Black Widows

by Cate Quinn

  Emily turns around and strolls off, humming a funny little tune.

  I guess she’s going to get cake ingredients.

  “Maybe I’ll get the mushroom soup instead,” says Rachel, half to herself, half to me. “Blake didn’t like potatoes that way, but I always thought they were better.”

  She looks at me for reassurance. Something passes between us. Like we both have gotten an inkling that we don’t have to be those women Blake made. We can be whoever we want.

  “You know what Blake would say ’bout that,” I say, wagging a finger. “He’d say a loving wife would fix potatoes the way her husband liked them.”

  I said it as a joke, but I’ve pitched it wrong, ’cause Rachel’s eyes are suddenly alive with pain.

  “Just because I don’t get all emotional,” she says, her voice all choked. “Just because I don’t scream and cry doesn’t mean I didn’t love him.”

  And she pushes on the shopping cart and walks very straight-backed toward the margarine in three-pound buckets.

  I watch her go, thinking it’s something we always fought over. Who loved him the most. And the strangest thought slides into my head. Blake liked us to fight about it.

  We join Rachel at the checkout to help her heave her outsize purchases onto the counter. I notice Emily’s bulk purchase of Drano is mysteriously missing. Rachel must have dumped the bottles out of the cart while no one was looking.

  “You ladies sisters?” asks the checkout girl cheerily as she heaves a full shrink-wrapped case of Hawaiian Punch cartons through. There’s an awkward pause. The checkout girl’s cheeks get a little redder, her eyes switching back and forth between us.

  This was part of the life Blake never told me about. I always figured Utah had no problem with polygamy. Never realized sayin’ the wrong thing could have us all arrested. I’m a worse criminal here than I was in Vegas.

  “Yeah,” I tell her casually, stuffing some of the smaller items into a bag. “We’re sisters.”

  The checkout girl sorta sags in relief.

  “Thought for a moment you were some of them freaky polygamists,” she says with a slightly hysterical laugh. “Boy,” she adds, pushing more groceries across. “We had some of ’em in a few months back. Those ones that hide out in the desert where the law can’t get ’em.” She adjusts the sleeve of her uniform to cover her garment line. “If you ask me, the manager shoulda called the cops,” she concludes with a spiteful expression. “Throw the lot of them in jail.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Rachel, First Wife

  In the run up to the funeral, it’s like there’s this awful deadline looming. The police haven’t yet been in touch with the autopsy results. We’ve driven out to an industrial-looking place on the edge of the city where you can get coffins and urns and whatnot at good prices. It’s the only place willing to do business with polygamists and reminds me a little of a movie I saw once where some Italian mobsters went to a warehouse to buy illegal guns.

  A man in a shiny suit and young enough to have acne directs us to view caskets. Just like we’re in a department store, shopping for household goods. You can tell he’s nervous about the plural marriage thing. He keeps snatching little glances at us, like he’s imagining us all in bed together.

  He gets a little absorbed in explaining his products though. Brass handles and so forth.

  It’s the darndest thing. Something about being in this funeral place. I keep seeing a box opening. I just know there’s something inside that shouldn’t be let out. Something to do with why Blake is dead.

  Keep sweet, Rachel, I remind myself. But things are spiraling out like octopus tentacles. Like Blake had a role for each of us, and now that he’s gone, it’s hard to know who I’m trying to be.

  The funeral place has a big mirror taking up an entire wall, and I can see all our faces in the glass. Tina has a weird smirk, and Emily looks guilty. And there’s another woman, round-faced, maybe in her late twenties or thirties. It’s me, I realize. I have this real strange, stony look on my face. Never knew I did that. Sure does make me look older. I pull my mouth into a smile.

  Tina leans closer to me. “Creepy, huh?” she whispers.

  I feel suddenly warm toward her. I glance over to Emily, thinking she’s gonna fall to pieces anytime soon, but she’s right next to the funeral boy, nodding earnestly at the list of casket accessories.

  She has a glow like she’s planning a wedding. Maybe she’s making up for her own. I’ll bet it was a big letdown compared to what Emily was raised to. After she married Blake, I saw a Catholic wedding party spill out of a downtown church. The bride wore a huge, poufy white meringue and carried a bouquet bigger than her head. It clicked then how disappointed Emily must have been.

  There were wedding arrangements, of course. Modest ones.

  After, during those first months, Blake would take Emily out for dinner to places he never took me. He wanted to try to work on her timidity, he said. I would get into a cold sweat, trying to decide the right way to be when they returned. Him with those awful hungry eyes, her meek and silent at his side.

  Then things changed. Blake announced he was taking Emily to the women’s clinic. When he wouldn’t say why, I knew. I just knew. And I couldn’t stop the smile creeping onto my face.

  She can’t do it.

  In the very early days, Emily had talked to me about her problems, but she’d never gone into great detail. If a doctor was involved, I had to assume things weren’t working at all. Not even a little bit.

  “This way, please.” The adolescent funeral director leads us into a room of coffins. Dozens of them, all laid out in rows. My feet feel as though they’re made of glue. Something is hitting me hard, right below the solar plexus. Seeing those coffins laid out. It’s like the dream I keep having. Where the lid slowly opens and there’s a smell of bleach and a bloody something inside.

  But now that image is overlaid with something else too. Something like…a white room.

  I’m seized by nausea, as though someone has socked me right in the gut. If I don’t get out, I’m going to vomit right onto the funeral carpet.

  Keep it together, I tell myself. Don’t make a scene.

  My head is hurting. I put a hand up to my forehead.

  A white room. A blood spot on a green dress.

  The funeral man is walking up to the first coffin, explaining something to Emily, who is nodding earnestly.

  “Wait…” My mouth is dry. Like the words won’t come. Tina turns to me, and I see shock.

  A room where everything is white. Carpets, walls. There’s a snowy bed, like in a fancy hotel, all plush linen and starched sheets. Naked women stand all around the white bed. Blake is choosing which one he wants.

  I feel as though I’ve been dropped in a cold bath.

  The funeral man is resting a hand on the polished coffin lid. He hooks his fingers on the handle.

  “Wait,” I whisper, “Don’t…” He isn’t listening.

  I’m seized with an urge I can’t explain. Something primal. All I know is I have to stop him from raising that lid.

  I know if he does, something absolutely awful will happen.

  A terrible memory is clawing at me. I’m a little girl again, back on the Homestead, helpless terror swelling. A scratchy voice in my brain whispers. A child’s voice.

  You’ve been a bad girl.

  Then everything goes black.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Emily, Sister-Wife

  It was such a funny feeling, getting into that black hearse car. Like being a famous person. Then climbing out the other side at the chapel. Everyone nodding and smiling. It felt like it should be someone else up the front. Like his actual family or something.

  Rachel didn’t ride with us. She drove our beat-up Chevy with a trunk full of extra food. Tina thinks she was making a point to Bishop Yo
ung about how she is the most important wife. I don’t believe it though. Rachel decided to drive herself when she saw the white casket in the back of the hearse.

  In the end, I had picked out the coffin and the flowers, because Rachel had lost it at the funeral store.

  We’d driven to some big warehouse out of the city, which I wasn’t happy about at all, because it didn’t seem like a nice place. More like a bargain basement for coffins. But Rachel told the man we were all three of us married to Blake, and I noticed right away he started to treat us different. Adding tax to some of the prices. The secretary out back kept shooting us nasty looks too.

  Funeral man changed his tune when Rachel began screaming the place down though. It was hard to hear exact words, ’cause she was speaking all funny. Like the thing they do in some churches when people speak in tongues.

  Tina thought she said, “Don’t open the box!”

  But I thought she said something different. For sure at the end, Rachel said something that sounded like a prayer. Like a protection invocation. In the name of Jesus Christ, something like that. I recognized it, ’cause my momma did something like that when I was little to stop the devil from putting lies in my mouth.

  I was pretty certain Rachel was experiencing some kind of sacred visitation, and that’s what I told the funeral man, too, being as he looked about ready to call the police.

  “We’re real holy folk,” I said, “and Rachel here is visited by the spirit. She has revelations and things of that nature.”

  It seemed to do the trick, though you could tell he couldn’t get us out fast enough after that. I even managed to get him to discount the white-and-gold open casket with the cream-satin lining.

  Mr. and Mrs. Nelson Senior didn’t ride in the funeral car with Tina and I either. We don’t get along, on account of Blake’s folks doing the regular LDS worship and us practicing an advanced form where you get into a better sort of heaven.

  Right before Blake and I got married, he took me to his parents’ house in some little dirt town above a general store. I was all dressed up in my favorite pink sweater and ballet pumps. Only while I was sitting on the couch, waiting to meet with his mom and dad, Blake’s whole family apparently trapped him in an upstairs bedroom and read him a bunch of scripture. The plan was to change his mind. Make him recognize polygamy as a real bad sin.

  Tina told me later what they did is called an intervention. Getting the whole family involved, trying to explain to Blake how God would judge him as fornicating. Blake and I left right afterward, so the first time I actually met Blake’s mom was on my wedding day when she came to try to stop the marriage from going ahead.

  Our shiny black car pulls up real silently outside the local church. It’s a modern building, made of white brick with a sloping red roof and a small white steeple for effect, and I remember being disappointed the first time I saw it. I’d expected all Mormon churches to be like the temple, all white stone and spires to the clouds.

  The funeral men carry the discounted coffin inside. There’s to be an open-casket viewing. Just members of close family, which in Blake’s case is a whole lotta people. I mean, everyone thinks Catholics have plenty of kids, but they got nothing on Mormons, no siree.

  Blake has two brothers, who look a lot like him, and two sisters who don’t. They got about four babies apiece already, even though the youngest brother is only a year older than I am.

  Rachel is already somewhere inside, organizing the food most likely. There’ll be a big buffet tomorrow, but she can’t help but feed everyone up.

  Tina comes to stand next to me. “Listen,” she says. “We need to figure everything out ahead of time.”

  “Figure what out?”

  “Well…” Tina shifts a little on her high-heeled shoes. “Rachel’s losin’ it, right? I mean, you saw her in the funeral place.”

  “Guess Blake’s death is hitting her hard,” I offer.

  Tina’s eyes kinda bulge. “Emily,” she says, “I’ve been sleeping with my bed pushed against the door. You do realize our desert ranch is an hour from nowhere in every direction?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Back at the police station, Brewer was askin’ me all kinds of things about Rachel’s medication.”

  “Me too. So what?”

  “Brewer thinks Rachel must have… I don’t know. Lost her mind. Like temporary insanity.”

  My mouth is moving, trying to work out what she means.

  “I’m not sayin’ she meant to do it,” adds Tina. “But she needs help.”

  “You think Rachel killed Blake?” The idea gives me a fit of the giggles.

  “Well, she and Blake had some kind of falling-out,” says Tina, “right before he went out fishing. You heard it. I know you did.”

  I chew my fingernail. I guess Blake isn’t around anymore to hand out punishments for bad behavior. “I didn’t hear everything,” I say. “But I heard enough. Never known Rachel to get so angry before,” I conclude, “but holy moly, she sure did lose it.”

  “She was angry?” I can tell Tina isn’t sure whether to believe me. Downside of having a colorful imagination, I suppose. Rachel never gets angry in a shouty way. The way she does it is kinda worse.

  “Like real angry,” I say, laying it on thick. “Fixin’ to kill someone angry.” I’m enjoying painting the picture.

  There’s a pause.

  “So…” says Tina, sounding annoyed. “Why was she angry?”

  “Be. Cause,” I say, drawing it out. “Blake had done something real bad without telling her.” I pause for effect, opening my eyes wide. “Blake had gone shopping for another wife.”

  Chapter Twenty

  Rachel, First Wife

  Blake’s church is in the small town of Tucknott, a mom-and-pop-store place, where Blake’s parents are the real-life mom and pop. His father’s store has been in business since the 1800s selling sodas and sundries and farming supplies. Since his great-great-grandparents emigrated to America from Denmark. Shortly after we met, Blake told me one of his earliest memories was sneaking root-beer syrup direct from the dispenser with his sister. I remember thinking Blake was too all-American to be true. Like an actual godsend. I’d asked for a regular husband, and there he was, the most regular of boys you ever did meet.

  That was until I met Blake’s mom. Never really knew what it felt like to be trash until I encountered Adelaide Nelson. Six generations of respectable Mormons, and no room for people like me, who drag their teeth on their fork when they eat.

  Bishop Young is standing to greet guests and forming a barrier between us wives and the rest of the Nelson family. They’re milling around at the back.

  We’re not really allowed to mingle with regular churchgoers on account of our corrupting influence. Regular Mormons figure the slightest whiff of polygamy will tempt their members into adultery.

  I stop dead when I see Blake’s mom. Adelaide Nelson is dressed in a black Jackie O–style suit, pillbox hat atop her teased-up highlighted hair, and a black veil, beneath which snatches of pink lipstick and spidery eyelashes can be seen. Naturally, Mrs. Adelaide Nelson hates me. So far as she’s concerned, I corrupted her angel son. She leans on her husband’s arm, weak with grief.

  I realize I’m actually grinding my teeth.

  She has to make it so clear that she’s the one grieving the hardest.

  Hunter Nelson conveys his wife rigidly, looking neither right nor left. He’s a sinewy-faced man with a permanent expression of disapproval.

  The food is all laid out ready. My funeral potatoes right in the center, and a lot of kind people have brought things. Emily’s cake is there, too, and I have to admit, it looks good. I didn’t know she had it in her.

  Braxton’s wife, Sukie, arrives, holding a baby, a toddler in hand, with a casserole dish wedged awkwardly under her arm. Braxton is Blake’s younger brother,
so in some people’s eyes, we would be sisters-in-law. But since our family is damned for adultery, Blake’s relatives don’t really like to use that term.

  Her two other kids are causing merry hell somewhere at the back of the room, running around like wild things. But they’re pin-smart in little suits, with their hair combed and gelled.

  For a long moment, I can’t stop looking at her baby. A familiar desperate feeling of unworthiness rises up in my throat. I prayed so hard, for so long.

  I remember rehearsing how I would tell Blake when it finally happened for me. The extra line on the testing stick. Maybe I’d come home with a pair of cute little booties I’d picked up in the mall.

  Looks like we’ll be needing some of these…

  I realize I’m staring and drag my eyes away from the little girl.

  “She looks just like you,” I say, smiling. “Here, lemme help you with that.” I wrestle free the container.

  “Thanks.” Sukie shifts the baby to the opposite hip. “I’m real sorry for your loss. How you holding up?”

  “I’m okay.”

  The baby makes a strange noise, and Sukie jiggles it automatically.

  “He was a good man,” Sukie says in a whisper, tears welling. “I always meant to tell him…to apologize for what I did to him…” Her voice breaks.

  I never did learn how to process oversharing. I was always taught to keep difficult things to yourself and not to dump them on other people.

  “Well,” I say in a high voice that signals I’d rather she stuck with the usual condolences. “I’m sure whatever you would have told him, he knows it now.”

  Sukie leans in and takes my arm. “I was under a lot of pressure from my family to break the engagement, you know?” she says. “To marry a perfect Mormon boy. When Blake came home early from his mission, they never could quite reconcile it.”

  I remember Blake crying in my arms, telling me how awful his mission was. Working fourteen hours a day to convert people who didn’t want to be converted.