Unremarried Widow

by Artis Henderson

  In the kitchen a line of ants crawled over the counter. They started in the windowsill where the wall met the frame and marched to the drain and back, ant after ant after ant, past the breakfast dishes gathered in the sink, the bowl with a rim of milk at the bottom, the spoon set beside it. I didn’t care. I opened the plastic take-out bag and a puff of steam rose up. I was slow, slow with it, careful. I reached in, pulled out the Styrofoam container, and slid the tab back on the box. There it was: pulled pork, macaroni and cheese, coleslaw. Red sauce smeared on the underside of the lid and condensation beaded on the top. The bottom of the box was still warm. I didn’t bother to put it on a plate. I carried the box through the dining room, past the secondhand table and the mismatched chairs painted pink and green. Watermelon colors. Someone else’s art project. I set the take-out box on the couch and sat beside it, my back to the armrest, facing the television. I was starving, a hole of hunger blown through me. Some people say children mistake hunger for other discomforts. They say I’m hungry when what they mean is I’m sleepy. They say I’m hungry when what they mean is I’m sad. I wanted to eat the pork in two greasy bites. I wanted to shove macaroni into my mouth, to pick up the coleslaw with my fingers and cram it down my gullet. I wanted to run my fingers around the edge of the container and collect the sauce stuck to the sides. I would raise my fingers to my mouth and suck off the sauce, even the bits caked under my nails. I wanted to eat and eat and eat until I was sick with it. Until I was full. But instead I flipped through the channels. I found a Baywatch rerun. I took my time. I ate the pork one slow bite after another. I took careful forkfuls of macaroni. I chewed until the food was paste in my mouth. I swallowed. I took another bite. Sunlight dripped from the picture window behind the couch and spilled across the laminate floor.

  When I had finished eating, I stretched out on the couch, my toes pointed toward the television set. The armrest felt nubby beneath my head. On the street outside laborers called out to each other as they headed home, and the lozenge of light on my living room floor faded to pewter. I rolled onto my side. From that vantage point I could see the dust beside the couch, the dry carcass of a cockroach, domestic tumbleweeds of lint and hair. I batted one with my hand. When I rolled over I tried to watch TV through my toes. The actors stood on a beach far away and a woman who surely smelled of coconut oil tossed her golden hair over one shoulder. I rested my hand on my swollen stomach, ran my tongue over my back molars, and poked at a piece of cabbage caught there. My cheeks tasted like mayonnaise as I drifted into sleep.

  I swam in darkness, five fathoms deep, where the black water is still, when a noise reached me. My phone ringing from the surface. I rose from that pelagic sleep and kicked toward the dark living room, to Hercules reruns, to my phone warbling. I sat up and reached for the receiver.

  “Hello?” I said.

  “Hey, honey. How are you doing?”

  Teresa Priestner.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “Fine.”

  I tried to work saliva into my mouth.

  “I ordered John’s autopsy photos,” she said.

  I squinted and rubbed my eyes.

  “Are you sure you want to do that?”

  “I need to see him,” she said. “To figure out what happened that night.”

  I folded my feet under my legs and the leather made a dry shifting sound. Cracks ran across the couch like tributaries, branching over the cushions.

  “I know our boys were shot down,” Teresa said. “I know John didn’t make a mistake. That man had fifteen hundred flight hours. Two deployments. No way he did this.”

  I picked at the places on the couch where the leather had flaked away.

  “It’s hard to believe,” I agreed.

  “Are you going to order Miles’s autopsy report?”

  “No.”

  “Because if we had both of them, we’d have a better idea of what happened.”

  “No,” I said again. “I never want to see that.”

  I could make out the sounds of traffic on the boulevard and the bark of dogs two houses down. Streetlights had come on outside and their yellow glow soaked through the curtains. I needed a drink of water.

  “I understand,” Teresa said finally in a way I knew meant she didn’t.

  * * *

  Soon afterward, Captain Delancey called from Iraq. I was surprised to hear his voice on the other end of the phone.

  “This is Scott,” he said.

  Scott? Of course. His real name. I’d never heard Miles call him anything but Captain.

  “How are you doing?” he asked.

  “Okay, I guess.” I looked around at the spare interior. “How are things over there?”

  “Fine,” he said. “Hot. And sandy.”

  I held the phone close to my ear to hear him over the static. There was a long pause. From him or the phone line, I couldn’t be sure.

  “Do you need anything?” he said after a while.

  I needed everything. I needed someone to fix the hole in my screen and to move the heavy boxes on my patio. I needed someone to plant the mango tree I was always talking about buying and to paint the dining room chairs. I needed someone to come home to, to speak to, to listen to. I needed someone to hold my hand at night. But instead of telling him any of that, I talked about the thousand mundane things that filled my life. I talked about work, friends, and the man next door who beat his wife. Scott talked about flight schedules, long hours, and when they might be coming home. We spoke like that, circling, until there was nothing left to talk about but the crash.

  “Were you there?” I said. I sat with my feet tucked under my legs and in the light of the living room I traced the hollows of my knees. “On the ground. When they recovered the bodies.”

  Scott’s voice sounded far away. “No. I wasn’t.”

  “Did you see him afterward?”

  “No.”

  The skin beneath my fingers felt thin, as if I might split it with a nail.

  “So you don’t know how he looked? The condition of his body?”

  “No,” Scott said, and the house shuddered in the silence that followed.

  Of course, I could have ordered the autopsy report. I could have read for myself what made the Army decide that Miles’s casket should stay closed. I could have examined the autopsy photos and inspected exactly what had made him unviewable. I could have been as brave as my mother and looked and looked and looked.

  People told me—or perhaps I told myself—that I imagined it worse than it was. But much later I spoke to a military doctor who worked in Iraq, a man who talked gravely of what he had seen in-country, and he told me that mortuary affairs does an admirable job with the bodies. They have tools at their disposal like Dermabond, a skin adhesive.

  “It’s like superglue,” he said. “If there was any way they could have made him viewable, they would have.”

  He told me this across a wooden conference table with a top smooth as glass, and I knew it wasn’t true what people told me, what I told myself. I had not imagined it worse than it was. I cried quietly then because I finally understood how Miles had come home.

  16

  In Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome there is a statue of the saint whose feet pilgrims have touched for centuries. The stone has slowly been rubbed away so that the toes are worn to nubs. In my rented house, I stubbornly kept Miles’s pencils in my desk drawer. I shelved his books in my bookcase. I mixed his socks in with mine. That way I would come across his things by accident and I would have such a feeling for him, such a sense of knowing, that for the space of a second I could believe he was alive. But over time the socks and books and pencils began to lose their effect. It was no longer like at the beginning, when I would have to step back and press a hand to my chest, the feel of Miles sharp there, as if just then remembering he was gone.

  This is how I came to understand why my mother had stored away my father. The lines of his memory must have begun to soften and fade. His image grew muddied. She must have kno
wn she was losing him with each pass. I would not lose Miles. I would not wear him to nothing. So, like my mother before me, I made my husband disappear.

  I began by asking Miles’s mother, Terry, to come to Florida to collect what had once belonged to her son. Together we dragged the tough bins close to the open garage door while sheets of rain poured over the door’s metal frame and drove divots in the sand on the other side. I brought over two wooden chairs, one missing half its back and the other shedding paint in green strips. I released the clasp on the largest tough bin, steeling myself for what lay inside. Sunlight filtered through the curtain of water and swam down to us to reveal the contents, the rolled socks and stacked magazines I’d left when I first sorted through the bins and had not touched since. They still held so much life in them, as if Miles had just folded the shirts, just turned back the pages of the books.

  “Look at all this,” Terry said.

  She reached into the pile and lifted out a pack of unopened boxer shorts.

  “I sent these to him,” she said.

  She glanced over the clear plastic wrapping and the folded underwear inside and then set the package beside the bin. She pulled out a cotton T-shirt printed with the Army logo across the chest and held the shirt in front of her before draping the material against her own chest.

  “Do you think it will fit?” she said.

  “I think so.”

  “I might take it to run in.”

  “Take anything you want,” I said. “This is all yours.”

  I wanted none of it. No reminders of Miles. Nothing to speak of his life or death. Rain splashed off the concrete driveway and into the garage, fine as mist, covering my arms while Terry bent over the box again and lifted out two books she had sent to Miles in Iraq.

  “I might take these.”

  I nodded. “Okay.”

  She leaned over the black tough bin again and sorted through the items in a way that I recognized, slowly and deliberately, as if she were looking for something that might ease her heart. I did not tell her she would not find it. When it was all too much—too much to remember, too much life packed into those plastic boxes—Terry pulled another T-shirt from the pile and pressed it to her face. She breathed deeply, as I had, searching for some trace of Miles, not knowing as I already knew that they had washed his clothes before sending them home. Losing a spouse is in no way like losing a child but all loss is in some way like losing ourselves. I stood from the chair with the paint peeling off in strips and reached for Terry, and though I am taller and broader through the shoulders she is built wiry and strong, like Miles. It was impossible to say which of us held the other up.

  Into the now-empty tough bins I relegated the last traces of Miles. On a weekend afternoon when I knew my mother would be out, I drove to her house and headed to the back bedroom where I had set aside the clothes for Miles’s R & R, a respite from the war he never made. The clothes were left waiting—as I was left waiting, as we were all left waiting—for Miles to come home. In their waiting they gave off a signal, a homing beacon, a message broadcast daily as if from an abandoned radio tower.

  Welcome home, they said. Welcome home.

  I could not stand to listen anymore.

  On my way to the guest room I set the muscles in my face so that if I glanced at myself in the mirror above the dresser, I would look stern. I squared my shoulders and walked with purpose, all composure and good sense. I was sure I could handle the task the way my mother might, without tears, without making a scene. I was proud of my resolve as I pulled open the top drawer and saw his clothes the way I had left them. The smell of the detergent I used in North Carolina rose from the open drawer, and without thinking I smoothed the top of the pile the way I had once smoothed our clean laundry. I lifted a brown polo shirt with white plastic buttons from the pile and set it on top of the dresser. I pulled out a pair of jeans with a faded stain at the place where a man might wipe his hands after changing his oil. There was a set of thermal underwear in case R & R came during the winter and Miles and I decided to go skiing, and a pair of flip-flops if we spent time in Florida. Beneath all this, there was the blue glass bottle of his cologne. I raised my gaze to the mirror and I was glad for my steady face, my dry eyes, the way I pulled each item from the drawer and laid it on top of the dresser. I made the mistake of thinking myself brave. Convinced of my own courage, I raised the cologne bottle to my nose. Often we become aware of our lover’s smell only through absence and distance, and here was the indelible scent of Miles. I felt him in a way I had not since he deployed. My knees went loose and I had to sit on the edge of the bed as the composure I had worked so hard to construct evaporated. I cried quietly with my head bent to my chest as I realized for the first time that the hurt was never going to go away.

  After a time, my face red and my eyes swollen, I stood, steadied myself on the dresser, and gathered the last of my resolve. I picked up the clothes and the cologne and made my way to the garage, where I lifted the lid to one of the tough bins. I placed the items inside and sealed them away.

  All that remained was my wedding ring, and in July, on the one-year anniversary of our wedding, I decided to take off the band. I sat for a time in my backyard as the light drained from the day, holding myself with both arms. A friend once told me the story of a party he attended in London with a middle-aged man who had recently lost his wife. Over the course of the evening the widower cornered one guest after another.

  “How long will I feel this way?” he demanded as his drink sloshed on the carpet. “How long?”

  I had decided—as we often decide these things: arbitrarily—that I would feel this way until July. If I just stuck to it, to the hospice group and the long nights of crying and the sick feeling of loss each morning, I was convinced I would be healed. But I had made it to July and I was not better.

  “I am not better,” I said to the empty backyard.

  I sat in silence until a cloud of mosquitoes had gathered at my feet and the yard was lost in shadow. Then I stood, walked back in through the porch, and locked the door behind me. In my room I picked up the wooden box Miles had once kept beside the bed that now held his wedding ring. I walked into the living room and lit a few candles. The books I read on grieving talked about ritual and I wanted this to be a ceremony. There was no script and, besides, there was no audience to hear what I might say. So I said nothing. I closed my eyes and let myself think about Miles. I thought about the way he had slipped the ring on my finger. I thought about the jewelry shop in Texas where we’d found the rings.

  “How about these?” Miles had said as he bent over the glass display case.

  I moved close to him in the wood-paneled store, my hands stuck in the pockets of my coat.

  “Those could work.”

  I let my sadness well in me until it coursed through my body. I sat in the white-hot space of my hurt. It worked its way through me and poured out my eyes in stinging tears. It seized my heart and shook the muscles in my chest. I shook with it. I rocked back and forth, the ring still on my finger, my hand pressed flat against my breastbone, and cried until my eyes ached, until my veins burned, until my throat stiffened with the force of it. When I stopped, I lowered my hand.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  I scrubbed my eyes with the hem of my shirt. I took a steadying breath, slipped the ring off my finger, and held it in both hands. I shut my eyes so that I was blind to the room, blind to the flickering candles, blind to my blank walls and secondhand furniture. I closed my eyes so that all I could see were the blank insides of my eyelids.

  “Please,” I said. “Please help me.”

  I spoke the words as I squeezed the ring in my fist.

  “Please.”

  I shook my head as I said it, slowly, from side to side.

  “Please help. Please.”

  My sense of things faded and the words lost all meaning. Soon I was chanting a wordless prayer, an om of sadness, a sound that was pure grief. I continued until my li
ps numbed and my fingers locked in their grip. I sat with my eyes closed and my breath low in the back of my throat, feeling the candle flames and the empty space of the living room. I felt the emptiness in me. I lowered my hand from my chest and opened my fingers, raised the lid to the wooden box, and set my wedding band inside. The two rings glinted in the light from the candles and I sat with my bare hands in my lap, trembling.

  * * *

  Time pressed relentlessly forward and the one-year anniversary of Miles’s death loomed. I had spent the days and weeks and months after the notification inside an iron lung, taking one joyless breath after another, not living really, just sustaining. There had been nothing beyond the next breath and still people told me the second year would be worse.

  “Once you make it through the first round of important dates,” an older widow told me, “you’ll be disappointed to discover what follows.”

  “What follows?” I asked.

  “Another year.”

  Widows who were further along told me that the challenge becomes not just surviving but living, less a question of How do I make it through the day? and more of the dilemma, What now?

  I planned to take a personal day from work on the anniversary itself. I thought I would drive to a park on an undeveloped stretch of estuary, pack a sandwich and a book, sit under a cabbage palm and listen to the raccoons in the buttonwoods. I thought I would walk the sand paths until they gave out on the shore. I would collect lightning whelks and lilac augers and drag my toes in the surf. But when the day came I did none of these things. I drove to my mother’s house and sat on a chair facing the beach as I had done in the first days after the notification. I watched the waves for hours, let them come into me, into my eyes, past the corneas and through the lenses and against the retinas, let the images penetrate my brain until they had wiped away all trace of what lay inside.