He stood in the early morning sunlight at the end of his long gravel driveway, looking down at the envelope in his hands, and it occurred to him that his posture was eerily similar to the pose of Marlena in the painting back in the upstairs studio. He lowered the manila envelope, folded it over the rest of the mail, and stuffed the whole thing into the pocket of his jeans. He closed the mouth of the big black mailbox and turned to hike back toward the house. The coffee percolator was probably boiling by now. He’d have a cup on the back patio and watch the river for awhile before starting his shift. The leaves were in full color now, after all, and there was a pleasant crispness to the morning air.
He’d ignore the big manila envelope. There was nothing in there that he needed to see, nothing that demanded his immediate attention. How could there be? For one brief, black moment, he imagined opening the envelope and finding one sheet of paper on top of the legal records, blank except for six type-written words: YES, YOUR WIFE IS STILL DEAD.
He grinned at the absurdity of it, and then laughed harshly, and the laugh was partly a sob. He choked it back and looked up at the trees.
Recovery is a slippery slope
, he thought.
Just when you think you’ve made it to the top of the mountain…
He wouldn’t open the envelope. He didn’t need to. He knew what was in it, had seen all of it before. One of the things in the envelope was a photocopy of a highway patrol report, complete with a grainy black and white printout of a photo showing Stephanie’s silver Honda. In the picture, it was hard to tell what kind of car it was. Frankly, it was a little hard to tell that it was a car at all. The first time Shane had seen it, he’d thought it looked more like mechanical hamburger. The only recognizable part had been the passenger’s door, which jutted up out of the mess like the wing of a dead bird.
“I need to tell you something,” Steph had said during her last phone call. “I don’t want to tell you on the phone. Can we meet somewhere?”
Shane had still been in the apartment then, and he remembered standing there by the refrigerator, clutching the phone to his ear, unsure what he should say. Some small, petty part of him said he should refuse her. If she had something to say, she could damn well say it on the phone, or she could come back to their old apartment and tell him there, maybe right there in the kitchen with the butcher block between them.
But he didn’t say that, of course. For the most part, Shane wasn’t a petty person. And besides, he still loved her. He knew her. He understood her well enough to recognize the tone of her voice. Something had changed. She hadn’t sounded like this ever since that awful day two months earlier, the day he’d lost both his job and his wife in a single hour. The divorce had gone remarkable quickly from that point—Janice Hayes was exceedingly efficient—and Shane had signed the papers only a week earlier. So why was Stephanie calling him now? What had happened to bring about that change in her voice?
“Can we meet at the Spring Garden?” she’d asked, and Shane suddenly thought he knew. After all, the Spring Garden was more than just an outdoor bar on the corner of fifty-seventh and Park. It was where he had proposed to her, seven years earlier. He realized that the tone of her voice didn’t so much signify a change of heart. It signified weariness and resolve, as if she’d finally dropped a charade that had been very difficult to maintain. What he heard in her voice was sincerity and relief. She was doing something she’d wanted to do for awhile, but had chosen, for any number of complicated, convoluted reasons, to resist. She was coming clean.
Somehow, Shane had always expected this. After all, she laughed at his jokes. He understood her. You didn’t just throw something like that away. The divorce might be final, but they weren’t. How could they be? Fate wouldn’t allow it.
He agreed to meet her at Spring Garden for lunch that day. He kept his own voice casual, as if there was nothing particularly special about her choice of meeting place. It was almost as if he didn’t want to jinx it.
She’d never arrived, of course. Shane had sat at one of the tall tables that lined the wrought iron railing, nursing a Rolling Rock beer and watching the crowd mill past.
Stephanie had been living in a small apartment in the Meadowlands at the time, less than ten minutes away on ninety-five. She had her own particular brand of punctuality; she was almost always ten minutes late, but never more than fifteen. Shane imagined that she’d barely even left her apartment until the time she was supposed to be meeting him, and that she’d come breezing along the sidewalk at a quarter after one, breathing heavily and fanning herself with one hand, apologizing distractedly. Shane had seen it a hundred times, and it was, if anything, somewhat comforting. It had been one of the familiar small dramas of their marriage.
He’d waited and sipped his beer and watched the people on the sidewalk, gazed over the cabs that crawled beetle-like in the hard afternoon sunlight. By twenty after she still hadn’t come. After half an hour, Shane had begun to wonder about her.
By one-fifty, he’d known something was very wrong.
It had happened less than a mile before her exit. The pickup truck that hit her Honda had been traveling at over a hundred miles an hour, driven by a young man named James Herk. He’d been very drunk, and as was so often the case, he had managed to survive the crash. Shane had never spoken to him, but Janice Hayes had assured him that Herk was very sorry for what he’d done, that he had no memory of the event whatsoever, and that he’d promised, tearfully, to join Alcoholics Anonymous as soon as he was released from the hospital.
Shane doubted it, but he didn’t really care. James Herk didn’t matter. Shane had expected to be angry at the guy, but he wasn’t. He couldn’t muster the strength for it. All that mattered was that Stephanie was dead. She’d never make it to Spring Garden again, never tell him whatever it was she’d meant to say.
He’d meant to give her back her tee shirt, the light blue one that said ADDICTED TO ENDORPHINS. He still had it in his backpack, freshly laundered and folded. When he’d gotten home that night, he’d taken it back out again and just looked at it. Folded, it read ICTED TO END. He read it over and over, not really seeing it, his mind reeling numbly.
“This isn’t an official part of the proceedings,” Janice Hayes had said on the day Stephanie’s assets were disbursed. “All of your wife’s belongings will be turned over to her mother, her closest surviving relative. This, however, was retrieved from the car after the accident. I understand she was on her way to meet you. I thought you might like to…”
For once, Janice Hayes had seemed to be at a loss for words. She’d shrugged and set the object on the table of the conference room. It was Stephanie’s purse. “I’m just going to go get some coffee. Would you like some coffee?”
Shane had said that he would. Janice Hayes had nodded and left, closing the conference door softly behind her.
The purse was scuffed. The strap had been broken off, leaving a ragged hole on one side. For nearly a minute Shane had simply stared at it. Finally, he’d pulled it toward him.
He’d felt strangely guilty opening it, almost as if he was snooping. After all, at the time of her death, she had no longer been his wife. Nevertheless, he had loved her, and this had belonged to her. It had been with her when she died, had probably been propped on the passenger’s seat next to her. Sitting on the conference table, scuffed and torn, it had still smelled like her, the mingled scent of her perfume and the hand lotion she used.
Inside had been a mostly empty package of Raspberrymint Orbit gum, a tube of Blistex, her lipstick, a travel pack of Kleenex. He’d placed the objects reverentially onto the table next to the purse, lining them up as if they were museum exhibits, or crime scene evidence. Her tortoiseshell compact had been cracked; brittle bits of the mirror sifted onto his hand when he moved it. Her cell phone, broken, the battery dead. Her wallet. A granola bar. A travel-size bottle of Anacin.
And then Shane had stopped. Everything he had taken out so far he had expected. Seeing her things laid out on the table was strangely cathartic. Seeing the gum she would never chew, the lipstick she would never wear, the phone she would never again forget to charge, all of these things were heartbreaking, and yet they made the reality of her death seem somehow manageable, like something he could begin to grope around the edges of. These were her things, things she would never again touch or see, things he himself had seen a thousand times during their marriage, things that represented her, even symbolized her.
Except for the last thing.
It had settled to the bottom, buried beneath her sunglasses and a paperback copy of Zagat’s restaurant guide. Slowly, Shane had reached in and felt the object, gripped it, drawn it out into the light. It was small, mostly yellow. It made a happy little clattering sound as he lifted it.
It was a baby rattle. The handle was plastic, but the top was soft plush, fashioned to resemble Paddington Bear. His little stitched mouth was black and demure, smiling slightly, as if he knew a secret. Shane was still holding the little rattle, staring down at it in his hands when Janice Hayes came back. She settled two coffees onto the conference table, near the collection of Stephanie’s things, and sat down in the chair at the end. After a moment, Shane drew a breath. His voice came out very calmly, so much so that it surprised him.
“Did you know?”
She looked down at the two coffees steaming on the table, and then up at Shane, meeting his eyes. She pressed her lips together slightly. She didn’t say anything at all.
Shane figured that was answer enough.
Stephanie had been pregnant when she died. Shane knew it, knew that’s what she’d meant to tell him at Spring Garden.
He imagined it over and over in his mind, dreamed it relentlessly, as if he could change reality just by willing it hard enough. In his dream it was always the same. In the dream, she met him at his table, took a sip of his Rolling Rock beer while she waited for her own drink, an iced tea with lemon. In the dream, Shane commented on her choice of beverage, and she nodded cryptically, unsmiling. In answer, she reached into her purse and drew something out. She took Shane’s hand and placed the object in it, watching his face, watching to see his reaction. The little Paddington Bear rattle sat in the palm of his hand and he stared at it dumbly, speechless, his mind racing.
Finally, he met her eyes, saw the scrutiny in her face as she watched him, hoping he’d understand.
“Does this mean…?” his dreaming self asked her.
The dream Stephanie’s expression didn’t change. Her eyes remained on his, unguarded. Her eyes were two different colors; one green and one blue. Not many people noticed that. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, she nodded, and Shane realized that the reason her eyes looked so bright was that there were tears in them, trembling, not yet spilling over her lashes.
“I found out after I left,” the dream Stephanie said, keeping her voice low, almost a whisper. “I swear it, Shane. I didn’t know it that day in the kitchen. I’d stopped hoping. But later, after things had gotten going with the divorce, I missed my period. I told myself it was just stress, but… well… after two months, there was no denying it. I didn’t want to tell you until I was absolutely sure. Oh, Shane…”
In the dream, Shane touched her hand and held it, and his own eyes thickened with tears. He’d shed a lot of tears in the last few months, but never like this. Never out of happiness. The two of them looked at each other, blinking back tears, and laughing a little helplessly, and the Paddington Bear rattle clattered merrily between them, held between their clasped hands.
But that hadn’t happened, of course. Instead, Stephanie had been hammered to death by a drunk kid in his dad’s GMC pickup truck. She’d died with the baby still inside her, died probably before she even knew if the baby was a boy or a girl, before seeing it born and healthy, before discovering if it had two different colored eyes.
There’d been no funeral for the unborn baby, of course. If it hadn’t been for Janice Hayes and her uncharacteristically gracious choice to allow Shane to find the Paddington Bear rattle, he never would have known at all.
Sometimes he wondered if the baby wasn’t even his, but never for very long. Of course it was. Steph wouldn’t have told him to meet her at Spring Garden to tell him she was pregnant with someone else’s child. Nor would Janice Hayes have led him to the discovery that his dead wife had been pregnant if the baby hadn’t been his. She was a lawyer, but she was also a woman. Shane didn’t know her very well, but he knew that Steph had considered her a friend. Janice Hayes had known, and she had decided Shane deserved to know as well, regardless of what was legally required. Maybe even in spite of it.
Shane thought about all of this as he painted that morning. The scenes played over and over in his head, full of heartbreaking clarity and forgotten details.
He remembered the sound of Stephanie’s voice when she laughed, and the way she looked in the morning before she got dressed, the annoyed sound she always made when her hair got in her face.
