This is what Maggie had hoped to find. It’s why she’s here, although she isn’t sure what it all means. Not yet. “Thanks,” she says and the shop owner nods. Hank glances at his watch and then out at the street, where a squad car is just pulling up a few doors down. Maggie reaches over, pats Hank on the arm, and tells him they should get together, Hank and his wife and Maggie. Or a double date, she says, although she hasn’t dated anyone for months. The shop owner is still glued to his iPad. He barely knows they’re there; his eyes are watery from staring at the screen, from straining to make things out through all the gray and haze.
“Wait,” he says. “You might want to see this,” but Hank’s already running out the door. “Let me know,” he calls back, “how it comes out, or if you need me on this.”
Maggie looks at the screen, where a crowd moves through the snow toward the car. The owner rewinds. “Wait,” he says again. “This is weird,” and he hits PAUSE and then PLAY and Maggie can just barely see the driver’s-side door opening as a figure reaches inside and then backs quickly away.
“Damn.”
“I know, right? Thought you might find that interesting,” he says. “After that, there’s nothing. At least nothing I could make out. I think the wind knocked the camera totally out of focus. Want me to play it anyway?”
“No,” Maggie says. “That’s okay. Listen, thanks. We really appreciate you doing this. Could you possibly—that one shot there. The driver’s-side door—could you replay that one more time?”
“Sure thing.” The owner fiddles with his iPad. “Here,” he says.
Maggie squints at the frame.
VII
KAREN
Karen jumps when her phone rings in her house in Waltham. Despite seeing Alice’s name across the tiny screen, she brings the cell up to her ear with trepidation. “I’m leaving in an hour,” she says. “Call you when I get off the train.” She doesn’t wait for an answer. She’s running late. She’s having trouble doing anything these days—sleeping, and getting out of bed, or off the couch—she hasn’t been back to work since the day Joe died. Her lovely turn-of-the-century house, spotless until recently, is now a mass of dirty dishes and half-filled teacups, wineglasses caked with film. Grease from fast-food wrappers seeps into antique tables where she’s set things and forgotten they were there. Antoine, their Papillon, has gulped them down, adding his eager slobber to the mix.
He’d spoiled the dog. Antoine only ever really liked Joe.
A prescription bottle from CVS sits beside a stack of mixing bowls in a white kitchen cabinet, Xanax, left over from a dental procedure Karen had weeks before. You’ll be needing these, the dentist told her, but she hadn’t. Not then. She’s good with pain. Excellent with pain. Tough it out, she always told her sons when they were little, when they whined over minor injuries or tattled on each other. But it’s a different kind of pain that lately has her padding to the kitchen in the wee hours, reaching for the pills that lurk behind flowered cups she bought at Anthropologie on a whim, the one on Newbury, the street where Joe died.
If details from the accident report are painful and maddening—the second Starbucks cup, the spilled hot chocolate—they make her husband no less dead. Nor do they make Karen less alone or empty, and certainly no happier. The insurance payout is apt to be delayed, a claims adjuster told her when she’d called the day before. Standard, she’d said, on a claim this size. And it is large. A million-dollar claim. Karen took it out herself a few weeks before the accident. The business was losing money; Joe was acting crazy, totally obsessed with a tragic house fire—heartbreaking—but in reality it had only the slightest, most tangential connection to his life. And then there were the e-mails, this understudyfork. With all the drama, all the intrigue, who knew what might happen? And then it had! Before the ink was even dry on the insurance policy—just that quickly, Joe was gone.
“We’ll have to sort through this a bit,” the adjuster told her, and it is unsettling, but only in a vague, unreal way. Money is the last thing on Karen’s mind, and, anyway, she has a little tucked away for the moment. That’s all she can handle now. Just this one day, this hour, this smallest, most colorless and unexciting step. Later, when it matters what she eats or what she wears, she’ll have Joe’s half of the company. Home Runs is her future.
She sets the new alarm in the foyer, this plastic, white-rimmed thing that clashes with both the trim paint and her nature. You’re gone so much, is what she’d told her husband, lobbying for the damn thing weeks before. She hadn’t told him that sometimes when she walked Antoine, or stopped for groceries, she felt a presence, someone there, just out of sight, watching her. She might have. If Joe hadn’t died, she might have.
She hurries through the door. The cold hits her as she scans the driveway, the street in front of the house, the droopy naked trees and salt-covered asphalt, the bright red of a neighbor’s newly painted door. She hits the button on her key ring and slides into her car, hears the locks click behind her as she starts the engine and fiddles with the radio, glances at the rearview, the side mirrors. The house.
“Breathe,” she mutters, settling on a soothing classical music station. “Just breathe.” Instead of meeting Alice, she should probably be on her way to see a shrink, something she last considered the summer she turned nine and read The Three Faces of Eve, plucked from their parents’ bookshelf by her older sister Lydia. Eve, with her headaches and three personalities packed inside her nervous southern body, made Karen wonder if there might be a daring alternate inside her, too, waiting to leap out and break all the bottles in her father’s gin collection or saunter down to the OK drugstore slathered in Lydia’s perfume. Still, aside from that one summer, seeing a shrink never even entered Karen’s mind until Joe ended up dead across his steering wheel in Back Bay, leaving her with a boxcar full of sorrow and regret for how things could have turned out and did not, and, worse, this feeling that she’s being stalked.
“How are you, sweetie?” Alice stands up to give her a hug.
“I’m okay.” Karen pulls out a high-backed wooden chair, sets down her tea and pastry.
Alice’s bookstore is a short walk from the Queen of Cups, where the two friends have been meeting here on Wednesday afternoons for years. If Karen’s working at the shop, they close and walk up here together. If she isn’t, she comes in on the train. It’s tradition. Rain or shine, no matter what, Wednesday afternoons belong to Alice. The little tea shop, filled with an eclectic mix of furniture and teas, has chocolate everything. Éclairs, truffles, cakes to die for. “Listen.” Alice leans across the table. “Why don’t you come stay with me for a while? Just until you—”
Karen throws her coat over the back of a funky, bright blue chair and stares at her croissant. Alice has lived with her cats in a tiny place on Beacon Hill ever since her marriage ended years ago, and at this point there is a definite allure—of course, at this point a cardboard box has appeal. “I just might take you up on that,” Karen says. “Thanks. And thanks for all your help with the funeral. With everything. I’ll be back to work as soon as I can get myself—”
Alice bites into a chocolate almond scone and waves her hand in the air. “Take as much time as you need. And, Karen. You know I’m always here. You know that. Anything. A place to stay, more hours at the bookstore, a shoulder to— Just let me know.”
Karen nods. “It’s all a blur.” She fiddles with her teacup. “Especially the funeral—all those people, Alice! And they all loved Joe. ‘Your husband was the nicest guy.’ I thought I’d go mad, I heard that so many times at his—at the church. After. You know. After the service.” She picks up her pastry, but then she sets it down again without actually tasting it.
“And at the cemetery. God. The cemetery. I was afraid they wouldn’t do the burial and we’d have to put it off until spring, but they were really . . .” Karen sighs, remembering that ancient, eerie place, with the wind wailing off the water, the cold damp ground, such an unfitting place for Joe. She clos
es her eyes, sees her husband laughing with his head thrown back. So alive. Warm. So unlike Karen, with her inability to open up, her reserve, her handful of people she really cares about, her sons and Alice and Joe, Lydia, taken far too soon by cancer, and, for a little while, Tomas.
“Everybody loved Joe,” Alice says. “Definitely one of the good guys.”
Karen butters her croissant, rips open her Earl Grey, and dips the tea bag in her cup. “He was. People used to come up to me all the time—Christmas parties, grocery stores, PTA meetings, back when the boys were still—you know—in school, on the soccer team. Complete strangers would come up and tell me what a good boss Joe was, what a great dad—all the coats he collected, all the toys, the mountains of canned beans. ‘Such a kind man,’ they always said. Of course, they didn’t live with him. They weren’t married to him.”
Alice starts in on a bear claw. “It’s always different for the wife,” she says. “You don’t have to tell me.” And for a minute neither of them speaks.
“Alice.” Karen leans over the small table, so lacquered it reflects the light from a lamp hanging above it. “I was there. The night Joe died, I was there.”
“You were where?”
“Where Joe hit that tree. Where he died. You were, too, actually. We might have both—I’m not sure exactly when we left the—” Her voice trails off.
Alice looks horrified. “God!” She glances at the window, takes a swallow of green tea.
“When they hit the tree,” Karen says. “She was with him—the girlfriend. It was in the accident report—not who she was, just that there was someone—you know—someone else . . . an extra Starbucks cup or something. Anyway, I guess you were right.” Karen clears her throat, plays with her napkin.
“Wait. I don’t— Did you see her? Did you see Joe’s car or—?”
“I did sort of see the car. But . . . it was snowing so hard, and, I mean, Joe wasn’t even in town as far as I knew— I didn’t see her—but I didn’t look, really. I just made my way to the station to catch my train. I could barely even see the car, but I— It did cross my mind. It looked like the Audi and I even took a couple steps toward the—but then I just took off in the other direction, caught the train. Sometimes, I wonder if I knew it was Joe. On some level, you know? Subconsciously. That I couldn’t deal with it, so—” I did what I do, she almost says. She stops.
“If so, you were probably in shock.” Alice tsk-tsks, takes Karen’s hand in both of hers. “Or blocked it out. Did you tell the police you were right there? Did you mention it when you went down to . . . ?”
Karen clears her throat. “To identify Joe’s body? No,” she says, and her eyes blur with tears. “I went to the hospital when they called me—but I never told them. It didn’t seem important.” Karen dabs at her eyes with a napkin and gulps down her tea. For a few seconds, other people’s conversations fill the space between them. She starts to tell Alice someone’s spying on her. Stalking her. She starts to say that even at the cemetery, even when she stood beside Joe’s grave, she’d felt this strange and disconcerting presence. That when she turned around, she’d seen someone—she could have sworn it—a figure in the trees. She sweeps a few random crumbs into a tiny mound. “I’ve got to get back,” she says. She wraps her croissant in a napkin, sticks it in her purse, and pokes at the running mascara at the corners of her eyes. “Antoine gets a little nuts when he can’t get out to pee.”
“Antoine’s always nuts,” Alice points out.
Karen hesitates. “Thanks,” she says, “for listening.” She stands up, puts on her coat, and leans over in the cramped aisle to give Alice a hug before she hurries to the doorway. Once there, she hesitates. For a second, she thinks about boarding Antoine and taking Alice up on her offer, staying in her tiny place, hemmed in by neighbors, surrounded by solid brick, the houseplants thriving under lamps. Although Karen has always felt a little claustrophobic there, it seems incredibly safe now, as if all of Beacon Hill were a scene inside a shoebox, with its up and down streets, the insulated feeling of this coveted and bustling area. She leans her shoulder hard against the heavy door and looks both up and down the sidewalk before walking quickly to her car.
Nearly an hour later, she pulls into her driveway, stares at a yard stretched like a sheet of cotton batting. Pure. Pristine. She walks up her front steps and unlocks the dead bolt, glances at the note she tries to remember to leave beside the alarm now every time she sets it—she’s learned the hard way just how quickly the company responds. She punches in the code. Antoine raises his head with a little snort and stares at a thin, black studded leash hanging near a kitchen door in dire need of paint. The portion underneath the knob is jagged from Antoine’s constant scratching and other paint shows through, a hopeful avocado from ten years before. Karen perches on a kitchen stool and stares at a stack of unpaid bills on the counter. She should have told Alice about her stalker, should have picked her brain. Karen eventually tells her best friend everything, so maybe Alice could have fit the pieces together, or at least had an objective opinion.
She fiddles with a plastic water bottle. No. She’d dumped enough on Alice for one day, admitting that she’d walked away from the unpleasantness of her husband’s messy death. It didn’t really happen that way but that was how it must have sounded to Alice. More than enough for one lunch, but that isn’t the real reason Karen doesn’t want to talk about this feeling that she’s not alone. She’s afraid if she does, it will become more real. She grabs a heavy flashlight on her way out to walk the dog, not so much for light, but as a weapon. Just in case.
The wind picks up. Antoine chases everything he sees, piddling, finally, at the edge of a neighbor’s snowy lawn, which, in the waning light, shows up her dog’s poor manners. Hers, really. “You need to drink more water,” Karen tells him, glancing at the patch of yellow snow. “Or maybe less.” She tugs on the leash and Antoine howls. The neighbor’s door flies open, and Karen sticks the yelping dog under her arm and heads for home, the flashlight banging against her hip. Antoine wails. Night drops suddenly and Karen picks up her pace as Antoine sinks his little razor teeth into her jacket. “Damn!” It’s slippery on the sidewalk going to the house, and Karen teeters, struggles to keep her balance. She grabs the flashlight from her pocket and shines it on the snowy path in front of her, where fresh footprints are scattered like fall leaves across the lawn. She shines the light along a trail of sunken spots marring the pristine blanket of thick snow.
On the front porch, Karen unlocks the front door and drops Antoine inside, pushes back to the yard. She finds the first footprint at the edge of the lawn near the street and follows the trail to the bay window in front, where the tracks turn right, heading for a small gate in the side yard. She stops, stands on tiptoe, aims the flashlight over the wood fence. In the backyard, tracks lead to yet another window and then back to the front, and finally to the street.
Snow picks up, filling the footprints, sucking them back into the night, the yard. Karen shivers. She turns and hurries back inside, sets the alarm, and stands at the edge of the window in the dark of the unlit living room. She could call the police, but by the time they arrive, the footprints will be invisible, with all this snow. They’ll tell her it was just a neighbor checking on her to make sure she’s all right—her car parked in the driveway, the darkened house, her husband’s recent death. Why doesn’t she ask around? they might suggest, their radios spluttering from their belts. Why doesn’t she check, see if it wasn’t just a well-meaning neighbor?
She walks through every room in the house. Checking. Finally, she pours a glass of Pinot Noir and drinks it quickly, pours another glass, and the theory of the worried neighbor seems more likely.
She slumps across the couch under an afghan. The house is far too large and empty with her husband gone. Creepy, now. Even with all his absences, there had always been the ambience of Joe, the knowledge that no matter how long he was gone, he would eventually come back. When he was home, she had his body there
beside her. Even if they curled away from one another like burning papers, if she listened, she could hear his breath, and if she moved just so, she felt the pounding of his heart. Since his death, she lies awake, remembering silly things, like standing in the automatic doors at Target, watching as he disappeared, bit by bit, running across a rainy lot to get the car, the blinking lights, the careless, swishing sound of the glass doors. She misses him a hundred times a day, laments the shocking death—the snow, that fucking ice. Cruel of him, she thinks, to die the way he did, with another woman there beside him in the car. Who was she? The question plagues her. Whose arms held him as he died or called his name for the last time? Who was there to say good-bye? Regret and anger bubble up through the wine. Somewhere at the back of the house, a curtain makes a rustling sound, like a sail, and she wonders if it’s Joe’s ghost come back to haunt her.
And the boys. She can’t even deal with that right now. They’ve taken on their father’s death in such completely different ways. Jon calls every day, comes by more often than he ever has before. He keeps it in, whatever he’s feeling. Not surprising—he and Joe always had a complicated relationship. Too much alike, she used to say. “Your son is just like you, so you have the same Achilles’ heel, the same temper.” And now, without the chance to set things right—“Give him time,” Alice always says. “He’ll sort it out. He just needs time.”
Robbie, on the other hand, deals with his father’s death like he deals with everything. Straight on. He cries, he drinks too much, he calls his mother twice a day. He’d sleep there on her couch if she let him, but, tempting as that sometimes seems, Karen keeps him at arm’s length. She needs her space and, even if he doesn’t know it, Robbie needs his, too.
She finishes the wine and hopes it keeps at bay the raw, wild grief that rakes through her late at night, fingers from the past that reach inside her bones to wrench from her all the moments of her marriage and toss them out into the spotlight, sorrow that leaves her wailing in a blue robe on a splintered wooden step at 3 A.M.
The Other Widow Page 5