The Other Widow (2 page)

Blood lies splattered on the dashboard clock, three drops above the nine, four more across the twelve; hot chocolate stains the seats. Everything is strangely soft, the dark, falling fast and hard, a velvet curtain. Dorrie hears the sounds of her own breathing, quick, frantic, and then she hears thin sounds, strange hums and murmurs, real or not, inside her head or from rooms above the shops along the street, her mother's voice whispering
Leave! Leave, Dorrie!
Sleet slams down sideways and a piece of newsprint dances in the air before it falls in through the broken window. One black glove lies faceup in a bank of snow.

The world snaps back in focus. Dorrie grabs her burner phone and shouts their whereabouts to 911. “Hurry!” she screams. “Please!”

She slides across the seat to Joe and even in her foggy, panicked state, she notices his airbag hasn't opened. She touches his face. Blood seeps from his ear and trickles down his cheek.
“Joe.”
She tugs at his arm. “Just breathe,” she whispers. “Just breathe,” and suddenly he does—a gasp, a gurgling, drowning sound—but only once.

Leave,
her mother says again, and this time when she reaches in the car, her fingers grasp the heavy coat and tug at the thick sleeve.
Go,
she says.
I'll take care of Joe,
and Dorrie bends to kiss him this last time. He's so cold. Everything is so cold. The wind howls in through fractured glass, and Dorrie slips across the seat to the passenger side. Blood oozes down her forehead and she touches it, feels the gummy heat of her insides. She bangs her elbow hard against the jammed door and slides onto the frozen ground. “I love you, Joe,” she says aloud and her words blow back to her.

She hesitates. Torn, before she turns away. She has no choice. To be found like this—with her—is the last thing Joe would want. He'd told her as much—the scandal, the embarrassment for Karen, for their sons. Dorrie tugs her knitted hat down over her forehead to hide the cut, to cover the blood, and her feet slip slightly on the icy ground as she backs up the dark street.

People spill from buildings, from apartments, bars, and restaurants. They dribble down from rented rooms, shouting, struggling into coats and pulling hats from pockets. The empty street buzzes with movement. Lights go on in buildings, silhouettes pass in front of windows, a closed shop opens suddenly, lighting up a mannequin with naked legs, a thin summer dress, ghoulish in the cold and death and dark. Large brick buildings loom like spectators around a grisly stage; tall windows come alive with winter coats on eerie faceless forms.

Voices bark. Sirens blare. People reach the sidewalks and hesitate, but only for a second, before they push on toward the car. When they are almost alongside her, Dorrie slips inside the crowd and moves with them toward the Audi, abandoned there against the tree. Snow collects on its roof, gathers in the broken windshield. But there's something odd. She takes a small step forward. A siren screams around the corner. She backs away, still staring at the car, at the driver's side, barely scratched.

When the ambulance and cops arrive, when the EMTs are there with Joe, when she hears one of them call to the others that he can't get a pulse, and then call out again that Joe is gone, Dorrie turns and staggers through the mounds of dirty slush, the ugly, wicked ice. She stumbles down a street cramped with people, with EMTs and cops, their cars pulled up against the wide, snow-covered sidewalks; others sprawl across the slick roadway. Headlights blast light in sharp, rude waves that bounce off bits of glass and stone and metal, corners of signs, the hem of a skirt against a boot.

Dorrie rounds the corner, watching until the ambulance is nothing but a blur, its shriek a thin sound on the night. She stops in front of a closed bakery—she can see its vibrant bright red awning even through the snow, in the faint scattered light of a streetlamp. Vague outlines of pies fill the window, and she squeezes close beneath the awning, blotting out the pastries with her reflection, pokes at the knit hat, at the blood painting dark red lines across the rows of cheery blue.

She waits. And then she picks her way back along the slick sidewalk to Newbury. A car lurks on the other side of the street, its engine huffing in the snow. It has only one headlight. Bright, like a beacon. Blinding. She can hear the tow truck coming up from Berkeley, the straining, grinding gears, and then the large, rough shape of it bumbling up the street. She listens to the shouts, the “Over here!” and “Back in! Back in!” and “Hook it up!” The clanging, thudding sounds of Joe's beloved Audi being chained. The one headlight from the lurking car winks as people cross in front of it, the make and model unclear in all the snow. She raises her hand to shade her eyes against the cloud of light as the car moves forward toward her and stops, catching her in its one blinding eye. Then, like a large and angry beast, it rolls out to the center of the street, turns, and grumbles off. A sedan, she thinks, dark—blue or black or gray. The taillights shed only a wobbly light. The tag is a blur.

She shivers. Joe is dead. She was there. She wants to lie across the stones of ice, to close her eyes and never open them again. But there is Lily. Her sweet Lily. She takes a deep breath, stares across the blinding snow. She'll get through this; she hasn't any choice. She
didn't
die. She has to find a way to glue herself together somehow, soldier on. She has a daughter she adores, a husband, a job. She has a life. Flawed, to be sure. Huge, gaping shocking flaws, but she'll do everything she can to hold on to it, even if that means walking away from a wrecked car, from this man she loved, even if it means putting on the most challenging performance of her life.

She glances at the lit shops, the slick street, and then she pulls her daughter's ruined hat down tight over her hair and rushes toward the train. Frigid winds snap at her gashed forehead, so strong they nearly knock her down. She feels for her glove in her coat pocket, has a vague memory of it flying through the windshield.

She drops her burner phone in a trash can, but nearly right away she hears its ringtone echoing behind her. She turns around and takes a step back toward the bin.

At first the car is just a blob of light. And suddenly it's coming toward her, swerving up from Arlington. The engine roars; the one bright headlight finds her in the haze, pins her in its sites as the car veers across three empty lanes, straight at her. The tires spin, whirring behind her as she runs across the street. Her feet in snow boots smash across crusts of snow. She slips and nearly falls, but she keeps running, moving—she keeps pushing forward, the knit cap plowing like a bullet through the night.

II

KAREN

K
aren Lindsay takes a quick look at the sky. She and Alice have just finished a late dinner at a restaurant near Alice's small bookstore, Bound for Glory, where for years Karen has worked with her best friend. Originally a joint venture with her ex, the running of the shop fell to Alice several years before, when the husband moved to Vermont with his twenty-nine-year-old personal assistant. So unoriginal, Alice says, if she speaks of it at all. She prefers not to.

Karen, who started working at the bookstore to help out, had stayed on, and, although she loves Alice, loves books, it's the sales she really loves. She misses working at her husband's company—chatting up potential customers, popping in to see how jobs were going, all the things she gave up years ago to stay home and raise the boys—all the things Joe does now.

“I don't know.” Karen squints out the window at the night sky. “Looks pretty ominous out there. We'd better wrap this up.”

“Probably so.” Alice takes a sip of tea, glances at the glass. “I'm close. Come stay at my place till the storm blows over.” She gestures in the general direction of Beacon Hill, toward the small brick building where she lives on Joy Street, with its cozy furniture, its grow-light plants, its two plump cats lolling on a futon in the bedroom.

“Antoine would have the house in shreds.”

Alice rolls her eyes. “You really should trade him in for a cat. They're much less trouble.”

“Careful. Antoine just might sic the ASPCA on you for being such a speciesist.”

“Sic! I love it. So Joe isn't back yet?”

Karen shakes her head.

“Rounding up clients?”

Karen folds her napkin, runs her palm along the crease. “He's in Rhode Island. Some kind of conference. After what happened last month—or was it the month before? Anyway, lately, he's a man possessed. I never see him. Even when I do, he's got his nose stuck in something to do with the company.”

“Wait. After
what
happened?”

“That fire in Jamaica Plain. Remember? Home Runs did renovations on it? About a year ago?”

“Wait. I don't— Oh! No. I
do
remember. That article you were reading at work. A couple died? The woman was pregnant? That horrible fire in the old two-story?”

Karen nods. “Joe was devastated. He knew them. At least he'd met them a few times. Our guys did the work on the house, so he was really— He is incredibly upset.”

“Was it arson?”

Karen takes a sip of decaf. “No. They investigated it pretty thoroughly, declared it a total accident, but you know Joe. He had to make sure it had nothing to do with Home Runs, the workmanship, supplies, any part of the renovation.”

“You can take the man out of the altar boy . . . No!
Wait!
God! What was that saying again?”

“It's the
church,
” Karen says. “ ‘You can take the
girl
out of the
church
, but you can't take' . . . Speaking of Joe—” She stops.

“What?”

Karen stares at her friend across the littered table. Her hand grazes a dessert plate, bumps a coffee cup. She leans forward as, behind her, snow flies across the window. “This might be nothing, but I found some e-mails,” she says, “written to him weeks ago. Several weeks.”

“What kind of e-mails?”

“I was snooping,” she says. “Joe was out of town, and I was, well, snooping, like I said. I logged on to his laptop and read through his e-mails. I was just trying to see where he was, actually. I couldn't remember if he said he was coming home that night or staying over. I kept calling him and he wasn't picking up, so—”

“Wasn't it locked?” Alice dabs her napkin against her lips and looks out the window at the storm, and, for a second, even she looks alarmed. “Password protected? Alan always—of course we're
divorced
—but he had everything protected. He was always so damn secretive, which is
why
we're divorced, probably, now that I think about it. So you found an e-mail . . .”

“Two. And it
was
password protected, but I figured it out. There were two e-mails.”

“From a woman?”

Karen nods. “In the middle of the night. She sent them while her husband was sleeping.”

“She said that in her
e-mail
?”

Karen nods again. “She also said she missed Joe.”

“Oh.” Alice grabs her glasses and takes a minute putting them back in her purse. She closes her bag with a definitive click and leans across the small two-topper. “I'm so sorry, Karen,” she says, and the look of pity on her face makes Karen wish she'd never brought it up, this crap about Joe's e-mails. “Is there anything I can do?”

“Don't be silly.” Karen moves around, gathering her things before she slides into her coat. “I'm sure it's nothing. I just thought I'd liven things up, toss a little intrigue into all this gloom.” She forces a laugh. “Really, Alice. It was probably some bored client. Joe isn't the philandering type. He's too disorganized. And he can't keep a secret. I've always known when he was lying—his whole thought process is right there on his face. I mean, it took me five seconds to figure out his
password
!”

“Karen . . . They're writing
e
-mails in the middle of the
night
!”

“No,” Karen says. “
She
is.
Was
. It was ages ago. I don't even know if she's still—”

“Don't be
naïve
!”

“I'm not. I'm many things, but naïve isn't one of them.” Karen stares at the frosty glass. She can barely see anything; snow is everywhere, blowing on the wind. The roads are empty, slick with ice. “You go,” she says. “I'll get this. It's my turn.”

“You sure you don't want to come stay with me until the storm—?”

“No,” she says. “But thanks.”

“Call me, then.” Alice gives her a tiny hug and their bulky coats bounce off each other as they stand beside the table. “Call me as soon as you get home so I'll know you made it back safe. Okay?”

Karen nods. “I will.” She sticks a wad of bills beside the tab, the scrawled total, trying to forget the night she'd found the e-mails, the night she'd tossed out so casually to Alice, as if it were a review of a dull movie. Really, she still sees the four typed lines every single time she closes her eyes, feels the glass of Pinot Noir in her hand, a chill in the air. That night is seared into her brain, the slight tear in the curtain behind the computer, Antoine thumping around downstairs, the smell of incense burning somewhere in the house, the e-mail.
Hi! I can't sleep. Lily's down the hall, wrapped in her dreams, and I'm here, sitting at the dining room table, staring at Samuel's empty cigarette pack and thinking of you.

She'd scrolled up, puzzled, to the address:
understudyfork@gmail​.com
, and then she'd checked back through his messages, found another one from five days earlier.

Sometimes when Lily looks at me I think she knows. It's in her eyes, the way everything always has been, like some small part of my DNA lets her see what's in my head.