by Laura Brodie
“I’ve never seen my husband,” the woman added after a while. “I’ve waited for twenty years, but never a glimpse.”
The water-skier’s widow sighed, and spoke in a quiet voice. “The only time I see Greg is in my dreams. Sometimes I’ll be talking to him, and it seems so real. Then I remember that he’s dead, and I tell him so. That always wakes me up.”
Around her the group murmured its assent. Dreams were the widows’ common denominator, the alternate world where life and death mingled. The redheaded professor launched into Freudian implications, while Sarah recalled visions of David, floating down the river.
She felt a hand touch her own, and turning to her left, Sarah found Adele leaning toward her, her dogwood brooch almost nicking Sarah’s shoulder.
“I’ve spoken to my Edward many times in the past forty years. Sometimes I’ll wake up and he’ll be standing beside my bed, still wearing his uniform. And I’ll say, ‘Eddie, you go on now and rest easy. I’ll be with you soon enough.’ ”
The old woman leaned back in her chair and chuckled, as if she had just told a marvelous joke.
Sarah didn’t know whether to be pleased or appalled. She had almost come to accept David’s appearances as a sign of mental breakdown, a delusion sparked by her isolation. But here were these women insisting that she wasn’t crazy, she was normal. Somehow the idea didn’t soothe her; a touch of insanity was preferable to the status quo.
She glanced over at Margaret, who was leaning against the kitchen doorway. “What do you think?”
Margaret hesitated, apparently choosing her words more carefully than usual.
“I think it’s going to be hard for you to have any closure until David’s body is found.”
“Which means you think this is all in my head?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“But you don’t believe in ghosts?”
Again Margaret hesitated.
“I believe there is a lot more going on in this world than we can comprehend. Whether or not that includes ghosts, I don’t know. But I’ll say this much—if you are really seeing David, there must be a reason. Either he is somehow trying to reach you, or you are trying to reach him. Most likely the latter. There’s probably something unresolved in your mind.”
It was ten o’clock when the group disbanded, waving and hugging and exchanging book titles on yellow Post-it notes. After everyone had left, Margaret retrieved a flashlight from her pantry and walked Sarah back to her house. There was only one streetlight at the start of the road, and its lavender glow faded as they walked to the end of the cul-de-sac, the beam from Margaret’s flashlight bobbing like a buoy.
When they reached Sarah’s porch, Margaret stayed on the lawn and shined the light up the stairs as Sarah unlocked her door.
“Thanks for inviting me,” Sarah called back. “It wasn’t so bad.”
“Your enthusiasm is breathtaking.”
“Tea at my house this Friday?” Sarah switched on the hall light.
“All right; and, Sarah?”
Sarah turned back and saw Margaret looking up at her with a slight smile.
“If David shows up again, tell him I said hi.”
• 8 •
Two days later Sarah was walking through the Safeway, filling her cart with bags of Skittles and SweeTarts. It was Halloween, and her shopping was motivated by guilt. Upon entering the store, she had seen Mrs. Foster hoarding enormous amounts of fruit: “The kids are having a party . . . I’m making caramel apples.” At Sarah’s vague nod Mrs. Foster had added: “Do you want the boys to stop by this year?”
The question was meant kindly, but Sarah couldn’t help imagining Mrs. Foster three years ago, inspecting her children’s candy for razor blades and opened wrappers, and discovering a Ziploc bag of Oreos.
“Of course, have them come. I’d love to see their costumes.” The neighborhood mothers were probably doubtful about her house this year, advising their children to leave poor Mrs. McConnell alone. Soon she would become the Boo Radley of the town, her life the subject of whispers, her address branded unlucky. Its location at the end of a street already made her house an inefficient stop on the Halloween route, unless the children were guaranteed a good payoff. And so she piled on the candy, imagining herself as the witch in “Hansel and Gretel.”
Widows were often accused of witchcraft, so Sarah mused as she inched past the Laffy Taffy. There was something frightening about a solitary woman, something that made her fit for burning. Many cultures blamed widows for their husbands’ deaths. Maybe this year she should retrieve her pointy black hat from the attic; some of the parents might appreciate the irony. She doubted it. Better not to put ideas into anyone’s head. Better instead to stock up on these bags of miniature Snickers bars. She would greet Halloween with a bright porch light, a bottomless bowl of candy, and a smile calculated to assure the neighbors that she was utterly harmless.
The children began to emerge from their houses shortly after six. First came the Foster brothers, all three, even the fourteen-year-old, whose only costume was a rubber George Bush mask. “Terrifying,” Sarah said as she extended a wooden salad bowl full of candy. She guessed that their mother had sent them together to pay their respects before they disbanded to their separate activities. All were unfailingly polite, taking only one piece of candy from her bowl.
“No, no, take more. I’ve got plenty inside.” Their fingers spread into claws and depleted her bowl to half its depth. She would have to limit the next children to two pieces each.
Sarah had never before seen so many trick-or-treaters. She counted seventy-six in the first two hours, an insignificant number compared to the main residential drag, where the totals regularly topped three hundred. In recent years the town had been overrun by county dwellers, children from small farms or new rural subdivisions where each house was separated by at least six acres. Too hefty a trek for a single piece of candy. In the wealthy neighborhoods of Jackson children ran from door to door accumulating hoards of sweets, while their parents waited down the street in dusty pickups. Jackson’s older residents complained that they were frightened by the unknown urchins and their lurking vehicles. Most of the old folks turned off their lights on Halloween and hun kered down, as if the children were a passing storm.
At Sarah’s house, half of the faces were familiar. Mrs. Foster seemed to have spread the word that she was accepting trick-or-treaters, because all the local children made a point of coming down the street, saying “Thank you, Mrs. McConnell” and “Happy Halloween, Mrs. McConnell” with rehearsed precision. Sarah welcomed princesses and fairies, vampires and superheroes; Harry Potter reigned supreme.
By nine o’clock the stream of children had slowed to a drip. Her doorbell rang at intervals of five, eight, and ten minutes, rousing her each time from a tepid Poirot mystery movie. At nine-thirty, as the last child was leaving, she stepped out on the porch and scanned the street. Three houses down, heavy-metal music thumped through the Fosters’ windows. Teenagers roamed the back lawn, drifting in and out of the bushes. Many pumpkins will be smashed tonight, she thought vaguely as she turned off the porch light and took the bowl of candy into her bedroom.
After changing into her nightgown, she settled under the sheets with a Mr. Goodbar. The body count for Poirot had reached three, but the inspector was unruffled. He conducted his search for clues as if it were a treasure hunt, confident that the prize was waiting at the end. She hated this cinematic version of predestination, where some characters were always fated to triumph, while others remained trapped in a cycle of despair. Clicking through the channels, she passed World Federation wrestling, CNN, the ubiquitous Law & Order rerun, and finally stopped at her nightly destination: the Weather Channel.
It had become a fascination in the past three months, to mute the sound and stare in silence at the ever-changing maps. She believed in weather as a measure of fate, the meteorologists a priestly caste with their hieroglyphic rain clouds, lightning bolts, and snowflake
s. Her life had been irrevocably changed by a storm, and she suspected that she was one among many—not so much the farmers and fishermen, who lived by the skies, or the owners of coastline property who dwelled in the shadow of each hurricane season. Her sect was more select. She counted herself among the landlocked city dwellers and smug suburbanites, with their lightning rods and Tyvek walls and monstrous SUVs, who, in the midst of their well-insulated complacency, had found their lives altered by heatstroke or hailstorm or an ill-timed lightning bolt. They were the recent converts to the cult of weather, for whom each symbol on these maps represented another tragedy.
Sarah had just switched off the TV when a knock came at the door. The clock read ten-fifteen, too late to indulge any greedy new-comers. She rolled over in bed and closed her eyes, willing the child to vanish. But there it was again, three knocks, slow and heavy. Sighing, she pulled on her robe. She would have to tape up a sign—OUT OF CANDY—to keep the stragglers from knocking until eleven.
When she opened the door the darkness was startling. She had forgotten that she had turned off the light, and now she wondered what sort of child would stand at a pitch-black porch. Remembering the teenagers down the road, she braced herself for a Halloween prank. Something disgusting would be left on her mat, something squishy or smelly or dead; the children would be watching from the bushes, waiting for her scream. It was best not to disappoint them. With a sigh of resignation, she switched on the porch light and looked down. Nothing was there. Glancing to the right and left, she saw that all of the rocking chairs and potted plants were in their proper places; nothing had been altered, nothing left behind. The floodlight pouring from the eaves revealed no one on the porch, the walkway, or driveway. It seemed to be a case of knock and run, and she was turning to close the door when she saw something move in the shadows.
It wasn’t a child. That much she could tell as her eyes settled on the black outline. It was a man, hidden underneath her vast magnolia. She was about to run and call the police, when the figure seemed to sense her impulse. He crossed from shadow into light and stood at the foot of her porch stairs.
She felt as if the air had been sucked out of her body. Her left hand reached out and she grabbed the side of the door, hugging it to her chest as she stared at her husband, standing there with his face glowing like the moon.
Sarah closed her eyes, guessing that this apparition would disappear as swiftly as all the others. But when she opened them again David was still there. Something about his steadiness helped to overcome her initial wave of shock. He didn’t speak or move, but his body looked so tangible, it seemed to give substance to her own legs. She thought of what Margaret had said, how there must be something unresolved between them, and the thought gave her courage.
She pulled the door back, shielding herself with it as she opened a path into the house. Then she met David’s eyes, and with a voice barely audible she whispered, “Come in.”
PART TWO
Flesh
• 9 •
He hadn’t meant for any of this to happen. So David claimed as he sat across from Sarah at their kitchen table, unfolding the long story of the past three months.
“I planned to see you the next day,” he began. And Sarah listened, all the while asking herself: Could a ghost have such solid flesh? Could his weight creak in a chair? There was nothing amorphous about David. She’s couldn’t see through his skin. He smelled like a man who hadn’t bathed in a week. Still, she couldn’t shake the sense that he wasn’t quite real. She’d read enough old legends to be suspicious of anything that came knocking on Halloween.
Back in July, David explained, when he left on his kayaking trip, he had expected to be gone only one night. Sarah was scheduled to meet him at five P.M. just north of the Buck Island Dam, where the Shannon widened into a small lake before dropping down a forty-foot concrete wall. There, a line of red buoys steered paddlers away from the precipice, toward a muddy portage point on the western shore. On Sunday Sarah would be waiting under the poplar trees, reading a paperback novel, sipping at something, probably bottled water. She would stand and wave as he approached, and together they would carry the kayak up from the river, across the road to the gravel parking lot. They would tie the boat to their station wagon, stow his paddle and gear in the back, and he would change into a clean T-shirt and tennis shoes. Halfway through their sixty-minute ride back to Jackson, they would stop to eat dinner at the Mexican café in Walker’s Draft. Everything was arranged; life was predictable.
On the first day, all had gone according to plan. The Shannon, which alternated between class-two rapids, rippling rock gardens, and long stretches of flat water, was flowing at a perfect level. Water splashed his face and arms at every rapid, but nothing about the river was intimidating. In the calm sections he leaned back and let the current carry him beneath canopies of maple and oak. As he floated into the hills and meadows beyond the outskirts of Jackson, the subdivisions gave way to occasional farmhouses perched above the floodplain. He paddled underneath one highway overpass whose metal beams hummed a steady alto, and at the next bend a cluster of children hailed him from a rope swing, briefly coming to swim at his side like a pod of dolphins. No other paddlers appeared that day. His only companion was a great blue heron, flying from tree to tree fifty yards ahead.
The river was a temple of meditation. Lulled by its steady current, he formed resolutions as if it were New Year’s Day. He vowed to exercise more, clean the attic, pressure-wash the porches. Above all, he needed to step back from his job. For the past two years he had spent hundreds of hours chairing committees and heading a push to build a new student health center, and although the causes were worthy, there was only so much joy to be gained from architects’ drawings. He often thought that a private practice would be more fulfilling; then he could follow his patients’ lives from diaper rash through acne, all the way to heart disease. But every time he imagined it, the insurance industry waited like a troll under the bridge. Besides, the answer to his restlessness did not lie in another variation on medicine. It waited in sunny afternoons, fishing, painting, and planting trees on their acres by the river. He wanted to visit friends out west—to hike through canyons he had seen only in National Geographic. And perhaps, if he worked fewer hours, he could salvage his marriage.
He and Sarah had been happy in their first decade together, satisfied with the present and hopeful about the future. It was only in recent years that they had lost their joint sense of purpose. Now they were held together by a web of social obligations, in which they fluttered like a pair of desperate moths. Sarah’s trap was especially cruel, victimized by her own biology. Last year, as he watched her settling into a permanent funk, he had brought home a pack of Prozac, but her response was so biting, so completely ungrateful, he had never uttered those two syllables again. Now divorce was the unspoken word that hovered above them, the angel’s sword waiting to fall.
The river slowed at a deep swimming hole, and David steered to the sandy bank, threw his paddle on shore, and stepped into the cool water. Pulling his kayak up the narrow beach, he sat and stared at the river. Six years ago he and Sarah had stopped at this same bank. They had shed their swimsuits and life jackets and folded their bodies together in the water, ripples multiplying around them like sound waves.
“We’re scaring the fish.” Sarah had laughed as she unwrapped her legs from his waist. Her voice in those days had a softer tone; the thought of its low music made him dig his toes into the sand. He needed to bring Sarah back to the river. She hadn’t been paddling all summer, and only once the previous year. He needed to bring her out to the cabin, to get her into the water.
Water was an instrument of renewal, a medium for rebirth. And God knows Sarah needed a change. She was becoming unbearable, the way she lashed out at him like a cornered animal. After the first miscarriage he had been full of sympathy, bringing flowers, cooking dinner, rolling his own mourning into a tightly squeezed ball. All his energy had been devoted to
keeping Sarah on an even keel. But after the second loss her grief was sharp as razor wire, a twisted perimeter holding him at bay.
Let her come to the river, David thought as he waded back into the water. He could play John the Baptist and give her a good dunking . . . No—he had to stop that bitterness. It was sad, how love was always tinged with aggression.
At two-thirty he reached their cabin, its backyard marked by a small dock extending from a muddy ledge. To the right and left the woods encroached, but here the sun fell on a wide clearing dotted with black-eyed Susans. He dragged his kayak up the bank and flipped it in the tall grass, laying his life jacket and spray skirt on top to dry. Fifty yards up the sloping yard, a bluish gray cedar cabin stood shaded by pine and oak, its back deck the only sunny spot fading in the heat. David walked around to the front and removed the spare key from its hiding place under a cracked brick beneath the shrubs.
Inside, the cabin air was thick with humidity, each piece of wooden furniture sweaty to the touch. He moved from room to room, opening windows and turning on ceiling fans. In the living room he paused at the sight of his brushes and paint, stacked near the window. For the rest of the day he would sit on the deck, sketch the trees, and try to see the world anew.
Only one thought troubled him as he settled outside with a beer in his right hand and a sketchbook in his left. Whatever peace he achieved this day could not be sustained once he returned to work. On Monday the summer school students would be lined up outside his door, sick from their weekend bacchanalias, while he and the nurses commiserated over cups of bitter Folgers.