How to Talk to a Widower (28 page)

41

I HAD A WIFE. HER NAME WAS HAILEY. NOW SHE'S GONE.
And so am I
.

A few weeks after Debbie's wedding, on a soggy gray Monday, I sit down at my computer and type those words onto a blank screen. Kyle has negotiated a deal with a major house and, after a few days of soul-searching, I've decided that it's time I got back to work. I have no outline, no guide other than the four-page proposal Kyle wrote and signed my name to, and the twelve columns I wrote for
M
that were the basis of the deal. A few days ago, I sat in a conference room high above the city while Perry Manfield, the acquiring editor, brandished a rolled folio of my columns and called the by-product of my ruined life “great stuff.”

I won't exactly be getting wealthy off the advance, but then again, I'm going to be wealthy anyway, and besides, that's not really the point. I've got Russ to think about now, and even though we don't need the money, I don't think it would be setting a particularly good example for him if I sat around scratching my balls all day. The book will be a memoir chronicling the mess I made of things after Hailey died. I'm not terribly eager to relive that time, but in the final analysis, it's the best way I can think of to keep her alive. Because I know now that the pain will inevitably fade, I can already feel it happening, like dying embers at the edge of a bonfire, turning a lifeless gray and disintegrating into the breeze. Knowing that there is a published record of us will go a long way toward helping me to let go, or that's the theory anyway.

So now I'm officially an author. I have a contract, an editor, a new laptop, a deadline, and no idea of how to write this thing. But it's a strange and not entirely unpleasant feeling, having something to do again. I sit at the desk in my bedroom, with the hard autumn rain pounding on the roof, clattering like applause on the metal top of the air compressor on the side of the house, and I look out the window and organize my thoughts.

I had a wife. Her name was Hailey. Now she's gone. And so am I.

That's all I've got so far. But I've got a year to write the rest, and it's not like I have any shortage of material. I'll come up with something.

         

To celebrate the book deal, Russ drives me to the tattoo parlor, where I commission a smaller version of Hailey's comet to be placed on the inside of my right wrist. This way, no matter where I am, I'll be able to flick my wrist and see it and remember that she's a part of me. I know that sounds corny as hell, but it just feels right to be marked by her. I explain my reasoning to Russ while the tattoo artist snaps on his latex gloves and starts scrubbing my arm with alcohol.

“Makes sense,” Russ says.

“Which begs the question,” I say. “Why did you put yours on your neck?”

“I don't know. It just seemed like a cool place for a tattoo.”

“But you can only see it by twisting your neck in the mirror, and then you're bending it out of shape.”

“Good point. I'll have to get another one like yours.”

“The hell you will.”

It's a very respectable tattoo parlor, sandwiched in a strip mall between a bakery and a dry cleaner, and the tattooist looks like your grandfather, with a ring of white hair around his bald, freckled dome of a head, a kind, thin-lipped smile, and a lumber-jack shirt under his apron.

“You have no tattoos,” I say, looking down at his pristine forearms.

“The cobbler's children go barefoot,” he says, powering up the needle. “How are you with pain?”

Russ and I look at each other and smile.

         

The nights can be rough. They used to be the easiest part of the day for me, the only time the pain would fade to a dull throb. There was less of a sense of the world continuing outside your windows, of people going about their lives, of time marching on, of you being sidelined from everything by the immense load of your grief. Also, by nightfall I was usually drunk. I don't keep any booze in the house anymore. Pot, either, for the record. So now I'm a clean and sober stepfather with nothing to take the edge off the witching hour.

I walk into Russ's room and he quickly flips off his computer monitor. There is a girl now. I'm learning about her in small increments, but it's still on a need-to-know basis. He's not yet comfortable talking about her, and I don't want to pry. I'm happy for him, but it's little things like this, turning off his monitor when I walk into the room, that remind me that no matter how chummy we are, I'm still the guardian and he's still the kid, and as much as we may blur the lines, they are still immutably there. I know that's probably a good thing, but I'd be lying if I said it didn't hurt a little. I've only been his stepfather again for a few weeks, and I'm already sad about the little pieces of him that I'll inevitably lose.

“How's it going?” I say.

“Swell.”

“Want to go to a movie?”

“Can't,” he says. “Homework.”

“Fine. Be that way.”

“Why don't you call Ms. Hayes?”

“Yeah.”

“Why not?”

“She made it pretty clear she doesn't want to hear from me.”

“You're going to let a minor detail like that stop you?”

I think about Brooke from time to time, and by “from time to time” I mean pretty much all the time. I look for her when I drive Russ to school, I deliberately drive past her Brady Bunch house several times a day, and I sit in the movie theater by myself, wondering if this will be the day she comes. I calculate the odds, days of the week, number of movies playing in the multiplex. It's something of a long shot. I consider leaving her a message to let her know when I'm going and which movie I'll be at, but then I see her expression when she said good-bye to me, and I can't bring myself to dial her number.

“You know,” Claire says to me over coffee and water at Starbucks a few days later, “a therapist would probably tell you that it's a marked improvement that you're pining over a living woman now, instead of a dead one.”

“That's why I don't go to therapy. Too much useless information.”

“What's that on your wrist?”

“I got a tattoo.”

“You did not!”

I show her Hailey's comet, streaking across the inside of my wrist. “That's amazing,” she says, running her fingers over it. “You're so counterculture.”

“I'm edgy.”

“You're dark and dangerous.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Now I'll have to get one.”

“Why?”

“You can't be the only one. It upsets the whole balance.”

“I don't know, Claire. A tattoo is a pretty big commitment.”

“What are you saying?”

“Nothing. How are things with Stephen?”

“Okay, I guess,” she says. “We have a lot of sex now. And then we talk about the sex. We rate it. We designate areas for improvement. But soon I'll be a fat horse, and then we won't have very much sex, and we'll have to come up with something else to talk about.”

“Well, you will have a child,” I say. “There might be something to talk about there.”

“Could be.”

“So, are you going to move back home?”

“I don't know,” she says, looking sadly out the window. “I kind of like things the way they are now.”

There has never been any helping Claire. For whatever reason, my beautiful, brilliant sister will always struggle against her own deeply ingrained compulsion to repeatedly slash and burn and rise from the ashes. She will always mistrust her own happiness, will feel compelled to subvert it, and realizing this makes me feel sad and old.

“Do you love him?”

“I think so.”

“Well, that's good.”

“You think I should move back in, right?”

“You'll know when the time is right.”

“Bullshit.”

“Okay. I'll tell you when the time is right.”

“Thanks.”

“The time is right.”

“Oh, fuck off.”

And so we go, back and forth, thrust and parry, pro and con, and none of it matters because I have no wisdom to impart and Claire is Claire and I'm me and we'll both always be defective to some degree. Maybe it's the price we have to pay for never having had to be whole on our own because we always had each other to fill in the gaps. Whatever it is, I don't like knowing that she'll never be truly happy, but all I can do is hope that maybe becoming a mother will wake something up in her, activate some long-dormant contentment gene. Or maybe it will be the thing that pushes her over the edge. I'd like to say I'm hopeful, but I'm still holding off turning the spare room into an office.

         

Late one chilly night, I drive over to Stop and Shop to stock up on groceries. The lot looks haunted, with only a handful of cars and abandoned shopping carts rattling back and forth across the pavement propelled by the strong autumn wind, like the ghosts of shoppers past. I'm about to step out of my car when I see Laney a few rows over, loading her bags into the back of her minivan. It was inevitable, I guess. I do my shopping at night to avoid people, and I guess she does too now. She's dressed in jeans, heels, and a clinging white sweater, and seeing her makes me inexplicably nervous. I slouch down in my seat, hoping she won't see me. Mike told me that she and Dave are in counseling, but they're sleeping in separate bedrooms and the prognosis is not good. I think of Laney's little girl, hugging me tightly as I carried her to her bed, and I know I'll always hate myself for this. I watch Laney wheel her cart over to the cart park, and I know I should just get out and say hello to her, I mean, we're going to run into each other at some point, but this lot is haunted and I'm paralyzed by a fear that makes no sense, and I don't stop shaking until I see her taillights light up and the minivan start to move. I've got a tattoo on my wrist to remind me of what I've lost, and I've got Laney Potter in parking lots to remind me of what I've done, and I'll just have to get used to it, but sometimes the absolute permanence of everything is like a tire iron to the skull.

         

I don't throw things at the rabbits anymore. After burying the one in my backyard, the least I can do is grant the rest of them full grazing rights, so his death will not have been in vain. They sit quivering on my lawn, sometimes alone, sometimes in groups of two or three, nibbling at grass, or just meditating on whatever it is that rabbits think about. The rabbits pay no attention to me, do not cast accusing glances in my direction as I feared they might, do not seem to connect me at all to the dark fate that befell their brother. The rabbits know that sometimes shit just happens, and there's nothing anyone can do about it. So they graze, and I watch them, and it would be nice to think that we're all maybe a little wiser than we were before.

And that's what I'm doing on Thursday afternoon, sitting by my open bedroom window in front of my laptop, watching a lone rabbit resting in the shadow of the giant ash tree and tinkering with my ever-changing outline, when the phone rings. “Doug? It's Brooke.”

Her voice is an aria, and the little hairs on my arms perform a standing ovation. “Hey,” I say. I stand up and pace the room nervously.

“I'm calling about Russ,” she says quickly, heading me off at the pass.

“What about him?”

“He stole the driver's ed car.”

“What?”

“He somehow pinched the keys out of Coach Warren's jacket and now he's gone.”

“That's unbelievable.”

“I don't want to involve the police yet, but it's been twenty minutes, and he's not a licensed driver. He could get hurt. Or hurt someone.”

“I know,” I say, my mind racing. “Where the hell is he going?”

“I was hoping you could tell me.”

Outside, a car beeps loudly to the beat of “Shave and a Haircut.” “Hold on a minute,” I say. “Is it a white Corolla?”

“Yes.”

“Don't call the police. I'll have it back to you in fifteen minutes.”

         

When I get downstairs, Russ is leaning against the car, grinning from ear to ear. “My first solo flight,” he says. “Am I good, or what?”

“Why the hell would you steal the driver's ed car?”

“It's a manifestation of my lingering grief?”

“You could have been arrested.”

“It was an acceptable risk.”

“You don't get it. You're in deep shit now.”

“It was this, or get into another fight. And I've renounced violence, for the time being.”

“But what were you trying to accomplish?” I say, exasperated.

“I don't know. I'm just a stupid kid.”

“That you are. And we're going back there right now.”

“I'll drive,” he says, and I flash him my dirtiest look. He shrugs and tosses me the keys, which I snatch angrily out of the air. “Fine,” he says, and then looks at me appraisingly. “You're not going to wear that, are you?”