Young Widower (5 page)

A few weeks later, the night before we were evacuated from Bangladesh, Katie and I packed what we could fit into our backpacks and left our sites on the last night buses. Whoever came to find us that next morning arrived at half-abandoned rooms strewn with papers and stacked with clothes, photographs, cassette tapes, and books. We hoped it seemed, for a while at least, only that we had forgotten to take out our trash and clean our kitchens.

We left Bangladesh for Bangkok. We flew from South Asia to Korea, took a discount tour of China, and finally landed at my parents’ home for the holiday. After Thanksgiving we flew one last time, to Chicago, where we both found work. I was a middle school social studies teacher. Katie managed the office of a green-development nonprofit. I slept most nights at Katie’s studio sublet in Lincoln Park, until after a while I had my own key, laundry pile, and grocery list. Evenings, we ran along the lakefront to one of the beaches and back. We came home, showered, made dinner, and played chess, cribbage, and rummy.

Wasn’t this our new, ordinary, and immodest life? Everything in America seemed luxuriously indulgent. We took buses and trains that ran on time and arrived a few blocks from heated offices. My Chicago public school classroom had its own telephone line and internet connection, a mobile computer lab in the back of the room, and several five-pound bags of candy in a locked storage cabinet. Sometimes, in the middle of the day, I sent Katie an instant message on the computer, and she wrote instantly back.

I like my job!

I like my job, too!

For the first time in either of our lives, we saved money. We opened checking accounts and savings accounts. We subscribed to magazines and theater seasons, took dance lessons, and traveled
weekends to visit our families. Tuesdays and Saturdays the diner across the street served four pancakes, a fried egg, and three sausage links, with pie and coffee, for six dollars. Movie rentals were two-for-one four nights a week.

Those evenings we spent in the apartment, Katie wore fleece sweatpants and made tea. She curled herself onto the ridiculous yellow-leather loveseat we inherited from previous tenants, to read books and magazines. I put my head in her lap, or we lay on the bed with the windows open, the cat teetering on the sill as we listened to the traffic, turning our pages. When it was hot in the city, we pulled the mattress under the window or set up the laptop to watch hours of television into the afternoon and evening. We liked to argue about whether the cat’s indifference to the traffic below meant she was charmed or incredibly stupid. I defended the cat vigorously.
Survival of the fittest
, Katie liked to say,
when her time is up, her time is up
.

4.

It is a warm June evening in Bucharest. The beer gardens and pizza shops around Bucharest’s enormous Lake Herastrau, which one side of our apartment building overlooks, are just open for the season. Someone is selling flowers from an umbrella stand: neon carnations mixed with weeds and grasses.

We walk the loop again and again around the lake.

Bucharest is by far our favorite city yet, and like every other city in which we have lived together, we intend to leave it with a sense that we have only just begun our explorations. We are excellent planners, even when we have no goal. Katie is starting yoga classes again and going with her friend to the gym. She is exercising to manage work-related stress. Membership in a private gym is a status symbol among the city’s elite. Bucharest is filled with families that have profited wildly and handsomely after Communism, privatizing industry, franchising corporations, dumping Western
Europe’s toxic waste in parts unknown of the Carpathian Mountains. Much of Katie’s work puts her in daily contact with terrible people who have real power and speak fluent English. Katie swims laps with their charming families in the morning and then walks past their offices on her way to work.

Katie will die in six weeks, but of course we cannot know this. We do not plan for it. We walk nearly every night around Lake Herastrau, complaining that we are bored, restless, and eager to explore still more beer gardens, park benches, trees, dams, and apartment buildings on either side with the avenues and the traffic circles between them. What else can we do until it is time, finally, to leave? We entertain ourselves. We people-watch. Romanians out walking, mostly kids, intermix family with youthful, libertarian élan. We have neither community nor zeal. It doesn’t really matter. We find the end of one conversation and begin the next. We repeat our conversations as we circle the lake. Every few hundred yards we pass a restaurant blaring British rock music: the Rolling Stones and Queen, Sid Vicious singing “My Way” and David Bowie singing “Young Americans.” It is the music of liberation and exhaustion, and we are lost.

5.

I stand in a small field at our Peace Corps training site. The coordinator has chalked an outline of Bangladesh onto the grass. As we each receive our assignment, we take the placard on which it is written and straddle our city. I get “Tangail,” a city the travel guide calls “the singularly least attractive place in Bangladesh.” It is a transportation hub across which the local crime syndicate taxes buses and cars as they make their way north from and south to the capital. Tangail’s de facto leader is recently imprisoned for beating a police officer to death with the leg of a stool, at the police station, while in police custody. He is reputed to have a violent temper. After his release, at his request, I teach his wife English.

The afternoon I receive my assignment, I smile like everyone else as we take a group photograph. Katie is fifteen, maybe twenty feet away, with five volunteers stationed in the cities between our cities. In the photograph I can just make out her dark hair and blue head scarf in the middle of the group. The coordinator walks across the map to congratulate each of us. He explains that he has picked me for Tangail because the Peace Corps needs
someone really large there
. It is a hard assignment, he says, but he knows I will do it well.

I think,
All of that training, and here is the criteria for my advantage, relative size
.

Even now I consider the choice again and what I think it means my time in Bangladesh might become. I try to imagine the life that follows, getting every part of the sequence wrong. How does falling in love with Katie start with this moment? How can our meeting here end years later in Romania with her death?

If I am ironic, then I say the next two years will contain the useless and immensely gratifying skill of smashing dying cockroaches, of learning when they are at their most vulnerable in my small cement room or already almost dead.

If I am earnest, then I speak thoughtfully about how a tragedy in one part of the world magnified our sense of need and commitment, until suddenly Katie and I were traveling the world together.

How can I not want to enter that sequence again and again, so that I might disrupt it?

I tell this part of the story because it hedges against larger and less certain speculations—boredom, order, meaning—and misses, always, the improbabilities of coincidence and scale.

I can walk our life together back this far: I am well-intentioned, naïve, and unambitious. I can find my life in the consequence of one decision and very little before it. I hardly think about the decision, over which I have control and influence. My role is consequent and representative. I’m not sure I have a right to contest it.
I do not want to seem disagreeable. I thank the country director as he walks across the country to congratulate someone else.

6.

Is it resignation, then, that ends my witness of the beginning of our marriage? Confusion? A certainty of arriving at, then becoming acted upon and overwhelmed by, a repeating pattern of circumstance and place? How closely that story follows my witness of Katie’s death, her funeral, and my continuing life in Indiana, where everyone quickly learns some version of that sequence. I move to Indiana with the celebrity and mystery of yet another country visited, and once again, I assemble a life in the aggregate and from a distance.

What should I do, then, with these last parts of the memory of our life together? The disparate pieces that seem to no longer belong to the whole? Picking Katie up at the last bus from campus. Working a Bon Jovi concert to raise money for a charity. Eating tacos at the truck by her office in Chicago.

Can I assemble them into anything worth saying?

One spring we trained together for a marathon. We ran six, eight, twelve miles a day, and when Katie turned her ankle and stopped running, still she followed me sometimes on her bike, calling out my split times, making small talk.

Can’t I prove we were in love, happy, committed, special?

I see no contract with our past selves. It was too easy to arrive in a new city and begin the process of restarting a life. Unpacking boxes. Mapping out the route to work. Finding grocery stores and learning the words for chicken, apple, rice, coffee. No part of our life then says we teetered on any brink. Why should it? We were volunteers, teachers, and young Americans. We were married, and soon we would work abroad again. We had graduate degrees, ambitions, résumés. When Katie died, we were traveling into the mountains, on vacation, between cities.

I will resist the lie that both story and affection must entirely transform in order to survive after her death. I will try again to tell the beginning, as I might have told it before Katie’s death, a beginning that is false and irrelevant and that perhaps stretches too easily its surfaces across a life. Isn’t this the consolation I seek from anecdotes: to suggest, in the place of feeling, reverence? To adapt a practice of faith, confession, to the secular realm? In devotion to see Katie more clearly and our marriage in its former, more perfect light?

7.

The new country director, arriving from Boston, held a welcome party for all of the volunteers at his rented home in Dhaka. There was a deejay, fried American foods, cold beer, and cake. Everyone made toasts. At the end of the night, Katie and I danced together, and when the song ended, she looked up at me. We were both a little drunk.

John Evans
, she said,
how come we don’t spend more time together?

I smiled. I loved moments like this.

Because, Katie LaPlante
, I said,
you can’t stand me
.

The Legend of a Life

1. The Jesus Rock

Katie had arranged a surprise for my birthday the next week. All during the hike, she enjoyed teasing me about it. Playing along, I asked for a hint.

It is something that you don’t enjoy until you see it, but then you are very happy
.

She pushed ahead to find Sara.

I take five short videos of our group that day. In no particular sequence we stand in front of a waterfall a third of the way up the trail. We hold our breaths a moment; our faces are lean and full
of hesitation, our voices higher pitched than I remember. When we relax into ourselves the image captures a certain fleeting bonhomie of the day, the good intentions of our being together. We alternately smile and clown, joking that we hope the photo looks good.

Of course, these are not photos. Each time I press the wrong button. We pose. Someone says there is no flash; the green light isn’t blinking. Our camera records thirty frames per second: 180 to 300 photographs with each failed take. Each video is so broad and inclusive as to emphasize nothing. The frame is too grainy. There is some kind of delay in how the camera pans that makes the image choppy. Perhaps, in more capable hands, the potential for extraction would exceed the wealth of data. To me it is all a blur.

This is our group in every lost photograph: Katie, me, Sara, and three strangers we met that morning at the base of the mountain, who agreed to join us for the long hike and with whom we become fast friends for the day. The Israeli couple on honeymoon has backpacked across Eastern Europe all summer. Friendly and very fit, seeming very much in love, they chose Busteni for its easy access into the Carpathians. She is a doctor who works at a hospital in Tel Aviv. He has some vague association with the military that no one seems eager to clarify. I tease Sara about it constantly, knowing she is paranoid about such things. The Romanian, the last member of our group, is hiking, at least in part, to kill his massive hangover. We have all talked a bit that morning, sitting together in the small waiting room next to the cable cars that never begin—high winds, early morning rain—the day’s run up the mountain. Now, we have all agreed to set off together up the nearby hiking trails.

These videos are the last record I have of Katie’s voice. She will die in six hours, and she does not mean to be recorded. She is saying nothing in particular, and later I will think,
This is how I remem
ber the sound of her voice now. I cannot exactly recall it. I hear it in echoes, always just before or after the thing I am remembering, as though she is not talking to me
.

Katie hikes ahead with Sara for a while and then falls back with the Romanian. He struggles to keep the pace. Katie is a natural athlete and leader, she has a terrific capacity for empathy—all of this is true—but she also understands that he is slowing down the group, so she hikes with him to keep us moving together up the mountain. We wait at river crossings and outcrops. He is overweight, winded. He explains to Katie that he works for an electronics firm in Bucharest and was out the night before partying at a club. The hike is more strenuous than he imagined it might be, as it was, more and more, for all of us.

I keep a steady place in the middle of the pack with the Israeli couple. We stop at an alpine face and climb single-file across a short distance using a pull rope, keeping our bodies flat as we move sideways across the rock. It is the hardest part of the hike, but we can see the end of the trail once we have crossed halfway: a giant white cross perched at the edge of the land, running its midday shadow dramatically down our path.

Later, we take photos in front of that cross and then behind its shadow, which stretches ten or fifteen feet at an angle from the ridge, widening to a peak. The Israelis like the spot. I use their camera to take thirty-two digital shots of them posing near it. It is hard to get the sense of scale right, and it is late in the day, so the angle drifts in each photograph, as though the shadow is following us, or we are approaching it from every direction. We have hiked all day to the top of the mountain, watching the shadow of the cross for the last part of the way.

A small snack stand waits where the path levels out onto the ridge, an old cabin in which someone has thought to prospect the for
tunes of desperate, self-congratulating hikers. We buy candy bars and cold sodas. Katie and the Romanian arrive last, and after a while Katie asks me to walk with her a ways further, separate from the group.

I found a rock with the face of Jesus on it
.

She smiles nervously and laughs. I laugh, too.

I hiked ahead and saw it on the ground
.

Don’t worry, though. I rubbed the mud a little, and the face disappeared
.

We walk back to the snack stand and open sodas. I shake out rocks from my shoes, put on a sweater, and lie down on one of the benches to catch my breath.

It is beautiful on the ridge. There is a pile of rocks down which snow melts into a small river across it. The sun is out and closer now to the horizon. It was warm in Bucharest, but here on the ridge it is windy and cold.

We decide we should keep moving, find food, and rent rooms for the night. There is a small hostel just to our right, but it does not have a kitchen. So we hike another mile or so across level terrain, to a larger hostel whose dining room, the guidebook says, looks out over a valley, toward the sunset.

The larger hostel where we eat dinner is crowded with summer tourists stuck at the top of the mountain, waiting all day for the cable cars. Of course, the tourists in the hotel cannot leave the mountain; they have been stranded in the hostel all night and day. They are keeping their rooms and staying at least until morning. The kitchen is nearly running on bare provisions. We eat pickled vegetables and a broth soup with stale bread and cold beer.

The Israelis keep insisting that we start back across the ridge toward the smaller hostel, to rent a room for the night. But the rest of the group isn’t worried, and we say as much. It is getting late, and soon it will be dark. The path is a little less than a mile across
level terrain. We ask the Romanian to call ahead to the smaller hostel on the house phone. We are grateful that someone in our group speaks Romanian well enough to work out the details. There is one room left, the owner explains, and we can claim it if we arrive within the hour.

Back out on the trail, Katie sits down suddenly, grimaces, and begins to cry. She has turned her ankle on a rock. I sit a while with her, until she feels strong enough to keep walking. I offer to help, but she insists that the ankle is fine: she just wants to hang back from the rest of the group with Sara by the lake, under the stars. They will follow in time. We should go ahead and be sure to get the room.

Do you need an ice pack? Should I ask the hostel for a first-aid kit so that we can wrap it?

Katie hates doctors. She understands her injury. She first rolled her ankle six years earlier, while we were hiking in South Korea, at the trailhead coming down Mount Daegu. She insisted on walking on it to reach the bus back to the city and later refused medical attention, eating handfuls of ibuprofen for the next few days, until the swelling went down a little and the color came back. It was only a year later, after the ankle started to click and swell whenever we went running in Chicago, that a doctor diagnosed a fracture that had not healed correctly. The clicking was the sound of the joint rubbing against itself. The ankle would swell like that, the doctor explained, whenever she turned it.

I am mad at Katie for staying back, for turning her ankle, and for letting the injury persist when she knows she loves to run and hike. I think she is foolish to insist on resting by herself now, to not let me help her. It is only a sprained ankle, but we still have the mile to hike. And, it is late.

But I also know that part of me is relieved to do nothing, to be absolved of any obligation to help her, to keep going and leave her
stubbornness behind. We have been hiking all day. I am tired. I do not want to pick the fight.

Suit yourself
.

Which is the last memory I have of Katie, alive and well: my saying goodbye with a great harrumph, leaving her on a hill with Sara and the Romanian.

There is a photo of Katie and me standing that evening under the kilometer marker next to the lake, with the rocks to the right and behind us. You can see water coming off the ridge, and if you look closely enough, you can just make out an outline of snow and ice where the white rocks darken under the clouds. I am wearing a Cubs hat, plaid shorts, and a black sweater. Katie is wearing blue jeans, her backpack, and a t-shirt from the 5
K
race in her hometown. We are leaning into each other and smiling. I have pursed my lips into the kind of pseudo-smile-and-smirk I once imagined demonstrated great thoughtfulness and consideration, perhaps poetic resignation.

We are standing on a tall mountain in Romania. Yes, we are
.

Katie is exhausted, still in pain, and smiling through her teeth. She smiles this way when she is smiling against her better judgment. I remember thinking it was important to get this picture right. It would be a kind of evidence to friends and family of our ridiculous day of hiking.

Sara takes the photograph, then hands me the camera. I step closer and photograph the two of them facing in the opposite direction, across the ridge. They are surrounded by blue sky and green land. Katie is smiling naturally. You can see it especially around her eyes. Her face is centered in the photograph. Sara is standing to her right, and a sliver of her body and face is cropped out of the frame. Her head is tilted back, as though she is laughing at a joke; perhaps it is an ironic laugh. Katie, with her blue eyes and dark features. Sara,
with her Irish ruddiness, hazel eyes, and spectacular long red hair. Katie has tied a dark blue bandanna in her hair. Sara has tied a light blue bandanna around her neck. To their left three or four valleys roll in succession away from the sunset.

We purchased the bandannas at the train station that morning, on a whim, as a gesture of solidarity.

We are beginning a vacation together. We have pennants!

I am exhausted from the hike and feeling short. I am eager for our wilderness adventure to end. I am not, by either birthright or practice, much of an outdoorsman. I have arthritic toes that surgery two years earlier only made worse. It hurts to step at an incline, duck and crouch under branches, jump across rocks. I wear sneakers constantly, with an orthotic, and neither does much to help with the pain or range of motion. The trail is unmarked where the hike becomes difficult. I am out of shape. We do not have much water. I am carrying a backpack packed for the week. I am scared and exhausted. I do not like wilderness adventures, and when we push ahead, up the mountain, toward an uncertain destination; when Katie stops to rest and tells me to go ahead, I want to keep going because I want to find the end. The peak, summit, ridge, and smaller hostel. Late afternoon, evening, nightfall, sleep.

Katie is smiling in her photograph with Sara, and I think it might be a kind of
fuck you
for the day. Or, perhaps, the smile is unchanged in both photographs. In our photograph my arm is draped across Katie’s shoulder. Her hair is sun-sweet. I can smell her powder-scented deodorant, shampoo, soap. I love these smells, and they are familiar. I stand there. I hear a voice telling me to look stoic. It is the end of a journey. We are victorious.

It is something that you don’t enjoy until you see it, but then you are very happy
.

Later that week my friend Ben forwards me the email from Katie. His plan was to come to Romania from Egypt, where he lived and worked, to celebrate my thirtieth birthday. Katie had spent the last few weeks arranging his flights, accommodations, and pickup. Sara would meet him at the airport, and Katie would make some excuse to divert me to her apartment. Ben would arrive with Sara, followed by friends from the school where I taught.

So, it was a game. There would be a winner and a loser. Or, really, at the end we would both win.

I left Katie behind with Sara because I wanted her to plan my birthday surprise; I was being generous; I was exhausted, and my feet hurt; our journey was almost finished; I did not want to disagree with her; I was angry with her; I would not indulge her injury-denying heroics; she should let me help her; we needed to claim our rooms for the night.

The truth is I left Katie behind on the trail because I imagined our life was very ordinary, invulnerable to trauma and tragedy. I understood the situation well enough to trust it. There was the predictable aspect and, always just lagging behind it, calamity. We would keep ahead of calamity because we always did. The Israelis and I would walk ahead until Sara and Katie and the fat, slow Romanian closed the gap and caught up. I would wait for them at the river crossing, where I could afford to sulk and feel petty. There was a range of ordinary possibilities, I told myself, to what would happen next.

2. Arête

The bear that killed Katie had white fur on its paws and muzzle, and for a little less than an hour it flashed white across the path of my flashlight, making a deliberate measure of her body and slowly, without pretense, pressing her chest into the ground until it made no sound and did not return the force.

This is how Katie died: gross thoracic trauma. Her body, mauled. The body, when we recovered it, bloodless and blank. It did not appear to be mangled. We stood together over her and thought she might have had a shock. She lay at an angle on the grass, and her body was intact, her clothes were not torn, there was not so much blood as we might have expected. To look at Katie’s body, we thought she had survived the attack, or perhaps the attack had only happened in our imaginations, or to someone else, or someplace else.

An hour earlier my group had left Katie’s group at the lake and walked a few hundred yards ahead down the path. We reached the river, where the Israeli doctor said we should wait to cross as a group. Or, her husband said, I could wait for Katie, Sara, and the Romanian while they went ahead to the smaller hostel. I watched them disappear into the darkness. I wound the mechanical charger on my flashlight, thinking that when Katie arrived I would need to show the way across. After a while, I became impatient, and then, after a longer while, concerned. What was taking them so long? I called Katie, then Sara on their cell phones. I left long, insistent messages to which they never listened, encouraging them to pick up the pace.