettable tattoo. They’ve already been through the Haight, a necessary pilgrimage for any pot smoker or classic rock fan or white kid who went to a liberal arts college and at one point identified vaguely with the freewheeling countercultural spirit of the place. It was maybe the most depressing stop on a trip full of them, a dismal hippie haven overrun with people trying too hard to re-create a moment they barely remember.

  After the cable cars take them up some hills and back down again—Austin leaning out the door and high-fiving pedestriansthey continue west. The drive to the coast is easy; the beach doesn’t seem like big business here, especially not compared to the New Jersey beaches, which at this time of year would be congested and overwhelming. They park at the foot of the beach and walk on the sand, shoes in hand, jeans rolled up and cuffed. Wind whips Amber’s hair into a cyclone above her head. The sun is visible through the fog, dull and distant, not so much setting as drifting away.

  He and Kait never watched a sunrise together. Nor a sunset. She wanted to, of course she wanted to, because that’s what lovers do: they watch the sun rise and fall together, symbolic, a validating moment for a relationship. He wanted to do it too, but always overslept, talked her out of it, distracted her. Found reasons to put it off. Said they should save it for later, for a special day, took too long to realize that special days cannot be predetermined but can only be remembered after they have occurred. Is finally realizing that later is a time that does not necessarily exist.

  Austin and Amber stroll down the beach hand in hand, Austin sometimes bending to pick up loose shells and skim them across the water’s surface. Hunter sinks down into a hump of sand, sets Kait beside him, and pulls his knees up against his chest. The waves roll in steadily, one on top of the other. Paul approaches Hunter from behind, says, “Amber’s a good kid, but she don’t know anything.” Paul twists a coffee stirrer between his teeth, sits to Kait’s right. He digs his feet into the sand, buries himself up to his shins. “Closure.” He makes a sound like a whale spurting from its blowhole. Tosses his coffee stirrer toward the water.

  Hunter thinks right now is the exact time when it would be convenient to be a drinker, because they could fill the silences by passing a bottle back and forth, let the burning in their chests do all the talking. “How long did it take you to get back to normal?” Hunter says.

  Paul stretches back, leans on his elbows. “No such thing as normal.” Waves crash in harder, eating away at the shore. Out toward the horizon, the water looks nearly black. “After a while, you just keep on living. You don’t have a choice.”

  Windblown sand piles up along Kait’s left side, nearly obscuring her name. A boat edges out toward the line of the horizon, and Hunter contemplates the terrifying leap of faith people made centuries ago when they piloted themselves toward what appeared to be the planet’s shelf. Completely ensconced in darkness, surrounded by sea monsters, they still pushed into the unforgiving night because they wanted to see what would happen when they reached the other side. They trusted that it would be worth the danger, and they took comfort in the rhythms of nature, knowing that the sun would absolutely rise in the morning at the right time and place and set in the evening at the right time and place, and the stars and the moon would absolutely be there to guide them. They knew better than anybody that the world would go on regardless and they had to learn to trust it or it would destroy them.

  Austin and Amber reappear in the distance, headed back toward them, Amber tiptoeing between broken shells. Paul pushes himself back to his feet and says, “You got to do something with those ashes. Get her off your case.” A trip that began as an attempt for Paul to relive the happiest days of his marriage has been hijacked by Hunter and Kait’s ashes. The three of them have been preparing for this trip for months, if not years, but Hunter’s status as recent widower overshadowed their carefully considered plans. He became a burden to them, even to smiling, persistent Amber, whose helpfulness manifests itself in pushiness and a pathological need to be acknowledged as helpful, which has made Hunter feel guilty for not having made himself available enough to have been helped. And, frankly, Hunter’s trip has also been hijacked by this quest; even the way Amber has begun talking, like she and Kait are old friends and like she somehow relates to Kait, is a hijacking of Hunter’s memory; it is Amber glomming onto his heartache because it seems romantic in some way. Both parties latched on to each other and used the other: they to add meaning and depth to their trip, and he to alleviate his loneliness, yes, but also to excuse himself from having to make choices.

  As Paul walks toward the ocean to dip his toes in the water, Hunter turns away, digs his phone out of his pocket and extends his tattooed arm out in front of himself to take a picture—Hunter and Kait, sitting together with the Pacific at their backs. The other side of the world as he knows it. Thinks about uploading it so he can caption it from sea to shining sea, but decides not to share it with anyone. Paul wanders off in the other direction, and Hunter pivots to look again at the ocean. Lines of whitecaps roll toward them, endless and relentless. A wave rises and swells and claws at the shore, and the mist from the crash washes over him. He finds a seashell in the sand next to him and lifts it to his ear. Twenty-five years ago, when he and Jack were walking together along a New Jersey beach, Jack knelt down and pressed a shell first against his own ear and then against Hunter’s. “I’ll tell you something your grandfather taught me when I was your age,” Jack said. “Not every shell is the same. If you find the right one, it doesn’t sound like the ocean at all.” He listened to another one, tossed it away. “Some shells have magic in them. If you listen really closely, you can hear voices from another world.” He tried another. “They’re hard to find, though. Unless you know what to look for,” Jack said, winking at Hunter to let him know that this was to be their secret. They tried a couple dozen shells that day until Jack found one that he said was filled with his own father’s voice, but when Hunter listened, he only heard the white noise of the ocean. Now, sitting alone with the ashes, Hunter knows that somewhere on this beach, there is a shell containing the message he’s been looking for. The first shell does not work and neither does the second, but in the third one he hears a sound like a whisper. He closes his eyes and concentrates so he can hear it more clearly. The whisper he hears is Kait’s voice. The journey is over, it says. When he opens his eyes he sees the waves still charging toward him, and in each wave’s crest he sees Kait rising up out of the sea and then diving back down. In the mist he feels her touch covering him completely; in every cloud he sees the outline of her body; in each grain of sand he sees her face; in the oxygen and nitrogen of the atmosphere, he feels her physical presence with him in a way he hasn’t since he drove away from home. Nobody in the world can see it, but she is sitting next to him and her arm is draped over his shoulder and she is saying in his ear: I was real and you were real and that’s all you can ask for. And she is saying: You kept your promise. And she is saying: It’s over, it’s over, it is over.

  The sound of the shell cuts out abruptly. He shakes it but it will never channel those sounds again. He stuffs it in his pocket, one of the few souvenirs he will take home with him. Then he snaps the cube open and turns it upside down to release her. He watches the ashes ride on the wind out across the beach and into the ocean and he k
nows they will travel across the globe on their own now. Austin and Amber, still by the water’s edge, are closing in. As he walks away from the beach, he quietly says goodbye, because he is never coming back to this place and he is never going to see these people again.

  TWENTY-ONE

  You see old couples everywhere you look, couples whose marriages have lasted longer than Kait’s life, and who flaunt their good fortune by strolling hand-in-hand along sidewalks and in shopping centers and in airports. They don’t have the decency to be considerate toward people like you, who can’t help parsing their relationships, seeing what they’ve done to deserve a literal lifetime of happiness, why they’re so worthy while you’re not. You compare visions of your unlived future with these people you’re seeing, wondering, would your love have lasted? It takes forty or fifty years for most people to finally become the person they want to be, and Kait never got that chance. Over time, would she still have laughed at your jokes, and would you still be able to see in her eyes the glistening girl you met on that rooftop? What happens when the joy of discovery gives way to comfortable complacency? Would you still share a bed and watch movies together and have things to discuss? How do people never run out of things to say to each other?

  YOU WORRY YOU WOULDN’T have been as selfless as the old man you see pushing his wheelchair-bound wife through the airport, his back permanently humped from a decade of leaning down to serve her. At some point, many years ago, his presumably fulfilling life was wrested from him and replaced with this one. You would have panicked and put her in a nursing home. Would have found a way to rationalize it and told her it’s for the best, I don’t know how to take care of people anyway, and you would have had to find a way to ignore the look of betrayal in her eyes during your thrice weekly visits, and you would have had to explain to everyone that yes, you’re still married but she’s living in the nursing home now because she needs that kind of care, and they would treat you with a mixture of pity and admiration for at least sticking with your invalid wife, but the reality is you would be looking forward to your time away from her, free from the pressure and expectations, those quiet nights at home when you could get high and watch comedies on TV and forget all about her miserable fate. Because what she would be is an inconvenience. Some people get off on that suffering-servant routine, demanding that others see them tending to their disabled loved ones so that others can say you’re such a good person, I could never handle that, and then the suffering servant can respond if you really love someone, it’s not a chore at all, it’s a privilege. Is it too cynical for you to say that’s probably a façade, to suspect that some mornings those people must wake up resenting their disabled loved one for taking everything away but still hanging on, half wishing they will find their partner dead just for the relief? Roles reversed, Kait would have cared for you to her detriment, would have sacrificed everything to ensure you had something resembling a quality life, and while she changed your diapers and bathed you and spoon-fed you and wiped the mess from your face and smiled sweetly through your memory lapses, you would be consumed with guilt for ruining her life by having had a stroke, but you would be rendered unable to apologize because you would have lost your ability to speak. And she would not complain. She would take her responsibilities seriously and somehow find reasons to love you more. And so maybe, knowing how she would have sacrificed for you, you would have discovered depths of resolve and compassion that you didn’t know you had, would have happily cared for her for another seventy years. What’s not fair is that you never even got the opportunity to find out. You never got to prove yourself to her. You find yourself sometimes wishing for the withering old age, the mutual degradation of your bodies and minds, the immobility and dementia. In a just world, couples would all have the opportunity to break down together.

  HOW MANY THINGS ARE there that you’ve left undone? How many old to-do lists will you find in your pockets and in your house? How else to describe your life but as incomplete? Is life supposed to be about completing a long series of tasks, or is the whole point that no matter what you do, there will be things you’ve only partly finished?

  WHEN YOU COLLECT SOMEONE’S ashes, you’re supposed to spread them somewhere. Ritual, the social contract. You’re supposed to do something poetic and moving. You’ve never understood any of this, the expectation that you should be so willing to send her soaring away from you. Even eight hours after emptying the urn on the beach, now flying east toward Philadelphia, you feel piercing regret at having left her behind, terror at the thought that you let go too soon, a magnetic attraction that tugs you back toward her at an atomic level. But sitting on the beach with her, it occurred to you that it’s selfish to keep holding on forever. It is detrimental to both of your spirits if you refuse to move on. You need to liberate yourself from the burden of her death and you need to allow her the freedom to go where she wants to go. If she wants to come back to you, she will. You can’t force it on her. Her soul has to choose you.

  THERE ARE NO FAIRY tales. No looking over in your bed and seeing her lying there again. No magic potions to bring her back to life. No spells you can cast or prayers you can recite that will solve this problem. No dreams in which her spirit appears and comforts you. No speaking to the dead through psychics and Ouija boards. No meeting another woman whose body has been inhabited by Kait’s soul. There is only a hole where a life used to be, and there is you sitting beside the hole, looking in and hoping to see something you cannot, will not ever, see.

  Like most people, Kait believed in some version of heaven. Not necessarily the clouds and harps and wings and the reunion with her beloved pets, and maybe not even the promise of enlightenment, but some amalgam of various popular visions of the afterlife. She believed she would still exist after death, believed that, wherever she would be, it would be a fine place, and she would still be able to interact with the material world on some level. You’ve never been able to conjure a vision of an afterlife that makes any sense, never been able to reconcile yourself to this idea that somehow everyone gets a life on earth, and then for some reason they’re also rewarded for simply existing by getting to enjoy themselves for eternity. When you die, you do not expect to go anywhere. There will be no reunion where you and Kait get to clink champagne glasses and rekindle your love affair while observing Earth’s dramas from afar. You will be dead and you will be ashes and someone will toss you somewhere too, and that’s the end. But wouldn’t it be nice if there was a reunion? Wouldn’t it feel good to believe?

  TWENTY-TWO

  It took over two months for him to wend his way across the country via car and bus and car again, and it takes only six hours for his flight to carry him from San Francisco back to Philadelphia. There is no one to pick him up at the airport when he lands. He boards a shuttle along with a six-person family returning from vacation. Looking down at his phone, he studies the photo of him and Kait on the beach, tries to learn something new about that moment, tries to imagine Kait sitting there with his ashes in the urn.

  His house looks relatively undamaged from the outside, with the exception of the waist-high grass waving in the late summer breeze, and bundles of mail spilling from the box, stacked on the porch, catalogues and magazines and sympathy cards and unpaid bills and second and third notices for unpaid bills. The inside of the house is ransacked, more damaged even than Sherry’s photos had indicated. Dishes swept out of cabinets and shattered, couch cushions gashed open as if they had been concealing bricks of cocaine, mattress flipped, books and DVDs strewn across the floor. Refrigerator left open and running, the food inside fuzzy with decay. Kait’s drawers picked clean, his drawers removed from the dresser and overturned. Toilet clogged, overflowing. Evidence of rodents everywhere, frayed wires and gnawed drywall, trails of mouse droppings lined across countertops and floors. The smell of moldy August rain. The house is a corpse, Kait’s family the scavengers.

  When fishing a pillow out from behind the couch, he finds the globe that started this who
le trip, the last gift she ever gave to him. Impossible to tell how it ended up there, whether he had left it on the floor, or whether her family had tossed it aside like it was trash. He lies on the couch, the globe sitting on his chest, and he spins it, watching the colors swirl past him, a life in fast-forward.

  Sleep should not come easy in the house, not with that belligerent odor, not with the chaotic mess, but lying on the torn cushions he still fades away for a few minutes. The exhaustion of months on the road, full days sitting in cars, nights curled on hotel floors, the fatigue hitting him organ-deep. When he wakes up, he calls Willow and tells her he’s home. Tells her he needs help.

  HE THINKS ABOUT CALLING the police to report a robbery, but if he presses charges, then he will have to see Kait’s family again, be reminded of how much she looked like her brothers, the way they all had the same noses and the same teeth and the same posture, the fact that every time any of them spoke, he heard only Kait’s voice.

  Besides, whatever they wanted from him, they’ve taken it, and now they will leave him alone. They never actually hated him, Hunter thinks; it was the situation that made them so angry, imbued them with this need to lash out at everything that had survived Kait. Was it any different from the way he’d been sabotaging their efforts to overcome her death?