The Widow's Season (2 page)

Until then his yardwork had consisted of an occasional afternoon with the push mower. She could still see him, wire-rimmed glasses sliding down his sweaty nose as he rocked the mower back and forth around the edges of lilac and forsythia.

From her seat at the kitchen table she had a clear view into the living room, where Margaret had arranged a private memorial on the fireplace mantel. To the right and left stood pictures of her two daughters, ages twenty-one and twenty-four, cheerful testaments to youth and health. Between them, an ebony-framed photograph showed streaks of sunlight pouring through the branches of a crab-apple tree.

Sarah was one of the few people who understood the picture’s full significance. She knew how Margaret, arriving home that spring afternoon, had found her husband stretched so neatly on his back, lifeless eyes open to the brilliant sun, that she had decided to lie down beside him—to look up through the crab-apple branches and see what he had contemplated in the last minutes of his life. There, with the twigs in her shoulder blades and Ethan’s hand touching her own, Margaret had been so struck with the bright fragments of blue sky, shining like shattered glass through pink petals and black branches, that after going inside and calling 911, she had come back with her camera. And here was the result on the living-room mantel, a triptych monument to life’s beginnings and endings.

It must be a British thing, Sarah thought, this pragmatism in the face of death. Margaret Blake was not one to be ruffled by the apparition of a dead man in a grocery store.

“Where did you see him?” Margaret turned and brought the teapot to the table.

“At the Food Lion.”

“I thought you shopped at Safeway.”

Sarah smiled. How typical of Margaret, to transform the morbid into the mundane.

“I was running some errands on the other side of town.”

Thank God it hadn’t happened at the Safeway. There were eight thousand people in Jackson, Virginia, and every time she shopped at the local market she ran into English department colleagues, or David’s old patients. Even the baggers had familiar faces—the teenage girl with Down’s syndrome, the man with the black earring. Sarah would have avoided them for weeks had they witnessed what she was now coming to think of as her “episode.”

Margaret sat down and poured two cups of Earl Grey. She placed the teapot on a folded linen napkin and offered Sarah a small blue pitcher of cream, etched with scenes from Canterbury Cathedral. Friends were always bringing Margaret these mementos from their European vacations, as if an atheist from Manchester was going to be nostalgic for Thomas Becket.

“I saw Ethan everywhere after he died.” Margaret wrapped both hands around her mug. “In crowds, in traffic. I’d see him in a car that passed and I’d drive like mad to catch up. But it never turned out to be him.”

Sarah nodded. The early weeks of her widowhood had been filled with false sightings. Each time she passed a man of David’s build and hair color she had felt a brief flash of recognition, invariably broken by the face of another stranger.

“But this was different. This time I recognized his shirt and his Yankees cap. And he stared right at me.”

“So what happened?”

“He disappeared.”

“Oh.”

Margaret put down her mug and focused on the sugar bowl, breaking the hard clumps with the tip of her spoon. With each silver tap, Sarah felt her jaw tighten. What did she need to say to gain a legitimating nod? The only words that came to mind were the same predictable refrain she had repeated for the past three months.

“They still haven’t found his body.”

And here Margaret did hesitate, just long enough to look into Sarah’s eyes. “They will.”

 

 

 

In her thirteen years in Jackson, Sarah had witnessed dozens of flash floods like the one that had taken David. Sometimes the water came in the midst of drought, when the land was too parched to absorb a sudden storm. Other days, the downpours capped weeks of steady rain, transforming the area’s usually placid creeks and rivers into muddy, frothing torrents. Locals told stories of entire mountain communities drowned in nighttime floods; water climbed the front stairs of double-wide trailers and seeped around bedposts while families slept. But Sarah knew of only a few isolated deaths—a drunk college student innertubing on Possum Creek, a woman in a Honda Civic who tried to cross a flooded bridge and was swept downriver as she climbed from her window.

In “David’s flood,” as she had come to call it, there were two other victims, a pair of little sisters. They had been huddled under an umbrella at the edge of their backyard creek, watching the water churn and leap, when the muddy bank on which they stood collapsed into the current. Their mother had witnessed it all from the porch of their farmhouse. She had been yelling through the rain for her girls to come inside when the creek opened its gaping mouth.

Sarah shuddered each time she envisioned it. That woman’s loss was so much greater than her own. She had no children, and could scarcely imagine the cold horror of watching that umbrella bobbing downstream. One girl’s body had been recovered a few days after the flood. The other had been found only recently, tangled among branches and leaves on the banks of the Shannon, into which all streams in the area flowed. The burial had taken place just last week.

And maybe that was the problem. Maybe it was the child’s burial that had been troubling her thoughts over the past few days, triggering all of these memories and visions. Sarah had read the newspaper’s brief account with a touch of envy, for she, too, had been awaiting a burial. Many nights, alone in bed, she had imagined David’s body resting on a bank beneath a grove of trees, water lapping at his ankles. Other times she saw him float from current to current, past fields and cliffs, pastures and houses,
away down the valley, a hundred miles or more
. In her mind, his body never decayed. He was the handsomest drowned man in the world, carried from farm to farm in the Shenandoah Valley, tracked by the eyes of quiet deer.

More and more, her mind was drawn to the river. Each time she drove across the concrete bridge that marked Jackson’s town limit, she saw the ripples and eddies below and inwardly gauged the water level. Lately the river’s slow current seemed to parallel the hypnotic rhythm of her afternoons—hours of unbroken quiet, stretched on her living-room couch while her mind sank deep into the past. She had always been the sort of person who could get lost in her thoughts, wandering their farthest corners while schoolteachers droned on about trigonometry or trilobites. As a child, she had learned early that imagination was preferable to reality, and that books could be a gateway into labyrinthine daydreams. That was why she had become an English professor, because of her love of fictional worlds.

But these days there was a danger in her daily immersions, for she had less and less reason to resurface, the material world losing its magnetic pull with each new death. Ten years ago she had lost her parents—her mother to cancer, her father to alcoholism—and then there was David, lost to the river while on an overnight kayaking trip. Now there was only Margaret left to reel her in; Margaret, who was rooted in reality like a massive oak. Sarah could hear that Manchester accent at this very moment, calling her back to her muddy tea. Margaret was complaining about the principal at the elementary school where she taught third grade: “The woman goes on about the bloody SOLs as if Moses brought them down from the Mount. And now the state wants us to put ‘In God We Trust’ on the walls, as if that’s going to improve the test scores.”

Sarah tried to respond; she enjoyed a good rant in eloquent company. But fast as her blood rose, it receded in a broken wave. She offered murmurs and shrugs to all the usual provocations, until Margaret sighed and put down her mug.

“Have you been sleeping any better?”

“Not really. I still have a lot of dreams about David. Sometimes I’m underwater with him, looking up from the bottom. And lately I’ve been sleepwalking. Yesterday I woke up and all the items on my dresser were gone. All day long I found hairbrushes and jewelry and bottles of perfume scattered around the house.”

Margaret nodded. “Are you taking those pills?”

Ah yes. The sleeping pills. The blue Lunesta with its ghostly butterfly flitting through television advertisements, haunting pillows and windowsills like some glowing angel of Morpheus.

Mr. Foster, from down the street, had given her the pills two days after the flood. He had pressed a vial into her hand at the end of a condolence call, saying “these might help,” as if drugged unconsciousness could somehow set the world right, just like in the fairy tales, where women woke from poisoned sleep to find their enemies dead.

“You are the enemy,” she had thought to say to the double chinned Mr. Foster. “You with your presumptuous gifts, your smug sympathy, your revolting flesh.” But instead she had smiled and said “thank you” as she closed the door behind him.

David had once tried to give her pills, a year ago when she had slipped into a bad bout of depression. He had come home with a pack of Prozac, “in case you want to give it a try,” and although she had liked their shade of green—the name Lilly on each capsule as if they were borrowed from a friend—she had refused to sample the stuff. She was suspicious of men who tried to medicate women, who wanted to shield the world against the specter of female hysteria. It was their own problem if they couldn’t bear women’s complaints, women’s tears, women with lavender moons waxing and waning beneath their eyes. She knew very well how she looked and sounded on her worst days, and to hell with them if they didn’t like it. Life was not always pretty and cheerful, with hair curled and teeth whitened and supper waiting on the table. Life was sometimes a bitter Harpy perched on the bedpost.

So now the pills stood side by side in her medicine cabinet, Prozac and Lunesta, like some Wagnerian couple.
One pill makes you larger and one pill makes you small
.

“No, I’m not taking the pills,” Sarah replied. And then, with a bitter smile: “I prefer alcohol.”

Margaret blew ripples across the surface of her tea. “You should come to my group this week.”

“Which one? The Quakers?”

“No.” Margaret laughed. “I’m only a fair-weather Friend. I haven’t gone in months. But I’m hosting my bereavement group this Sunday. I think you’d like some of the women.”

“I thought you gave up on them years ago.”

“Not entirely. I still see them a couple of times a year, just for the companionship. Some of the older women are very funny.”

Brilliant. A gaggle of humorous widows.

But Margaret promised to bake scones and lemon bars and chocolate cake, and when Sarah thought of the cans of creamed corn waiting in her half-empty cupboards, she acquiesced just long enough to say that yes, come Sunday, she would think about it.

Walking home in the first shadows of twilight, Sarah saw two skeletons hanging in the Fosters’ poplar trees. Silly String cobwebs cluttered their rib cages, and their skulls drooped in shame. On the porch, two sheeted ghosts, apparently fled from the desecrated bones, sat in wicker rocking chairs.

It looked like the aftermath of a lynching. But so it must always be in a house with three young boys. Each year the Foster brothers celebrated Halloween with a grisly exuberance. Purple blood dripped from their pumpkins’ howling mouths.

The other two houses that separated Sarah from Margaret had porches neatly trimmed with baby pumpkins and dried corn husks. And that would have been the extent of her own decorations this year, had things been different. She would have managed a few straw flowers and a bowl of polished gourds—something tasteful and completely devoid of imagination.

In the early years of their marriage, she and David had driven out to a local farm to choose their pumpkins. She preferred long, thin ones with melancholy expressions; David liked round jack-o’ lanterns with cackling smiles. The challenge lay in contriving annual variations on these themes—serrated teeth and crossed eyes and teardrops shaped like moons. David always did the carving, as seemed to befit a doctor, although he hadn’t touched a scalpel since medical school. When the operation was complete, they inserted candles, turned out the lights, and sipped hot cider while the pumpkins glowed on the kitchen table.

She couldn’t remember when that tradition had ended. Each fall seemed busier than the last, until it was an achievement just to buy a pumpkin, let alone carve it. Halloween was for children, and children were the elusive ghosts that had haunted their marriage.

One year they had forgotten Halloween entirely until the Fosters’ youngest boy arrived at their door with an ax in his skull. A cerebral jelly made from peeled purple grapes oozed through his hair. Sarah apologized profusely as she dropped a Ziploc bag of Oreos into the boy’s pillowcase of candy. She knew that the local children rated the neighbors according to the quality of their Halloween treats—from full-size Snickers bars down to anonymous orange-wrapped toffees. The boy’s derisive gratitude indicated that the McConnells had sunk to the bottom of the neighborhood ladder. Had she thought of it, she would have given him money, a few quarters to buy his silence, but seeing more children approach at the curb, she and David had locked the door and retreated to the basement.

That had been a good Halloween. They had stayed up past midnight, sitting in the dark, drinking beer and watching
Tales from the Crypt
. She could still see David’s blue eyes lit by the television screen, and with that memory came the image of his face in the grocery store today, bent slightly toward her, as if he had something to say, something she needed to know.

She hadn’t told Margaret about David’s expression. She hadn’t explained how his eyes looked torn, how his mouth seemed on the verge of speaking. Perhaps that detail would have made his appearance more credible. But why did she need Margaret’s approval? And if she craved legitimation, why hadn’t she told Margaret the whole story?