The Black Widow

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  On that awful day, standing beside her son’s tiny casket with Ben, Gaby was in such a daze that she didn’t even realize at first that Kasey was there in the crowd, let alone with Dylan in tow. But then the baby started whimpering, and the sound seemed to pierce the air with all the subtlety of an air horn blasting in a library. Dylan’s cries filled Gaby’s head, drowning out the hushed voices and muffled sobs. She wasn’t hearing Kasey’s son, but her own. She heard Josh crying in the night, crying for help, crying for her, crying instead of slipping silently away before she could save his life.

  When she finally snapped out of it and caught sight of black-clad blond Kasey holding a white-wrapped, squirming bundle, she was overcome by jealousy so profound that it made her physically ill. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair that Kasey’s son was cuddled in her arms while her own son was all alone in a cold, dark wooden box. Grief had hit her anew; the cruelty of it all was staggering.

  Now here’s Kasey, heading home to spend the weekend with her husband and children but acting as though she’d like to switch places. It’s all Gaby can do not to lash out at her.

  “Do you know how long it’s been since Adam and I went out to dinner?” Kasey lathers her hands, staring at her own reflection in the mirror. “I can’t even remember the last time. It’s been forever.”

  “That’s too bad.” Gaby tosses her mascara back into her purse. Only one eye is done, but that’s enough for now—or maybe for the night. There are worse things than sporting one raccoon eye when meeting a blind date.

  “I’m not talking about anything fancy. I’d be thrilled with burgers and beers at the pub down the road if I could get away from the kids for a night.”

  How do you reply to a statement like that?

  You don’t. Gaby zips her purse.

  “So where are you going tonight?” Kasey asks her, still sounding wistful.

  “I’m not sure. Have a good night,” she says, and leaves the room.

  In truth, Gaby knows exactly where she’s going: to a new bistro in Chelsea. What she doesn’t know—and isn’t about to tell Kasey—is who she’s going out with.

  Oh, she knows his name, and what he does for a living; knows that he’s in his mid-thirties and lives in the city and has no children. A man with children—after what she’s been through—would be out of the question right now.

  But really, she wonders as she waits for the elevator, what does the profile questionnaire really tell you about a person?

  “It tells you everything you need to know,” Jaz said on the phone last night, when Gaby reported that one of her InTune connections had asked her out.

  “It tells me almost nothing I need to know.”

  “Does he seem nice?”

  “Yes,” she admitted. “He seems nice.”

  Surprisingly nice, and surprisingly normal. He’d struck up a conversation by instant message that first time she signed into her account—right after she saw the message from Ben.

  Fancy meeting you here.

  There she was, contemplating the fact that Ben had a profile on a dating Web site—that he now also knew she had a profile on a dating Web site—when a little box popped up on the corner of her screen, with a tiny rectangle picture and a single word: hi.

  “I meant to disable the instant message setting,” she later told Jaz. “You have to show me how to do that.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I can’t have people popping up and wanting to socialize every time I sign into my account.”

  Jaz just looked at her. “That’s the point. Socializing.”

  “Well, I socialized. So you should be proud of me. I have a date with this guy Friday night.”

  “I’m proud. I’d be even more proud if I didn’t think it had something to do with Ben.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You saw Ben’s profile, and the next thing you know, you’re saying yes to a date. If you hadn’t seen Ben’s profile . . .”

  Gaby denied it, of course. To Jaz, anyway.

  But the truth is, if she hadn’t been faced with blatant evidence that her ex-husband had moved on, she probably wouldn’t have impulsively said yes when a total stranger asked her out.

  She never did answer Ben’s message.

  It didn’t really seem to require a response.

  Fancy meeting you here.

  Maybe she’ll write back to him at some point, if only just to remind him that she still has a box of his belongings. It’s only fair. He cherishes those things; he probably thinks he lost them, like all his other childhood possessions.

  But if she reminds him, he’ll have to come get his stuff, and she’ll have to see him again. She’s not ready for that yet.

  Not in person, anyway. She did check out his online profile thoroughly.

  The photos all appeared to be recent ones. The last time she saw him, he was gaunt and his olive skin seemed to have taken on a sickly pallor. These snapshots showed—well, not the old Ben, the one she fell in love with. It’s true that he’s looking like his broad-shouldered, muscular old self, and his complexion has a familiar, healthy-looking glow, as if he just came back from a week at the beach. But the Ben in these recent photos has a sprinkling of salt and pepper at his temples that was never there before, and a faint network of wrinkles around his eyes and mouth. Laugh lines? Has New Ben been laughing again? Maybe even laughing with someone else, the way he used to laugh with her when they were young and unencumbered?

  When was the last time she really laughed? How did she become this brittle, sad, too-serious woman?

  How?

  You know how. It’s hard to find joy when you’ve lost everyone who ever mattered: not just Josh and Ben, but Mama and Daddy and Abuela . . .

  Everyone but Jaz.

  Despite having been born a mere week earlier than Gaby, Jaz has always done her best to bulldoze her like a bossy big sister.

  “Don’t you let her push you around, Gabriela,” her grandmother would warn her, and when Ben came along, he said the same thing.

  Neither of them seemed to grasp that Gaby only did what Gaby wanted to do. Her relationship with her cousin was complicated, but she’d inherited her share of fiery Latin temper. Hers just tended to simmer long after the rest of the family would have boiled over. But when she did explode—look out.

  “Es como un volcan en erupcion!” Abuela would say, colorfully comparing her to an erupting volcano.

  Now Abuela is long dead and Ben is long gone. Only Jaz is still there for her.

  For all her cousin’s faults, Gaby truly loves her and would do anything for her. Including joining the dating Web site that has now brought her ex-husband back again.

  She stared at Ben’s photos for a long time before allowing herself to click past them and see what he’d written about himself.

  There was the usual biographical information—age, location, occupation, marital status . . .

  Divorced.

  That gave her pause.

  Of course it’s accurate. Her own profile says the same thing. But it’s such an ugly word. She’s still not used to it.

  The next item on the questionnaire, regarding children, hits her like a sucker punch.

  When she answered it on her own profile, she simply wrote none. She wasn’t ready or willing to explain her wrenching loss to anyone.

  But Ben had written one (deceased).

  How could he put something so tragic, so private, out there on the Internet?

  And on a dating Web site? Was he looking for sympathy from women who read his profile?

  She felt sick.

  To think he’d accused her of dwelling on the tragedy, not being able to pick up the pieces and move on.

  Scanning the rest of his profile—the usual questions about hobbies and habits, likes and dislikes—she wondered how many women were doing the same thing; wondered how many were deciding Ben was Mr. Right. How many were feeling sorry for the man who had lost a child? How many were flirting with him in privat
e messages right at that moment?

  She had to force herself to read the essay section headed WHAT I’M LOOKING FOR, afraid of what it might say.

  Like . . .

  I’m looking for someone who’s the polar opposite of my ex-wife.

  But Ben didn’t say that.

  His answer was just one word. It wasn’t love, which Jaz claims everyone on InTune is looking for. Nor was Ben’s answer fun or marriage or you or any of the pithy answers she’d seen on other profiles.

  No, Ben was simply looking for happiness.

  Well, who the hell isn’t?

  We had that once. We were so damned happy, Ben . . .

  How dare you look for that again, with someone else? How dare you assume that you can find it, keep it? How dare you tell a stranger—a world full of strangers—about our lost child?

  Gaby’s elevator arrives, jerking her back to reality, back to the present and the immediate future. She steps on and rides down to the lobby with a couple of silent businessmen and a group of young secretaries from an upper floor. They’re laughing and chatting, on their way to a party.

  For them, the night is full of promise.

  For her . . .

  Who knows? Maybe this will turn out to be fun, she tells herself as she pushes through the revolving door onto the street. If nothing else, at least it’s a step in the right direction.

  He’d arranged to meet her in the bar area of Tequila Sam’s at seven.

  He arrives at seven-eighteen, having spent the past hour nursing a draft beer at a dive around the corner.

  He’s learned that here in New York no woman bats an eye if you’re fifteen or twenty minutes late. Twenty-five minutes, half an hour—then she might get cranky. But losing twenty minutes to mass transit problems is entirely plausible.

  Most women arrive early. By the time he gets there, she’ll have already bought, consumed, and paid for—because the bar at his favorite Mexican restaurant will be too crowded to run a tab—a drink. Maybe even two drinks. If he doesn’t like what he sees, he leaves, goes straight home, and deletes his latest profile. She’ll never find him again.

  If he does like what he sees, he introduces himself and suggests that they go straight to the table, since the reservation is for seven-thirty.

  The benefit to this trick—aside from the obvious, sparing his wallet a pricey bar tab—is that she’ll be relieved when he finally shows up, having almost convinced herself he was going to stand her up. She’ll also be liquored up enough to be relaxed when they sit down at the table and for obligatory getting-to-know-you BS.

  He’ll order a bottle of Spanish wine with dinner—not the cheapest one on the menu, but the second cheapest—and he’ll sip one glass slowly while she drains hers and the waiter refills it. By the time they’ve shared dessert, she’ll often agree to a nightcap nearby—or even invite him back to her place.

  Most women would never agree to come to his. Not on a first date, not with a stranger. Which is, of course, even more to his advantage, because the Upper West Side apartment he mentioned in his profile—the one in a historic prewar building, with a Hudson River view—doesn’t exist, any more than “Nick Santana” exists.

  The bar is crowded tonight as he makes his way through, looking for his date. She said she’d be wearing a red dress, having read in his profile that it’s his favorite color.

  It isn’t.

  His favorite color is black, but when he wrote that in a past profile, he found it tended to attract artsy, depressing women.

  Live and learn, right?

  Shouldering through crowds of boisterous white-collar professionals who linger on, having taken advantage of the happy hour two-for-one drink specials and free bar food, he spots her at the far end. She’s standing beside a high-top table not far from the three-deep bar, holding a glass that’s half empty—or half full, depending on how you look at it.

  Unlike the other women here who are noticeably alone, she’s not busy with her phone, or looking around wistfully. She just seems to be waiting; expectant, but comfortable.

  She’s tall—taller than him, probably. She has long dark hair and attractive facial features. Attractive features below the face, too: plenty of curves, shown off by a crimson dress with a plunging neckline. Just like her profile promised, which is unusual. Too many times, self-professed “curvy” women turn out to be downright porcine, having posted old or doctored photos of themselves.

  Skinny women turn him off. He likes curves. The healthy kind, like this. But you don’t dare advertise that it’s what you’re looking for, because you’ll be inundated with morbidly obese lonely hearts.

  Again, live and learn.

  Pleased with what he sees from a distance, he hurries over to her. “Sofia?”

  She nods, extends her right hand. “Nick?”

  “That’s me. Nick Santana.” For tonight, anyway.

  The bar is dimly lit. Up close he can see that she’s older than he thought. And her curves appear to be more toned and muscular than soft.

  With a strong handshake, she says, “Nice to meet you.”

  “You, too. I’m so sorry I’m late. I hope you didn’t think I was going to stand you up. There was track work on the downtown express.” Blame it on the MTA, as always.

  She shrugs and says nothing, flicking her gaze over him from head to toe as though sizing him up. She’s probably comparing him to his profile photo, the red sweater one from several Christmases ago.

  Uncomfortable, he points to his watch, a convincing Gucci knockoff. “We might as well go straight to the table.”

  “Oh, not yet.”

  “I have a seven-thirty reservation.”

  “It’s all right. I already spoke to the maitre d’. They’ll hold the table so that we can have our drinks first.”

  Caught off guard, he protests, “That’s okay, I don’t—”

  “I got you a Bourbon and water.”

  That stops him in his tracks. She bought him a drink?

  She reaches for a glass filled with brownish-gold liquid and slides it along the high-top table toward him. “It’s Maker’s Mark—you said you like it, right?”

  Pleasantly surprised, he nods. He probably did say that. He said a lot of things in the private messages they’ve been sending back and forth for a few weeks now, ever since she first reached out to him. It’s nice to know she was paying such close attention.

  “Thank you. What are you drinking?” he asks her, and feels obliged to add, “Can I get you a refill?”

  “Vodka tonic. And no, thank you, this is my second.”

  Vodka tonic. A nice surprise. Most women go for the watered-down margaritas.

  She lifts her own glass—half full, he decides—in a toast.

  “Here’s to tonight,” she says simply.

  He grins and clinks his drink against hers. “To tonight.”

  Gaby is surprised—not pleasantly—to find that her blind date, Ryan Hunter, is even more handsome than he appeared to be in his profile photograph, and even more nice and normal than he came across in their correspondence.

  On the way over to the bistro from the office—including a quick stop in the restroom at Grand Central Terminal, where she’d applied makeup to her other eye—she’d convinced herself that he was going to turn out to be a loser. In that case, she figured she could call it an early night, inform her cousin that this online dating stuff isn’t for her, and delete herself from the InTune Web site.

  Tried it, hated it, case closed.

  That would have been easy.

  This—sitting across a small table from a man who’s not only handsome, but polite, witty, and utterly appealing—is complicated. Five minutes into the date she’s already wondering what she’ll do if he wants to see her again.

  She should, of course, want him to want to see her again.

  She should want to see him again.

  But somehow Ben has worked his way into the back of her mind and refuses to budge. Probably because seeing
Kasey in the ladies’ room back at the office reminded her of their loss.

  Ben is the only other person in the world who knows what it was like to be Josh’s parent—and to lose him. At least when he was in her life, there was someone who shared her grief.

  This man, this stranger, Ryan Hunter—he’ll never share that. He’ll never understand her. So why bother?

  “Do you want red wine, or white?” he asks, studying the list the waiter left on the table in a skinny leather binder.

  “Either is fine.”

  “How about white? A sauvignon blanc?”

  “Sure,” she says, though her favorite is red. Malbec. Ben would have known that without being told. She’s too shy to tell Ryan.

  He motions the waiter over.

  She watches him order the wine, admiring his dark good looks, the expensive cut of his suit, the easygoing banter as he and the waiter discuss his choice. He doesn’t pretend to be sophisticated, isn’t trying to impress her or the waiter with his knowledge of wine.

  He’s a good guy. A nice, normal guy. He could have been a jerk, a loser—a serial killer, for that matter. She’d taken the precaution of telling Jaz exactly where she was going tonight, and with whom.

  She’d read that advice this afternoon in an article about online dating. Nothing like being reminded, at the eleventh hour, that the Internet is crawling with dangerous predators.

  Luckily, Ryan doesn’t seem to be one of them.

  She feels herself relax, just a little bit, as the waiter leaves, and Ryan smiles at her. He has a nice smile.

  “I love this place,” he tells her. “Great wine list, great food, great service.”

  “You’ve been here before?”

  “Many times.” He doesn’t elaborate, leaving her to wonder if he’s come with other women.

  Probably.

  Should she care?

  Is Ben on a date right now with a woman who’s wondering or asking about his ex-wife?

  “So you’re an editor?” Ryan props his elbows on the table, laces his fingers together and rests his chin on them as though he’s really interested in her work. “What kind of books? Fiction?”

  “Yes.”

  “Anything I’d enjoy?”