The Widow's Season

by Laura Brodie

  Show’s over, he thought. There would be no funeral procession, no headlit drive to the cemetery. There was nothing to bury or burn, no corpse to slather with grisly makeup. He supposed they would all congregate at his house, and he wondered if he should follow.

  Behind him, the five-thirty sun leaned toward the Alleghenies. If he didn’t leave soon he would be pedaling through the mountains in complete darkness. Still he hesitated, because in watching Sarah, the dark, addictive pleasure had returned. Shameful as it might be, he wanted to know what was going on inside her head, what secrets she might reveal in her unsuspecting quiet.

  Ten minutes later he was headed home, not on the usual roads, but through fields and alleys that led to the woods beside his backyard. On a slope overlooking the eastern side of the house, David rested his bike on the leaves and knelt behind a screen of blackberry bushes. To his left, a row of parked cars revealed the identities of Sarah’s visitors. His accountant drove the silver Audi; the BMW must be Nate’s. The maroon station wagon belonged to his favorite nurse, Anna Marie.

  On the patio, mourners circled Sarah while Margaret poured iced tea into crystal-blue glasses. Nate stood farther down the yard, beside the butterfly bushes, running his fingers along his girlfriend’s naked arm. Strange, thought David, how the trees’ shadows formed a boundary between himself and the sunlit world. Although his name kept rising from the crowd, a curtain had fallen between his life and the drama below. When he sat against a white pine and closed his eyes, he felt that his exile was complete.

  After two hours all of the cars were gone except for Nate’s. David walked down from the slope, leaned up against the house’s back wall, and glanced into the kitchen. Anne was fixing a pot of tea—good, reliable Anne. She was arranging cups on a tray, filling a purple sugar bowl. He moved to the living room window and watched her carry the tray to the coffee table. She poured a cup for Sarah, who was sitting on the sofa, and two more for Nate and his girlfriend in the wing chairs across the room. David smiled as his brother sipped politely; Nate was no tea drinker.

  Around him, the twilight air felt chilly; it would be a cold night sleeping in the woods. To his right, concrete steps led to the basement door, and quietly, very quietly, he walked down the stairs and tried the knob. The door was unlocked; that much hadn’t changed in the past three weeks. He walked across the dark space and stretched out on the couch. A half wall separated the top of the stairs from the main room; if someone came down from the kitchen, he would have a few seconds to hide behind the sofa.

  Evening faded into night until the room was completely black, but he did not turn on a light. Instead he lay there listening to the voices above. Occasionally a word emerged—“yesterday,” “ceremony,” “river,” “David.” The rest were a haze of syllables, mixed with footsteps in the kitchen. This, he thought, is what it must be like to be buried—to lie underground, paralyzed in the darkness while the living murmur overhead.

  He heard a change in tone, bits and pieces of good-bye. Footsteps crossed the hallway and the front door closed, followed by a car’s gradual departure. The two sisters were left in the kitchen, the lilting alto of their voices punctuated by the clatter of dishes in the sink. Water gurgled through the basement pipes as a toilet flushed, then footsteps moved across the floor and up the stairs.

  Another fifteen minutes and the house was silent. Sitting up, David switched on the lamp and waited for his eyes to adjust. They settled on the bookshelves on the opposite wall, filled with old pa perbacks. At the cabin, the only decent book was an anthology of short stories that he had read twice over the past few weeks. The others were house rejects, third-rate novels and college textbooks. David walked to the shelves and touched the books’ spines. Here were the sort he wanted, time-consuming classics: War and Peace, Huckleberry Finn, David Copperfield. Sarah would not need them for her women’s studies classes. He stacked them by the couch, along with a pile of National Geographics, a Penguin edition of Shakespeare’s tragedies, and Fielding’s guide to North American birds.

  When he stepped back to assess the books, something was missing. Perhaps it was his brush with death, or the silence of the woods, but for the first time in his adult life he wanted to read the Bible. Upstairs they had a beautiful copy, a gift from his mother on his twelfth birthday. “Required reading,” she had called it, “if only to understand Shakespeare.” After listening for the slightest sound in the house above, David took off his shoes and approached the stairs.

  He ascended one step at a time, testing each stair for creaking joints before planting his weight. At the top, he turned the knob and silently pushed the door, just a crack, to check that all was clear before he entered the kitchen. He left the door slightly open, so that he wouldn’t have to turn the knob again on his way down, then he glided into the living room, took the Bible off the shelf, and rearranged the other books to hide the gap. He paused to thumb through the New Testament, where the words of Jesus appeared in flaming red, as if to keep Christ’s blood forever on one’s conscience. Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep, but I go to awake him.

  David’s eyes leaped at the sound of feet. Sarah was coming down the stairs, her legs now in view. How stupid of him, not to have realized that she might still be up there. A few steps more and she would have a clear vantage into the living room. He thought to hide, but any movement might attract her attention, and so he stood still as a lamp, watching her fingers trace the banister, down, down, curling to the right, away from him, into the hallway. She never looked up. He listened to her bare feet walk down the hall and into their bedroom, then he waited for the door to close, but the sound didn’t come. Sarah was opening her closet door, walking in and out of their master bathroom. With a click, the hallway dimmed, and he knew that she had turned off her overhead light, leaving only one lamp, probably the one on her bedside table. He waited again for silence, then swiftly, with Bible in hand, he crossed from the living room into the kitchen and tiptoed downstairs, closing the basement door gently. From the corner of his eye he had seen Sarah at her vanity, her back turned, apparently oblivious to his presence. He sat motionless on the couch, hoping for silence.

  After a little while he heard her feet coming down the hall. She was entering the kitchen, standing near the basement door. Obviously she had seen him. At any moment the door would swing open, the overhead light switch on, and Sarah would descend. So be it. It was time. They were alone, the house was quiet. Three weeks of separation had tested their marriage. Explanations, wholly inadequate, raced through his mind. But just as he was settling on his opening words, he heard the rapid patter of feet, running back along the hall. Strange. He waited another ten minutes, but the danger seemed to have passed.

  David set the clock radio beside the couch for five A.M. Tomorrow, in the half-light, he would wake and leave Jackson before anyone might recognize him. In the meantime, he pulled a crocheted afghan up to his shoulders, lay back against the pillows, and opened the Bible. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters.

  Ever since that night, he had known that he must return and speak to Sarah, but only in the past week had he finally come back, sleeping in the basement at night and watching from the woods by day, trying to study her face, to sense if she would want him. He had watched her eat on the patio, walk down the street, read in bed with glasses of red wine. And yes, he had watched her undress at night, hair falling into her eyes, hands rubbing lotion up her calves, knees, thighs.

  The encounter at the grocery store had been wholly accidental; he didn’t think she ever shopped in that part of town. For one brief moment he had considered revealing himself then and there, but instead he had panicked and run through the swinging doors in the dairy section, into the storage area, where he had weaved through cardboard boxes and out the delivery entrance. That evening he had lain awake in the basement, certain tha
t it was time to go upstairs. Still, he fretted over her response, the anger and the shock.

  Only tonight, on Halloween, as he sat in the woods and watched the children come and go, had he felt the time was right. Seeing her open the door to all visitors, he had hoped for the same warm reception. His was the spirit returning on All Souls’ Eve, come to tell a tale of death and resurrection. All that was left now was to ask her forgiveness.

  • 14 •

  At last he was silent, studying her from across the table. And she, too, had nothing to say for a long while, struck by the strangeness of this body sitting in her kitchen.

  It looked like her husband. He had the same eyes and hands. And his story, though infuriating, was consistent with her knowledge. It explained his appearance in the house and at the grocery store. It confirmed her sense of being watched. And explanations were crucial, weren’t they? Every problem needed to be solved, every oddity framed in a logical context. God forbid that her life be filled with mystery.

  But still, there was something surreal about this midnight visitor, with his unnaturally pale face and too-convenient story. Why did his words sound so much like the narratives in her mind—the meticulous fictions she had constructed over the past three months to explain his long absence? She had concocted so many intricate tales, so many logical reasons for why he was gone and how he would return, that now David’s story seemed like the merest echo of her own thoughts.

  She could tell that her silence was starting to unnerve him. Underneath the glass table his hands were folding and unfolding. Good, let the bastard squirm. Let him rot in hell. Better to have been a corpse than a spy.

  “What are you thinking?” he asked.

  Sarah took a long breath. “Why are you here?”

  He seemed surprised. “I wanted to see you . . . to know if you were okay.”

  “You’ve seen me several times, and you say that I looked okay.”

  “I wanted to talk to you and explain what happened.”

  “To make yourself feel better.”

  “That’s fair enough. But I thought it might make you feel better, too.”

  It didn’t, and Sarah wondered why. Any normal woman would have been desperate to see her husband again, overjoyed at this miraculous reprieve from widowhood. She had longed for a miracle as deeply as any mourner, and a part of her wanted nothing more than to walk over to David and embrace him with a hard, ferocious love. But all she could think of was the old admonition: Be careful of what you wish for. Because there was nothing normal about a husband who hid in the woods, who spied on his own memorial service and watched at windows. None of it seemed like the man she had married. And besides, she didn’t buy this sudden urge for confession.

  “Why are you here now?” She looked into David’s eyes and for once he answered without forethought.

  “You turned off the power.”

  Sarah leaned her head back and laughed. Of course. Every October they closed the cabin and turned off the electricity. This year she had forgotten until she got a phone call from her neighbor Rich, who worked for the power company. When asked if she’d like the cabin’s power shut down for the winter, she had said yes, thank you. That had been twelve days ago, time enough for the cabin to thoroughly chill. She pictured David’s breath crystallizing on his lips as he shivered in bed, and the image blended with all her previous visions of his corpse.

  “So you want the power back on?” Her tone was sarcastic.

  “Yes. But it’s not just that. Really, Sarah.” He raised his hands above the table and reached toward hers, but instinctively she pulled her fingers back.

  “I want you to come to the river. I want us to be alone together, away from everything. Come with me to the cabin.”

  How eerily his words seemed tuned to her desires. She had wanted to leave this big house for so long, to flee the tepid sympathy of minor acquaintances, but she felt a great resistance to David’s will. Thus far he had controlled the entire sequence of events. He had abandoned her, spied on her, transformed her into an object of neighborhood pity. She owed him nothing, the son of a bitch. But anger required energy, and along with her disgust came an overwhelming sense of exhaustion.

  “I don’t know.” She looked around the room in search of things concrete—her refrigerator, her trash compactor, her gleaming marble countertop. It occurred to her that in the past few years of her life, cleanliness had replaced ambition. She had tended her kitchen like a substitute child, washing its surfaces and dressing its windows, seeking a sense of progress in updated cabinetry.

  This was not what she had wanted for her life.

  “I am tired,” she murmured.

  “Of course.” David raised his palms in a gesture of conciliation. “Think it over. I’ll sleep in the basement tonight if that’s all right, and I’ll head back to the cabin tomorrow morning. You can decide whether or not you want to join me. But, Sarah”—and now he was leaning toward her—“I want you to know that I didn’t plan this. I wasn’t trying to leave you. This path just opened before me and I had to follow it. I know that’s not an excuse. There are no excuses. But please, come to the river.”

  With that, he rose from the table and walked to the basement stairs. She listened to his feet descend, then folded her arms on the table and laid her face upon them.

  • 15 •

  The next morning Sarah woke in bed with Grace at her feet. Rectangular blocks of window light slanted down her bedspread, returning the house to its mundane pastels. The clock read seven A.M., and she was about to roll over and close her eyes when she remembered the man in her basement. His eyes came floating back, along with the rhythm of his voice, and she imagined David as her Ancient Mariner, the restless spirit reciting his long mea culpa. Water, water everywhere.

  She stood up, waited for the dizziness to pass, then walked to the kitchen. The room bore no mark of the figure who had occupied it the night before. A pair of blue ceramic turtledoves, branded S and P, once again dominated the glass table. Their mundanity challenged any thought that this might have been the site of a miracle—a dead man come home. Opening the basement door, she listened for sounds of life below. There was no noise of a man dressing or snoring, no sound of a television tuned to the morning news. As she walked down the basement stairs, the room emerged item by item—the unruffled couch, the dusty books, the pillows and afghan arranged in their usual manner. She found no note, no scent, no mess, nothing to cling to as evidence of David’s visit.

  It was to be expected. All ghosts must flee at sunrise. But had she even risen from her covers last night, or was it all a product of her elaborate imagination? And what was the difference between reality and dreams, in a life spent mostly in bed?

  She sat on the couch and rested her face in her hands, her skull fragile as a glass jar, blown thin at the rising flame. I need an aspirin, she thought—no, she needed something stronger. A few Bloody Marys might banish a persistent ghost. Still, one idea rocked back and forth with her swaying body: He’s alive, alive, alive.

  She thought to jump into her car and follow David out to the cabin right away, but that impulse died as quickly as it came. She would not chase after the man who had widowed her. David had kept her waiting for three months; he could wait for at least twenty-four hours. Time enough to think things through. For now, only one action was needed—she reached for the basement telephone and dialed the power company.

  All day long Sarah did not dress or shower. She paced the house in a long white robe, thinking, I have become the anxious spirit, and David is the living man. But what sort of man would hide at a cabin for months, never calling his wife or friends?

  In high school she had dreamed of living as a modern-day Thoreau. Alone in the woods in a rustic cabin, her only companion a body of water—that was the setting for genius. Never mind the cold, the hunger, the loneliness. The pains of self-reliance could be forgotten when daydreaming in a heated bedroom.

  But David was forty-three, with a wife, a
job, a mortgage. Too old to be indulging in a Boy Scout fantasy.

  She took their wedding album down from the living-room shelf and marveled at the dark-eyed bride whose hair was wreathed with baby’s breath. Pearl buttons ran from her breasts to her navel, and at her feet, a two-foot train of Victorian lace spread in an ivory puddle. Beside her, Anne wore salmon silk, while above their heads the Spanish moss served as mistletoe. The pictures were filled with kisses from uncles and cousins and friends, a clownish kiss from David with wedding cake smeared on his lips. But it wasn’t the kisses, the crumbs, or pearls that struck Sarah most. It was the smiles, the unrestrained enthusiasm of it all.

  In recent albums her expression was more subdued. She was standing at a table covered with salads and cold pasta—a departmental potluck. Their host was roaming with a camera, and she had paused to indulge him while David turned his back. It seemed that their joys had been tempered, their pleasures qualified. Age, she told herself, does not appear first in wrinkles or gray hair, but in the dulling of one’s smile.

  She returned the albums to the shelf and paused to examine the paintings that decorated their living-room walls. David had always wanted the opportunity to become a full-time artist, to immerse himself in the road not taken. Few people ever got the chance to thoroughly transform their lives; it was so much easier to maintain one course, stifling regrets along the way. She couldn’t fault him for trying something different, and yet, a man of courage should have acted publicly. He should have announced to the college, and to the whole world, that he was giving up medicine in order to paint. That would have taken guts—to endure the incredulous stares and indulgent smiles, and to let the entire town witness his success or failure. But how could he have done it with a wife at home, sitting in their enormous house, expecting the bills to be paid?

  Sarah liked to imagine that she would have been supportive, willing to move back into a two-bedroom cottage and muddle through on her adjunct pay. And maybe in her twenties it would have been possible, when life was still a grand adventure, not rooted in material goods. But truthfully, if David had come to her in the past year and said that he wanted to give up his job to become an artist, she wouldn’t have tolerated it. Sure, she might have acquiesced in a muttering way, but all the while she would have held him back—a nagging, resentful anchor.