I didn’t know about the accidents yet.
9
CLAIRE SHOWS UP IN HER PIMPED-OUT ESCALADE and her Gucci sunglasses and her three-hundred-dollar jeans. It’s been a few hours since Laney left, and I’ve just woken up from a short postcoital nap to sit on the porch and eat Cap’n Crunch out of the box until my teeth are numb. Good sex, bad sex, right sex, wrong sex; I always wake up with the munchies. Claire barrels up the driveway, sending the rabbits scattering in a frenzied panic, and brakes much too hard, so that I hear the high whine of her grinding discs, but she somehow manages to avoid whiplash. She drives the way she lives, with equal parts zeal, impatience, and ineptitude.
“What the fuck, Doug!” she says, marching up onto the porch like she owns the place. I don’t take it personally. That’s just Claire. Even when we shared a womb, she was in charge. Two minutes older than me, she’s walking proof that our DNA is much better executed in the female form, with her flowing mane of dark hair shined to a shampoo commercial gloss, flawless olive skin, eyes the color of the evening sky, and a crooked, knowing grin that, when called upon, can effortlessly transmute into a brilliant toothy smile. Our mother wanted her to be in movies, which naturally made it the last thing Claire would ever do. I’ve got the same hair, skin, and eyes, but on me they all seem randomly placed, like rubber features slapped onto Mr. Potato Head, never quite coming together to form a cohesive whole. Claire says she got the brains and the looks and I got the spare parts in case anything ever breaks down.
“I’ve been trying to reach you all day!” she shouts at me. “Why don’t you answer your fucking phone?”
“I threw it at a tree.”
She gives me a look. “Anyone I know?”
“Mom.”
She nods. “Next time, just say you have another call and hang up. It works for me.”
“I’ll try to remember that.”
“I tried the house phone too.”
“Yeah. I never pick that up.”
“No shit, Doug.” She fixes me with a stern look. “But you can’t go silent on me. Not after what happened.”
“Oh, for God’s sake. Will you let go of that already.”
“You tried to kill yourself.”
“I fell asleep in the tub.”
“You ODed.”
“They were sleeping pills. I just misunderstood the recommended dosage.”
“Generally speaking, half a bottle is too much.”
“Let it go, Claire. You’re worse than Mom. You guys have created this whole myth of my attempted suicide. It wasn’t like that. Trust me. I was there.”
“Maybe you were there, but you didn’t have to watch the cops kick down your front door and pull you out of the tub. You were too busy going into cardiac arrest.”
“Enough, Claire.”
“You were fucking blue!”
“It was an accident.”
She looks away, shaking her head in frustration. The truth is I don’t even remember that night. The booze and sleeping pills had scrambled my brain and I woke up in the hospital, strangely euphoric and unable to remember what month it was.
“We’ll have to agree to disagree,” Claire says, shaking it off. She can do that, change moods like taking off a hat.
“I’ll get a new phone,” I say, which is the closest thing to a concession I’m going to make on the subject.
“Way ahead of you, little brother.” She reaches into her bag and tosses me a colorful box. “It’s got a camera and plays movies and picks up your dry cleaning for all I know, and I’m not leaving until you activate it.”
“Thanks.”
“And no throwing this one. It cost like five hundred bucks.”
“Deal.”
Having tended to business, she bends over to kiss my cheek. “What’s new and exciting in the grief racket?”
“Same old same old.”
“Your last column made me cry.”
“Sorry.”
“No. It was great. Mom’s got it on the fridge.”
I smile. “Wow. I finally made it back to the fridge.”
It was our mother’s strict policy that only A-plus work was displayed on her stainless-steel Subzero refrigerator. Growing up, Claire’s and Debbie’s schoolwork was always plastered all over it, but once I’d moved beyond first-grade spelling tests, I never made it back up there again.
“I guess you get an A in being sad and lonely.”
“Top of my class.”
She gives me a fond smile and grabs me by the hair to look down at me. There are faint creases at the corners of her eyes that I never noticed before. You see the people you love the way they are in your head, but every once in a while you accidentally catch a glimpse of them in real time, and in those split seconds, as your brain scrambles to adjust to the new reality, small things inside you swerve off the road and drive over cliffs, spinning and screaming all the way down.
“We’re getting older,” I say.
“Fuck you. I am not.” Her eyes narrow into slits. “Hey,” she says. “You have the look of someone who’s been freshly fucked.”
“What?”
“My twin telepathy is telling me that you went ahead and bagged the meatloaf babe.”
“We don’t have twin telepathy.”
“Of course we do, it’s just subtle, like … flesh-colored nail polish.”
I grin. “Like … central air.”
“Like … a white wine buzz.”
“Like … Mel Gibson’s Australian accent in Lethal Weapon.”
She laughs and then stoops to lower her face directly in front of mine, staring at me nose to nose until I look away. She’s the lone person I can look in the eye these days, but even so, in twenty-nine years, I’ve never outstared her.
“Oh shit, you really did!” she shouts gleefully. “No wonder I couldn’t get you on the phone. You were boning the horny hausfrau!”
“Keep it down, will you?” I say, looking around the street.
But Claire’s enjoying this too much. “Dougie, you slut!”
I lean back on the porch swing, shaking my head. “What gave it away?”
“Elementary, little brother,” she says, sitting down next to me. “There’s lipstick on your ear, your T-shirt is on inside out, and you’ve got a world-class case of bed head.”
“Come on,” I say skeptically. “I always look like this.”
“Well, then, I guess you’ll have to reconsider the twin telepathy thing.” She grabs some Cap’n Crunch from my box and starts shoveling it into her mouth. “You and the meatloaf babe,” she says, starting to laugh. “That is just too funny.”
“Hysterical.”
Her laugh tapers off and she rests her head on my shoulder, which means she has something to tell me. Whenever she’s stressing, that’s what she does, and over the years, her head has carved out its own little spot there, like water dripping onto a rock for a hundred years. I always imagine that we must have floated that way in the uterus, and in times of stress it’s our version of the fetal position. “Good for you,” she says softly, rubbing the fleshy part of my hand between her thumb and forefinger. “I think it’s a big step.”
“It’s adultery.”
“You’re not married.”
“She is.”
“With all of your problems, you’re going to start worrying about hers now?” She licks her finger and wipes something, probably some of Laney’s lipstick, off my cheek.
“It’s my problem too.”
“Wrong. Your problem is that you stopped living when Hailey died. An emerging sex drive is the first positive sign we’ve seen in a long time. It’s not a problem, it’s cause for celebration, is what it is. I can’t wait to tell Mom.”
I laugh, but then quickly say, “You’re joking, right?” If there’s one thing you can be sure of with Claire, it’s that you can never be too sure.
“We’ll see how nice you are to me,” she says with a shrug. “So how was it?”
“I d
on’t know. I think I’m still in shock.”
“Dougie, Dougie, Dougie. When will you learn to keep your brain out of your bone?” She sighs. “Sometimes I think I should have been the boy.”
“Sometimes I think you are.”
“Which actually provides a convenient segue to our next topic.”
“Which is?”
“I’m pregnant.”
That puts some lift in my eyelids. “That’s great, Claire. Congratulations.”
She nods against my shoulder. “Thanks.”
Then she says nothing, but I can feel her muscles flexing like springs under her skin, her breath short and quick. We just sit there for a few minutes, staring into the yard. There’s a gray rabbit nibbling on the grass in the shadow of the hedges. Out of range. “There’s more,” I say.
“Yup.”
I think about it for a minute. “Stephen.”
She looks up at me, smiling even as a lone tear emerges from the corner of her eye and slides across the bridge of her nose. “And you said we don’t have telepathy.”
Then she stands up, shaking it off, and heads for the front door. “Do you have anything to eat in here? I’m starving.”
I get up to follow her in, but then, out of the corner of my eye, I notice that the gray rabbit has wandered within striking distance of the porch. “Hello, Bugs,” I say under my breath, keeping one eye on him as I reach for the rock pile. My throw goes too high, sailing a foot over Bugs’s head, and bouncing soundlessly across the lawn in front of him. The rabbit looks up at me, and something in his dumb, unthreatened expression enrages me, so I make a show of charging noisily down the steps. That gets him moving, and he zips away to the side of the lawn, stopping at the hedges to flash me a pitying look. I’m all out of rocks, so I run at him, waving my arms and screaming like a banshee until he flees into the underbrush. When I turn back to the porch, Claire is giving me a strange look from the doorway.
“I just like to keep them on their toes,” I say sheepishly, coming up the stairs.
“Little brother,” she says, throwing her arm over my shoulders as we head into the house. “You really need to get out more.”
“So what happened?”
“It’s a long story.”
“You said you have time.”
“I can’t talk on an empty stomach.”
I follow her into the kitchen. “Did you cheat on him?”
“Nice. Adultery loves company, is that it?”
“Did he?”
“I wish.”
“So what happened?”
“Why are all the magnets on the floor?” she says, heading over to the fridge. “Oh! Shit. I don’t want to know.”
“Claire, for Christ’s sake! Just tell me what happened already.”
She opens the fridge and bends down, noisily sliding jars around, lifting up Tupperware lids to smell things. “Jesus,” she says, her voice echoing inside the mostly empty fridge. “Do you ever actually eat?”
“I order in.”
She slams the fridge closed. “I can’t wait. Let’s go out.”
“First tell me what happened.”
She looks at me, and then sort of collapses gently against the fridge. “Nothing happened. Nothing ever happens. And nothing ever will happen. And that,” she says, sinking down to the floor and cradling her head in her hands, “is what happened.”
I sit down on the floor beside her. “Have you considered counseling?”
She gives me a look. “I don’t need some sterile Freudian with a bow tie and a dirty mind to tell me I should never have married Stephen. You’ve been telling me that for years. I seem to recall you actually making your case somewhat emphatically at my wedding.”
“I was drunk.”
“You were jealous.”
“Maybe. A little.”
“But you were right, of course. And I knew it. Even walking down the aisle, I remember wondering what would happen to the video, to the wedding pictures, when it was all over. How sick is that? The surprise here is not that I’m leaving. It’s how long I actually stayed. I always meant to leave him, I just never got around to it.”
“Why not?”
She frowns and raises her hands in concession. “You get rich, you get comfortable, you develop all these equations and pie charts to prove to yourself that you’re actually happier than you think you are.” She shrugs. “I fell asleep at my post.”
“So why now?”
“Well, after Hailey died, I started seeing everything differently. I mean, you were a mess—you still are, by the way—and I would think of you sitting out here alone, all grief stricken and disconnected from everyone, and this is going to sound horrible, but instead of feeling sorry for you, I was actually envious of you. You were miserable and alone and I was fucking jealous. Because there’s something beautiful in grief, isn’t there? It’s like mourning is your chrysalis and when the time comes you’ll be reborn as this beautiful butterfly. And then I had to ask myself, when you start feeling envious of your fucked-up, bereaved brother, what does that say about you?”
“That you’re deeply disturbed?”
“That you’re even more fucked up and heartbroken than he is, you just don’t know it.”
“And now you do?”
“Now I do.”
“Listen, Claire, I know that losing your wife in a plane crash and drinking yourself to sleep every night may seem somewhat glamorous, but just between you and me, it’s really not all it’s cracked up to be.”
She gives me a shove. “You know what I mean.”
“I’m not sure I do yet. Get to the part where you get knocked up.”
She laughs softly and leans the back of her head against the fridge. “The irony of the whole thing is that we barely even have sex anymore. It’s nothing less than a miracle that I haven’t cheated on that man, a horny chick like me. It was just this one night, this anomaly, where he had no late meetings, and no calls to make, and there was nothing on TV, and I guess we were both bored, so we had sex. It was that or cleaning out my closet. And it was nothing special, believe me. I mean, I forgot about it as soon as it was over. But then, a few weeks later I was late, so I took a test and imagine my surprise … ”
“You’re sure the test was right?”
“I took five tests.”
“Okay.”
“So I’m sitting there in the bathroom, washing the pee off my hands, and it just hits me that I’m going to be a mother and now this is all I’ll ever be. Mrs. Stephen Ives, just another rich, bored housewife, a sad cliché. And I don’t want to be Laney Potter, screwing other men just to feel alive again for a few hours.”
“Thanks for that.”
“No offense.”
“None taken.”
“I thought maybe I could stay here for a while.”
“Sure. The guest room’s yours.”
The fridge vibrates gently against our spines as we sit on my kitchen floor, talking quietly while twilight falls like a curtain over the windows. I can hear the sounds of kids in front yards, urgently attending to childhood affairs, shouting and laughing, young and untouched and thinking they’ll always be that way. When we were kids, whenever I was sad, Claire would put on this white chef’s hat and concoct ridiculous ice cream sundaes that we would then force ourselves to finish. Banana splits with chocolate syrup, Jell-O and gummy bears, hot fudge sundaes floating in root beer, quadruple-scoop ice cream cones with marshmallow fluff between each scoop. Half the fun was watching her dart madly around the kitchen, randomly selecting ingredients as she narrated the process in her best Julia Child voice.
“Remember the funny sundaes?” I say.
Claire rests her head on my shoulder, turning her face into my neck, and quietly starts to cry.
10
* * *
How to Talk to a Widower
By Doug Parker
Because of this newfound tendency I’ve developed of unleashing rapid-fire bursts of raw, unadulterated pai
n—my emotional Tourette’s—and because I can’t stand to be the object of anyone’s pity other than my own, I pretty much stay home these days.
The only downside to this system is that the house is a minefield and I never know when I’m going to step on a latent memory of Hailey and get my legs blown off. Even after all this time, she’s still everywhere. On her night table still rests the last book she was reading, some chick lit thing with a lipstick pink cover about overweight, smart-assed women and the men who cheat on them, and when I pick it up, I see that she doodled on the last page she read, a bug-eyed cartoon man with a handlebar mustache and evil eyebrows, and it makes me smile, but even as I do, I can feel the tears start to come.
I had a wife. Her name was Hailey. Now she’s gone. And so am I.
Or in the bathroom, her red bra still hangs on the doorknob. She’d no doubt meant to toss it in the hamper but never got around to it. That’s something I taught her, to let simple household tasks percolate for a little bit, to do no chore before its time.
I move through our bedroom like a ghost, careful not to disturb the haphazard evidence of her existence; the book, the bra, the hairbrush still filled with knots of her blond hair, her perfume and cosmetics scattered across the sink top, the water ring from a sweating glass of water she’d put down on her dresser, the silk blouse laid out across the chair next to her bed that she’d decided at the last minute not to pack for her trip, the frayed stuffed elephant named Bazooka that she kept wedged between her pillow and the headboard ever since she was a little girl. For a while after she died, I didn’t even change the sheets because they still smelled of her. Then they stopped smelling of her and, after a few more weeks, they just smelled like ass. And that’s as good a metaphor for grief as any of the thousands of others that occur to me on a daily basis. You cling desperately to every single memory, and in doing so the memories themselves grow stale and turn, like the sheets on my bed.
Still, it hurt when I changed the linens, was just one more way of moving Hailey into the past tense, one more step across the inevitable divide, and I can’t bring myself to straighten up, because every little thing I remove or clean up is one more trace of her that I will immutably erase. I want to put up stanchions and red velvet ropes, like they do in historical mansions to keep the tourists from screwing with the past, because, given the chance, that’s what we’d all do.
How to Talk to a Widower Page 6