The Other Widow

by Susan Crawford

  Maggie slides the check to the center of the table. “I think she’s into you,” she says, nodding toward the waitress. “What guy?”

  “At that table over there,” Lucas says, and he cuts his eyes toward a shadowed booth in a corner near the door.

  “No,” she says. “I don’t think so. I can’t really see him. Why?” She bends down to grab her purse, slides into her coat.

  “He’s been staring at you all night.”

  “Oh,” she says. “That. Happens all the time. My beauty, you know.” She laughs, but Lucas doesn’t.

  “I can see that,” he says, and Maggie feels her cheeks turn red. She’s grateful for the darkness of the bar. He stares at her.

  “God,” she says. “Stop, willya? You’re making me self-conscious.”

  “Sure. Sorry.” Lucas sticks a wad of bills under a water glass and the two of them stand up to leave.

  “So where’s this guy?” Maggie turns around again, hoping for a better look, but the table is empty. “Where’d he go? Maybe we can fix him up with our waitress.”

  “Gone,” Lucas says. “He took off a couple minutes ago.”

  XXXII

  KAREN

  Karen closes Tomas’s door with a tiny whisper sound and almost runs down the odious dark stairs. She flings herself against the heavy outside door to the sidewalk, but once outside, she doesn’t want to go back home. She isn’t ready. She’ll go see Alice at Bound for Glory.

  She takes the train back to the restaurant where she’d left her car hours before and drives straight to the bookstore. The sound of tinkling bells announces her entrance and she stands, for a few seconds, in the doorway, trying to catch her breath.

  “Are we alone?” She looks around.

  “Sadly.” Alice sighs. “January.”

  “I’ve done something really stupid.” Karen crosses the room and takes off her coat, hangs it on a hook behind the counter.

  “What? Oh. Before I forget—” Alice reaches for a little pile of books beside the register. “They’re on grief,” she says. “I’ve been meaning to give them to you, but I keep forgetting.”

  “Thanks,” Karen says. “These are great. They’re really—I slept with Tomas.”

  “Wow.” Alice raises one eyebrow. “That’s kind of—umm—out of character. Sleeping with some guy you haven’t seen in—what? A year? Two years? Not a very Karen thing to do.”

  Karen sighs. “I’ll straighten out those shelves,” she says, but she doesn’t move. She runs her thumb along the pages of her little pile of books. The store is lit completely by the lamps and the smattering of lights across the ceiling. The yellow day is now the color of mud; almost no light comes through the windows, and Karen eyes the reading area, longs for a quick nap. Behind the crowded shelves, two couches and a wooden rocker sit enticingly on a worn Persian rug—Persian to match the cats, Alice said when she bought it. There is always a fresh pot of coffee, nearly always pastries from the Queen of Cups. The ambience is cozy. It is, as Alice always says, her second home.

  “Maybe that’s exactly why I did sleep with him,” Karen says. “Maybe I just wanted to feel something. Anything. And he was . . . there.” Some people can get away with acting on impulse, Karen thinks, but she’s never really been one of them. Dorrie probably is. Definitely is.

  “Maybe.” Alice looks up. The bells tinkle. “Hello!” she says, as two women close the door behind them. “Welcome to Bound for Glory,” and she squeezes out from behind the counter, walks toward the door. “Is this your first visit?”

  Karen helps out, stalling until rush hour is over and even then she takes the long way home. She wishes now she’d joined Tomas in the shower at his place. She feels dirty. No, she thinks. The shower wouldn’t help; it’s more that she feels tainted, compromised, and she’s surprised by sudden overwhelming guilt. She’d thought she could escape for a couple of hours, feel some kind of vindication for what Joe did to her, to their marriage, all those months. Years, for all she knows. She’d also hoped that being with Tomas would erase all thoughts of both her dead husband and Edward. And it has. She wasn’t banking on this, though, this guilt, remorse, almost. It was too soon.

  Maybe, she thinks, pondering the afternoon on her way home, she’d wanted to see if the feelings for Tomas that she had up until today ignored, denied, could ever be revived. Like it or not, ready or not, she’s alone now. There’s no husband, good or bad, faithful or philandering. She is totally alone in a drafty old house in the middle of Waltham, sharing a bed that’s far too large for only her, with Antoine, who would doubtless go completely nuts if she actually did take up with someone. If nothing else, Antoine is loyal to his rotten, furry, growling little core. But not Karen. Or so she’d thought.

  The second she heard the shower come on, dribbly and sparse from the bad pressure on the fourth floor, as soon as she heard Tomas begin to sing, she knew she’d made a terrible mistake. Tomas himself doesn’t worry her in the least—she can tell him that she feels disloyal, she needs time. She can say the cops know she was right there when Joe died. She needs to be careful, she can tell him. She looks guilty enough already—the insurance policy, her presence. The fact that she’s involved with another man . . . it could destroy her.

  No. It isn’t really Tomas. It’s herself she’s worried about—her sanity. Her dignity, maybe. She isn’t sure. She only knows that she feels duplicitous, as if she’s spit on everything she valued, as if she’s spit on Joe. Even if he wasn’t the best husband these past months, he was still the love of her life. How could she taint his memory the way she has, demean herself the way she did this afternoon? She doesn’t even love Tomas. Never loved him; she can see that now. It was only lust, maybe a sprinkling of revenge for Joe’s philandering, a smattering of longing for Tomas, of course, for their friendship years before. But mostly it was lust.

  The odor of his building is inside her pores, the smell of soap and floor cleaner and garlic, of Tomas’s hands, his skin, the odor of their lovemaking. She’ll wash her clothes when she gets home, her hair. She won’t think about today again, at least not for a while. She stares through the windshield. A dark night. Streetlights shine like small round stars against the black.

  She turns on her iPod, fast-forwards through the mournful, melancholy songs she’s listened to since Joe died, fiddles through to vintage Springsteen. She turns it up. And then she turns it up louder, singing quietly along. She sings louder, pressing her foot down harder on the gas. Tramps like us, Baby we were born to run. For the first time in years, she feels like a woman. For the first time since Karen can remember, she feels alive!

  When she gets home, she realizes she’s forgotten to set the new alarm again. A foreboding, although at first she doesn’t see anything out of place. It’s only when she’s taken off her coat and tossed her hat on the couch.

  Antoine shivers in a corner of the kitchen, his fur damp and cold, as if he’s just come in from the yard. Antoine doesn’t have a doggie door, even though Karen had for years insisted they should get one. Joe hated the idea, thought it was inviting trouble. Rats, he said, or, hell, a break-in. “At the very least he’ll bring in all his friends,” Joe said one night, shaking his head and walking out of the kitchen, flapping the sports page loudly. “That’s ridiculous,” Karen had said. “Antoine doesn’t have any friends.”

  “What happened, sweetie?” She stoops to pet him and he doesn’t snarl. A bad sign. Antoine must be really off his game. His fur is nearly frozen. Karen grabs a towel from the bathroom and dries him off as best she can, and then she plugs in the hair dryer and aims the warm air at him. Antoine yelps in protest and only then does it occur to Karen that if he went out, someone else must have come in. She tiptoes to the back door. It’s locked, but Antoine’s paw prints are still visible in small wet spots that dot the tiled kitchen floor. There are no larger, footprint-size puddles, which tells her that whoever came in cleaned up the telltale tracks. Did one of the boys stop by? No. Robbie’s still at work—s
he’d spoken to him not an hour ago, and Jon’s on Martha’s Vineyard with his girlfriend’s parents.

  This time she doesn’t hesitate to call the police.

  “Please,” she says. “Hurry.”

  “Anything out of place? The house look different at all?”

  “Haven’t checked,” she says and she hangs up. She only hopes whoever broke in found a way to get back out again. She slinks down the hall to the back bedrooms, barely breathing. The wide-screen TV still sits pompously in the living room; the computer she uses for her writing projects is open on a desk in the den.

  She walks to the back of the house. Her jewelry, when she looks in the box, is still there. At least at first glance, everything appears untouched. Outside, a police car whirs to a stop, and she goes quickly to the door to let in the patrolman. Officer Rush. Fitting. He’s alone.

  “Aren’t you supposed to come in pairs?” she says, but Officer Rush just shakes his head.

  “Not on something like this,” he says, and Karen knows he isn’t taking her call seriously. He is here perfunctorily, but she hasn’t a faintest hope that Officer Rush will do much about—about what, exactly? A wet dog? She clears her throat.

  “So. Anything missing?” Officer Rush wonders. He taps his pen lightly against his pad. He stands inside the doorway, but just barely.

  “Not so far. No,” Karen says, “but I haven’t really had a chance to—you know—really. Thoroughly. You arrived so quickly.”

  “Right.” He looks pleased. “Our response time is excellent.”

  “Do you want a cup of coffee, Officer?” Karen feels nearly at home with this whole situation. Brennan. Officer Rush.

  “Been drinking it all day.” He waves his large hand in the air between them. “One more cup and you’ll be peeling me off the ceiling. Thanks, though.” He takes a step or two toward the kitchen. “I’ll have a look around. See where they got in. Let me know if something comes up missing.”

  “Right,” Karen says on her way to the back of the house. “I didn’t see anything when I came in, but, like I said, I didn’t really—” She opens the door to Joe’s old office carefully. She’s stuck Antoine inside the room so he won’t go crazy with Officer Rush in the house since he seems seriously traumatized as it is. She looks around. Joe’s laptop. Where is it? She looks everywhere—she starts with where she knows she left the thing, and works her way around the room from there. Gone.

  And so is her iPad.

  “Got it!” Officer Rush has clearly discovered something.

  “What?” She hurries down the hall toward his voice. “Where are you?”

  “Here,” he says. “In this little room back here. Off the kitchen here. I found where they got in.”

  Karen joins him in the tiny storage room. Broken glass covers the floor.

  “You’ll need to get that boarded up till you get the window replaced.” He jerks his head toward the broken window.

  “I know what he took!”

  “Yeah?” He turns around. “What’s that?”

  “My husband’s laptop,” Karen says. “He just died. My husband. He’s just passed away.”

  “I’m sorry,” Officer Rush says, scrolling around on his cell.

  “Yes.” She nods. “It was totally—” She stops, takes a breath. “And my iPad. My iPad’s gone, too.”

  “Is that it?” He sticks the phone in his jacket pocket and jots something down. Karen can almost see him stopping at the nearest McDonald’s for a coffee, running it through his mind now where the closest one is. Checking it on his phone. Not close at all, actually. Recalculating. He snaps the little notebook shut and starts to stick it in his pocket. Well. That’s a wrap. Now for that Double Mac.

  “That’s all I noticed. So far,” Karen says. “It’s an Apple, though, and I have an iPhone, so you can track it.”

  “ ‘Find’ feature enabled?”

  “Yep,” she says. “Putting in my password now.”

  “Oh.” Out comes the little pad again. “And the laptop?”

  “No,” Karen says. Damn. She hands her phone to Officer Rush. Both the laptop and her tablet are relatively new. Her iPad was barely out of the box, Joe’s laptop only about a year old. Small enough to sneak out under a jacket, get through a window, out of the neighborhood without a moving van or a vehicle at all, actually. Perfect for a quick afternoon heist.

  “Got the track,” the officer says. “You’re lucky he didn’t turn off the ‘find’ feature first thing. Happens a lot.”

  “Whew,” she says. “Great. Where is it?” It can’t be far. Most likely someone wanting drugs, a quick buck to trot over to a dealer. Some kid. She’s got to start turning on the alarm when she goes out.

  “In town,” he says, surprising her. “I’ll call it in to the Boston PD with the location. I can’t see what kind of place it is, but, hopefully, it’s still with your intruder there and we can grab the laptop at the same time.”

  “Great!”

  “Unless they’ve already sold it,” Officer Rush says, and he heads out the front door.

  Karen walks back to Joe’s old office and bends down to pat Antoine, who is strangely quiet in the corner. He shivers, even though she’s dried him with the hair dryer, and Karen wonders if he’s going into shock. “Antoine,” she says, “come on, boy!” She trudges up the hall to the kitchen and rattles the bag of dry dog food, but he is stubborn in his misery. She scoops him up. Without all the yipping and snapping, he seems suddenly very small. She carries him into the bedroom and sets him on the bed, covers him with a quilt, and Antoine brightens. Barely. She brings the dog food from the kitchen and hand-feeds him, coaxing him at first. After a few tiny nibbles, Antoine feels up to helping himself, sticking his wet nose inside the bag and even managing a small snarl. Back to normal. Almost.

  She would gladly have bought a laptop for the thief, one without all the company finances on it. Better yet, just handed him the money. She sorts through Joe’s papers. This time she’ll go through everything, every file, every cabinet. He must have hard copies somewhere. Or are they at the office? In his car? Joe was careful. Cautious when it came to technology. Almost old-school. “If it fails, nine times out of ten, people are totally lost,” he used to say, “unless they backed everything up or have a hard copy.”

  The phone rings, and Karen looks behind her, trying to remember where she’s left it. The bedroom, she thinks, with Antoine. She jumps up to head for the hallway and her heel catches in the plaid doggie bed. She falls forward, grabs at a table to steady herself, knocking a stack of papers to the floor. She glances down. She’ll get it later. And then she sees the spreadsheets. Sheets of them. September–December, one of them says, and then May–August. She stops, bends down. January–April. All of it’s here! Right here! Thank, God! She feels like letting out a little yip of joy herself. “We’re okay, Antoine!” she calls out toward the bedroom. “It’s all here!”

  “Officer Rush,” a very masculine-sounding voice informs her, when she grabs the phone on the last ring. “They got your iPad. It’s at a restaurant down on Commonwealth. Owner says a waitress turned it in after she found it on a table in back. Weird. Kids,” he says, and Karen pictures Officer Rush throwing up his hands. “Anyhow, they’re taking it down to the station now for prints. Should be good to go by morning.”

  “Great,” she says. “Thank you, so much! How about the laptop?”

  “No laptop. Sorry. Get that back window boarded up and turn on your alarm. Probably a random break-in, but now they know the window’s broken and they’ve got a way in, so be careful, Mrs. Lindsay.”

  “Right,” she says. For a minute she thinks about calling Tomas, about asking him to come by after work and stay the night. She even scrolls to his work number at the hospital. She hesitates. He won’t be off for hours. And even if she talked him into ditching work and coming over now, it would only make things more uncomfortable between them. She’d be leading him on. Worse, she’d be using him. And he’d be comi
ng here to her house, which he has never done before. She’s feeling guilty enough without adding to it, beating herself up later for having Tomas sleep in her late husband’s bed. And he would. At this point, she can hardly ask him to spend the night on the couch.

  No. She hurries out to the garage and finds a piece of plywood from some abandoned project—a birdhouse, was it? A backboard for a high-school science project? And then she calls Robbie, tells him what’s happened. She can hear his car door beeping open before she’s even finished.

  “Did they dust for prints?” Robbie stands in the small violated room, and Karen says she doesn’t know, actually. She assumes so.

  “Not they,” she says. “It was just the one guy. Officer Rush.”

  Robbie nails the plywood over the broken window and checks the yard three times before he leaves. Reluctantly leaves. He offers to spend the night. Insists on it. Think about what Dad would want, he says in desperation, but Karen tells him no. She’s fine. She’s not alone; she has Antoine, but thanks him for his concern. She practically pushes her son out the front door and then she sets the alarm, curls up on the couch with several quilts and the now dry and fluffy Antoine. Robbie calls her back from the highway into town. “So,” he says. “You’re saying someone went to all that trouble—breaking into a house in a suburban neighborhood, a house with a barking yippy dog—and then just happened to forget the iPad in a coffee shop in Boston?”

  “I know.” Karen yawns. It’s been one hell of a long day. “And it’s strange they didn’t take more.”

  XXXIII

  DORRIE

  Dorrie leaves work early and takes a cab to the hospital, even though there’s nothing much to be done for Jeananne at this point. Still, she can talk to her. She can sit with her, or, really, stand—ICU is not the place for lengthy visiting. Jeananne’s still in there somewhere, just unable to answer at the moment, or open her eyes, apparently. Music from the iPod streams from a metal table beside the hospital bed, playing Jeananne’s favorite songs.