The Other Widow

by Susan Crawford

  Dorrie sits in the lobby on a plastic chair. Sometimes she isn’t allowed to see Jeananne at all. Sometimes she sits for an hour or so and leaves without even a glimpse into the room in ICU. It depends on who’s on duty. Jeananne has no family nearby, or, as far as Dorrie knows, anywhere at all. She was an only child, father long gone, and her mother died three years ago. A cousin somewhere, but Dorrie has no idea where. It was only the husband—ex-husband now, so most of the nurses let her go in. They’ve been easing off on the sedation for the past couple of days, and Jeananne is breathing on her own. She has, the nurse called to tell Dorrie earlier this afternoon, even come around for brief periods. She’s confused, but that happens. “All the drugs,” the nurse explained. They’ve operated on Jeananne’s ankle, her broken wrist, and she’s apparently come through like a trouper. Dorrie’s not to be too optimistic, she’s been cautioned, but she is. She knows Jeananne. “Can’t keep a good woman down,” she always says, and the nurse smiles, gives Dorrie’s arm a depressing little pat. “We’ll hope for the best.”

  Dorrie reaches for her bag. She’ll phone home, leave a message for Samuel and Lily. She hadn’t known about Jeananne before she left the house this morning. She rummages through her purse. No phone. Damn. With all that’s happened, she doesn’t like to be without it, not even for a minute. She feels herself start to panic, even though she’s sitting in the lobby of the ICU, surrounded by medical personnel and concerned, nail-biting family members. She thinks about taking a cab to the office to grab her cell phone off her desk. It’s only a short ride. She could still make it back in time to see Jeananne.

  “Dorrie?” The nice nurse stands in the doorway. “Your friend seems to be coming around,” she says. “You might want to walk back, see if you can help. She’s more likely to respond if you’re there.”

  Jeananne is tiny and pale. She doesn’t look any different today than she did the last time Dorrie saw her. She looks like a doll. A shell. Dorrie hesitates.

  “Come in.” The nurse moves over slightly in the cramped space. “Just talk to her,” she says. “Try to connect with her. She’s still a little disoriented.”

  “Jeananne?” Dorrie is suddenly self-conscious in this room of beeps and blinking lights, the huffing pumps and monitors. “Jeananne?” she says. “It’s Dorrie. Can you hear me?” There is a tiny movement, the flicker of blond eyelashes. “Jeananne?” Dorrie leans over the bed. Her face hovers in the air above Jeananne’s. Her breath is fast. Her heart pounds. “Jeananne,” she says. “It’s Dorrie. Can you open your eyes?”

  And she does.

  “Nurse!” Dorrie turns around. The nurse stands in the hall, writing on a chart. “Nurse!” Dorrie calls again, but the nurse is already crossing the threshold, already grabbing Jeananne’s wrist, fragile as a bird’s wing.

  “Hey,” she says in a soft voice. Bridget, her name tag says. “Welcome back.”

  Jeananne’s lips twitch. In the bright and greenish light, her white face is opaque, like milk glass.

  “Do you know who this is?” Bridget gestures toward Dorrie. “Do you recognize your friend?”

  Jeananne nods a teensy little nod.

  “Can you tell me her name?”

  Jeananne’s voice is a whisper, a small, light wisp, catching in the cacophony of hospital sounds, but it’s still her voice, even though she doesn’t actually answer Bridget’s question.

  “Where am I?” Jeananne squints around the room.

  “You’re in the hospital. Mass General.” Dorrie moves in beside Bridget and the two of them crowd against the metal rails, gazing down at Jeananne as if she is a newborn in a crib, as if they’ve never seen anything more beautiful. She stirs. Dorrie can see her veins through the skin along her forehead and the white skin of her arms. Darkness pools beneath her lids. She closes her eyes.

  “I am so sorry,” Dorrie says. “I feel like this is all my fault. If you had just come with me to Mug Me—if I hadn’t been in such a hurry . . .”

  Jeananne’s eyes open again; her forehead creases. “Silly.” Jeananne shrugs, a tiny movement underneath the sheet. “Accident.”

  “I know.” Dorrie takes her hand. “I’m so glad you’re awake,” she says. “So glad you’re going to be all right.” Would she? Dorrie looks around, but Bridget’s gone. “I should let you rest,” she says.

  Jeananne’s lips twitch. Not quite a smile.

  Dorrie bends to give her a small hug. “I know. Enough with the resting, but you need to get your strength back. We really miss you at work. Especially Edward. And me, of course.”

  Jeananne’s forehead crinkles again and it occurs to Dorrie that Jeananne might not exactly know at this point who Edward is. The theory that they were passionately involved now seems absurd.

  She catches a cab back to work to pick up her car and her cell phone that she’s sure she’s left somewhere in her office—she probably set it down on her desk after the call from the hospital, when she’d run out to the hall to tell everyone the good news, only to find the place was virtually empty. Only the new temp who barely knew who Jeananne was looked up when Dorrie announced the good news in the hallway. “That’s really awesome,” she’d said, chewing on an aqua fingernail. The cab turns onto Charles and Dorrie stares out the window at the sidewalks lit by streetlights, and tries to shake off an edgy feeling. In the back of her mind, her mother whispers something Dorrie can’t quite hear. She doesn’t want to. It’s enough that Jeananne’s better.

  The taxi pulls off I-93 toward South Station and merges onto Purchase Street. As it lurches to a stop against the curb on Summer, Dorrie spots the guard through the large front window. Still on duty. Her edginess recedes a smidgeon; the whispers in her head subside.

  Lights are on at Home Runs, and she wonders for a second who could possibly still be there. Jeananne was the one who worked late. And will again! She smiles, raises her fists high in the air. Yes! She hurries down the hall, spots the lights on in the back office—the tech guy must be here installing the new computer system. She doesn’t bother to go back to say hello.

  She finds her phone where she’d left it on her desk, sticks it in her purse, and starts to hurry out to the garage, but, on a whim, she goes back and sits at her computer. It’s late, way after hours, so there’s no one here, only Len, lost somewhere in the bowels of the back office. It’s the perfect time to take another look at the customer files and see if there’s anything she might have missed the other day when she glanced at the background on the couple that died in the fire. Robbins. She turns on her computer and pulls up the file, scrolls down to the R’s, but she doesn’t see their name. She scrolls back up. “Remaley . . . Rogers.” What the hell? She scrolls through all the R’s again, and then she types “Robbins” into the search engine. Nothing. A wave of nausea hits her. Someone’s deleted it. She looks around behind her and then up and down the hall. The edginess snakes back along her spine, an eerie feeling as if she’s not alone, as if she’s being watched. Her heart flip-flops like a trapped bird.

  But maybe she did it. Maybe, in her hurry the other day, she deleted the Robbins file. She checks under Upcoming Auditions. The copy she’d made is still there. Good. And she has the hard copy zipped inside her bag. She closes out and takes the elevator down to the garage.

  The lights are wonky, casting shadows everywhere on the walls, distorted, stretched-out shadows. She unlocks her car and the beep of the key lock echoes in the huge bare space as Dorrie slides behind the wheel and starts the car. Tries to start the car. It makes a whirring sound and cuts off.

  Damn.

  She tries again. This time the motor coughs and the car shudders, but the engine still does not turn over. It’s very cold. Extremely, maddeningly cold. But the car is only three years old, so it isn’t as if she’s driving one of her husband’s old fixer-uppers that can’t handle this kind of weather. She climbs out and looks under the hood. She’s learned a few things after all these years with Samuel. She checks the battery connections, all
the hoses she can spot—nothing seems loose or disconnected. She shakes the battery and turns the key again. Nothing. This time there’s only a click. A dead-engine click. And then the squeak of the outside door. She doesn’t move. She’s frozen, her hands gripping the steering wheel so hard her knuckles go from pink to white. She stares ahead, through the windshield, terrified to look around her, terrified to look at the side door. She doesn’t hear it close; there’s only the squeak of the hinge. The wind, she tells herself. It’s only the wind. It’s stormy out. Lots of wind. It’s caught the door, that’s all. It’s swung the thing open. Any second now she’ll hear it slam back shut.

  She waits. The door is either being held open by the wind or someone has been careful, closing it gently to stop the noise. She grabs her purse and this time she looks around, makes sure no one is there beside her car or crouched nearby. Footsteps echo in the silent cold garage, clipped, hurried footsteps, and for once she’s glad the light is bad.

  She opens the car door without a sound and runs as fast as she can for the entrance, around the lowered arm and back into the building, calling for the security guard who sits, playing games on his cell phone. Oblivious. But at least he’s there.

  “Help!” she yells. “Please.”

  “What?” He hurries toward her in the lobby. “What happened? What’s wrong, Dorreen?” He remembers her, remembers her name. Dorrie stops running.

  “There’s someone in the garage!”

  He stops. Roland, his name tag says. “Who? Did he—”

  “I don’t know who, exactly, but I think whoever it is followed me. And my car. It’s—it won’t start!”

  “Did you see him? Can you describe him to me so I can—?”

  “No.” Dorrie considers. “I didn’t—I didn’t actually see him. I heard him, though. Coming toward me in the garage. The light’s so bad I didn’t—I couldn’t actually see him.” She remembers the heels, the clicking sounds of someone hurrying away. “Or her.” Or maybe a totally clueless office worker clicking through the garage at the exact right moment scared off the would-be attacker.

  “I’ll take a look,” Roland says, and he runs out of the building, turns left down the sidewalk.

  She’ll call a cab, ask the guard to watch her until she’s safely inside, until the taxi’s pulling into the street. She calls Samuel. “My car,” she tells him. “It’s stuck here in the garage. Can you come get it?” She leaves this in his voice mail and then she ends the call and waits, but Samuel doesn’t phone her back. She texts him, waits again, but, again, nothing. The security guard comes back a few minutes later, shaking his head, throwing his hands up in a gesture that tells Dorrie there was no one there by the time he got to the garage.

  “Was the door open?”

  “No,” he says. “The door was closed. Maybe it was the wind. It’s raw out there. Maybe what you heard was just—”

  XXXIV

  KAREN

  When Karen called them, the people from Glass Houses wasted no time coming to repair the broken window, replacing it with double thermal glass—so much better than the old single panes, they told her. She should really have all the windows in the house replaced.

  She still hasn’t gotten back her iPad, and she scans her memory, trying to recall what she had on the thing. She’d occasionally used it as a sort of journal. Shopping lists, books she heard mentioned on talk shows or on the radio that she wanted to remember to pick up on her next trip to a bookstore. Dribs and drabs of a fairly uneventful life.

  She runs the broom across the floor, sweeping tiny bits of glass into a dustpan. She isn’t really bothered by the thought of the police skimming the contents of her iPad. Things that people jot down might be annoying or poetic, depending upon one’s point of view, but they’re certainly not illegal, and not, she thinks, especially interesting to a squad room full of thirtysomethings cops, busy texting their wives or girlfriends on their lunch breaks. It’s whoever stole it that she wishes hadn’t any access to her thoughts or book preferences or, hell, her shopping list for that matter. She feels as if she’s been violated twice. Raped. Exposed. First her house and then her brain. From now on she’ll use the ugly white alarm religiously.

  Her home phone rings. Edward’s name pops up on her caller ID.

  “Hello?” she says, answering, finally, on the sixth ring. “Hello, Edward.”

  “You okay?” She can hear him puffing on the other end of the line, as if he’s running a marathon or walking up a steep hill. “Robbie told me about the break-in.”

  “I’m fine,” she says. “I wasn’t home, actually.”

  “Well,” he says, “thank God for small favors, eh? Listen. Karen. Can we talk?”

  She sighs. “Sure.”

  “It’s about the company,” he says. “Have you thought about my offer?”

  “Yes,” she says. “Well, actually, no. Not seriously, but since you ask. No. I would have to say I have no intention of selling my half of the business to anyone. Not even you, Edward.”

  There’s a brief silence. “Entirely your decision. I’d give it a little more thought, though.”

  “Why is that, Ed?” She strolls to the back door, lets Antoine out. He looks both ways before he steps tentatively across the threshold to the snowy yard, a little gun-shy after his ordeal.

  “All this digging around on account of the insurance policy. That, coupled with the—unpleasantness—with the books and the, um, irregularities. Are you sure you want to be involved?”

  Edward. Gloom and doom. “Of course I don’t. But how would selling my part of the company change any of that?”

  “It wouldn’t,” Edward says. “But I’d take full responsibility for everything. It’s all on me. I’d be the one holding the bag here, and I think that’s what Joe would want. I knew him better, probably, than anyone—except you, of course—and I know he’d want me to do everything I possibly can to protect you from this.”

  “And maybe you’re right. But that’s kind of moot now, too, isn’t it? Joe’s dead. Who knows what he would have wanted, and, really, at this point . . .” She stops. At this point who cares? “The company is pretty much all I have now, Edward,” she says, and she is struck by the poignancy of this truth. “I want to come back to Home Runs—take over Joe’s old job.”

  “You haven’t been part of the company for years.”

  “And just look what happened!”

  He laughs. “Point taken,” he says. “But my offer stands. Oh, and Karen.”

  “What?”

  “Lock your windows,” he says, “and get an alarm if you don’t have one. I can help you find a good security—”

  “Got one,” she says, “but thanks.” She hangs up. She stretches, feeds Antoine, who has strolled back inside and seems to be almost up to biting her hand, but not quite. She peruses the entertainment section of the paper, scans plays in the area. She finds one at the Loeb Drama Center that sounds like an excellent escape, certainly a healthier one than sleeping with Tomas. She grimaces. They had gone together to three plays—two at the Loeb. In fact, she’d only ever gone to plays with Tomas, at least in the last few years, doubtless why she’s thinking of them now. She sighs. And then she reaches for the phone and calls Alice. “I have to get out of my house,” she says. “I’ve been burgled.” For a minute she wonders if that’s the right word. It doesn’t sound right. “I was thinking of a matinee,” she says, “at the Loeb. Can you get away? Can Sally watch the shop while we—?”

  “Your house, you mean?” Alice says. “Your house was burgled?” And Karen says yes. The house. Small electronic items. Alice says she’s so sorry, and yes the shop is covered and of course she’d love to see a play. “It’ll be fun,” she says. “It’s been ages! I’ll meet you at the Harvard Square Station. What time is the play?”

  Karen stands with Alice in the lobby of the Loeb theater. Outside the wind moans, and Karen considers staying over with Alice at her place, but then she thinks of Antoine and sighs. The play was
an experimental one. Good but, Karen fears, a little over her head. Maybe she’s losing her mind, she thinks, her brain. Maybe she’s so rattled by Joe’s death that even a simple play is puzzling.

  “I didn’t really get it,” Alice says.

  “Oh,” Karen says. “Good! I’m so glad! I thought it was just me. My brain or some—”

  She feels a hand on her arm and she jumps. “Tomas?”

  “Yes.” He winks. “For some reason, I had the urge to see a play.”

  “Me, too.” Karen smiles. “Did you like it?”

  “Yes.” He glances around the lobby, takes in all the people. “Very much.”

  “Did you get it?”

  He nods. “Of course. You forget I’ve been in this country most of my life, Karen.”

  “No. That’s not what I really— Never mind. This is my friend, Alice,” she says. “Alice, Tomas.” They shake hands and the three of them make small talk for a few minutes, but it’s uncomfortable. Awkward.

  “I’d better go,” Tomas says finally, and everyone is a little relieved. “It’s my one night off this week, and I’ve got things piled up to do.”

  “I wonder if he really did get it,” Karen says when Tomas has disappeared around a corner, “or if he was just trying to impress.”

  Alice shrugs. “Hopefully, he was just trying to impress us. Well—you. I can see the attraction,” she says. “That I get. He does seem a little needy, though, and needy men can be really . . . needy. Draining.”

  “ ‘Methinks thou dost protest too much’?”

  “Nope. Not my type.” She looks sideways at Karen as they push through the door. “But . . . yours, clearly.”

  “It was just the one time.” Karen sighs. “Granted, it was an unforgettable, tempestuous, passionate, orgasmic one time, but still one time. A total anomaly. Anyway, I have to say, it was romantic, Tomas turning up here after the other day.”