The Other Widow (16 page)

She doesn't go straight home. Samuel won't be back for hours and Lily's texted her to say she's going out to eat with Mia and some other friends. The evening stretches out impossibly. Memories of Joe suffocate her. She feels edgy, restless, craving a connection to him. On impulse, she googles his address and programs it into her Garmin. Without stopping to think, she suction-cups the Garmin to her windshield, pushes
GO
, and turns down the volume, so the sexy British voice won't blare out
ARRIVING AT DESTINATION
in front of Karen's house. She heads down Brighton Avenue. She needs the closure, she tells herself. That's all. Joe always kept his home, his family, so removed from her, from the two of them, secure in Waltham. Protected. She speeds up when at last the traffic thins a little. She turns up the radio—an REM special—and stares out at the town, the streets; the Garmin snaps directions.

She makes the turn before Joe's block and sucks in a deep breath. And then she's on his street, the street he navigated all those years, where he put on his brakes or eased off his accelerator. Here's where he might slow down to finish a phone conversation with a client, or to hear the end of a good song before he pulled into his driveway, opened his garage door.

She almost stops. Suddenly, she wants to turn around. The notion of a garage and a yard is all a contradiction of who she'd let herself believe he was. Clearly, Joe was so much more than just her lover, so much more than a boss or a business owner. He had a whole other life. A nice, stable, good life—respectable, with dogs and sons and garages and a wife. For the first time, here, on this street lined with ancient trees and somber, stoic brick, she understands what she did not before—that she was just his way of letting go of Karen—of his marriage.

Dorrie nearly chokes. She no longer wants to see his neat storm shutters, his twiggy hedges. She starts to sail quickly past his house, to ignore the lure of his porch lights, the shimmer of his snowy lawn. The front curtains are closed except for a space where they don't quite meet, where a small brown-and-white dog sits with its nose against the glass. Without thinking, Dorrie pulls over across the street, dims her headlights, twists her hair into a knot beneath her hat, adjusts the brim. She turns the REM special down so low it's nearly off and when she looks up again, a woman walks to the window and stops. Quickly, before Dorrie can either turn off the headlights or turn them up, Karen's face is there against the glass, staring out across the lawn, and then she moves away. As Dorrie backs the car up and struggles with the gears, Karen must be grabbing a coat from somewhere close—a chair, a sofa—because Dorrie glances back to the house just in time to see her fly out the front door as REM whispers “Losing My Religion.”

XVIII

DORRIE

W
hen she hears Samuel come in, Dorrie's dying to tell him what she knows, to bombard him with questions—how could you go to my friend's
hotel
room? Or I
knew
you always had a thing for Viv—but she can't afford to open that whole can of worms. And that's exactly what would happen. The real reason for her husband stretching out across her best friend's bed was her own, and unlike Samuel's,
actual
infidelity. She'll have to bite her tongue, at least for now. She concentrates on a small crack on the wall above the stove, remembers, as she sticks leftover tuna casserole in the oven, the first time she'd invited Viv over for dinner—how Samuel had insisted that they'd never met, although they had, in fact, met at a play in Cambridge a few weeks earlier. She remembers how he said, “I never forget a face. Not, anyway, a face like yours”—how Viv had laughed, how she said, “Samuel, honey, I do believe you've kissed the Blarney Stone,” her dark hair curled around her face, those eyes, her southern drawl. Dorrie slams the oven door and remembers trying to explain the meaning of a Blarney Stone to Lily.

She gnaws on her lower lip. “Where were you?”

“A meeting,” Samuel says. “I told you. I called you from Amherst. The car turned out to be a total junker, but I paid the owner a hundred bucks to hold it for me. I might be able to use some of the parts on Lily's—”

“What sort of
meeting
? At work, you mean?”

He doesn't answer. He shrugs his shoulders, walks across the room toward the coffeemaker.

“The Copley Square
Hotel
?”

“Huh?” He pushes the button on the Keurig and turns around. “No. Why?”

“Just wondered.” She turns back to the stove. “So, where?”

“Downtown.”

“Where the hell
were
you, Samuel? What
kind
of meeting, exactly?”

“AA,” he says. He bends over the Keurig, waiting for his coffee fix.

“Really?” she says. So that explains the pot in the garage.
It takes the edge off
, he'd said. “Wow. That's— Why, now, though?”

“Does it matter why?” he says and he walks out of the room.

“No,” she says. “It really doesn't. I'm glad you're— Wait. What about dinner?” But he's out of earshot, and if he answers her at all, she doesn't hear.

Later, when Lily is back home and sleeping, when Samuel slips into his side of the bed, Dorrie inches up against the wall, ignoring him when he puts his arms around her. She doesn't move. She waits for his snoring to begin, waits for him to roll over to his side of the bed, to fall asleep the way he always does, with his back to hers, but he doesn't move away. He keeps his arms around her; his unshaved face is scratchy up against her skin. Dorrie turns around and they kiss, differently, more passionately, than the usual quick peck. He tugs at her pajama top and she raises her arms over her head as he pulls it off. They make love in the dim light from the mute TV across the room, soft light from a full moon eking in beneath the shade, as Purrl thumps loudly down the stairs to the kitchen for a midnight snack and Dorrie pulls the quilts over their heads to smother sound. It's very different this time from their usual encounters—few and far between and always awkward. This time she doesn't hold her husband at arm's length. She doesn't look over his shoulder at the wall or smell beer heavy on his breath, and, most surprising of all, she doesn't pretend he's Joe.

They don't say much afterward. It isn't a fairy-tale moment—they haven't really fallen back in love—but at least it's a start. She lies beside her husband as he turns away and she wonders how they got here, to this vacant place she thought they'd never ever be—so different from when they were young, running home on their lunch hours to be together, Samuel taking her in his arms, knocking the door shut with his foot as he backed her to their creaky bed—and afterward, flying across the Common to her job, red-faced, her shirt not quite tucked in or with the buttons wrong, her hair frizzed crazily. Time was so much longer then, the hours, the minutes, a song on the radio, waiting for Samuel to come home after work, listening for the sound of the hall door creaking open, his feet bouncing up the five flights of stairs—it seemed like an eternity. Is that the way Viv felt, waiting for him that night? Is that the way Viv
feels
? Maybe they still sneak a drink together at the hotel. No. She's just projecting. Rationalizing, and Dorrie wonders if the time will ever come when she can look her husband in the eye and say nothing happened or everything happened, without that feeling in the pit of her stomach that she's let everyone down.

Her cell phone buzzes across the room. Dorrie finds her pajamas and slips them on as beside her Samuel snores, oblivious.

It isn't really
really
late, but it is late for someone to be calling. She should let the message go to voice mail. All her unexpected phone calls lately are scary, anyway, and the quilts are heavy and warm, calming her into what could finally be a decent night's sleep. She sighs, takes one more look at Samuel and gets up, grabs the phone out of her purse.

Viv. What the
hell?
At least it's not from Joe's old number, and Dorrie sneaks downstairs, muffling the phone against the flannel top of her pajamas.

“Hello?” She sits in the window seat on the slightly peeling wood, the bay window with old thin glass. Icy air drifts in through cracks around the panes, but, despite the cold, she inches closer up against them, speaking in low tones that echo in the silent room.

“Dorrie? Listen, I know it's late. I was planning to just leave you a message.”

“Well,” she says. “I'm up now. Actually I— We—”

“Look.” Viv sounds almost breathless. “There's something I have to tell you.”

“Great. What? You're having Samuel's child?”

For a minute, there's just the sound of Viv breathing and then she says, “I told you he was really different that night.” In the moonlight streaming in, Dorrie nods, rolls her eyes.

“There was something else.”

“What?” Dorrie's only vaguely interested at this point. It's been a long, exhausting day, and after their last conversation, she has no desire to talk to Viv, especially at this hour, especially now, when she's finally feeling almost okay about Samuel. “
What?
”

“He wasn't himself.”

“So you've said. And
said
.”

“No, but . . . it was more than that. He was really, really angry. Just be careful, Dorrie. I know you're furious with me, but I still love you. And I'm worried, that's all.” She hangs up.

Oh for God's sake.

The sky is sparkly and the street is beautiful, bathed in moonlight with the streetlights looking like stars. It's freezing, though, even with the magic of the snow, and after a minute or two, Dorrie tosses the afghan back on the couch and hops off the window seat.

And then she sees Samuel. He's standing on the stairs, silhouetted by the lamp behind him in the hallway. He stares at her.

“Samuel?”

He doesn't answer, and it crosses Dorrie's mind that Viv was right. The man who has stopped halfway down the stairs does
not
look like her husband.

“Wait!” she says, her hands on her hips. “Samuel, wait!” But he just stands there for a second longer, like he's made of stone.

XIX

KAREN

K
aren studies her hair in the bathroom mirror, trying to decide whether to wear it up or down. The first time she saw Tomas it was up in a twist with a few loose wisps. It certainly attracted his attention then. Still, she doesn't want to give him the impression she's spent hours trying to re-create the details of their first meeting. This might well be true, but the purpose is defeated if he knows it.

She turns from side to side in front of the full-length mirror in the bedroom, noting her mushrooming waistline—all those days of lying on the couch, of eating whatever junk food was easiest to heat or pick up from a drive-through window. She sucks in her breath and watches as her stomach nearly disappears. At least it's wintertime. She pulls a sweater out of a drawer and puts it on. Simple, but still nice. Red. Tomas always loved red. “On you,” he used to say. “Only on you, I like the color red.”

She decides to keep her hair up after all, and she steps into a pair of black jeans from last winter. A little snug, but they'll stretch out by the time she gets to the restaurant. She does a few squats, feeling the material give slightly, and then she checks her makeup on the way out of the bedroom, slides a pair of boots over the skinny jeans. She feeds Antoine, finds her coat in the hall closet, and heads out to her car. She'll take the train. It's more dramatic.

Tomas is already in the station when her train screeches to a stop. He stands in the center, where he can spot the trains coming in and going out, reminding Karen of the times she caught the E line here to meet him. She can't really study him, observe him from her seat—there isn't enough time—but she can see that he looks good. Great, in fact. He's wearing a coat she doesn't remember, and she wonders if it's from Honduras or if he bought it after he arrived. Did he find it here in Boston at the end of autumn or the snowy start of winter? She's not exactly sure how long Tomas has been back in the city, or even in the States.

She reaches up to fix her hair as best she can, tucking a few runaway strands into a hairpin, and then she hurries off the train. She stops. She stands inside the hubbub of the station, and then Tomas is coming toward her, and she finds herself walking faster, nearly running. Anna Karenina. He stretches out his arms and she lets herself slide into him, lets herself be hugged by him for a moment. She pulls away.

“Tomas!”

He moves back a step or two, holds her at arm's length. “You look beautiful,” he says.

“Thanks. So do you. Handsome, I mean.” She feels a little off balance, almost breathless. Silly. Like a schoolgirl with a crush. It's cold in the station. She pulls her hood over her head and a few hairpins shimmer to the ground, land soundlessly on the concrete. He takes her hand and she feels the cold of his fingers through her glove. His freezing hands. She wonders how long he's been standing here on the platform, how long he's been waiting here. For her. She smiles. Her lips are numb.

“Let's go,” he says. “I've found a new restaurant. It's close. The food is very good.” His coat is cold. Heavy and coarse. They walk in near silence, their words nipped off at the ends, a quick sideways glance, a light, halfhearted laugh, their faces buried in the fronts of their coats. Snow falls in slivers and collects along their sleeves.

“Do you like it?” They sit near the window. The place is warm. Friendly, with a clamor of dishes and laughter.

“Yes,” she says. “It's very cheery.” She pulls off her gloves—her fingers are chapped and old-looking from the cold. She sticks them in her lap, leaves her coat on, shivers from the lingering chill.