The Widow's Season

by Laura Brodie

Now she understood the superstitions of ancient cultures, the impetus for séances and Ouija boards, and the necessity of burial, so that the dead might sleep in peace. She couldn’t say which was more troubling—the state of her husband’s soul or the state of her own mind, for she suspected that all those mourners with their mirrors reversed did not dread spirits so much as the look of their own haunted faces.

  Anyway, the sheets were a bad idea; the covered mirrors resembled ghosts tacked on the walls. After two days she took all of the mirrors down, dismantling her vanity with a Phillips-head screwdriver. She lay them on the guest-room bed, where they stared vacantly at the ceiling. That left only the mirror in her bathroom, which was screwed into the wall. She decided to leave it up, but to look into its reflection only in the brightest light of day, with the television set blaring in the background. If David wished to appear beside the toilet or in the bathtub while Regis Philbin commented on the morning news, so be it. She would reduce his ghost to something domestic. She would not be afraid.

  She thought of the mirrors now as she stood in front of her house, the last structure before the street dead-ended in a wooded cul-de-sac. Two months had passed since the night of the memorial service, and although in that time she had often felt the sense of being watched, she had never again seen a full-bodied apparition inside her home. Her precautions had either been highly effective or completely unnecessary.

  Sarah leaned her head back as she assessed her house: a two-story beige Victorian with white trim, pine-green shutters, and wraparound porches. She could describe it with a Realtor’s precision, having spent two years researching the local housing market. Once David had signed his contract with the college, she had begun to examine properties in town and in the country—ranch houses, farmhouses, Cape Cod cottages. Colonial, Victorian, Georgian, contemporary. She had studied the merits of heat pumps and copper pipes, wells vs. springs, thermal windows and shingled roofs.

  This house had not been her first choice. She had fallen in love with a three-bedroom contemporary in the style of Frank Lloyd Wright—a stone-and-cedar jewel on a private hill a few miles from town, with a backyard terraced south in raised flower beds. She’d felt almost giddy, showing David the solar heating, the picture windows, the granite countertops. But when they stepped onto the back patio, he had laughed. “A swimming pool? Who’s going to take care of a swimming pool? Oh, Sarah.” He rolled his eyes. “You can’t be serious?”

  “It’s only a lap pool.” Her volume had dropped to a murmur.

  “And what about all those flower beds?” His arm swept south. “Who’s going to take care of them?”

  “I will,” Sarah replied, but already the coneflowers seemed to wilt beneath David’s critical eyes.

  “Sure, you’ll take care of them for a few months, until the novelty wears off. After that, the beds will be full of weeds, and we’ll be stuck paying a pool guy.”

  She remembered his indulgent smile as he put his hands on her shoulders and looked into her face. “It is beautiful. I know. And if we were retired, with all the time in the world, this house would be perfect. But how many hours are you going to have for weeding once we start a family?”

  Walking to the pool’s edge, David had knelt to stroke his hand through the heated water. “You know that a pool is the worst thing to have with a toddler around.”

  He was right, of course. David was always right. Or at least, David had an air of certainty that made him sound correct, and that always made her feel mildly ridiculous.

  Was it possible to love a man who made you feel ridiculous? Of course, Sarah assured herself as she looked up at her huge Victorian house—the house David had chosen. Love was complicated, that was all. Or was love simple, and marriage was complicated? In seventeen years of marriage David had often left her feeling frustrated, and furious, and disgusted, yes—but he had also made her feel beautiful, and protected, and loved. And oh, what she would give to feel loved right now.

  She hoped Mrs. Foster wasn’t looking out her window—staring down the street and seeing Sarah at her driveway, wiping her eyes with the sleeve of her sweater. She remembered when David had first shown her this neighborhood. He had declared it perfect—the mature trees, the well-groomed yards, the elementary school within walking distance. This hundred-year-old house, he had explained, was the ideal family home, with four bedrooms, a large backyard, and a finished basement where children could shout at one another in privacy. “Isn’t it big?” Sarah had asked, thinking, Isn’t it boring? But David had explained how the rooms would shrink with each child that occupied them, until at last she agreed. This was the perfect place for children. She imagined them filling the space like a current of warm air.

  On their closing date, signing page after page in the lawyer’s office, she had been ten weeks pregnant, and had already bought a nursery border of ducks and teddy bears. She could still remember that sense of ease, the threads of her life coming together in one complete tapestry: the house, the child, the successful husband, the part-time teaching job that would keep her intellectually alive while she raised her children past their preschool years. It was the last time in her life that she had felt content.

  Eight days later when she woke in a small puddle of blood, she had consoled herself with statistics. One in three pregnancies ended in the first trimester; the trick was to last well into the fourth month. But four was a magic number, the unattainable goal her body could never achieve. She thought she had managed the feat when her third baby reached fourteen weeks. Pulling a kitchen chair into the nursery, she had spread the wallpaper border like a celebratory banner. One week more and she was standing on that same chair, scraping at the teddy bears. Curettage, curettage, it sounded like ballet.

  How ironic it all seemed, to have spent so many years tending to her brain, memorizing the required facts, polishing her sentence structure, believing that if she were smart enough her life would culminate in some glorious fulfillment. And then to be betrayed by the lesser parts of her body, to fail in a task mastered by the most brainless of women, by drug addicts and child abusers and the dithering cheerleaders from high school. In the end, they had all outdone her.

  Now, as she looked at her enormous house, with its latticework and porch swing and white-pine rockers, she knew what any stranger would assume—that nothing could be wrong in a place like this, a structure so symmetrical, so clean and creamy. No one would guess that behind those walls each empty room represented an unrealized life, each window a gaping frame for an absent child who should have been waving to her at this moment. She could sometimes hear their voices in the upstairs bedrooms—the crying of an infant, the babbling of toddlers. “The pipes are noisy,” David would say. “The wind whistles on the tin roof.” But Sarah had assigned faces to every sound.

  With David gone, she had sealed off the upstairs, shutting the heat vents, closing the doors, and huddling in her bedroom with real estate guides, wondering if she should find a house with less space to heat, less grass to mow. All around her, life was shrinking into something small and hard, a shell into which she was retracting, newly invertebrate.

  Sarah gathered her letters from the mailbox and inspected the return addresses as she walked along the driveway. Bills, credit-card applications, and three more notes of sympathy; they kept trickling in from distant acquaintances around the country. She walked up the porch steps and over to the door, reaching into her purse for her key, but the knob turned in her hand. She would have to be more careful about using the lock.

  Leaving the mail on the hall table, she walked into the kitchen and put her pocketbook on a chair. Grace, her Persian, soft and gray as a pile of ashes, curled around Sarah’s legs as she opened the refrigerator. “Hungry, my love?” She pulled Grace into her arms and rubbed her nose behind the cat’s ear. The refrigerator’s depleted shelves reminded her of her abandoned shopping cart at the Food Lion. By now some resentful bagger would have reshelved her lin guine and oranges, her Cabernet and Zinfandel and
Australian Shiraz. She took out a leftover bowl of tuna salad and placed it on the floor for Grace, then removed a half-empty bottle of Chardonnay. Taking a glass from the cupboard, she stepped out onto the patio and sat at the wrought-iron table.

  The yard was in its last gasp of autumn glory. A row of thick, burning bushes that separated her property from the neighbor’s privacy fence had turned a deep ruby red. This was the only time of the year when those bushes distinguished themselves. Her other shrubs were spring and summer bloomers—rose of Sharon, crepe myrtle, pink and white azaleas, all framed with ten inches of grass.

  She would have to learn how to use the Weedwacker. And the staple gun, the chain saw, the blowtorch. Despite all her talk of feminism, she had never changed a tire, never checked her antifreeze, or even lit a pilot light. There had never been a need; David had handled all the “men’s work.” The one time she had tried to use the Weedwacker, yanking at its starter cord a dozen times and yielding nothing more than a guttural cough, David had come outside and lifted the handle from her fingers. “It’s all right. I can do it.” With one turn of a knob, one jerk of the cord, he was off trimming around the porches. That was his nature, always in control.

  As the alcohol lingered on the back of Sarah’s tongue, goose bumps rose along her forearms. It was happening again—that unmistakable sense that David was there, watching her. Where was he this time? The bedroom window? The neighbor’s roof? The feeling was becoming so common it bordered on the ludicrous. For once, however, she felt a rare bravado. Perhaps it was the wine, or perhaps her growing resignation, but Sarah rose from the table, lifted her glass into the air, and spoke aloud: “Come out, come out, wherever you are.”

  For a few seconds the yard remained absolutely quiet, even the mockingbirds pausing to listen. And then, from behind the burning bushes came the crunch of leaves. Someone was standing there, shifting his weight.

  Run, she told herself. Run into the house and lock the door. Run straight through the hall and out the front, down the street to Margaret. But the longer she waited, the more resolute she became. After all, what did she have to fear? David, the good doctor? Or did she fear her own death? No. The miscarriages had changed her attitude toward death. She didn’t fear it; she despised it. She hated how it had planted itself in her body, making her its walking vessel. Sometimes in her angriest moments she even hated God—what had she ever done to Him, to have cast so many shadows upon her life? With that thought she put down her wine, walked to the garden shed, and retrieved a hoe.

  She carried it to the face of the middle burning bush, six feet tall with leaves so thick she could not see beyond them. Carefully she inserted the handle of the hoe into the shrub like a giant thermometer until it hit the fence on the other side with a dull thud. She repeated the gesture four times, imagining a man on the other side, contorting his body to avoid the thrusts of her horticultural sword. At last she dropped the hoe, raised her hands, and inserted them into the bush, watching her fingers disappear into the red leaves.

  She had a vague idea of what she might touch. Something cold, something sharp, a set of teeth. She both dreaded and desired another pair of hands, to grab her own and pull her in. But all she felt was a mesh of branches. With a sudden jerk, she divided the bush to the left and right, and looked straight through to the fence beyond.

  There was another crunch of leaves, a blinding rush of wings, and when she opened her eyes she saw a pair of blue jays ascend into the darkening sky.

  • 4 •

  Early the next morning, while the eastern horizon lingered in a predawn blue, Sarah woke to a slow tapping. In her dream David’s blue-white knuckles were rapping at the window, but when she sat up, the sound became liquid. Barefoot and dizzy, she slumped into the bathroom and discovered a wet towel dripping from the shower rod. Where had it come from, this foreign object? It hadn’t been there last night, of that she was certain, but when she pulled it from the rod and wrung it out into the tub, the action felt familiar.

  Back in her bedroom, she noticed that her windows were shut tight—she usually kept them open to the night air—and when she pressed her toes on the carpet beneath the windowsill, it was damp. A storm must have passed after midnight. She must have risen to shut windows and sop up puddles throughout the house. It was strange that she couldn’t remember, but the line between sleeping and waking had grown tenuous in recent weeks.

  Outside, the lawn glittered with frosted rain, carrying her mind back to the morning of David’s death. Then, too, a thunderstorm had emerged in the early hours, and she had trudged around the house with a towel, closing windows that faced north and west. David had been gone on an overnight kayaking trip. He had wanted to spend two days paddling the Shannon south through the Blue Ridge.

  She had driven him to his put-in point the previous morning, helping to carry the kayak down to the water’s edge. One last kiss, given carelessly as she tucked his wallet into the Velcro pocket of his life vest, and she had stepped back to watch him perform the brief ritual of preparation. She could still see him, tightening the chin strap on his helmet; stowing his camera, sandwiches, and cell phone in a waterproof pack at the back of the kayak; pulling his spray skirt around his torso, and finally wading into the water and settling into the boat. Usually the midsummer water was too low for paddling; kayaks scraped rocks at every rapid. July, however, had been unusually rainy, and even the Shannon’s long stretches of flat water flowed at a steady pace. With a shove of his paddle, David was away from the bank, waving to her as the current caught him. He planned to paddle for five hours that day, and to stop midway through the next county, where they owned a cabin by the river.

  Normally Sarah would have gone with him; they knew the importance of the buddy system. But she had agreed to help with registration for the college’s summer scholars program, and David was determined to take advantage of this one free weekend. She had asked him not to go, told him to wait for an afternoon when a friend could come along; even now she was annoyed at his overconfidence, his refusal to be delayed. But what was the use in chiding the dead?

  That night David had called from his cell phone. The river had been gorgeous. He reported seeing two deer, several trout, and a few children plunging from a rope swing. In the early evening he had set up an easel on their cabin deck, painting the trees along the river’s edge. Art was a lifetime passion that David could only indulge on occasional weekends. The cabin was his main studio, and the basement, with its high windows, his second choice. If David was painting, all was well.

  And so, when the thunder woke her that July evening, she had not worried. She hadn’t thought of the river, slowly swelling, changing color and pace. Only now, with the trees still dripping, her mind was full of rivers. As she settled back into bed, she imagined swirling currents, clogged with leaves and fallen branches that metamor phosed into mossy arms, pulling her down.

  • 5 •

  At eleven o’clock Sarah was still lounging in her robe, crawling in and out of her covers while cups of tea replaced the empty wineglasses on her bedside table. Each morning she seemed to stay in bed a little longer, poised somewhere between depression and luxury. Ever since childhood she had loved to read and nap in her sheets, slowing time to a groggy limp. Her happiest summers had been spent as a freelance writer during graduate school, when she had taken her laptop to bed. Afloat in a sea of pillows, she had clicked the mornings away, sometimes falling asleep with the screen open on her belly. David had suggested that she draft a special clause in her health insurance for bedsores.

  Now, with The Washington Post spread across his side of the bed, she could have easily drowsed until noon. But when the digital clock read eleven-thirty, she remembered that Nate was coming down from Charlottesville for lunch. She had invited him to look through David’s things, to see what clothes might fit, what childhood mementos might hold special meaning. Her bathroom was filled with masculine odds and ends that she wanted to pass along: shaving cream and black shoe polish
and Old Spice.

  With the thought of Nate’s arrival, she was instantly out of bed and flipping through her closet. A visit from Nate required more than her usual jeans and sweater. It called for something casual but pretty, sufficient to show that she was not falling apart. She looked through skirts, blouses, and pants, before settling on a loosely cut light blue dress. Was it too summery for October? Her entire wardrobe was probably too summery for a widow. Stepping into a pair of sandals, she weighed and rejected the idea of makeup; it would be an achievement just to brush her hair and find the barrette that had fallen under the bed.

  Five minutes later she was lying with her cheek pressed against the carpet, intent on a shimmer of mother-of-pearl beneath her dusty headboard. She took a pencil from the bedside table and stretched her body flat, inching the barrette around the abandoned books, socks, and cough-drop wrappers, all the while thinking: Was this necessary? Why did she need to dress for Nate? But the answer was obvious. Every woman dressed for Nate. To stand beside Nate wearing shabby clothes was to look like a chain-link fence propping an arbor of roses.

  Nate was a beautiful man, a man whose face had determined his fate. As a child, his dark hair and blue eyes, combined with an eloquent tongue, had left a wake of charmed teachers, moonstruck girls, and one mildly disgusted elder brother. According to David, Nate was a sweet-tempered boy ruined by the flattery of schoolmates.

  Sarah couldn’t say whether David’s assessment was fair; she had always felt an unspoken sympathy for her brother-in-law. Now, as she clipped the barrette in her hair and walked into the kitchen, she paused at the photo of Nate and David that hung on her refrigerator. In any other family Nate would have been the ideal son—handsome, popular, and bright. But the McConnell brothers had been raised by a pair of philosophy professors who valued the life of the mind more than the wonders of the flesh, and who maintained, from their own awkward youths, a lingering prejudice against prom kings.