Young Widower

by John W. Evans

  I know “treasure” is a lame word, but that’s how I feel about our relationship, our talks, our writing exchanges, all of it. If it was in me to reciprocate your feelings, I’d be a fabulously lucky girl, but for whatever reason, it just isn’t.

  It’s good to hear you say that you feel good telling me about this. And I feel good too. If you want to talk on the phone, please give me a call today, tomorrow or whenever.

  It is redemptive to witness suffering that will not last. It confirms our hope for the worst part of morality, that something outside of ourselves might limit our intentions in and for the world. The individual life must continue, we hope, with its satisfactions and frustrations, understandings and appetites.

  I had no idea how to continue the argument I had started with my friend—Love me! No, really, love me!—so instead I tried to win it. I pretended my friend didn’t exist, and when that didn’t work, I got angry at her. I started and ended phone calls abruptly, made thinly veiled jabs, edited the writing we shared with unfair criticisms. I returned en masse a series of books I had borrowed over the years. I was petty, and whenever I felt called to account, having overstepped the furthest line of decency and fairness, I had to only say “Katie,” and everyone understood instantly that I was not well. These blunt frustrations of widowhood found sharp relief in the living world. It was intoxicating to feel anything.

  The sympathies of grief did not extend beyond witness and consolation. I formulated elaborate arguments and justifications, explanations, and they all meant nothing. However eloquent, I would not win this argument. It was not an argument. We had no common terms. I had a tremendous sense of entitlement, but no purpose. The emphases of grief and widowhood up close were not persuasive to everyone or to every situation in which I sought an advantage. My marriage to Katie, her death and our life together, had little, if anything, to do with the trivialities of daily life.

  When I was a kid, I often came home from middle school in a full panic, eager to confess to my older sister how certain I was that everyone hated me. Usually, she would gently correct me, maybe even patronize me, but she always found a way to tamp down the anxiety, at least a little. One time she looked at me a little while, sighed, then said, John, they don’t hate you. They probably don’t even think about you. You really have to give a damn about someone to hate them.

  Most of Katie’s friends stopped checking in. They could only manage so many conversations about the same thing. They had performed their duties as worthwhile and caring witnesses, but their emotional investment was not in me. They knew me in the abstract, as Katie’s widowed husband, from a few visits over the years. After a while, I think, they simply missed and remembered Katie without me.

  The healthy body does not grieve forever. It will not stay in bed all day, or refuse to work, or drink too much alcohol, or take too many pills. It is a highly adaptable organism. It lives in ice and grasslands, near oceans and rivers, on the sides of mountains and across long, dry plains full of wheat or sand. Like every appetite, grief gradually reveals its strengths and weaknesses, is reckoned with, evaluated, made even to yield to progress. If healthy is the subjective term, loaded with straw-man arguments and corrupted by the power of the expert, it is nonetheless akin to Potter Stewart’s famous pronouncement about pornography. You know it when you see it.

  I spent New Year’s in Chicago, watching professional wrestling in my brother’s townhouse while he and his wife went to a neighborhood party. Ben stopped by that evening to check in before going out with his ex-girlfriend. It was a thoughtful gesture, but I did not need to be saved. There was not much to check in on. I watched wrestling, then music videos and then the news, and finally the first fifteen minutes of a John Cusack movie. Around 10:00 p.m., I walked over to the party and talked with my brother’s friends. The ball dropped. We sang. Somebody suggested we all meet the next morning at 6:00 a.m. in the courtyard, to make the Polar Bear plunge into Lake Michigan. I said I’d be there and set the alarm on my phone.

  As I walked back to my brother’s place, I wondered how cold the water would have to be to stop our hearts. Wouldn’t it be ironic, and unfortunate, to have survived the place where Katie was killed, and to have lived the rest of the year in Indiana, only to die on New Year’s Day, jumping through the broken ice? I looked online for answers, but the opinions were uncertain. I woke up late the next morning. I checked my phone. It was muted, and the alarm was flashing next to the message indicator. The neighbor was bailing on the lake jump but wished me luck.

  In Indiana I looked for Katie at baseball games, saw her face or the shape of her body and the back of her head in shopping malls and foreign cities. But she was only there in passing, that damp and sweet smell of her sweat, her powder-scented deodorant and plain laugh. I woke from dreams that terrified me, in which she never appeared, and I was grateful for her absence.

  When Katie was alive, the rope would slip through my hands, by the yard. I would think, we have all summer to fix this. It will get better. I meant well, and I would change nothing. Or, I would make sincere and complicated plans to change my lifestyle, to exercise more and not expect so much, to listen and communicate better. Always, we fell back into our old patterns. I was scared. I was well intentioned. I didn’t know better. Or, I knew better and I failed. And then Katie died, and it didn’t matter.

  Rehearsals for Departure

  1.

  We take a cab to the outskirts of Bucharest to rent a car for the day. It is early spring, and Katie will die in a few months, but this morning I wonder how we might beat the weekend traffic. The plan is to claim the car, pick up Sara, and then drive two hours to Busteni. The rental office is seven stories up a Communist-bloc apartment complex. It retains a certain aura of unquestioning silence: marble pillars, travertine facades. We stand in the hallway, ringing buzzers and looking through the dark glass. Katie calls the company on her cell phone, but there is only a recorded message that we cannot translate. We retreat to the café across the street, lean our packs against the wall, and order eggs and coffee.

  The office manager arrives a little before noon, hung over, eager to pick a fight. We need a car that morning. He will not have a car until late in the afternoon. We have no need for a car if it means we cannot leave town that day. He will charge the credit card either way. We will not pay him. Either take the car, or forfeit the deposit and fee. We sign the papers, load our things into the trunk, and head back to Sara’s place.

  At a supermarket we buy beef ribs, spices, potatoes, imported chocolate bars with chilies and candied fruit, bottles of wine. We dig a barbecue pit in the yard, then decide it will be better to slow down a bit and enjoy the afternoon. We are in no hurry. We have all day now to do nothing together. Sara finds some painkillers left over from her back surgery. She says they might take the edge off. We open the wine and watch three or four DVDs of a television show we like. We cook our dinner and eat it on her back porch, then walk to a nearby park to watch the sunset. We are tired again and a little cold, ashamed for having wasted the day like this. Sara asks to keep the car to run errands.

  Calle Victoria is a straight shot between the two plazas nearest our apartments. We walk against traffic where it narrows into a single lane, past the park and art museum. We meander the neighborhoods. The streets and sidewalks are empty. We are still a little high. Katie holds my hand and swings her arms. We push the pace. We want to get home, to finish the day. A few minutes from the apartment, Katie suggests we stock up on milk and eggs for the morning. Sundays, nothing will open until late afternoon. At a fruit stand we buy fresh green apples, tart and a little underripe for the season.

  Say, for argument’s sake, we hire the car that morning and drive to Busteni or take the train instead. Say the rental agent is not sick. We are his only business, valued customers, in fact, for whom he has a late ’90s Peugeot gassed up and ready to go. We make good time out of Bucharest, past the abandoned industrial parks and new farms, and arrive quickly in Busteni. We rid
e the cable car up the mountain, take photographs under the white cross at the top, poke around a bit. We find an easy day hike across the ridge and back, eat lunch, drink our celebratory beers on the porch outside the basement of the hostel.

  We say that it was good to get out of the city and away from our routines. We should do this more often. On the ride down the mountain, we tell Sara about our weekend in Cali Manesti, for Katie’s birthday, how we hiked near the sulfur springs and got lost on the farm, where I surrendered my shoe to a manure pile. Coming down the mountain, the cable car clicks and swings and stops for a while over the deep valley to wait out the high wind, but it starts again. We do not travel to Busteni three months later. Katie does not die on the ridge of that mountain on a Saturday in late June. The ridge is not made sacred by her violent death. A bear crosses the ridge that day and attacks no one. Instead, that afternoon in March, we cross Busteni off of our list. There are other parts of Romania to visit that summer, for my birthday, before we leave the country for good.

  2.

  I leave Indiana on a Monday in August. I have lived there, with Ed and his family, for a little more than a year. I pack my car the night before with everything I own, mostly books and a few pieces of small furniture I fit crossways in the backseat. I drive the kids to their bus stop and wait with Beth to give everyone hugs. The kids step up and head off to their new school year. Everyone is a year older. I haven’t planned how to say goodbye to Beth or what it means to leave, except in the broadest terms. I am excited to be on my way. I have known for months that I will be leaving. We smile, say goodbye, and say goodbye again. I drive slowly down the block until, through the rearview mirror, my sister-in-law turns around to walk back into the neighborhood. I find the highway and play the mix of valedictory songs I have mapped out in advance for this moment. But the music feels too self-congratulatory. I start to feel guilty. I turn on the news until the signal fades past Lafayette, and when I am south of Merrillville, I call my sister-in-law and tell her I will be in Chicago in a few hours.

  Earlier that week I drive to the storage locker and open the last boxes from Romania. I have promised Katie’s family they can look through the boxes and take what they like, but before they do, I want to make sure I know what I am offering and that I will not miss the things they take. I separate out some of her clothes into one box, papers from her work into another. I find a Sudoku book where Katie has solved most of the puzzles. She has the habit of finishing one, then dating it, writing all over the page in an exuberant, loping script, “YES! TWO DAYS!” or “FINISHED!!!” Taken together, they make an informal calendar of our last year together, a record of one part of her happiness. I like seeing her handwriting again. I remember how she would write messages in the margins of the puzzles, passing them over my way as she was off to run errands or if one of us was talking to our family on Skype. I would find annotated Sudoku pages torn out of the book, all over the apartment. We even used them for scrap paper.

  I drive north past Chicago. I stop at the grocery store a mile from the nature preserve and buy flowers. I park in the lot and make my way toward the place where we spread Katie’s ashes. It is warm, even for the season, and there is not much shade. The flowers are coming out. All of the grass cut back from the path in winter has grown in thick, a little weedy. I can just make out the place where the ashes fell in a great clump, before we spread them by hand. I stand there a while, feeling good. We were right not to bury Katie in a cemetery. She can go wherever she wants to, I think, but that is too corny. Let the wind take your troubles away, from a song we both liked, is better.

  A police officer stops Judy, Ed, and me in the parking lot of the subdivision across the street, the night after her funeral. You should not be doing this. It is late, the preserve is technically closed. The officer writes down our names, addresses, driver’s license numbers. He gives us a warning about trespassing so close to a construction site. After he leaves, we sneak around to the back entrance. Fireflies are out, and crickets. After the summer rain, everything glows. The memorial site is a little more than a mile from that entrance, just past the clearing. We find it coming both ways on the path. We stand together and then spread out a little. We hug and put our arms across each other’s shoulders, waiting to be done with our individual silences. The pile of ashes is hard, like wet cement beginning to set. All summer and fall I keep waiting for nature to get to work and dissolve it into the soil. In wintertime it disappears under the snow and ice, but come spring, I reach in and break it into smaller crumbles and throw handfuls of hard clay deep into the field.

  3.

  Ed takes me to the mountain bike trails just west of the city, a series of ramps and narrow, rocky paths with dusty turnouts and gravel pits. In his enormous red pick-up, we talk about the mountain biking trails in North Miami, where Katie and I went to graduate school: stretches of mangrove next to Biscayne Bay, steep hills and fences, the long slopes down to where the “diamond” trails began. We make our own loops across and back to the parking lot. I plug in my headphones and play Yo La Tengo’s “Did I Tell You?” (“My brain’s impatient, my heart’s still willing to wait”) over and over on my headphones.

  I meet Ben in Chicago for the first anniversary of Katie’s death. We have plans to fly to Bucharest, take the train to Busteni, and climb the mountain where she died, but I panic, and at the last minute I cancel our tickets. Instead, we walk the lakefront to Andersonville, past Katie’s and my old apartment, and make our way to Moody’s, where we play all of the Cat Stevens we can buy on the jukebox. Katie loved Cat Stevens, the Harold and Maude soundtrack especially. Leaving the bar, we try to take a shortcut east from Clark Street, back toward the lake, but we end up wandering into one alley, then into another, until we get turned around. Coming back out to Clark Street, we pass a party on one of the balconies, four or so stories up. A rock anthem ends, then the low hum of party chatter. As we pass under the side stairwell, clear as can be, the opening chords of “Moonshadow.”

  That first summer in Indiana, I lose Katie’s wedding band. I wear it on the band of my watch until one day it falls off in the gymnasium where I play basketball with her brother, or disappears under the seat of his truck, or perhaps is lost in the burrito shop, after basketball, where I am sweating so much I take the watch off to protect the leather band. The watch is crystal action, wind-up, Russian made with Cyrillic letters across the dial. Katie bought it in Romania for me and gave it to me for Christmas. There is a small indentation where the ring leaves an impression on the finish, a crack in the leather. That night I stumble between rooms in the house, searching everywhere for it. I have taken a sleeping pill, and now I struggle to stay awake long enough to complete my search. I know I will not find it, that I am even probably looking in the wrong place, but I have to make a full effort. I need to believe that I have done everything I can to save the ring before I quit looking for it.

  The ring that I lose is not Katie’s engagement ring; I keep that one in a box on a shelf. It is not even the ring Katie wore on our wedding day. The ring I never find is white gold, slender as a ring tab. She purchased it in a Miami jewelry store to replace the original bands of thick titanium we had found online, whose weight she hated on her finger, how it clinked against everything she touched. I tie the titanium ring to a rope twisted with a metal chain and wear it around my neck for the next year.

  4.

  Ion kills the engine and runs his headlights long enough for us to find the trailhead. The trees spread out down the hill in both directions. We walk shoulder to shoulder until there is no space between them, and when we stagger out seven or eight feet, Katie takes the lead and Sara walks behind me. I can hear the crunch of snow underfoot as I shine my flashlight on the back of Katie’s head, then down at the path in front of me, then back behind me for Sara to see the way. I follow Katie. She keeps walking.

  It is April 2007. Two months before Katie’s death, six weeks after we do not drive to Busteni. Ion’s bed-and-breakfast
offers valet service from the train station, whatever the hour. His blue diesel pickup sits four across, with our bags in the back next to an enormous dog. The dog doesn’t move, not even when the road narrows to a single lane between buildings and we stop to wait for oncoming traffic. The ride that night is uneventful. It takes less than an hour. We park near a turnout from the highway one, maybe two kilometers’ hike from the cabin. Just follow the trail, Ion says. He will bring around the bags.

  The next day, from his porch, we see houses up and down the ridge, but that night we seem only to walk deeper into a forest. Shouldn’t we be there by now? I think. Isn’t that a fork in the path ahead and, beyond that, another fork? I can smell wood smoke and charcoal, and periodically the snow seems to get deeper or shallower. We make as little noise as possible. Much later, when it is neither dark nor late, we agree a second possibility crossed each of our minds that we were terrified to acknowledge. We might never arrive at the cabin. There might be no cabin, no Transylvania, no Ion; only some elaborate Romanian hustle to fleece tourists and ex-pats, then abandon them in the winter mud and ice.

  What curiosity plunges us so headlong toward adventure that we trust Ion’s unmarked trail?

  And then we are there, standing before a magnificent wooden palace filled with light, against which our flashlights make no shadow or intrusion. Ion and his dog stand on the porch, waiting for us. If Ion has passed us in the forest, he makes no mention of it. He invites us inside to shake out our shoes and hang our jackets, hats, and gloves near the fire.

  Ion’s wife has set out plates of cheese and cubed lard, which he now pares with his pocketknife and spreads on crackers. He ticks through a list of hospitality-laden questions, one after the next, practicing his English.