The Widow's Season (32 page)

“He painted it three years ago,” Sarah said quickly. “When we spent a month out here together.”

Carver didn’t reply. Instead, he sat down beside her and together they stared out at the water. “This is the hardest part of my job,” he said.

“It’s all right,” said Sarah. “I’ve been expecting you.”

Carver reached into his pocket and placed something on the table—a brown leather object, weather-beaten and torn at one edge.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“You don’t recognize it?”

Sarah shook her head.

Carver lifted the object into his hand. “Some teenagers found a body four days ago. Washed up from the river, in the woods about eight miles from here. It’s pretty badly decomposed, but what’s left of the life vest matches the description you gave us last summer. And we found this in the pocket.”

He placed the faded wallet on the table in front of Sarah’s fingers. Slowly, she opened the leather flap, pulled out the plastic cards, and arranged them like a poker hand. A fading image of David smiled at her from his driver’s license.

“I liked David a lot,” said Carver. “He was a good man.”

His voice cracked, and Sarah saw that his hands were balled into fists on the table’s surface. She was amazed at her own sense of calm, a feeling almost of relief; one part of her life was ending so that another might begin. Placing her palm gently over Carver’s right hand, she murmured, “Do you believe in ghosts, Carver?”

He wiped his eyes. “What do you mean?”

“It’s just a question. Do you believe in ghosts?”

He cocked his head, as if expecting a trick.

“As a matter of fact I do.”

“What would you say if I told you that I’ve been seeing David’s ghost out here, in this cabin? That I come here to talk to him, and spend time with him, and he sits in that very same chair where you’re sitting now . . . Would you say that I’m crazy?”

She ended with a laugh, but Carver’s face was intent, studying her in silence. “I’d say you weren’t the first person to report such things . . . But if I were you I wouldn’t tell anyone else.”

Sarah nodded.

“I’ll tell you something more, that I’ve only told two other people.” He leaned toward her slightly. “I was with my father at the hospital when he passed away four years ago. He was eighty-two and full of pneumonia, so I knew it was coming. But when he died I sensed something, like his spirit was moving around that room, and I’d swear to this day that I felt a hand on me.” He reached up and grasped his left shoulder. “He always rested his hand on my shoulder like that, ever since I was a boy, and I sensed the weight of it in that hospital room. After a while it faded, like my shoulder was just heavy. But I know what I felt, and nobody can tell me that it wasn’t real.”

Sarah smiled. “It’s real for me, too—but afterward it feels like I’ve only been sleepwalking.”

She looked out at the river. “He’s here now, outside. I should go and talk to him.”

Carver shifted uncomfortably. “I don’t like the idea of leaving you alone out here.”

“This won’t take long.” She rose and opened the deck door. “If you’ll wait I’ll follow you back to town when I’m done.”

 

 

 

David was seated at the end of the dock, peeling a long sliver from the railing at his side. He tossed it into the water as Sarah sat down beside him.

“Carver brought your wallet,” she said. “They’ve found your body. I suppose there will be a funeral, now that there’s something to bury.”

David threw another strip of wood across the water’s surface. “I prefer cremation. Scatter my ashes in the river.”

Sarah watched the small bits of pine float downstream. “Remember what you told me you saw from the bottom of the river, at the moment when you were drowning? You said you saw me calling you back, telling you to come home? . . . I think that’s right. I think I wanted you back so that I could apologize for the last few years of our marriage.”

David shook his head. “You have nothing to be sorry for.”

Sarah shrugged. “There’s always something to regret.” On the back of her left hand she traced the letters
S-O-R-R-Y
. “I was angry for a long time,” she began. “Angry at the world for not giving me everything I expected. Angry at you for getting on with your career while mine was going nowhere . . . You never did anything wrong—never drank or had affairs, or flirted with your students. I think I wanted you to do something wrong, just to bring you down to my level.”

“I’ve done plenty wrong—” David objected, but Sarah stopped him.

“Do you know the last act of
The Crucible
? When Elizabeth Proctor is talking to John? He’s deciding whether to confess—it’s a question of life or death—and she’s thinking about their marriage. She says, ‘It were a cold house I kept.’ That’s the line that came back to me, when you disappeared: ‘It were a cold house I kept.’ ”

“You blame yourself too much,” David replied. “I never helped you. After your second miscarriage, I put all my energy into my work, and I left you on your own. Too many evenings you were alone in the house. That’s a lot of time and reason to be angry.”

There was truth in it, thought Sarah. Truth and contrition, and maybe that was all she had ever wanted from him. “I’m not angry anymore,” she said.

“Neither am I.” David stared into his hands, and for a few minutes they remained silent, watching the river.

“You know,” he said eventually, “there’s somebody else who’s been calling to me.”

“Who?”

“Another woman.” David watched Sarah’s eyebrows raise, then he grinned. “It’s my mother.”

Of course, thought Sarah. How silly of her, all these months, to have imagined David as immeasurably lonely. The dead always had company, generations upon generations.

David took her hand, and for once his palm was warm as the sun spreading across them. He leaned over and kissed her cheek, so softly that she felt she could dissolve into his body, as if he had always been permeable; she had only imagined the boundaries of skin and bone.

“Good-bye, my beautiful wife.”

Sarah remained seated, watching the current, while David walked off the dock and across the grass. Only when he had reached the edge of the woods did she stand and look back. “David!” she called. “Wait!” He turned, waved, and was gone.

Another ten minutes passed before she left the dock, the sun tipping into the trees as she waded up the yard. Inside the cabin, Carver was on the couch, reading a
National Geographic
. He rose when Sarah entered.

“Are you ready?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said quietly. “I am ready.”

The history of English literature is haunted with dead husbands. Sometimes they appear as ghosts, like the King in
Hamlet,
as troubled by his widow’s sexuality as by his own murder. Other times they appear as living men who have faked their deaths in order to spy on their wives. Chapman, Molière, Behn, and Steele—to name only a few—create husbands who leap from the wings when their widows take new lovers. Finally, there are the husbands who exist as figments in widows’ minds, because women have been encouraged, in conduct books and educational treatises from medieval days forward, to imagine their husbands’ spirits as ever-present beings, whose eyes, joined by the eyes of God, see everything.

The idea for this novel grew from a favorite chapter in my dissertation on widows in English literature, and so first thanks go to the director of that project, Patricia Meyer Spacks. From there, many readers helped to shape the story. The inaugural members of the Southern Inn writing group, Chris Gavaler, Molly Petty, and Paul Hanstedt, read the first draft as it emerged chapter by chapter. Stephanie Wilkinson, Anne Davies, Beth Colocci, Kerry Humes, Marian Bouchard, Leigh Shemitz-Winters, Tinni Sen, Marsha Heat wole, Carolyn Capps, Michael Matin, Carol Howard, John Leland, and Laure Stevens Lubin all gave advice and encouragement; and Rod Smith, editor of
Shenandoah
, has been very supportive. Special thanks go to Rosemary James and Joseph deSalvo for their unflagging promotion of new writers through their work as co-founders of the Pirate’s Alley/Faulkner Society, and to Michael Malone, who chose
The Widow’s Season
for the Faulkner-Wisdom 2005 prize for Best Novel-in-Progress. The novel would never have been published without the combined efforts of Gail Hoch man, my agent, who saw the promise in the story and encouraged me to keep writing, and my editor, Jackie Cantor, who has been unfailingly enthusiastic.

Closer to home, my neighbors, Jeanette Coleman and Catherine Tomlin, provided free childcare that gave me the time to write, and I am always indebted to my husband and daughters, to whom the novel is dedicated.

by Laura Brodie

READERS GUIDE

1. What are some of the meanings behind the novel’s title? Why do you think the author chose it, and how does the plot follow the holiday seasons?

2. Why do you believe the author tells the story both from Sarah’s and David’s point of view?

3. This novel stemmed from the author’s graduate dissertation on widows in English literature—in particular, a chapter about “dead” husbands (either ghosts or men who fake their deaths) watching their wives. Take a look at the novel’s epigraph, which comes from that study. Do you think that today’s widows still feel that their husbands are watching them? Does society encourage them to keep their husbands present in their lives?

4. What are some of the underlying reasons that Sarah and Nate have the affair? What do they gain from the relationship? Why do you think Margaret encourages it?

5. At one point Sarah wonders, “What could be extraordinary in the life of a small-town upper-middle-class white woman” like her? Why does she think her life is so mundane, and what is ironic about her question?

6. Sarah is mourning more than just the loss of David when he disappears. Explore why she is in such a dark place in her life. Can she pinpoint when it happened and why?

7. After learning that David survives the storm on the river, and hearing his explanations for his actions, do you think his “hiding out” was a selfish act or a reasonable option?

8. Sarah thinks, “Age . . . does not appear first in wrinkles or gray hair, but in the dulling of one’s smile.” How does this sum up the life she was living with David before his disappearance?

9. Why do you think David is so real to Sarah? Why does she need him to be?

10. At the end of the novel, we discover what really happened to David. Did Sarah create an alternate reality, or is David a real ghost?

11. What did Sarah expect to gain from her life with David? Was it for her peace of mind and healing, or to give him the chance to live the life he had always dreamed?

12. What was needed both from David and Sarah in order for his ghost to finally leave?

13. Sarah feels angry and frustrated about many of the things in her life—the downfall of her marriage, her inability to carry a child to term, David’s disappearance. How does she finally find peace with herself?