The Other Widow (7 page)

“And at the cemetery. God. The cemetery. I was afraid they wouldn't do the burial and we'd have to put it off until spring, but they were really . . .” Karen sighs, remembering that ancient, eerie place, with the wind wailing off the water, the cold damp ground, such an unfitting place for Joe. She closes her eyes, sees her husband laughing with his head thrown back. So alive. Warm. So unlike Karen, with her inability to open up, her reserve, her handful of people she really cares about, her sons and Alice and Joe, Lydia, taken far too soon by cancer, and, for a little while, Tomas.

“Everybody loved Joe,” Alice says. “Definitely one of the good guys.”

Karen butters her croissant, rips open her Earl Grey, and dips the tea bag in her cup. “He was. People used to come up to me all the time—Christmas parties, grocery stores, PTA meetings, back when the boys were still—you know—in school, on the soccer team. Complete strangers would come up and tell me what a good boss Joe was, what a great dad—all the coats he collected, all the toys, the mountains of canned beans. ‘Such a kind man,' they always said. Of course, they didn't
live
with him. They weren't
married
to him.”

Alice starts in on a bear claw. “It's always different for the wife,” she says. “You don't have to tell
me
.” And for a minute neither of them speaks.

“Alice.” Karen leans over the small table, so lacquered it reflects the light from a lamp hanging above it. “I was there. The night Joe died, I was there.”

“You were where?”

“Where Joe hit that tree. Where he
died
. You were, too, actually. We might have both—I'm not sure exactly when we left the—” Her voice trails off.

Alice looks horrified. “God!” She glances at the window, takes a swallow of green tea.

“When
they
hit the tree,” Karen says. “She was with him—the girlfriend. It was in the accident report—not
who
she was, just that there was someone—you know—someone else . . . an extra Starbucks cup or something. Anyway, I guess you were right.” Karen clears her throat, plays with her napkin.

“Wait. I don't— Did you see her? Did you see Joe's car or—?”

“I did
sort
of see the car. But . . . it was snowing so hard, and, I mean, Joe wasn't even in
town
as far as I knew— I didn't see
her
—but I didn't look, really. I just made my way to the station to catch my train. I could barely even see the car, but I— It did cross my mind. It looked like the Audi and I even took a couple steps toward the—but then I just took off in the other direction, caught the train. Sometimes, I wonder if I knew it was Joe. On some level, you know? Subconsciously. That I couldn't deal with it, so—”
I did what I do
, she almost says. She stops.

“If so, you were probably in shock.” Alice tsk-tsks, takes Karen's hand in both of hers. “Or blocked it out. Did you tell the police you were right there? Did you mention it when you went down to . . . ?”

Karen clears her throat. “To identify Joe's body? No,” she says, and her eyes blur with tears. “I went to the hospital when they called me—but I never told them. It didn't seem important.” Karen dabs at her eyes with a napkin and gulps down her tea. For a few seconds, other people's conversations fill the space between them. She starts to tell Alice someone's spying on her. Stalking her. She starts to say that even at the cemetery, even when she stood beside Joe's grave, she'd felt this strange and disconcerting presence. That when she turned around, she'd seen someone—she could have sworn it—a figure in the trees. She sweeps a few random crumbs into a tiny mound. “I've got to get back,” she says. She wraps her croissant in a napkin, sticks it in her purse, and pokes at the running mascara at the corners of her eyes. “Antoine gets a little nuts when he can't get out to pee.”

“Antoine's always nuts,” Alice points out.

Karen hesitates. “Thanks,” she says, “for listening.” She stands up, puts on her coat, and leans over in the cramped aisle to give Alice a hug before she hurries to the doorway. Once there, she hesitates. For a second, she thinks about boarding Antoine and taking Alice up on her offer, staying in her tiny place, hemmed in by neighbors, surrounded by solid brick, the houseplants thriving under lamps. Although Karen has always felt a little claustrophobic there, it seems incredibly safe now, as if all of Beacon Hill were a scene inside a shoebox, with its up and down streets, the insulated feeling of this coveted and bustling area. She leans her shoulder hard against the heavy door and looks both up and down the sidewalk before walking quickly to her car.

Nearly an hour later, she pulls into her driveway, stares at a yard stretched like a sheet of cotton batting. Pure. Pristine. She walks up her front steps and unlocks the dead bolt, glances at the note she tries to remember to leave beside the alarm now every time she sets it—she's learned the hard way just how quickly the company responds. She punches in the code. Antoine raises his head with a little snort and stares at a thin, black studded leash hanging near a kitchen door in dire need of paint. The portion underneath the knob is jagged from Antoine's constant scratching and other paint shows through, a hopeful avocado from ten years before. Karen perches on a kitchen stool and stares at a stack of unpaid bills on the counter. She should have told Alice about her stalker, should have picked her brain. Karen eventually tells her best friend everything, so maybe Alice could have fit the pieces together, or at least had an objective opinion.

She fiddles with a plastic water bottle. No. She'd dumped enough on Alice for one day, admitting that she'd walked away from the unpleasantness of her husband's messy death. It didn't really happen that way but that was how it must have sounded to Alice. More than enough for one lunch, but that isn't the real reason Karen doesn't want to talk about this feeling that she's not alone. She's afraid if she does, it will become more real. She grabs a heavy flashlight on her way out to walk the dog, not so much for light, but as a weapon. Just in case.

The wind picks up. Antoine chases everything he sees, piddling, finally, at the edge of a neighbor's snowy lawn, which, in the waning light, shows up her dog's poor manners. Hers, really. “You need to drink more water,” Karen tells him, glancing at the patch of yellow snow. “Or maybe
less
.” She tugs on the leash and Antoine howls. The neighbor's door flies open, and Karen sticks the yelping dog under her arm and heads for home, the flashlight banging against her hip. Antoine wails. Night drops suddenly and Karen picks up her pace as Antoine sinks his little razor teeth into her jacket. “Damn!” It's slippery on the sidewalk going to the house, and Karen teeters, struggles to keep her balance. She grabs the flashlight from her pocket and shines it on the snowy path in front of her, where fresh footprints are scattered like fall leaves across the lawn. She shines the light along a trail of sunken spots marring the pristine blanket of thick snow.

On the front porch, Karen unlocks the front door and drops Antoine inside, pushes back to the yard. She finds the first footprint at the edge of the lawn near the street and follows the trail to the bay window in front, where the tracks turn right, heading for a small gate in the side yard. She stops, stands on tiptoe, aims the flashlight over the wood fence. In the backyard, tracks lead to yet another window and then back to the front, and finally to the street.

Snow picks up, filling the footprints, sucking them back into the night, the yard. Karen shivers. She turns and hurries back inside, sets the alarm, and stands at the edge of the window in the dark of the unlit living room. She could call the police, but by the time they arrive, the footprints will be invisible, with all this snow. They'll tell her it was just a neighbor checking on her to make sure she's all right—her car parked in the driveway, the darkened house, her husband's recent death. Why doesn't she ask around? they might suggest, their radios spluttering from their belts. Why doesn't she check, see if it wasn't just a well-meaning neighbor?

She walks through every room in the house. Checking. Finally, she pours a glass of Pinot Noir and drinks it quickly, pours another glass, and the theory of the worried neighbor seems more likely.

She slumps across the couch under an afghan. The house is far too large and empty with her husband gone. Creepy, now. Even with all his absences, there had always been the ambience of Joe, the knowledge that no matter how long he was gone, he would eventually come back. When he was home, she had his body there beside her. Even if they curled away from one another like burning papers, if she listened, she could hear his breath, and if she moved just so, she felt the pounding of his heart. Since his death, she lies awake, remembering silly things, like standing in the automatic doors at Target, watching as he disappeared, bit by bit, running across a rainy lot to get the car, the blinking lights, the careless, swishing sound of the glass doors. She misses him a hundred times a day, laments the shocking death—the snow, that fucking ice. Cruel of him, she thinks, to die the way he did, with another woman there beside him in the car. Who was she? The question plagues her. Whose arms held him as he died or called his name for the last time? Who was there to say good-bye? Regret and anger bubble up through the wine. Somewhere at the back of the house, a curtain makes a rustling sound, like a sail, and she wonders if it's Joe's ghost come back to haunt her.

And the boys. She can't even deal with that right now. They've taken on their father's death in such completely different ways. Jon calls every day, comes by more often than he ever has before. He keeps it in, whatever he's feeling. Not surprising—he and Joe always had a complicated relationship. Too much alike, she used to say. “Your son is just like you, so you have the same Achilles' heel, the same temper.” And now, without the chance to set things right—“Give him time,” Alice always says. “He'll sort it out. He just needs time.”

Robbie, on the other hand, deals with his father's death like he deals with everything. Straight on. He cries, he drinks too much, he calls his mother twice a day. He'd sleep there on her couch if she let him, but, tempting as that sometimes seems, Karen keeps him at arm's length. She needs her space and, even if he doesn't know it, Robbie needs his, too.

She finishes the wine and hopes it keeps at bay the raw, wild grief that rakes through her late at night, fingers from the past that reach inside her bones to wrench from her all the moments of her marriage and toss them out into the spotlight, sorrow that leaves her wailing in a blue robe on a splintered wooden step at 3
A
.
M
.

Her phone rings and Karen closes her eyes, waits for it to stop—Robbie, she thinks, or Jon. Vigilant. Kind. Worried—her little sentries, like guardian angels, these two. The ringing stops and then starts up again, insistent and unnerving. She won't worry the boys. Not now. Antoine barks, runs in circles at the edges of a dusty Persian rug. Karen sighs, forces herself up from the couch, and digs around inside her purse until she finds her cell. “Hello?”

“Karen,” a familiar voice says. “It's Edward. We need to talk.” She notices his lack of—something. Tact? Humanity?
Edwardness
? He is usually so calming—kind, really. “It's important,” he says. “It's about the company.”

“Were you here?” Of
course
. It must have been Edward, barging over unannounced, leaving tracks across the lawn, trying to get her attention through the window after driving all the way out here. Inappropriate, but still a lot less scary than the thought of some stranger. She tries to remember Edward's shoe size, match it to the footprints in the snow. The size of someone's feet was supposed to mean something—the size of their feet and hands, was it?

“No,” he says. “
Your house?
Why would I? Jeez. Drive all the way out there without letting you know I was
com
—?”

“How 'bout now?” she says. “Where are you
right now
?”

“Still at the office.” He sounds grumpy, and she pictures Edward, sitting Scrooge-like in his office as the snow pelts down outside. “Meet me for lunch?” he says. “Tomorrow? I can come there if you don't feel up to driving. I could pick up something to go and swing by your—”

“No! God!” She looks around at the plates in piles on counters and the rug coated in dog hairs, the dining room table stacked with mail. “I'll meet you in town.”

“Even better.” Edward sounds like himself again. “Legal's on the wharf at twelve? That work?”

“Fine,” she says. “Legal's at twelve.” She hangs up. For a fraction of a second, she thinks about stopping in to see Tomas.

VIII

KAREN

O
n the way to meet Edward, Karen taps the brake in front of Mass General. She could just park and run inside, visit her old friend Tomas in the ER, or wherever he is now, just to feel there's something concrete in her life. Some
one
concrete, some kind of anchor. She can't stay, she'll explain—she has this business lunch. Joe is gone—her husband. Dead. She'll take a breath or two, get herself under control before she mentions that her engine sounds a little off. That place in Waltham—that place Tomas worked for a while. Hoods? Does he still recommend it?

She stops, but only for a look, a quick glance at the building, and then she heads to Summer Street. She'd gotten only two texts from Tomas when he came back from Honduras months before. I'm in Boston, he'd said in the first one, which Karen had instantly deleted.
Working at Mass General again. Would love to see you
. There'd been another sort of half text.
Karen? Where are you????
And the question marks had added urgency, passion, but, again, she'd not responded.
Would love to get a coffee and catch up
, she might have said, but she hadn't. Tomas made it clear before he left the country that he had wanted more than she. He was certainly attractive, with his soft brown eyes, his sexy smile. No argument there. Still, when Karen weighed the pros and cons of taking that next step with Tomas, she'd decided not to. He wasn't married. He might turn out to be a little needy, show up at their front door in the middle of the night, drunk and demanding. Latin lovers were known for their passion, something Karen sensed in him that both attracted her and gave her pause.