The Other Widow (4 page)

“Yes,” Lily says. “It's fine.”

“Be careful.” Dorrie hugs her daughter and continues to hold on until Lily pulls away. “Stay on the beginner slopes. Okay?”

“Right.” Lily rolls her eyes. “I left my gloves on your dresser,” she says. “I need them back, though. You never did return my hat . . .” She's already opening the door, already stepping out to the front porch, and Dorrie makes a mental note to replace Lily's hat. Something artsy, she thinks, something festive.

“Nasty weather rolling in.” Samuel turns back to the kitchen. “Bet they'll change their minds about going.” He looks at Dorrie. “You should be fine,” he says. “Just take your time.”

Dorrie listens to the slam of the kitchen door, the two sets of boot heels stomping down the steps. A moment later, Samuel's old Toyota starts up in the garage, moving slowly through the stacks of junk. One of these days the whole shaky mess is going to fall in on him, she thinks. And there he'll be, pinned into his own car by a bunch of silly random things like Lily's broken ski from a ninth grade field trip or a cardboard box full of The Complete Works of Shakespeare or the cartons of clothes for St. Vincent de Paul they never got around to donating.

She scrambles two eggs, dropping one of the yolks into Purrl's dish, where it stares up at her like a large eyeball. Dorrie thinks her husband would have made a great mechanic; he's good with cars—brake jobs, sparkplugs, tires. His current car is one he cobbled together, an old Corolla he picked up for a song. Most weekends, now, he goes to his friend's garage to work on a Volvo he'll give Lily when she turns sixteen. It looks like a little tank. White, and Lily will hate it, of course. She'll want a sexy sleek car like Mia's.

Samuel could have even been a carpenter, considering the great job he did last summer on the kitchen, but he's actually a computer programmer, a very good one. He's brilliantly creative, gifted with his hands. Samuel could make anything beautiful if he tried. He just doesn't usually try.

Sometimes, Dorrie regrets confronting him about his drinking. Maybe he needs to drink. Maybe it keeps his demons at bay or maybe it creates more—demons that block Dorrie out and build a wall between them

“Look,” she'd said one night, as Samuel rolled over to his side of the bed, his breath sour with cigarettes and beer. “I can't go on like this.” And then, in a sudden and ill-timed attempt to lighten things, she'd pulled the top of her nightgown low and said in a husky, Scarlett Johansson voice, “What've you done with the sweet guy I married?”

“Funny,” he'd said. “That's really funny, coming from you. Where were you, sweet
gal
? Where were
you
three nights ago? You really think I don't notice when you're not home, Dorrie?
Really?
” He'd gotten out of bed, stepped into his jeans, and pulled a T-shirt over his head. A second later, she'd heard him in the living room, the jingle jangle of his keys in the front lock, and then the angry rumbling of his car peeling out of the driveway.

When he came back he didn't mention their conversation. All he said was, “I don't know, Dorrie.” He stood across the bedroom, glaring at her as she sat on the window ledge in her white summer nightgown, the hum of the AC throbbing underneath his words. “I'm not sure we'll make it,” he said. “And you know what? I don't even think I care anymore.”

Their sex life all but disappeared after that, the rare attempts at lovemaking awkward and strained, with Samuel disappearing afterward to smoke a cigarette on the back porch. Their approaching anniversary has become a deadline of sorts. “Let's see where we are then,” he's said from time to time over the past months. “We'll take stock and decide where to go from there.” They still sleep together every night, still share a bed, but they are separated now by heaps of blankets and hurt feelings.

She runs a comb through her hair, unknots a snarl with her fingers, swipes a makeup brush across a square of brown eye shadow and runs it over the few gray hairs near her part line. Samuel, Lily—they're her life. The humdrum moments, the husband in a ripped T-shirt, the daughter laughing on a phone, the messy bedrooms and flat tires, the ordinary, everyday events that singly are forgettable but strung together constitute a life—these things she's gambled she will fight to keep with everything she's got.

By the time she starts her car, the day has grown still darker and more ominous. Dorrie turns off the expressway and glances at the GPS. The clouds dip suddenly, closer to the ground, like cheesy props in a play. Beside the highway, pale buildings hunch together in the cold, the faded brick, the mix of old and new. Naked trees lean forward toward her car, and she speeds up. Their branches look like bones. Dorrie almost never goes to funerals. They bring back her mother's death, her wrecked and ruined car on the six o'clock news, a can of peas rolling down the street, and a size-six shoe at the side of a snowy road. Her mother's funeral, too, was on a freezing winter day. Standing at the cemetery, Dorrie held her father's hand and watched her mother's ghost perched on the hood of the Kellys' old Pontiac in a sleeveless summer dress that billowed out around her in the February cold.
Mom!
Dorrie started to say.
You came back,
but her mother only touched her finger to her lips and smiled before she floated off and disappeared into the sky.

The church is crowded, stuffy with bodies and heat. Dorrie stands in the doorway for a minute, lost in the ambience of incense, flowers, and ancient stained glass, dull and unbright in the sunless day, the muffled, shuffling sounds of heavy coats and boots.

She slides in beside Jeananne and the others from work who sit in a rigid little clump in a back pew. Joe's longtime partner, Edward, stands in front beside Karen, the two sons, the daughter-in-law, his family Dorrie doesn't want to see, the one that contradicts everything Joe was to her. The priest drones on, the service hums and buzzes in the air, the day grows darker through the colored glass, and Dorrie closes her eyes, hears herself in some amorphous hotel room.
I feel so free when I'm with you.

The procession wends its way to the Mount Feake Cemetery, passes between two stone walls that edge the entrance. The wind blows hard off the river, scrapes across the naked trees, the crusty snow. Dorrie parks at the outer fringe of cars and stares through the windshield as tiny shards of ice begin to fall.

Her phone beeps. A new message. She reaches over to play it back, noticing the caller comes up as unknown. She panics, pushes at the button, hoping nothing has gone wrong on Lily's ski trip—impassable roads, difficult, dangerous slopes.

But it isn't Lily. “
Luck
,” she hears, and, “
yours
.” The voice is shrill, tinny, neither male nor female. Not human. Goose bumps stand out on Dorrie's arms. The two words hang in the front seat. She plays it again, and in the silence of the car, the voice is harsh and personal, as if the speaker is right there beside her; the eerie voice scratches at her brain. “
Everybody's luck runs out,
” it says. “
Next time it might be yours.
” She plays it one last time, listens as it rips through her and steals her breath, a cold, cruel hand around her throat. It could be anyone. It could be someone at the grave or sitting in a parked car only feet away, or standing in a clump of mourners, watching her. Observing her. She looks around through windows fogged with cold. She stares at a plot of trees behind her car and a shiver runs along her spine.

Was this about the other night—that she was lucky, then, to get away, but next time she might not be? Was this a threat? Her hands shake. Her teeth chatter. She blasts the heater, but she can't get warm. She opens the car door and steps out into the heaviness of looming clouds to make her way across the slippery ground. Her breath is raspy as she hurries past parked cars and huddled trees to stand beside Jeananne, where gravestones are lined up like short, grim soldiers keeping guard, where granite angels wait. She stands at the fringes of Joe's relatives and friends, huddled resolutely in the cold, their heels sinking in bitter ground. The wind howls over the Charles, through the barren trees, crackles through the twiggy bits of branches. Sleet comes down and sticks like needles to their clothes, making an odd sound, like seeds falling through a chute.

Beside the casket, a young priest leans forward to say something to Joe's family and Karen nods. A few blond strands of hair peep out from under her large scarf, and then she turns around, quickly, unexpectedly, before Dorrie has a chance to look away, to run her hand along her coat, or fix her hat, or clear the look of naked anguish from her face. For a second, Karen seems to stare straight at her. She looks lovely and fragile. Lost. She doesn't smile. She lifts her gaze and focuses on something behind Dorrie, her eyes intense and frightened. Blue, like Joe's, and Dorrie can't quite get her breath because the terror that she feels is mirrored there in Karen's eyes. Then, just as suddenly, Karen turns back to the priest and lowers her head. Dorrie turns around, too. She squints to see what Karen saw. There is a shift, a movement in the trees and again a chill slices up her spine because there's something there at the edge of her eye. A figure or maybe just the raw and blustery wind. The service ends. People stand in line to say their last good-byes; people walk among the headstones to their cars.

“Dorreen?”

“Yes.” She jumps. “Edward. Sorry. Didn't see you there.”

His face is bright pink in the cold. “We'll really have to pull together now.” His eyes skate sideways off her face. “Without Joe, it'll be rough. No way around it.”

Dorrie's heart gives a little lurch, but she stares at Edward, and it occurs to her that she is not the only actor here. The solemn gaze, the hearty hugs and glad-handing, the support. Edward is a virtual fortress. But maybe not. She nods.

“I need you and Jeananne on board. Both of you.” His eyes dart here and there and come up empty, since Jeananne and the others from the office have already gone.

“Right,” she says. Her voice is light. Airy. Bright. “I'll tell Jeananne.” Dorrie leans in to give Edward an awkward little hug, which he does not return, and then she pulls her hat down nearly to her nose and walks away, trails her gloved hand out behind her in a small, desultory wave.

When she reaches her car, Dorrie turns to take one last look at the disbanding group of family and friends, at the gaping hole that will soon hold the man she once held in her arms, the man who didn't care if she was a little odd, or if she didn't always think before she spoke. For a moment she can almost see him walking toward her, smiling. She can almost feel his warmth again, can almost hear his breathing, almost catch the moments whistling by, quick, shimmering, like skirts on a dance floor, or wind blowing through a jacket in a field. Joe, with his voice like music.
Kiss me,
like the words to an old song or a curtain flapping in a breeze or sun on a tiled floor. Like a memory just out of reach.

People are beginning to move toward her, talking among themselves, shaking drops out of their hair, brushing tiny bits of ice from their coats with the tips of their fingers, and Dorrie fumbles with her keys.
I love you, Joe,
she says to the sky outside the window, and then she sticks on her dark glasses and sets her GPS for home.

She starts the car and picks up her phone from where she'd left it on the front seat. Missed calls. She looks again. She tosses her sunglasses on the dash and stares hard at the last number as she sits, trembling, inside the freezing front seat of her car. There's no mistake. The number from Joe's burner phone stares up at her from the Night Sky background of her cell.

V

MAGGIE

M
aggie Brennan opens her eyes. She glances up at a small skylight, like the one in the book about Heidi and the grandfather on the mountain. The illustrations in the book intrigued her as a child, especially the picture of a makeshift bed where Heidi slept beneath a window in the roof. It's what sold Maggie on this place. The skylight. “Yes,” the landlord said when she'd remarked on it. “A renovation. Costly, but it adds so much light to what could otherwise be a little dreary.”

It's still a little dreary.

But Maggie likes it. She likes to monitor the light herself—how much comes in, how much doesn't. She yawns, switches on a small flat-screen TV across the room. A home remodel burbles in the silence of early morning as Maggie lies buried under multicolored quilts, coveting the claw-foot tub, the large black and white square tiles of a bathroom renovation on HGTV.

The skylight turns a lighter gray. A cough slides through the wall. Maggie rolls out of bed and heads for the shower as, on TV, a couple walks across newly installed laminate.

She'd left her car at work the night before and taken the train home. The main roads are clear, the small ones soon will be. Still, she was nervous about driving in the storm, made a snap decision she regrets now. She'll have to take the train in.

She slips on a sweater from the Loft and sticks an English muffin in the toaster. Nearly everything is within arm's reach of everything else. Her apartment is a closet. “But just look, darling! A skylight!” her mother said when she first saw it, even though she almost never comes to visit.
Four flights of stairs!
Maggie stuffs the remnants of her breakfast in the garbage disposal and flips the switch for a few seconds, rattling cups and spoons on the counter. She leans across the bed for the remote—the skylight is an odd cream color where the sun slants in, where the glass isn't covered in snow. She sticks on leather gloves and steps into her boots, unbolts the door, and slips into the hall.

She'd stayed home the night of that last bad storm, brought in dinner from the deli down the street. With her job at the insurance company, she at least has regular, daytime hours, unlike before, so she can decide things like this, when to stay in, when to go out. Although most people opted to stay off the streets that Friday night, far too many were out driving when they should have stayed at home. Inside. The phones at Mass Casualty and Life have been ringing off the hook ever since; the office is drowning in claims. She pulls up her coat collar and picks her way across the mounds of white. Two girls lie in a patch of perfect snow, moving their arms, making angels before it's all a dirty brown, covered with boot prints. A woman stands in the doorway, shouting, shivering in a pink robe. Maggie waves—it's a neighbor she sees sometimes at the corner market, with its granite steps, its bananas and fresh fish in summer. The woman gestures at the snowy street, raises her hands, and shakes her head as the girls run toward her, laughing, pushing at each other, their angel selves left in the snow.