by Laura Brodie
An hour later Nate had chosen a dozen pictures and two paintings. One was an oil landscape with a barn and fence, beautifully done, though Sarah never would have guessed that the subject would appeal to him. The other was a watercolor of Helen, David and Nate’s mother, bent over a garden of daylilies.
“Yes, that one is nice.” She should have known that he would choose it. Helen was the great love of Nate’s life; beside her, all girlfriends shriveled to insignificance. She used to come to Virginia to flee the winters of her native Vermont, made so much colder after her husband’s heart attack. Many evenings while David was off at medical emergencies, Sarah and Helen had spent hours by the fire, comparing book-club lists, lamenting the state of undergraduate grammar, and sharing stories about the McConnell brothers.
Nate never knew how much his mother admired him, how she had marveled at his beauty as he grew from toddler to teenager, wondering how her body could have produced such symmetry. Sometimes when he exited a room Helen would raise her eyebrows at Sarah and say: “A thing of beauty is a joy forever.” Keats’s line had a wonderfully ironic ring on those days when Nate was feeling sullen; his mother’s presence had a way of reducing him to sulky petulance.
If Helen had lived, Sarah now thought, Nate could have been the only son. He could have monopolized his mother’s attention, become her raison d’être. Or perhaps a dead brother would have been harder to compete with than a living one? Regardless, Helen had succumbed to breast cancer three years ago, leaving her sons without that point in the family triangle to hold them together. In the last year, the two brothers had scarcely spoken.
Sarah knew that it was a betrayal, to let Nate acquire this symbol of love between David and his mother. David had completed Helen’s portrait as a Mother’s Day gift, trumping Nate’s fresh flowers with these painted lilies. But Nate would treasure it; all images of Helen were sacred.
“Keep them for the exhibit.” Nate put both of the paintings back into the bin. “Just mark them for me.”
By late afternoon Sarah was helping Nate pack boxes of clothes, books, and videotapes into his trunk. His visit had been more pleasant than she expected. He had taught her how to start the Weedwacker, and had trimmed the entire yard. He had checked the fluids in her car, and had shown her where to pour the oil.
“Are you going to be all right?” he asked as he stood beside his car.
“Of course.” She gave him an awkward hug.
And then he did a strange thing. He lifted his right hand and combed it through her hair, pulling her bangs back from her eyes and stopping behind her ear, where he cupped his palm and held her skull as if it were a brandy snifter. He tilted her head toward him ever so slightly and leaned forward, kissing her gently on her left cheek.
Before she had time to think, he was in his car and down the street, leaving her blushing on the curb. She hadn’t been kissed so tenderly in years, and the effect was wrenching. Her mind was caught between annoyance and puzzlement, wondering what sort of game he was playing. But her skin, still tingling with the soft pressure of his lips, whispered “More, more, more.”
• 6 •
What woke her at 3:13 that night? There was no thunder, no rain on the roof. All was quiet as she sat up in bed, her knees pulled to her chest. She knew she had been roused by a loud noise, some sort of crash. It sounded as if it had come from the basement.
David is in the house, she thought. He’s looking for something. Soon he’ll be coming up the stairs. He’ll turn the knob on the basement door and step into the kitchen with cold, damp feet. Wet indentations will sink into the rug as he walks down the hall.
He wants to come back to bed. He’s so, so tired. He wants to get under the covers and warm his hands.
“Enough.” She switched on her bedside light. She had to stop scaring herself with these morbid visions. David was not some clammy ghoul. He was a good man, and if his ghost was in the house, she should go to meet him.
She rose from her covers and reached for the terry-cloth robe that hung on her bedpost. As she tied the belt around her waist, she turned to face the open hallway.
There was nothing to be seen, of course. There never was. She walked down the hallway and into the kitchen, turning on every light. The furniture, the wallpaper, the carpets, all emerged from the shadows in their usual shapes. The patio door was locked; she always locked it now. That left only the basement door, waiting beside the pantry. It occurred to her that on the night of the memorial service, when she had seen David’s ghost enter the kitchen, she hadn’t thought to check the basement. She had been so drawn to the patio doors, so certain that he was standing on the other side, she had not considered that he might have gone downstairs. Now, with her hand on the basement doorknob, she wondered if she should hurry back to bed. Perhaps she should get under her covers and wait until morning; whatever was downstairs could be confronted in the daylight.
“Nonsense.” If something or someone was in her basement, she should know about it. She took a deep breath, yanked open the door, and stared into the darkness.
Something was rushing up the stairs, something that howled. She managed two steps backward before the object wrapped itself around her legs. “Grace.” She knelt and lifted the cat to her chest. “Did I leave you down there?”
The cat jumped from her arms and trotted down the hall while Sarah switched on the light and walked downstairs. As the furniture came into view, she spotted the problem on the opposite side of the room. A glass jar, filled with paintbrushes, had fallen off the shelves and shattered on the tile floor. She walked over and picked up the largest pieces, holding them gingerly in her hand. When she turned back to the stairs, she gasped.
David was watching her from the couch. His eyes were staring, his lips slightly open. His face looked unusually pale. It took two seconds for her to register that this was only his self-portrait, propped up against some pillows. Nate must have left it out, although it was strange—she thought they had been careful to put everything away. Looking down, Sarah noticed that her hand was bleeding. In her surprise, she had clutched at the broken glass.
“Shit.” She went to the couch and with her free hand she picked up the self-portrait and returned it to the bin, next to the painting of Helen and her daylilies. Then she walked back upstairs, turned off the light, and dropped the pieces of glass into the trash can. Bent over the kitchen sink, Sarah watched her blood mix with the water as it flowed down the drain.
• 7 •
At seven o’clock the next evening Sarah sat on her porch steps, trying to muster the enthusiasm to visit Margaret’s widows. She had dressed for the occasion, ironing a white blouse and crisp tan slacks, and what a shame it would be to have ironed for nothing. Ironing was such a rare event, done only because she envisioned the other widows in impeccable clothes—sixties-ish dowagers with light makeup and heavy jewelry, all trying to fill the empty spaces in their lives with conversation. God, how she dreaded the banalities to come, the insipid tenor of rich women’s angst. But if she didn’t make an appearance, Margaret would worry. She would think that Sarah was depressed or antisocial. And it wasn’t true—not this time. It wasn’t depression that held her back as she stared at the stiff leaves of her magnolia. It was a distinct fear that Margaret’s friends would look into her heart, measure the depth of her sorrow, and find it lacking.
Over the past few months she had come to suspect that she wasn’t truly mourning the loss of her husband. She was mourning the loss of an idea, a vision of how her life should have been. And that vision had not been swept down the river three months ago; it had been dying slowly over the past several years, with each small dream that she had abandoned.
Her dreams had never been overly ambitious. No—Sarah shook her head as she wiped a dead moth off the step beside her. She could not be accused of overreaching. During her first few years with David, living in New York, she had worked as an administrative assistant at a shelter for battered women. By day she had typed grant p
roposals and answered the telephone; by night she had stuffed fund-raising letters while watching TV. How righteous she had felt, and how incredibly bored. In her mind, the physical battery of wives began to blur with the economic exploitation of women such as herself, young idealistic females who did society’s dirty work of caring for the needy, earning minuscule salaries or nothing at all.
When David was offered the position in Jackson, he had said that it would give her a chance to start again, but still she hadn’t wanted to move. She already knew about small-town Southern life, the awkward blend of transplanted Yankees and Confederate flag-wavers. After her childhood in South Carolina, New York had seemed like progress. She felt that she was climbing a geographical ladder, if not a professional one. But who was she to block her husband’s path? David had a career; more than that, he had a calling. And what did she have in New York, except a job that was going nowhere?
Jackson had proven to be more cultured than she expected. She had signed on as marketing director for a community theater that specialized in Appalachian folktales. But the group’s financial health was never better than precarious, and after four years of treading water, Sarah had traded the world of nonprofits for its academic equivalent, a PhD in English.
What a luxury that had been, a six-year immersion in poetry from Beowulf to Bishop. Granted, the commute was tiring—three days a week across the mountains to Charlottesville—but she had compensated with weekends stretched in bed beside a pile of novels. Words had always been her most faithful companions, and her curriculum vitae boasted all the prerequisites for a brilliant future: published articles, conference papers, a dissertation fellowship. When her first foray into the job market yielded nothing, she hadn’t worried. It often took several tries to land a tenure-track position, and at thirty-four she wanted, above all, to start a family. Part-time teaching at the local college would be ideal while she raised her children past their early years. She could still remember David’s comment when he read her framed diploma: “I guess we’re smart enough now to make a baby.” At the time, it had seemed funny.
Once, in a footnote to a pregnancy guide, she had found a term for herself: the habitual aborter. She liked its criminal ring; it matched the darkness of her mind over the past few years, teaching expository writing to college freshmen who had never mastered subject-verb agreement. She had thought that adjunct teaching would be freeing, even fun, but instead it was a purgatory that par alleled her body’s limbo—pregnant, not-pregnant, pregnant again. Her career and her family seemed equally stunted, which might not have mattered had she been younger, with plenty of time for life to unfold. But her thirty-ninth birthday had arrived like a plague, a hideous reminder that by forty a woman should have something to show for herself: a book, a child, an assistant deanship. Something more than a remodeled kitchen.
She had never been able to explain her misery to David. He was the sort of person who had witnessed other people’s shortcomings, but had never tasted the bitterness of failure for himself. She felt that her miscarriages were tainting his perfect world, a barren wife being the most ancient blight of all, and she sometimes suspected that the acidity of her mind might be poisoning her womb; no life could grow within a body so bitter. Some nights David would stay at work just to avoid her tone at the dinner table. She recognized the fear in his meager excuses, the dread of a middle-aged woman turned prematurely sour, and for days at a time she was able to check her anger, talking airily about Asian babies, Russian babies, Romanian orphanages. But inevitably the knife edge of her temper would return.
So what should she tell Margaret’s widows? That she was mourning her youth, her muted intellect, her unborn children? That she missed her husband less than she missed the early years of their life together, when each day had promised something new? In recent years their marriage had hardened into a daily routine, without accusation but also without passion. She supposed that was inevitable in most marriages.
Perhaps she should go back inside her house. Stay at home and pass the evening without speaking. She had done it before, gone for days seeing no one, living in silence, wondering if her vocal cords would atrophy. Before her the future yawned, a pale tundra in which her only conversations would be with telemarketers. That thought was sufficient to lift Sarah to her feet. Enough of this brooding. She would arise and go now, go to meet the widows, if only to hear her voice speaking aloud.
By seven-thirty a handful of strange women had assembled in Margaret’s living room. Four were well over fifty, their husbands lost to a mixture of recent illnesses and old wars. Two younger women had been widowed in sudden accidents, a car crash and a waterski ing incident. “One if by land and two if by sea,” as Sarah’s morbid brain put it. Inside the kitchen she leaned against the round oak table, filling a platter with cheesecake squares and blueberry scones while Margaret recounted her guests’ tragic histories.
“Patty is interesting, though a bit pompous. You might know her, she’s the thin one with the red curly hair? She teaches in the sociology department.”
Sarah shook her head.
“Anyway, she saw her husband through two years of lung cancer, and now she’s made widowhood into a research topic. I think she’s working on a book.”
“So anything we say can be used against us?”
“Exactly.” Margaret arranged some cheese and crackers on a lazy Susan. “Try to sit near Adele. She’s the one with white hair and a peach jacket. Always dresses as if she’s going to a garden party. She’s eighty-two and her mind is sharp as a pin. Her husband died in Korea and she ran his hardware store for thirty-two years.”
“Fascinating.” Sarah rolled her eyes as she bit into a scone.
“Any woman who’s lived through World War Two, Korea, and Vietnam is going to be a lot more fascinating than you or me.” Margaret put the lazy Susan into Sarah’s hands and steered her shoulders toward the door.
Inside the living room, the conversation was centered on one of the older women, Ruby, whose husband, Bob, had died without leaving a will. The omission was especially troublesome, since Bob had a son by his first marriage who didn’t approve of Ruby, and who was fighting her in court.
Sarah liked this Ruby woman—a petite, graying bulldog who used words like greedy bastard. Profanity was always entertaining when it fell from the mouth of a septuagenarian. Sarah lay the cheese and crackers on Margaret’s coffee table, scanned the room for Adele, and settled into an armchair beside the only woman in peach.
It seemed that Bob’s son wanted to liquidate everything. He thought they should hold a massive estate sale, transforming his father’s life into a pile of money that could be divvied up. But Ruby refused to abandon the house, and insisted that she would spend the last years of her life within the space she had called home for the past decade. Stubborn Bob Junior, who had grown up within those same walls, resented his stepmother’s intrusion, and now lawyers were scripting the family drama while their fees whittled away at Bob’s estate.
Ruby’s tale sparked a flurry of lamentations about wills, annuities, and government entitlements, all of which made Sarah newly grateful for Nate. He had handled everything after David’s disappearance—insurance, taxes, Social Security. Nate had filled out all the paperwork, consulting with David’s accountant and the college’s personnel office, and scouring desk drawers for every policy, every receipt. Sarah had only to locate the “sign here” stickers at the bottom of each form.
David had left her with an insurance policy for four hundred thousand dollars, a sum he had chosen back when they were planning a family. Add that to the college’s death benefit and her monthly Social Security checks, and widowhood had proven to be an enormous windfall. She planned to give half of the insurance money to the college, to establish a memorial scholarship for each year’s top premed student, but thinking about the money only made her restless. Margaret’s widows sounded more like an investment club than a bereavement group.
Sarah wondered what these women w
ere really thinking. Did they feel lonely or liberated? Bottled up with rage, or drowning in apathy? She, who loathed group therapy, found herself wanting less talk about money and more about misery. She wanted someone to break down.
Perhaps that was why, when Ruby tipped her head and asked, “How are you doing?” she let the truth drop so abruptly.
“Not so great. I think I’m being haunted by my husband’s ghost.”
She expected silence. She thought her words would stain the atmosphere like a glass of red wine spilled on the carpet. But the reaction was just the opposite. The group seemed to bubble into life.
“Have you seen him?”
“Do you talk to him?”
“How does he look?”
She told them about the two occasions when she had seen David’s ghost, and explained how she had often sensed his invisible presence, and all the while the women nodded, as if she were giving a recipe for chocolate chip cookies. When she finished, the red-haired professor spoke for the first time.
“It’s not that unusual. Statistics show that widows are the most likely demographic group to report contact with the dead, everything from sightings of apparitions to vague feelings that ghosts are present.”
“Of course,” Ruby interrupted, clearly impatient at words like demographic, “women are much more psychic than men.”
“I don’t know about being psychic,” the professor pressed on, “but women are more pious, and that makes them more likely to believe in ghosts, whether or not they’re real.”
“They’re real all right.” An older widow spoke up. “I saw one in my grandmother’s backyard in Missouri, when I was eight years old. It was Thanksgiving morning and I was inside, reading in a window seat, and when I looked out there was a man standing under the big elm. It was my grandfather, clear as day. I recognized him from the pictures in Gran’s bedroom. He died of a heart attack before I was born, right in the middle of a church service, and Gran always said that meant he’d gone straight to heaven. He was still wearing his Sunday best when I saw him, and it was windy, and his hair was blowing, and he looked cold. But he was gone in an instant, like it was just a thought that had flashed across my mind.”