by Polly Dugan
We talked while some other guys joined Leo at the dartboard, and for every detail, large or small, that I shared, she had at least one question. Even then, I’d always thought I was good with women, charming, cagey if I wanted to be, and was naturally, not withholding exactly, but careful about what I’d share in conversation. Though it was far from uncomfortable, by the time we were finished talking and joined Leo to play darts and then pool, I felt like a criminal suspect who’d been grilled, then released. From that night on, it was as though I’d known her as long as I’d known Leo. When they got married in Wilton the next summer, I was the best man.
After their wedding, I didn’t see them for six years, but we called and wrote—that’s how you kept up a friendship back then—until the rare visit we could coordinate, living as far from each other as we did. I went back to school for one graduate degree, then taught high school, then got a second graduate degree, became a college adjunct, then went back for my PhD. I didn’t stick with most things for very long, and made the switch easily to something new when I was tired of what I was doing, but I did like being in school, on both sides of the desk.
I still had that fucking piece of paper he made me sign all those years ago. Leo had dated it December 31, 1999/January 1, 2000, and mailed it to me a few weeks after my trip. He had enclosed it in a thank-you card—as our mothers had taught us to send for far lesser things, or at least tangible things we could unwrap and hold, a gift or a check. So you’ll have it if you need it, he’d written in the card. I wondered if Audrey knew. Sobriety was evident in his straight, clean handwriting, so for reasons I couldn’t understand, he was serious. I wasn’t a worrier by nature, but for the next several months, I was anxious and afraid that he was going to die, like he eerily knew something was coming that no one else knew about, the way you heard people say they did. Maybe it was the millennium that had done it—both before and after, until people settled down—it had made the world skittish. After enough time passed waiting for the tragic news about Leo that didn’t come, I stopped worrying. Except during our time that New Year’s Eve, and Leo’s card, we never mentioned it again. Even the “second husband” banter between the three of us, fueled by Leo and fed, tongue in cheek, by Audrey, had run its course and died a natural death.
But I had saved the paper anyway, not like the years of tax returns I was paranoid to part with, but as an unlikely souvenir, like the photograph that’s a bad picture of everyone in it but the only tangible proof of the good time had by all when it was taken. I had the note in a manila folder in a hanging file in my desk, in with cards and letters from both Audrey and Leo. A joke that had become something much graver, although it was far from a binding document of any kind.
I couldn’t wrap my head around it. That Leo was dead. I thought I should have known, that I should have felt something happen the moment he died, but maybe Audrey had. Of course, if there had been any kind of an alert, she should have been the one to get it. And not being a believer, or with murky beliefs at best, maybe I wasn’t a fertile recipient primed for the goodbye one soul says to another.
When we’d lost my mother to pancreatic cancer three years earlier, we were all there at the house in Radnor, sitting vigil while she was dying. Sometimes we were together, but mostly we took shifts. My father, my sister, Kate, and me. We had been ready for days because of what the hospice people said, the signs they recognized. I loved those people, doing the hardest work I could imagine with their unwavering and infinite kindness and compassion.
When my mother finally did die, on a Tuesday, all three of us were there holding her hands. Her death was peaceful and dignified, like her, and afterward we stayed with her, adjusting to those first minutes of her being gone. When we finally left the room and my mother’s body alone, I called the funeral home. They were expecting our call. After I hung up the phone, I saw something happen to Kate, who was sitting in a dining room chair.
Like responding to a reflex, Kate began talking aloud to no one in particular. “Oh my God. Oh my God. I keep having this feeling. I can’t stop having this feeling.” Her face was flushed and lovely. Her hands clung to the arms of the chair. “I can’t stop having this feeling.” Five minutes earlier she’d been sobbing. The purest word I could think of to describe what happened to her was epiphany—a genuine spiritual ecstasy—that lasted less than thirty powerful seconds. We’d discussed it many times, my father, Kate, and I, and the only thing she could ever articulate was during that short, intense spell, Kate felt—didn’t think, she felt—that for the rest of her life she would never feel sadness that our mother was dead. Although she had the memory of what happened to her, she’d returned to her grief after the sensation passed, and had told me more than once since how she wished she could call that feeling back up whenever she wanted.
I don’t know why it was my sister and not my father who experienced what she did. My mother and Kate, they’d been as thick as thieves, with their tennis and their Junior League, and were both good Catholics. And when my mother was terminal, in those last months, Kate had suffered insomnia and a pervasive anxiety about my mother’s death, about her leaving our lives, our physical world. I concluded later, in spite of my skepticism—I had witnessed it, after all—that Kate’s euphoria was my mother’s last message to her, letting her know she’d arrived safely in heaven, or the afterlife, or that her energy had traveled onward into the universe and its new destination. My family, whatever else you could say about us, we were consistent about one thing we asked of each other: Call me when you get there. I want to know you arrived safely. Our parents demanded it of us our whole lives, and when we got old enough, Kate and I demanded the same of them, and each other.
Leo flew east for the funeral, alone. My mother had loved him and had loved that we had stayed friends. He read the Twenty-Third Psalm at her funeral mass. We got drunk after the burial, and both wept over my mother, and he left the next day. That was the last time I’d seen him.
When the phone rang, late here, and I saw it was Audrey, maybe I should have known something was wrong. The late-night call. But it wasn’t late on the West Coast, and Leo had called me on her phone before. Maybe he was having a beer and feeling chatty, too lazy to find his own phone. So I’d answered, “Hey.” But instead of Leo a little buzzed on the other end, it was Audrey, crying. “Oh, Garrett.” That was the first thing she said.
Although we’d been already asleep—it was after midnight in Boston—I told Celia to go home, I was sorry, I didn’t know what to do, but I wanted to be alone. I knew she wanted to stay but I asked her to please, please just do this. She didn’t know Leo, although I had told her about him. The last time I’d talked to him was less than two months before, on Christmas Eve when he’d called me from work. He’d told me the addition was going well, when he had the time to spend. He was doing most of the work, and Kevin from his firehouse was pitching in quite a bit. Once it’s finished, if it doesn’t kill me, you have to come visit again, he said. I’m sure it will be as good and solid as if you’d built it with me. When he had started the project in October, he had emailed me after he’d poured the foundation. Audrey and I decided, we can’t move out of the house, so we’re moving the house out, he’d written. They had drawn the plans together with Mark, Audrey’s best friend’s husband, who was an architect. Everyone was in on the project. I wondered how far he had gotten, if there was a gaping hole left in the house.
After Celia left—I knew she was pissed—I poured whiskey into a tall glass and sat on the couch and drank. “Fuck you.” I railed at a dead man in my empty apartment. “Goddamn you, McGeary.”
I knew, in terms of what lay ahead, Audrey thought she could handle it by herself. She cried on the phone while she told me the news, but I heard her resolve underneath, her commitment to meeting it head-on, like potty training a stubborn toddler or running a race in a good time. Even though she hated help, she couldn’t do this by herself, no one could. But that was her default. A few weeks after my New Year’s
visit, when she was pregnant with Andrew, Leo called and told me that while he was at work that morning she’d had a scare—she couldn’t feel the baby moving, so she went in, and everything had turned out fine. The baby had only moved behind the placenta, where it was harder for her to feel him.
“Can you believe her?” Leo said to me. “‘Why didn’t you call me?’ I asked her. ‘If something had been wrong I should have been there.’ Do you know what she said? ‘If something had been wrong, you would have been, because I would have called you and then you would have been there.’ What am I supposed to say to that?”
“I don’t know, man,” I said. “You seem surprised that your wife is the woman you married.”
That’s how she was, but this was without precedent. The longer I sat there drinking, it came to me: I’ll go and finish the house. We’d worked so many jobs together all those years ago that after I caught up, I’d know exactly where he’d left off and where to pick up again. And there were plans. There was nothing in Boston that wouldn’t still be here, or somewhere else, later. If he could have, he would have done the same for me, I thought, as I filled my glass again. That stupid old promise had nothing to do with it. It really didn’t. If there hadn’t been what he’d left behind, unfinished, I wouldn’t have had any reason to up and leave, but there was one thing out there I could fix. I took my glass, sat down at my desk, rifled through the drawer of files and found the paper, soft from folding and time, and forgotten for so long. Staring at it through my whiskey blur, I wanted to shred it, burn it, break a window with it clutched in my fist, but instead I tucked it deep into a pair of rolled-up socks, left the socks on top of my dresser, and went to bed. Initially—and for so long—the paper had been insignificant and juvenile, but with one phone call, it had turned into a sobering artifact from a careless night: What you think will never happen, might.
Audrey
In the hours, then days and then months after the recovery of Leo’s body, when I keened when I saw him, with Richard Allen’s firm hand on my shoulder, and the helmet that did no good—don’t fall down—I was grateful that he hadn’t died on Brian’s birthday.
We had planned to go up to the mountain the previous Saturday, February 4, the day Brian turned fourteen, but the fridge, which had been on its last legs for weeks, tanked overnight. I opened the door early that morning, planning to pack lunches when it was still dark and everyone was waking up, and a sour warmth poured out. Everything was spoiled, and the food in the freezer was tepid to the touch. I was furious. I had seen this coming. The fridge wasn’t old—it was a high-end model we’d gotten on clearance because it seemed like too good a bargain to pass up, but in hindsight, there’d been a catch. The icemaker hadn’t worked for months, and for weeks the element inside the freezer had been caking with ice so that every other day Leo defrosted it with my hair dryer, insisting he could keep the whole thing working. When I badgered him enough to repair it properly, he finally made some calls and told me the model had been discontinued and parts were no longer available.
“Well, goddamn it, Leo,” I said. “We need a fridge that works, for Christ’s sake. For as much food as we go through in this house.”
“Audrey, it’s fine,” he said. “It’s not old enough to die on us. I’ll figure something out. There have to be parts I can find somewhere, or an old-timer who can extend the life of this thing.”
So that morning of Brian’s birthday, when I took coffee up to Leo, I broke the news.
“The fucking fridge is done,” I said. “We can’t go up today. I knew this would happen. We need a new fridge. I’m going back downstairs to toss out all our rotten food. All our balmy, rancid food. So Brian’s not going to have the birthday we said he would.”
Leo sat up in the dark. “What are you talking about?”
“The fridge, Leo. It’s done, dead. It’s almost hot inside there. I told you this would happen. I’m going back downstairs. See you down there. Take your time.”
“Well, shit,” he said.
So we went the following weekend, and since the skiing was better than it had been the previous week, it felt like serendipity.
During that ride back from the mountain, and for months afterward, I sought comfort in one never-ending thought that flowed like water smoothing a stone: Brian, my sensitive, sage soul. He would never have gotten over it. But then, when I was awake at two in the morning, pacing the house, I’d think, What if we had said fuck it. All the food was past salvaging. We should have gone anyway. Even if conditions did get lousy, we would have had a good morning. The fridge could have waited until Sunday. We hadn’t had to stay home, but I had insisted on dealing with the fridge, which wasn’t a matter of life and death, so I blamed myself. Since I couldn’t undo what had happened and couldn’t let myself off the hook, I worked to accept the relief that for the rest of his life, Brian didn’t have to share the day of his arrival in the world with the one on which his father left it. Three days later, on Valentine’s Day, I accepted that I was a widow. Nobody’s sweetheart.
But other days, I was enraged that he had insisted on making that last run, alone. And then, I raged at myself for the very last thing I had said to him before he skied down to the lift: Don’t be long. I hadn’t said, Hurry up or Make it quick, but I’d tacked on that last statement after Be careful. Why hadn’t I stopped there? Because the care was really what mattered, always—the time was nothing at all, it just came out. And if one of the boys had gone with him, surely he wouldn’t have skied so fast. Leo had learned to ski when he was four years old—when he was finally ready to but wouldn’t go on his own—and his mother had pushed him down the bunny hill in the Poconos. She skied behind him the whole way, although he didn’t know it until they both reached the flat. He had sobbed and fretted the whole way down, but by the time he got to the bottom, he couldn’t wait to go up and do it again. And yet. After surviving whiteouts and stupid stunts as a kid in the Northeast, the mountain that Leo had mastered and dominated for more than twenty years had taken him.
After all the years of shifts he’d been on. My worry every time he went to work, Maybe he won’t come home tonight.
“It’s a wonder you’re alive,” I told him more than once.
Every time, he laughed and said the same thing. “It’s nothing short of a miracle, I’ll admit.”
He wasn’t afraid of death, he’d often said, not back when he was young and careless and felt immortal and not later as a grown man, putting himself at risk in a different way. “How can I be if I want to do my job well? What’s the cause of death, anyway? Being alive, right? Being afraid doesn’t change that, and it doesn’t help.”
After he was gone I kept waiting for him to send me some kind of message, some comfort that it wasn’t something I should be afraid of either.
Garrett
I called Audrey early the next morning. I had a headache and was dehydrated, but my thoughts were clear. Shaky as I was, I was full of tenacity and ambition.
“When’s the funeral? I’ll fly out tomorrow or Tuesday, after I talk to people at school,” I said. “Then I’m staying. You can’t say no. I’m not asking. I’m going to finish the house.”
“The funeral is in a week, on Saturday,” she said. “No, Garrett, I can’t let you do that. Aren’t you living with someone? Aren’t you trying to get tenure? Come and then get back to your life.”
“I told you, I’m not asking,” I said.
She exhaled a quiet laugh. It was a small, unexpected sound. “It will get finished someday, and I don’t even give a fuck about the house right now.” She wasn’t saying anything I hadn’t expected. Then she started to cry. “I’ll have money,” she said. “Leo increased his life insurance two years ago and didn’t tell me till after he did it. You know what he said when he told me? ‘It’s a guarantee that you’ll never need it.’” I could hear her trying to compose herself. “You have a life. Come and then go back to it.”
“I told you, I’m not asking.” We were d
eadlocked. “And no, I’m not living with someone. That was last year. Don’t spend your money on that, Audrey. You’ll use it for what you really need. I’ll text you with details.”
“Okay.” Her voice was hoarse. “I’m so glad you’re coming, Garrett. I’m really glad you’re going to be here. For however long.”
I started packing and called Celia. I got her voicemail and left a message.
We had been together for three months, doing what we were doing, and I liked her, I did, or rather, I liked things about her. We had met at a birthday party of a mutual friend. Celia taught English and drama at a private school in the city, and she was funny and beautiful, and thirty. When I emailed Leo about her, he emailed back, Good for you, no Amber or Trixie. How old is she, anyway?
In bed, I couldn’t complain, but out of bed, she did things that made me feel worked over. She hadn’t seemed impressed with me at the party—she talked to a lot of men that night, but she and I sang a karaoke duet when I grabbed her hand and pulled her up to join me at the mikes. I got her number, and when we went out two weeks later, she acted, a tiny bit, like she was doing me a favor. After all the women I’d known, if nothing else, I was hard to fool. From the beginning, she acted independent—for independence’s sake, not because she really was. Whenever I asked her out, she was always busy and suggested a day or two later—every time. I started counting and after the fifth time figured out the pattern. Because I was feeling played, I asked if she was seeing other people, which was fine, I said, but I wanted to know. She fell all over herself telling me she wasn’t, and asked me if I was, and I told her I wasn’t either, not currently. So I thought that was good to get out in the open, but her games continued. Once I offered to pick her up at the airport and she said she’d take a cab. And some nights when I thought we’d spend the night together she’d get up and leave, saying she really wanted to sleep in her own bed, even if it was late.