The Widow's Season (7 page)

When David was offered the position in Jackson, he had said that it would give her a chance to start again, but still she hadn’t wanted to move. She already knew about small-town Southern life, the awkward blend of transplanted Yankees and Confederate flag-wavers. After her childhood in South Carolina, New York had seemed like progress. She felt that she was climbing a geographical ladder, if not a professional one. But who was she to block her husband’s path? David had a career; more than that, he had a calling. And what did she have in New York, except a job that was going nowhere?

Jackson had proven to be more cultured than she expected. She had signed on as marketing director for a community theater that specialized in Appalachian folktales. But the group’s financial health was never better than precarious, and after four years of treading water, Sarah had traded the world of nonprofits for its academic equivalent, a PhD in English.

What a luxury that had been, a six-year immersion in poetry from Beowulf to Bishop. Granted, the commute was tiring—three days a week across the mountains to Charlottesville—but she had compensated with weekends stretched in bed beside a pile of novels. Words had always been her most faithful companions, and her curriculum vitae boasted all the prerequisites for a brilliant future: published articles, conference papers, a dissertation fellowship. When her first foray into the job market yielded nothing, she hadn’t worried. It often took several tries to land a tenure-track position, and at thirty-four she wanted, above all, to start a family. Part-time teaching at the local college would be ideal while she raised her children past their early years. She could still remember David’s comment when he read her framed diploma: “I guess we’re smart enough now to make a baby.” At the time, it had seemed funny.

Once, in a footnote to a pregnancy guide, she had found a term for herself: the
habitual aborter.
She liked its criminal ring; it matched the darkness of her mind over the past few years, teaching expository writing to college freshmen who had never mastered subject-verb agreement. She had thought that adjunct teaching would be freeing, even fun, but instead it was a purgatory that par alleled her body’s limbo—pregnant, not-pregnant, pregnant again. Her career and her family seemed equally stunted, which might not have mattered had she been younger, with plenty of time for life to unfold. But her thirty-ninth birthday had arrived like a plague, a hideous reminder that by forty a woman should have something to show for herself: a book, a child, an assistant deanship. Something more than a remodeled kitchen.

She had never been able to explain her misery to David. He was the sort of person who had witnessed other people’s shortcomings, but had never tasted the bitterness of failure for himself. She felt that her miscarriages were tainting his perfect world, a barren wife being the most ancient blight of all, and she sometimes suspected that the acidity of her mind might be poisoning her womb; no life could grow within a body so bitter. Some nights David would stay at work just to avoid her tone at the dinner table. She recognized the fear in his meager excuses, the dread of a middle-aged woman turned prematurely sour, and for days at a time she was able to check her anger, talking airily about Asian babies, Russian babies, Romanian orphanages. But inevitably the knife edge of her temper would return.

So what should she tell Margaret’s widows? That she was mourning her youth, her muted intellect, her unborn children? That she missed her husband less than she missed the early years of their life together, when each day had promised something new? In recent years their marriage had hardened into a daily routine, without accusation but also without passion. She supposed that was inevitable in most marriages.

Perhaps she should go back inside her house. Stay at home and pass the evening without speaking. She had done it before, gone for days seeing no one, living in silence, wondering if her vocal cords would atrophy. Before her the future yawned, a pale tundra in which her only conversations would be with telemarketers. That thought was sufficient to lift Sarah to her feet. Enough of this brooding. She would arise and go now, go to meet the widows, if only to hear her voice speaking aloud.

 

 

 

By seven-thirty a handful of strange women had assembled in Margaret’s living room. Four were well over fifty, their husbands lost to a mixture of recent illnesses and old wars. Two younger women had been widowed in sudden accidents, a car crash and a waterski ing incident. “One if by land and two if by sea,” as Sarah’s morbid brain put it. Inside the kitchen she leaned against the round oak table, filling a platter with cheesecake squares and blueberry scones while Margaret recounted her guests’ tragic histories.

“Patty is interesting, though a bit pompous. You might know her, she’s the thin one with the red curly hair? She teaches in the sociology department.”

Sarah shook her head.

“Anyway, she saw her husband through two years of lung cancer, and now she’s made widowhood into a research topic. I think she’s working on a book.”

“So anything we say can be used against us?”

“Exactly.” Margaret arranged some cheese and crackers on a lazy Susan. “Try to sit near Adele. She’s the one with white hair and a peach jacket. Always dresses as if she’s going to a garden party. She’s eighty-two and her mind is sharp as a pin. Her husband died in Korea and she ran his hardware store for thirty-two years.”

“Fascinating.” Sarah rolled her eyes as she bit into a scone.

“Any woman who’s lived through World War Two, Korea, and Vietnam is going to be a lot more fascinating than you or me.” Margaret put the lazy Susan into Sarah’s hands and steered her shoulders toward the door.

Inside the living room, the conversation was centered on one of the older women, Ruby, whose husband, Bob, had died without leaving a will. The omission was especially troublesome, since Bob had a son by his first marriage who didn’t approve of Ruby, and who was fighting her in court.

Sarah liked this Ruby woman—a petite, graying bulldog who used words like
greedy bastard
. Profanity was always entertaining when it fell from the mouth of a septuagenarian. Sarah lay the cheese and crackers on Margaret’s coffee table, scanned the room for Adele, and settled into an armchair beside the only woman in peach.

It seemed that Bob’s son wanted to liquidate everything. He thought they should hold a massive estate sale, transforming his father’s life into a pile of money that could be divvied up. But Ruby refused to abandon the house, and insisted that she would spend the last years of her life within the space she had called home for the past decade. Stubborn Bob Junior, who had grown up within those same walls, resented his stepmother’s intrusion, and now lawyers were scripting the family drama while their fees whittled away at Bob’s estate.

Ruby’s tale sparked a flurry of lamentations about wills, annuities, and government entitlements, all of which made Sarah newly grateful for Nate. He had handled everything after David’s disappearance—insurance, taxes, Social Security. Nate had filled out all the paperwork, consulting with David’s accountant and the college’s personnel office, and scouring desk drawers for every policy, every receipt. Sarah had only to locate the “sign here” stickers at the bottom of each form.

David had left her with an insurance policy for four hundred thousand dollars, a sum he had chosen back when they were planning a family. Add that to the college’s death benefit and her monthly Social Security checks, and widowhood had proven to be an enormous windfall. She planned to give half of the insurance money to the college, to establish a memorial scholarship for each year’s top premed student, but thinking about the money only made her restless. Margaret’s widows sounded more like an investment club than a bereavement group.

Sarah wondered what these women were really thinking. Did they feel lonely or liberated? Bottled up with rage, or drowning in apathy? She, who loathed group therapy, found herself wanting less talk about money and more about misery. She wanted someone to break down.

Perhaps that was why, when Ruby tipped her head and asked, “How are
you
doing?” she let the truth drop so abruptly.

“Not so great. I think I’m being haunted by my husband’s ghost.”

She expected silence. She thought her words would stain the atmosphere like a glass of red wine spilled on the carpet. But the reaction was just the opposite. The group seemed to bubble into life.

“Have you seen him?”

“Do you talk to him?”

“How does he look?”

She told them about the two occasions when she had seen David’s ghost, and explained how she had often sensed his invisible presence, and all the while the women nodded, as if she were giving a recipe for chocolate chip cookies. When she finished, the red-haired professor spoke for the first time.

“It’s not that unusual. Statistics show that widows are the most likely demographic group to report contact with the dead, everything from sightings of apparitions to vague feelings that ghosts are present.”

“Of course,” Ruby interrupted, clearly impatient at words like
demographic,
“women are much more psychic than men.”

“I don’t know about being psychic,” the professor pressed on, “but women are more pious, and that makes them more likely to believe in ghosts, whether or not they’re real.”

“They’re real all right.” An older widow spoke up. “I saw one in my grandmother’s backyard in Missouri, when I was eight years old. It was Thanksgiving morning and I was inside, reading in a window seat, and when I looked out there was a man standing under the big elm. It was my grandfather, clear as day. I recognized him from the pictures in Gran’s bedroom. He died of a heart attack before I was born, right in the middle of a church service, and Gran always said that meant he’d gone straight to heaven. He was still wearing his Sunday best when I saw him, and it was windy, and his hair was blowing, and he looked cold. But he was gone in an instant, like it was just a thought that had flashed across my mind.”

“I’ve never seen my husband,” the woman added after a while. “I’ve waited for twenty years, but never a glimpse.”

The water-skier’s widow sighed, and spoke in a quiet voice. “The only time I see Greg is in my dreams. Sometimes I’ll be talking to him, and it seems so real. Then I remember that he’s dead, and I tell him so. That always wakes me up.”

Around her the group murmured its assent. Dreams were the widows’ common denominator, the alternate world where life and death mingled. The redheaded professor launched into Freudian implications, while Sarah recalled visions of David, floating down the river.

She felt a hand touch her own, and turning to her left, Sarah found Adele leaning toward her, her dogwood brooch almost nicking Sarah’s shoulder.

“I’ve spoken to my Edward many times in the past forty years. Sometimes I’ll wake up and he’ll be standing beside my bed, still wearing his uniform. And I’ll say, ‘Eddie, you go on now and rest easy. I’ll be with you soon enough.’ ”

The old woman leaned back in her chair and chuckled, as if she had just told a marvelous joke.

Sarah didn’t know whether to be pleased or appalled. She had almost come to accept David’s appearances as a sign of mental breakdown, a delusion sparked by her isolation. But here were these women insisting that she wasn’t crazy, she was normal. Somehow the idea didn’t soothe her; a touch of insanity was preferable to the status quo.

She glanced over at Margaret, who was leaning against the kitchen doorway. “What do you think?”

Margaret hesitated, apparently choosing her words more carefully than usual.

“I think it’s going to be hard for you to have any closure until David’s body is found.”

“Which means you think this is all in my head?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“But you don’t believe in ghosts?”

Again Margaret hesitated.

“I believe there is a lot more going on in this world than we can comprehend. Whether or not that includes ghosts, I don’t know. But I’ll say this much—if you are really seeing David, there must be a reason. Either he is somehow trying to reach you, or you are trying to reach him. Most likely the latter. There’s probably something unresolved in your mind.”

 

 

 

It was ten o’clock when the group disbanded, waving and hugging and exchanging book titles on yellow Post-it notes. After everyone had left, Margaret retrieved a flashlight from her pantry and walked Sarah back to her house. There was only one streetlight at the start of the road, and its lavender glow faded as they walked to the end of the cul-de-sac, the beam from Margaret’s flashlight bobbing like a buoy.

When they reached Sarah’s porch, Margaret stayed on the lawn and shined the light up the stairs as Sarah unlocked her door.

“Thanks for inviting me,” Sarah called back. “It wasn’t so bad.”

“Your enthusiasm is breathtaking.”

“Tea at my house this Friday?” Sarah switched on the hall light.

“All right; and, Sarah?”

Sarah turned back and saw Margaret looking up at her with a slight smile.

“If David shows up again, tell him I said hi.”

Two days later Sarah was walking through the Safeway, filling her cart with bags of Skittles and SweeTarts. It was Halloween, and her shopping was motivated by guilt. Upon entering the store, she had seen Mrs. Foster hoarding enormous amounts of fruit: “The kids are having a party . . . I’m making caramel apples.” At Sarah’s vague nod Mrs. Foster had added: “Do you want the boys to stop by this year?”

The question was meant kindly, but Sarah couldn’t help imagining Mrs. Foster three years ago, inspecting her children’s candy for razor blades and opened wrappers, and discovering a Ziploc bag of Oreos.

“Of course, have them come. I’d love to see their costumes.” The neighborhood mothers were probably doubtful about her house this year, advising their children to leave poor Mrs. McConnell alone. Soon she would become the Boo Radley of the town, her life the subject of whispers, her address branded unlucky. Its location at the end of a street already made her house an inefficient stop on the Halloween route, unless the children were guaranteed a good payoff. And so she piled on the candy, imagining herself as the witch in “Hansel and Gretel.”