Unremarried Widow

by Artis Henderson

  “I know,” I said.

  She leaned forward to crawl onto her knees and stand slowly, one leg at a time. I followed, fanning my shirt like a bellows. Teresa touched John’s gravestone and turned toward the road while I let my own hand linger on the marble. I followed her to the car, and in the shade of the old oak I sensed the roots pressing into the earth. I imagined a time when the heat might subside.

  * * *

  I have read that the human heart is roughly the size of a fist. This is how I saw my own heart: as a fist curled in the space behind my breastbone. The fingers of that fist ached, they’d been cramped together so long. Sometimes I tried to imagine what it would feel like to unfurl them and extend an open palm.

  In the late summer, I told Scott Delancey the good news about journalism school.

  “New York City,” I said. “Can you believe it?”

  “Amazing. When are you moving up?”

  “Before school starts. In a month or so.”

  “Need any help?”

  I laughed. Was he joking? Of course I needed help.

  But instead I said, “I’ve got it.”

  “Seriously?” Scott insisted. “It’s no problem.”

  “I’m staying with a friend until I find my own place. There’d be nowhere for you to stay.”

  “I’ll get a hotel room.”

  “You’re serious?”

  “It’s too easy,” he said.

  New York was steeped in heat the day Scott flew in and a dense jungle humidity lay over the city. Sweating bodies crammed the streets and the asphalt boiled beneath our feet, but Scott laughed off the hot weather.

  “This is nothing compared to Iraq,” he said.

  That night we made our way to a bar in Hell’s Kitchen where candles flickered on the tables and reflected off the red walls. I was on edge in my nice clothes, trying to figure out if Scott was there because of me or Miles. He ordered a whiskey and Coke for himself and a club soda with lime for me. He finished his second drink before I broached the subject of where I would spend the night.

  “So,” I said, “it’s too late for me to go back to Queens.”

  Technically untrue. I could have caught the subway, which ran all night, and walked back to my friend’s apartment, twenty minutes from the train station. Not the safest trek but doable. Scott waved a dismissive hand.

  “Stay at the hotel with me.”

  I gave him a sidelong look. I didn’t want him to think he had me so easily, that I was like any other girl he could pick up.

  “But we can’t sleep together,” I said. “You have to promise.”

  Scott tilted his head back and laughed, then he leaned over and kissed me on the cheek.

  “You’re my friend’s wife,” he said. “Nothing will change that. I’ll always be here to look after you and protect you. But we’re not sleeping together. You’re not even in my orbit.”

  Suddenly I felt like a fool in my dress and high heels. I had hoped—what? That Scott would come to New York and save me? That we might share the hurt between us? That I might start a new life with this man while still holding on to Miles?

  “Let’s play a game,” Scott said to change the subject. “Let’s look around the bar and say who we’d sleep with.”

  I hoped the hurt didn’t show on my face.

  “Okay,” I said. I wanted him to think it was no big deal.

  “I’ll go first,” Scott said.

  He pointed to a table of women across the room. They were New York sleek, with shiny hair and expensive clothes, pretty and sophisticated in a way I will never be. All at once the bar felt too warm, too close. I sipped the last of my drink and rattled the ice in the glass.

  “You know what?” I said as I set the tumbler on the bar. “I don’t want to play.”

  Scott looked at me from where he sat on his bar stool.

  “I’m ready to go,” I said.

  He didn’t fight me. He paid the check and hailed a cab. On the way back to the hotel, people streamed by on the sidewalk as we passed. It had rained earlier and puddles on the concrete caught the glow from neon signs. Neither of us spoke.

  At the hotel we took the elevator to Scott’s room, and I walked in front of him down the carpeted hallway.

  “Your ass looks good in that dress,” he said.

  I rolled my eyes. This was the Scott I remembered.

  He lent me a shirt to sleep in and I showered in the marble bathroom. He was already in bed when I came out, and when I lifted the comforter to slide in beside him it was as if we had shared this routine our entire lives. Scott turned out the light and I lay on my back in the dark room. The curtains were pulled tight against the city lights but I could hear the noise of New York below. A horn honked and someone called out on the street. I felt Scott beside me, awake and listening.

  Finally, he spoke in the dark.

  “Tell me again why we’re not sleeping together?” he said.

  “Because I don’t sleep with men I’m not in a relationship with,” I said.

  Not strictly true, but I refused to be one of the women who came and went in Scott’s life.

  “But I thought you said you didn’t want to be with me,” he said. “In the bar.”

  I shook my head and the pillowcase rustled beneath my hair.

  “That’s not what I meant,” I said. “I didn’t want to sleep with you if you weren’t serious about me.”

  Scott turned to face me and I could feel his breath against my cheeks.

  “Does that mean you would consider dating me?” he said.

  “I thought I wasn’t even in your orbit.”

  Scott lay without moving and I listened to him take in a careful breath.

  “You’re the only one I want,” he whispered. “The only one I’ve wanted for a long time.”

  His words split me open and all that I carried inside rose from that parted place. Here was a man who was nothing like Miles. Yet he remembered the way Miles looked, the way he laughed, the way he carried himself. He remembered the sound of Miles’s voice. When Scott reached his arm across the bed to pull me to him, I let the curves of my body fit close to his. Outside, the city had stilled. We stayed silent for a long time, and then I asked Scott if I could see the tattoo he had mentioned once on the phone, a memorial he had inked on his skin after the deployment.

  “Yes,” he said.

  He rolled onto his stomach and in the glow through the curtains I could see the design that covered half his back. John and Miles were there, rendered as skeletons, and I recognized Miles instantly. His face, his smile, his posture—all delivered as bones.

  “It took twelve hours,” Scott said. “Two sittings. The pain felt like penance.”

  I traced the ink with my finger.

  “I should have grounded the aircraft that night,” Scott said. “I was the battle captain. I was in charge. I knew the weather was bad. I knew visibility was limited. I should have told them to stay at Warhorse.”

  What could I say? I know. Or: Yes. Or: There was nothing you could have done.

  I ran my hand softly over his back.

  “You did all you could do,” I said. “It was no one’s fault.”

  The traffic in the street hummed quietly and I listened to the steady rhythm of Scott’s breathing. When he spoke next, I had to lean close to hear.

  “I would trade my life for Miles,” he said.

  Without speaking, I laid my face against his skin so that the ink of the tattoo touched my cheek. I would let him.

  Early after Miles’s death, I asked myself how I would know when I was healed. This is what I decided: when I would not trade everything in my current life to have Miles back. Every new moment, every new experience, every new love. But now I see this for the impossible bargain it was. In the dim hotel room, I could feel the life I had known slipping through my fingers. Even as I held tight, I let go.

  * * *

  When the sharpness of Miles’s loss had faded but the sting was still there,
as I am learning it always will be, my mother and I spoke for the first time about my father’s death. I called her from my apartment in New York and she carried the phone out onto the deck.

  “I still remember that nurse in the hospital,” my mother said. “The one who walked me down to the morgue. I remember her saying, ‘You’re not even crying. How can that be?’ And I thought, Lady, I ain’t got time for that right now.”

  Here was the mother I had always known, rough, a fighter. But what she said next surprised me.

  “I made up for it later,” she said. “I wept for months.”

  This woman I did not recognize.

  “I always made sure I didn’t cry around you,” my mother said. “I had to be the strong one. You were counting on me totally. It was me. Just me. You needed all of your strength and all of mine and me sitting around crying? We couldn’t do that.”

  Here was my mother with all the fight gone out of her, and it occurred to me how exhausting it must be to seem so hard all the time.

  “What was it like to be with Dad?” I asked.

  “It was magical, right from day one. I didn’t realize that you could feel that way about a guy, that you could be that happy. It was really, really good what we had. You can’t replace that.”

  Yes, I thought. I know. Or I’m beginning to know.

  “Was there ever a time when it started to hurt less?”

  “It still hurts,” my mother said. “It’s never going to go away.”

  I leaned my head against the frame of my bed, understanding in a way I had never understood the weight of the grief my mother had carried for so long. She was quiet for a time and I could hear the sound of the waves beneath the deck.

  “You and I have never really sat down and talked about this, have we?” she said.

  I gripped the phone in my hand and took a slow breath.

  “No, we haven’t. Why do you think that is?”

  My mother spoke so softly, I had to press the phone to my ear, and even then I had trouble hearing her over the wind and water.

  “Too painful,” she said. “Too painful for me.”

  I closed my eyes and listened to the sound of the Gulf as the waves drew in on themselves and spilled back to shore. The weight of my mother’s courage seemed to press through the phone and across the receiver, so that it flowed into me and joined us like a cord.

  “Would you still have chosen to be with Dad?” I said. “Even if you had known how everything would turn out?”

  My mother did not hesitate.

  “In a heartbeat,” she said, and I smiled.

  Of course.

  2011

  Five years after Miles’s death, I spent time at a residency in Florida working on this book. I had graduated from Columbia University’s School of Journalism in 2010, spent a year in West Africa, and recently returned from a stay in the South of France. On a warm fall afternoon, I took the day off writing and drove to the middle of the state to the town of Cassadaga, where a community of psychics and mediums live. It was mid-October and the city had been outfitted for Halloween: plastic bones leaned on stone benches and Styrofoam tombstones poked from the ground. An eerie scene for a town that specializes in communicating with the dead.

  I parked at the welcome center and walked through the gift shop, sliding past the incense and crystals to the bulletin board at the back of the store. I found a business card tacked to the board for a woman named Maeve who called herself a “psychic/medium.”

  “I’m just down the street,” she said on the phone when I called. “You can walk here.”

  I set out on foot. Spanish moss hung from the trees beside the sidewalk and a one-eyed cat glared at me from a front lawn, daring me to walk on the grass. I reached a row of apartments behind a screened-in porch and Maeve opened the door when I knocked, looking less like a spiritual medium and more like a schoolteacher. She wore a coral sweater and pressed khakis, silver earrings and subtle makeup, the kind of outfit worn by women who don’t have to work. The room inside—her office—had just enough space for the two of us to sit at a round table draped in purple cloth.

  “Would you like a psychic reading?” Maeve asked. “Or more of a medium experience?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe a little of both?”

  What I wanted was reassurance. I was prepared—eager, willing—to suspend my disbelief in exchange for a heavy dose of optimism. What that would look like, I couldn’t say.

  “Well, have you lost anyone important to you?” she asked.

  “I lost my husband.”

  “Then we should do a medium experience,” she said.

  I nodded and tried to imagine this slight woman channeling Miles. Maeve closed her eyes and I envisioned her placing a long-distance call.

  Dear God, I thought despite myself, let her get through to him.

  She opened her eyes and smiled.

  “He had a great energy,” she said. “Charming, like a boy.”

  A pad of paper and a pen sat on the table in front of me and I realized they were for taking notes. I wrote down what she said.

  “He liked to have fun, to go on adventures, to try new things.”

  I scribbled this on the lavender notepaper.

  “He didn’t like to be dressed up. He liked to dress casually.”

  I nodded, wrote dressed casually.

  “I sense that he died suddenly,” she said. “That this was an unexpected death and there was a vehicle involved.”

  I bit my bottom lip and ground the nib of the pen into the page.

  “I see that he was thrown and he died from those injuries.”

  I thought of Miles’s death certificate. MULTIPLE BLUNT FORCE TRAUMA. I looked at the clock on the table and saw that half my time had passed.

  “I see the two of you walking in the woods,” Maeve said. “Did you ever do that?”

  I thought of the first time Miles had driven to Tallahassee to visit me, of our feet pushing through the dry leaves, Miles holding a branch so I could pass.

  “And when you walked in the woods together, did you sometimes feel like you could read his thoughts? Like the two of you were having a conversation without talking?”

  Miles behind me on the trail, his boots crunching on the gravel. I could feel him.

  “What he wants me to tell you—”

  She opened her eyes and looked at the timer set on the table. We were almost done, my session headed to a close. She shut her eyes again and drew her brows together, the way a person will when they are listening intently.

  “He wants you to know that it’s like those walks in the woods. He’s always beside you, even if you can’t see him. You can talk together the way you once did. He’ll hear you. He’s right there.”

  That night I lay on an abandoned dock that stretched into the back bay while the dome of the sky reflected in the water at my feet. It was all one: sky, sea, stars. No end and no beginning. No horizon, no dividing line. No before or after. Only the spiraling heavens and the black tides and the narrow dock like a smudging finger in the dark. Thin clouds traveled across the night sky and the brightest stars peeked through the covering veil. Mullet jumped, and the slapping of their reentry sounded over the still water. The earth spun slowly, slowly, and I moved with it. I was not afraid.

  * * *

  In the fall of 2005, when Miles was stationed at Fort Hood, we took a trip in the rolling hill country west of the base. On an overcast morning we drove to a lake where the wind formed whitecaps on the gray water, and I shivered as we looked out from the banks. We shelved our plans to go kayaking and drove instead to nearby caverns. Texas, like Florida, was once covered with a warm shallow sea. We were the only visitors on the tour and the air was damp and cool in that underworld. Sound vibrated back and away, washing over us like a memory of the tides. The guide lit each room in front of us and extinguished the bulbs over the path we had just walked. At the end of the tour she said she would shut down all the lights, to let us see the c
ave in its natural state. Miles and I looked at each other uneasily. I raised an eyebrow. He nodded his head. The guide flipped a switch and the metallic clicking ricocheted off the walls. The cavern disappeared in a blackness without end. I lost Miles then, but I breathed in the dampness of the cave and found him there in each particle of subterranean air.

  “Miles?” I said.

  His voice in the dark was a whisper, an echo.

  “I’m here,” he said.

  Acknowledgments

  To my brilliant editor, Sarah Knight, who brought this book into being. When I describe you to other writers they always say, “She sounds like the perfect editor.” To which I respond: “She is”;

  To my beautiful agent, Anna Stein, who held my hand when I needed it most. Thank you for your unwavering support and encouragement;

  To Sam Freedman, who believed in this book—and me—before I knew how; and to Kelly McMasters, whose kind hands shaped this story in its early stages;

  To the team at S&S—Molly Lindley, Jessica Zimmerman, Andrea DeWerd, and everyone who supported the book;

  To the residencies where this book was written—the Atlantic Center for the Arts and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts—and to La Muse, where this book was begun and where it was finished. A magical place;

  To my first readers and the women of the Writing Corps;

  To Dr. Richard Paritzky, who led me from the dark. “If you want to try grieving on days other than Tuesday,” he said, “give me a call”;

  To the widows who bravely shared their stories with me—Jennie Allgaier, Debi Coffelt, Casey Rodgers, and Shellie Smith. You were with me on every page;

  To Teresa Priestner, who tirelessly answered questions about the military, sat for multiple interviews, and proofread sections of this book. My sister widow and friend, thank you;

  To the Hendersons for their kindness and generosity, always;

  And to G., who when I said, “You saved me,” answered, “You saved yourself.”

  Simon & Schuster