The Other Widow (3 page)

She'd read it again and again. She'd read it nine times, racking her brain. Who the hell was
Samuel? Lily?
Who were these people, shooting themselves into her life like a virus through a dirty needle? Clearly, Lily was the writer's daughter. And Samuel must be the husband, tucked away somewhere in a back bedroom. No wonder the poor guy smokes.

Karen pushes through the door. The wind is so strong that for a second she can only stand on the sidewalk, trying to get her balance—awkward, swaying in her bulky coat. She takes a few steps, vaguely aware of some commotion up ahead. She reaches for her gloves and sticks them over hands already red and half numb from the frigid air.

The street is dark; she's stayed much longer than she'd planned, and she wishes she'd taken Alice up on her offer. She still could. She could take the train to Beacon Hill. She ponders this as, somewhere several blocks away, a siren wails—a wisp on the strong wind. She heads for the station. The police are redirecting traffic, and Karen is grateful she took the train to work instead of driving in. She'd be tied up forever in this mess. An accident, she guesses, and, a minute later, she sees its silhouette ahead. She sees it only dimly through the snow—a dark sedan, a branch.

The car could be Joe's. It looks, through all the white and haze, like his old Audi smashed into a tree. No. It can't be Joe. He's in Rhode Island. She starts to take a step or two up the street to get a better look, but then she stops. She huddles in her coat and turns away to trek through the snow, her lips cracking in the corners, her face numb in all the bare, uncovered spots. She hears shouting, the close shriek of the ambulance as it rounds the corner and turns down Newbury.

The siren stops. Karen pushes on, relieved to reach the station, happy to stumble into the first car. She slumps across the seat, turns off her phone, watching as the B train plows through the snow as deftly as a knife might pierce the delicate white frosting of a cake.

When she stands on her front porch, rifling through her bag—when at last she manages to fit her key in the lock with frozen fumbling fingers and fall through the heavy wooden door to her foyer, Karen's house phone is already ringing.

III

DORRIE

D
orrie prays the front door won't squeak. The house is silent except for the white cat purring loudly on the sofa. Dorrie creeps into the downstairs bathroom to wash the cut on her forehead, sealing it together with a bandage she finds in the back of the cabinet. Butterfly. Such a happy name for what it is. She will probably regret not getting stitches when the cut begins to heal into a scar, but for tonight she's happy to be home, far from Joe's body lying still and gray in a hospital morgue. She takes off her bracelets, glittery, incongruous in the dim light oozing from the porch. She strips off her coat and jeans, buries Lily's bloody ruined hat in the trash. She moves the white cat gently to the end of the couch and drops onto the sofa with a quilt pulled over her eyes. Her sweater still smells faintly of Joe, a hint of his cologne clings to the threads. She lies in the black room until somewhere near dawn, when she falls into a fitful, dreamless sleep, waking later to her husband tugging at the blanket. She opens one eye, surveys the room through the ribboned edges of the quilt. The sun tilts in at the window. In the kitchen, Purrl stares pointedly at her empty dish.

“Where's Lily?”

“Spent the night at Mia's,” Samuel says, and Dorrie feels a small surge of relief that Lily's at her best friend's house. Samuel's voice is gruff, impatient. His hair sticks up in tufts. “So where
were
you?” He plunges his hands in his jeans pockets and looks around until his eyes light on a pack of cigarettes on the dining room table.

He's angry. She can see it in the way he walks across the room, his short sharp strides. She gets up, wraps the quilt around her in the cold house, and slides behind him in her stocking feet. “I guess it was a lot later than I thought.”

She reaches out to touch him, but he takes a step away, leaving her hand stuck in the air like a small chapped flag. She pumps up the thermostat and tucks her hands back inside the quilt. “It's freezing in here,” she says, but Samuel doesn't answer. He sits down at the dining room table with a coffee cup that used to say One Great Dad, but, after all these years of heavy coffee drinking, it says, O eat Dad. Smoke from his cigarette drifts out a window he's cracked open to the bleakness of the yard, and Latin music from next door flies in on the wind. “I called you all night.”

“Oh,” Dorrie says. “I guess my phone was off. Sorry. Jeananne was upset,” she tells him, “so I took her out for a drink. I left you a note. Didn't you see it? On the door?” She's babbling, nervous. She wills herself to stop before she says too much. Dorrie's often thought that restlessness and Catholicism are a dangerous mix, that she's always been a little too forthcoming, a little too contrite for her own good.

In the glass on the cupboard door, she watches Samuel staring at her back. His lips are tight over his teeth. He still looks furious and she doesn't really blame him. He shakes his head, glances away from her to the backyard. He's actually something of a mystery to her lately, this man she's been with over twenty years. She pries her thoughts away from the night before, from Joe, from the car driving straight at her. She tries to concentrate on this one minute of this one morning in her living room with an angry husband, a failing marriage she has no idea how to save.

As far as she knows, her husband's never been truly unfaithful to her, at least not with another woman. She doesn't count the bottle, but sometimes she thinks she should. Other times she looks at him and wonders why she couldn't just be satisfied with what she had, even if Samuel is unquestionably an alcoholic like his father, dead at sixty three from cirrhosis, never mind the euphemistic “liver troubles.” You're the love of my life, Dorrie, Samuel always says. Why couldn't that just be enough?

Certainly her husband is no saint, with his riveting gray eyes, his tousled good looks. And there was all that flirting with a neighbor right around the time he and Dorrie had a row. He'd packed a bag and vanished for the next few days, insisting later that he'd moved himself into a cheap hotel, but Dorrie always wondered if that was true. She thought the flirtatious neighbor looked at Samuel differently after his three nights away, as if they shared a secret, and once she caught the woman smirking at her in the grocery store. “You have trust issues,” Samuel said when she mentioned the encounter at the market, and Dorrie couldn't argue with him there.

Men are just really stupid, her best friend, Viv, said when Dorrie told her about Samuel disappearing at a dinner party given by friends—
She wanted me to help her fix the toilet in the upstairs bathroom. What did you expect me to do?
Or the time he spent on a backyard deck in semi-darkness with yet another attractive neighbor.
Mapping out a summer garden
, he told her on the way home, as she sat smoldering beside him. Maybe Samuel's strayed and maybe his flirtations never went beyond a backyard garden or a running toilet. Maybe he's an innocent or maybe he's just really good at hiding what he does. In either case, she isn't innocent at all. Dorrie is the one who's strayed.

She sighs. She won't tell him the truth about the accident. She can't. Not even part of it. She's on her own—to understand what really happened, to figure out if someone truly tried to run her down, and if so, why? And who? It's up to her to save herself.

She takes a deep breath, puts on her best Mariska Hargitay on
Law & Order
face. Strong. Focused. Calm. She clears her throat. “I guess I had too much to drink,” she tells Samuel's reflection in the cupboard door. “I tripped over a barstool and cut my head on the counter.” She turns around, shows him the butterfly bandage, looks him in the eye. “See?” She tells him how she went with Jeananne to a bar on Charles Street and about the man at the table next to theirs who ordered drinks for all of them. She tells her husband how Jeananne stopped sniffling over her ex to smile at this man with the blond hair and the dark eyes and the scar on his left cheek, elaborates on Jeananne dancing in the tiny aisle of the bar, going home, eventually, in a cab, and how Dorrie sat alone, sipping her drink and waiting for the snow to let up, not realizing how tipsy she was until she stood and lost her balance, hit her head.

When he's had enough, Samuel puts on his coat and steps outside, closing the door behind him. Smoke flies up from his cigarette and blows off into the sky. He coughs a raspy cough into the cold morning, and Dorrie knows he hasn't believed a single word she's said; she just doesn't know why.

She looks behind him at the door popped back open by the wind. It stands ajar. She stops. Panic sends a chill along her spine beneath her heavy sweater, beneath the quilt that used to lie across the bed she shares with Samuel. She feels as if she's sliding, plummeting, that there is no one anywhere to catch her. And then she remembers staring through the snow at Joe's wrecked Audi, the clumps of people pointing, shouting, as she took small steps back toward the car. There was something different then from the way she'd left it only a moment or two before, but at the time she couldn't put her finger on what it was. And now she can. Crossing the small foyer to the door that Samuel has neglected to close properly, she knows. The driver's-side door—
Joe's
door—the one that had been tightly shut right after the accident, was open when she came back with the crowd. And the car with only one headlight—it was there, she thinks, across the street. Lurking. So whoever was inside the waiting car had likely seen her slip away. She takes a breath, and Joe's last words come back to her.
It isn't safe. For
us.

IV

DORRIE

T
hey'll bury Joe today. Dorrie touches the cut on her forehead, puckered and healing, an ugly train-track lie leading backward to the night he died. She tugs at her bangs, covering the naked scar, runs her hands down her straight black skirt, pencil thin, demure, adjusts her stockings. Her blouse is black brocade beneath a black silk sweater, a plaid wool scarf the only touch of color.

She stands at the kitchen window, staring at the small backyard, where an old elm shivers. Behind it remnants of the autumn garden rot into patchy ground and Dorrie lets her eyes go out of focus, hoping for some sign of Joe. Nothing comes. The sky that started out a pastel blue has grown much darker through the morning and the same clouds that were thin and white at breakfast have turned gray by early afternoon.

“So is it a wake or a funeral or what?” Samuel squats in front of the nearly empty fridge and grabs a carton of milk. She looks away.

“A funeral. It's so . . . It's so awful. I really don't want to go.” If there were any way at all she could stay home, she would. But her absence would raise questions, the last thing Dorrie wants.

“For his wife especially,” Samuel says. He's staring at her. Dorrie feels her cheeks burning underneath a heavy layer of foundation. “Are you okay? You look a little—pale or something. A little green around the gills. You should probably eat something before you go.”

Dorrie nods. “I will. You know how I hate funerals.”

“I know.” Samuel squints at the date on the milk carton. “This can't be easy for his wife. Unless they weren't really—”

“They were,” Dorrie says. She straightens her skirt, puts on a bland face, a bland concerned voice. Sedate. Calm. “
Extremely
close,” she says. “And I'm sure this must all be un
bear
able for Karen. I can't even imagine.” She sticks her daughter's cereal bowl in the sink and pictures Karen reaching for a plate in her own kitchen with a graceful, fragile arm, imagines her holding a cigarette, tilting her head back to blow out the smoke, can almost hear the echo of her footsteps on the stairs, her voice bouncing off the open empty spaces of the house she'd shared with Joe. A character in a Greek tragedy.

“What if it'd been me?” Samuel says.

“Oh! God, Samuel! I'd be devastated. Don't even talk like—”

“Would you?”

“Yes,” she says, moving closer to her husband as, again, he takes a tiny step away. “Of course!” And she would be. Even with the lies between them, even with his nights at the corner bar, even though she yearns for Joe. Even if her husband lately takes a step away when she moves toward him. Even so, she'd be distraught if something happened to him. She loves Samuel. She knows he loves her, too; she's never doubted that. She knows that if, at the end of his life, he's standing in some mystical place between worlds and someone asks him to name his one great love, Samuel will breathe out her name without the slightest hesitation.

Dorrie might have a harder time with that question. She would have to weigh all the moments, hours, years, spent with Samuel—Lily's birth, the times they cried together, all the meals and fights, the rants and silences, the blankness they share now. She'd have to weigh it all against the time she had with Joe, exciting, perfect moments that left her always wanting more.

They are two entirely different things. Husbands. Lovers. One is for the long haul, and the other—well, the other probably isn't, although she's only had this one experience, and she'd never really meant to sleep with Joe. But it was like a drug, their love. It forced her to wake up. It saved her.

“Dad?” Lily stands in the kitchen doorway, an overnight bag in her hand. She's going on a ski trip with her best friend, Mia, and Mia's thrill-seeking, fun, athletic parents. “Ready? You look pretty, Mom,” she says, crossing the new kitchen floor to give Dorrie a kiss. “See you in a couple days.”

“Thanks, honey. Do I look— Is my makeup okay?” Her voice is high-pitched, squeaky.