The Widow's Season (8 page)

Widows were often accused of witchcraft, so Sarah mused as she inched past the Laffy Taffy. There was something frightening about a solitary woman, something that made her fit for burning. Many cultures blamed widows for their husbands’ deaths. Maybe this year she should retrieve her pointy black hat from the attic; some of the parents might appreciate the irony. She doubted it. Better not to put ideas into anyone’s head. Better instead to stock up on these bags of miniature Snickers bars. She would greet Halloween with a bright porch light, a bottomless bowl of candy, and a smile calculated to assure the neighbors that she was utterly harmless.

The children began to emerge from their houses shortly after six. First came the Foster brothers, all three, even the fourteen-year-old, whose only costume was a rubber George Bush mask. “Terrifying,” Sarah said as she extended a wooden salad bowl full of candy. She guessed that their mother had sent them together to pay their respects before they disbanded to their separate activities. All were unfailingly polite, taking only one piece of candy from her bowl.

“No, no, take more. I’ve got plenty inside.” Their fingers spread into claws and depleted her bowl to half its depth. She would have to limit the next children to two pieces each.

Sarah had never before seen so many trick-or-treaters. She counted seventy-six in the first two hours, an insignificant number compared to the main residential drag, where the totals regularly topped three hundred. In recent years the town had been overrun by county dwellers, children from small farms or new rural subdivisions where each house was separated by at least six acres. Too hefty a trek for a single piece of candy. In the wealthy neighborhoods of Jackson children ran from door to door accumulating hoards of sweets, while their parents waited down the street in dusty pickups. Jackson’s older residents complained that they were frightened by the unknown urchins and their lurking vehicles. Most of the old folks turned off their lights on Halloween and hun kered down, as if the children were a passing storm.

At Sarah’s house, half of the faces were familiar. Mrs. Foster seemed to have spread the word that she was accepting trick-or-treaters, because all the local children made a point of coming down the street, saying “Thank you, Mrs. McConnell” and “Happy Halloween, Mrs. McConnell” with rehearsed precision. Sarah welcomed princesses and fairies, vampires and superheroes; Harry Potter reigned supreme.

By nine o’clock the stream of children had slowed to a drip. Her doorbell rang at intervals of five, eight, and ten minutes, rousing her each time from a tepid Poirot mystery movie. At nine-thirty, as the last child was leaving, she stepped out on the porch and scanned the street. Three houses down, heavy-metal music thumped through the Fosters’ windows. Teenagers roamed the back lawn, drifting in and out of the bushes. Many pumpkins will be smashed tonight, she thought vaguely as she turned off the porch light and took the bowl of candy into her bedroom.

After changing into her nightgown, she settled under the sheets with a Mr. Goodbar. The body count for Poirot had reached three, but the inspector was unruffled. He conducted his search for clues as if it were a treasure hunt, confident that the prize was waiting at the end. She hated this cinematic version of predestination, where some characters were always fated to triumph, while others remained trapped in a cycle of despair. Clicking through the channels, she passed World Federation wrestling, CNN, the ubiquitous
Law & Order
rerun, and finally stopped at her nightly destination: the Weather Channel.

It had become a fascination in the past three months, to mute the sound and stare in silence at the ever-changing maps. She believed in weather as a measure of fate, the meteorologists a priestly caste with their hieroglyphic rain clouds, lightning bolts, and snowflakes. Her life had been irrevocably changed by a storm, and she suspected that she was one among many—not so much the farmers and fishermen, who lived by the skies, or the owners of coastline property who dwelled in the shadow of each hurricane season. Her sect was more select. She counted herself among the landlocked city dwellers and smug suburbanites, with their lightning rods and Tyvek walls and monstrous SUVs, who, in the midst of their well-insulated complacency, had found their lives altered by heatstroke or hailstorm or an ill-timed lightning bolt. They were the recent converts to the cult of weather, for whom each symbol on these maps represented another tragedy.

Sarah had just switched off the TV when a knock came at the door. The clock read ten-fifteen, too late to indulge any greedy new-comers. She rolled over in bed and closed her eyes, willing the child to vanish. But there it was again, three knocks, slow and heavy. Sighing, she pulled on her robe. She would have to tape up a sign—OUT OF CANDY—to keep the stragglers from knocking until eleven.

When she opened the door the darkness was startling. She had forgotten that she had turned off the light, and now she wondered what sort of child would stand at a pitch-black porch. Remembering the teenagers down the road, she braced herself for a Halloween prank. Something disgusting would be left on her mat, something squishy or smelly or dead; the children would be watching from the bushes, waiting for her scream. It was best not to disappoint them. With a sigh of resignation, she switched on the porch light and looked down. Nothing was there. Glancing to the right and left, she saw that all of the rocking chairs and potted plants were in their proper places; nothing had been altered, nothing left behind. The floodlight pouring from the eaves revealed no one on the porch, the walkway, or driveway. It seemed to be a case of knock and run, and she was turning to close the door when she saw something move in the shadows.

It wasn’t a child. That much she could tell as her eyes settled on the black outline. It was a man, hidden underneath her vast magnolia. She was about to run and call the police, when the figure seemed to sense her impulse. He crossed from shadow into light and stood at the foot of her porch stairs.

She felt as if the air had been sucked out of her body. Her left hand reached out and she grabbed the side of the door, hugging it to her chest as she stared at her husband, standing there with his face glowing like the moon.

Sarah closed her eyes, guessing that this apparition would disappear as swiftly as all the others. But when she opened them again David was still there. Something about his steadiness helped to overcome her initial wave of shock. He didn’t speak or move, but his body looked so tangible, it seemed to give substance to her own legs. She thought of what Margaret had said, how there must be something unresolved between them, and the thought gave her courage.

She pulled the door back, shielding herself with it as she opened a path into the house. Then she met David’s eyes, and with a voice barely audible she whispered, “Come in.”

PART TWO

Flesh

He hadn’t meant for any of this to happen. So David claimed as he sat across from Sarah at their kitchen table, unfolding the long story of the past three months.

“I planned to see you the next day,” he began. And Sarah listened, all the while asking herself: Could a ghost have such solid flesh? Could his weight creak in a chair? There was nothing amorphous about David. She’s couldn’t see through his skin. He smelled like a man who hadn’t bathed in a week. Still, she couldn’t shake the sense that he wasn’t quite real. She’d read enough old legends to be suspicious of anything that came knocking on Halloween.

Back in July, David explained, when he left on his kayaking trip, he had expected to be gone only one night. Sarah was scheduled to meet him at five P.M. just north of the Buck Island Dam, where the Shannon widened into a small lake before dropping down a forty-foot concrete wall. There, a line of red buoys steered paddlers away from the precipice, toward a muddy portage point on the western shore. On Sunday Sarah would be waiting under the poplar trees, reading a paperback novel, sipping at something, probably bottled water. She would stand and wave as he approached, and together they would carry the kayak up from the river, across the road to the gravel parking lot. They would tie the boat to their station wagon, stow his paddle and gear in the back, and he would change into a clean T-shirt and tennis shoes. Halfway through their sixty-minute ride back to Jackson, they would stop to eat dinner at the Mexican café in Walker’s Draft. Everything was arranged; life was predictable.

On the first day, all had gone according to plan. The Shannon, which alternated between class-two rapids, rippling rock gardens, and long stretches of flat water, was flowing at a perfect level. Water splashed his face and arms at every rapid, but nothing about the river was intimidating. In the calm sections he leaned back and let the current carry him beneath canopies of maple and oak. As he floated into the hills and meadows beyond the outskirts of Jackson, the subdivisions gave way to occasional farmhouses perched above the floodplain. He paddled underneath one highway overpass whose metal beams hummed a steady alto, and at the next bend a cluster of children hailed him from a rope swing, briefly coming to swim at his side like a pod of dolphins. No other paddlers appeared that day. His only companion was a great blue heron, flying from tree to tree fifty yards ahead.

The river was a temple of meditation. Lulled by its steady current, he formed resolutions as if it were New Year’s Day. He vowed to exercise more, clean the attic, pressure-wash the porches. Above all, he needed to step back from his job. For the past two years he had spent hundreds of hours chairing committees and heading a push to build a new student health center, and although the causes were worthy, there was only so much joy to be gained from architects’ drawings. He often thought that a private practice would be more fulfilling; then he could follow his patients’ lives from diaper rash through acne, all the way to heart disease. But every time he imagined it, the insurance industry waited like a troll under the bridge. Besides, the answer to his restlessness did not lie in another variation on medicine. It waited in sunny afternoons, fishing, painting, and planting trees on their acres by the river. He wanted to visit friends out west—to hike through canyons he had seen only in
National Geographic
. And perhaps, if he worked fewer hours, he could salvage his marriage.

He and Sarah had been happy in their first decade together, satisfied with the present and hopeful about the future. It was only in recent years that they had lost their joint sense of purpose. Now they were held together by a web of social obligations, in which they fluttered like a pair of desperate moths. Sarah’s trap was especially cruel, victimized by her own biology. Last year, as he watched her settling into a permanent funk, he had brought home a pack of Prozac, but her response was so biting, so completely ungrateful, he had never uttered those two syllables again. Now
divorce
was the unspoken word that hovered above them, the angel’s sword waiting to fall.

The river slowed at a deep swimming hole, and David steered to the sandy bank, threw his paddle on shore, and stepped into the cool water. Pulling his kayak up the narrow beach, he sat and stared at the river. Six years ago he and Sarah had stopped at this same bank. They had shed their swimsuits and life jackets and folded their bodies together in the water, ripples multiplying around them like sound waves.

“We’re scaring the fish.” Sarah had laughed as she unwrapped her legs from his waist. Her voice in those days had a softer tone; the thought of its low music made him dig his toes into the sand. He needed to bring Sarah back to the river. She hadn’t been paddling all summer, and only once the previous year. He needed to bring her out to the cabin, to get her into the water.

Water was an instrument of renewal, a medium for rebirth. And God knows Sarah needed a change. She was becoming unbearable, the way she lashed out at him like a cornered animal. After the first miscarriage he had been full of sympathy, bringing flowers, cooking dinner, rolling his own mourning into a tightly squeezed ball. All his energy had been devoted to keeping Sarah on an even keel. But after the second loss her grief was sharp as razor wire, a twisted perimeter holding him at bay.

Let her come to the river, David thought as he waded back into the water. He could play John the Baptist and give her a good dunking . . . No—he had to stop that bitterness. It was sad, how love was always tinged with aggression.

 

 

 

At two-thirty he reached their cabin, its backyard marked by a small dock extending from a muddy ledge. To the right and left the woods encroached, but here the sun fell on a wide clearing dotted with black-eyed Susans. He dragged his kayak up the bank and flipped it in the tall grass, laying his life jacket and spray skirt on top to dry. Fifty yards up the sloping yard, a bluish gray cedar cabin stood shaded by pine and oak, its back deck the only sunny spot fading in the heat. David walked around to the front and removed the spare key from its hiding place under a cracked brick beneath the shrubs.