The Other Widow (23 page)

The front door opens and Francine hurries in. Her coat rustles across the lobby. “Dorrie?” she calls. “Good
gawd
it's cold out. Dorrie? Are you here?”

“Yes,” Dorrie calls back. “Be right there. Just let me—” She saves the e-mail to her Upcoming Auditions file and closes out, just as Francine appears in her doorway; her face is pink, her nose a fiery red.

Why all these returns?

XXVII

KAREN

K
aren wakes up to Antoine nibbling at her hand. She forgot to stick him in his little room the night before, or maybe she just wanted the company. At any rate, he's wakened her before she was ready to wake up. He's waked her in the middle of a dream. About
Edward
, of all people. “Thanks, Antoine,” she says. “You got here just in the nick of time!”

There was a short period, back in college in Miami, when Karen and Edward were closer. It was before she'd actually met Joe—long before the languid days in his old crumbly apartment.

Edward was in one of her classes. She closes her eyes and drifts, tries to remember which one. English Lit, she thinks. Or, no. Humanities. He sat behind her in the dome-shaped auditorium, watching slides—a whirlwind trip through the history of art—Leonardo to Georgia O'Keeffe in six weeks' time. A taste, the professor said, to whet their appetites. They'd shared a table in the cafeteria once or twice, had a few Cokes together, a couple of talks about Degas or Bosch, wending their way through throngs of students to sit down. Her hair was long and bright. Edward was tall and kind. Who knows what might have happened? Karen had wondered once or twice over the years, during one or another of Joe's endless trips, or sitting in traffic on the way to the ER to treat Jon's sprained ankle or Robbie's broken arm. It might have crossed her mind as she sat alone on the back porch, her husband dozing in front of the TV, that things might have turned out differently if Joe hadn't come along when he did. It turned out they were friends—the poli sci major and the budding engineer—a perfect match, the two of them, so opposite they rounded one another out. “You complete him,” Karen used to tell her husband, laughing. And it was a better match by far than she and Edward would have been. The man went through wives as quickly as a bottle of scotch, and then paid lavishly to be rid of them. Edward's Expensive Exes, Joe called them. All four of them.

Still, there was that one time. Edward's second wife had left him in a huff. Her spiky heels had barely clicked out of his life, her plane was barely off the tarmac before Edward turned up at their door. “She's gone,” he had announced. “She isn't coming back.” And Karen let him in, fixed him a drink, fixed him another, and, before she realized it, the three of them were wasted. Joe staggered up to bed, and Edward stayed the night, too drunk to drive. They talked for a while longer, just the two of them and Karen made some coffee, made it very strong, a cup for each of them, because she'd felt attracted to him then. That one time. That one night, tucking in the sheets on the couch in the den.

And now she's had a dream about him.
Always loved you. Always will
.

God!

“Okay, okay.” She lets Antoine lead her to the kitchen, watches as he runs in circles between her and his empty bowl. The dream was so vivid. So sexual! She pours Antoine's kibbles in his bowl and makes herself a cup of coffee, but she doesn't sit down. She paces. She tells herself the dream of Edward was only misplaced longing for her husband—it would be too painful to dream of him, his death too fresh a wound, too recent, still. It was Edward in the dream because he'd held on to her a tiny bit too long outside the restaurant; it stuck in her subconscious. That was all. That and his offhand remark about always loving her. She tells herself these things, and then she reaches for her phone and texts Tomas.
Can you get away
?

Yes
, Tomas texts back.
Of course. Where?

Lunch
, she says, but in her heart she knows it won't be only lunch. She lets Tomas pick where they'll meet—a little ethnic place on Boylston. She reads his text directions, slathers raspberry jam over her toast, and washes it down with her coffee. Outside, Antoine runs across the snowy yard and she opens the back door. He bounds inside, shakes off the cold. Trees sway in the wind. It's a sunny day. A yellow day. The sky is clear. Snow sparkles on the tree limbs. As she watches, a blue jay lands on a large oak branch and makes a raucous sound before it flies to a rickety bird feeder that she keeps stocked with seeds. Karen looks back at her phone.
Yes
, she texts Tomas.
Twelve thirty is perfect
.

At lunch she barely tastes the food. Chilean, she thinks, or Peruvian—something South American, and she's not even sure of this. Afterward she can't remember what she ate. The conversation is stilted, halfhearted. Tomas drones on about Honduras, his job at the hospital.

“How are you?” he says. “Are you doing all right? Is there anything you need?”

Karen nods. She looks up at him. “Yes.”

They play with their food. They speak of the weather, what a pretty day it is, how glad Tomas is that he doesn't go to work until the evening. Usually. “Not always, though,” he says. “If they need me at another time, they call me in. I am the last one hired. I am the new one.”

Karen pokes at her food, asks him how his family's holding up after the mother's death. Polite, a little distant, as if they are friends who know each other slightly, co-workers grabbing a quick bite before a meeting.

“Fine,” he says. “It was expected. No one was surprised. Sad, of course, but we were prepared. My brothers and I were with her at the end.”

Karen stares at her hands. “And after? When you got back? Do you have your old apartment?”

“No,” he says, “but the one I live in now is near to the old building. Would you like to see it sometime?”

“Yes,” she says. “I'd like that very much. Is it far? Can we walk there?”

He looks away, somewhere over her head. “Yes,” he says. “Not in this weather, but it isn't far. A short train ride from here. Would you like to see it?”

She nods. “Yes.”

It's a tiny fourth-floor walk-up. No elevator; the stairs are poorly lit. Even in the daylight, even on a day as bright as this, it's difficult to see the stairs.

“Be careful,” Tomas says. “The owner is a crook. He doesn't care about these things.” He cups her elbow lightly in his hand, steers her in the dark stairway, and Karen finds she's breathing very hard by the time they get to the fourth floor.

“Out of shape,” she says and laughs. “I didn't realize quite how much.” Tomas fumbles in his pocket for his keys. The door is old—dark brown paint is chipped away in spots, exposing other colors. A rainbow door. The lock is also old and Tomas jiggles the key until it catches, finally, in the tumblers. Odors from apartments downstairs drift in the air between them, beef and garlic and rich sauces. Karen inhales. “Guatemalan,” Tomas says. “Sometimes the women bring me food to try.”

“It smells heavenly.” Karen inhales again. “I've gained five pounds just breathing in your doorway.” For a second, she has the craziest thought that she could leave her life in Waltham in a heartbeat and live here in this quiet, unassuming place, at least for a little while. A transition period—that she could slide inside Tomas's life without a backward glance. She's lived in places like this—that room off Boylston, before she moved in with Joe, and the place in South Miami with the landlord's grumpy dog, its leash clipped to a clothesline in the yard.

The place is tiny. Dark, again, despite the yellow day. The window is small, dirty with smoke from the stove. A huge cat sits on the fire escape, turning when he hears Tomas's voice. He thumps against the window with his massive head.

“Spike,” Tomas explains. He wrenches the window open a few inches and the cat slinks in. “One day I was sleeping between shifts, and I woke up to a commotion on the fire escape. I looked out and saw this scruffy old guy fighting with a tom on the third floor. I believe a female house cat was involved. Attractive. Fluffy. I sometimes see her sitting in a window on the second floor. Spike will come inside to eat now, to visit, but he's an alley cat at heart. ‘I could never live indoors,' he tells me. ‘It is much too boring.' ” Tomas tugs at the stuck window and it slams shut with a noisy thud.

Karen looks around. Tomas flicks on a light, rummages in a cabinet for a bag of cat food, and pours the pellets in a chipped yellow bowl in the kitchen, an alcove off the only real room.

There is a large brass bed that he explains came from a junk shop two or three stops up from his. He tells her about lugging it onto the train in pieces. “Three trips,” he says. “One for the headboard, one for the footboard, and one for the—what—the raves?”

“Rails,” she says. “The rails.”

She perches on the bed. There isn't any other place to sit, really. It's the bed or the straight-backed chair pulled up to the table near the kitchen. She takes off her boots. They both know why they are here. Tomas sits beside her but not too close. He looks at the fire escape, at the small opening at the bottom of the window, and for a few seconds, neither of them speaks. There is only the crunching sounds of Spike at his bowl, voices floating down the hall, up and down, a cadence, words she doesn't understand, the clang of dishes. Somewhere there's a delicate, faint sound, a teaspoon on a china cup.

Tomas leans toward her. He cups her face in his hands, and she moves her head slightly, kisses his rough palm. He touches her hair, light, tentative, and it comes undone, drops around her shoulders; hairpins fall across the blanket and he kisses her. Soft. The bed sinks down in the middle; the springs are worn, the mattress falls inward slightly, forms a valley when they make love. He is gentle, whispering her name and other words that Karen can't quite hear or doesn't want to, endearing things, sweet things, fragments. The mattress puffs up around them. She closes her eyes and sees the print of a chenille bedspread, Tomas's. Or was it somewhere else? Was it another time? Another room? Joe's, or someone else's? Through the wall she hears a radio or maybe a TV, the news in Spanish, mixing with the oddly distant sounds of her own climax.

She opens her eyes. Sunlight leaks through the smudged window. Spike watches her from the bureau; his eyes are yellow in the near dark of the kitchen.

“Come here, Spike.” She pulls her hair back from her face, feels the bones of Tomas's arm against her back. “Here kitty-kitty.” Spike yawns. He jumps down from the bureau and Tomas gets up, opens the window, closes it again as the cat slinks out to the fire escape.

“He is going for a smoke,” Tomas says.

They lie together, not speaking. Tomas lights a candle, pulls a cigarette from a pack on the bedside table, leans to light it from the flame, a votive candle in a glass. Like in a church, she thinks, like candles for the dead.

“I have to go.” She leans up on her elbow. In the darkness of the room, Tomas is gray. His cigarette burns orange, crackles. His body underneath the sheets looks shrouded. Sacred.

He nods. “I love you,” he says. At least she thinks so. He says it so quietly, she isn't sure. She doesn't answer. She isn't certain what he's said. She shifts her body slightly. And in that second Karen knows that she does not love him. He's lovely and exotic and a little enigmatic. He's patient, kind; he's gentle, and he's waited all this time for her. For this. But she does not love him. Maybe before he went away. Maybe on a beautiful spring day with a bright blue sky. Or maybe sometime in the future, when Joe's death is not so fresh, when anger, pain, and guilt aren't all mixed up together and fear isn't so much a part of her life. But not now.

She sits up. “Your apartment is wonderful,” she says. “I wish I could stay here forever.” And it's true. She loves the place, the cat; it's just Tomas she doesn't love.

“You could.” He snubs out his cigarette. “You can.”

She laughs. “Antoine has probably eaten half the living room by now.”

He looks at her in the dull light from the dirty window and the tiny flame of the votive candle. He doesn't speak. He reaches out to touch her hair. Just a touch, and then he gets up. “I'm going to jump in the shower,” he says. “Join me?”

“In a minute.” She lies back down until she hears the water coming on, and then she gets up, too, slips into the tiny bathroom and washes at the sink. She doesn't join Tomas in the shower. Instead she pulls on her jeans and sweater, slides into her heavy coat, tugs on her boots.

Across the room, Tomas's cell phone jingles; it bounces on the wooden table near the bed. She starts to knock on the bathroom door, to tell him that he has a call, but she doesn't. “WORK,” it says. She scribbles down a note for him.
Had to go. Thank you for an incredible day. The hospital called while you were in the shower. Xoxo K
. And then, as an afterthought, just because it's there, she programs his work number in her phone. Just in case. She props the note against the pillow on the sagging bed and slips out through the rainbow door.

XXVIII

DORRIE

D
orrie knows she'll end up going to the Starbucks. It's both unsettling and frightening that whoever texted her from Joe's phone knew where they had their last rendezvous, their last cups of coffee and hot chocolate, their last chance to look into each other's eyes. A chance they'd squandered. What she wouldn't give to get it back, but she doesn't want to go there now. She shouldn't go.
It isn't safe.
She will, though. She can't not go.

Waltham, the man had said. She's googled the name and found that Geppetto's is a bar. They serve food, but it's primarily a bar. Waltham. Did
Karen
call her from there? Did she have Joe's throwaway phone? Did someone else find it and give it to the dead man's wife along with the rest of his personal belongings? The police? The EMTs? Did Karen call the only person whose two numbers Joe had logged into his phone? Is she intent on drawing Dorrie out? On seeing who was with her husband on the night he died? Was Karen sufficiently fueled on hate and fury to start running people down in the streets?