The Widow's Season (11 page)

By sunrise his mind was already set. He would stay at the cabin and try to create a new life, something Sarah might want to share. When the time was right, he would return to her, and ask if she wanted to start again.

On the ride to the store, he considered everything that he was leaving behind. The college would be fine without him; several physicians in town would be happy to take his place, and his student patients came and went so frequently, he had made few strong connections. For serious ailments, undergraduates usually went home to their family doctors, and as for the faculty, most of them avoided the college waiting room, dreading sick students who might plead for extensions.

All in all, he felt surprisingly few obligations toward other human beings. His friends were so busy with their jobs and children, they wouldn’t have much time to mourn, and Nate had so many consolations between his women and his wealth, he would never suffer for long. Only Sarah had the capacity for extended grief. Sarah, with her memories, her poetry, her inconsistent philosophies. He could not leave her in limbo. Eventually he would have to go to her, to explain everything and give her the power to decide what should happen next in their lives.

At the store he withdrew two hundred dollars from the ATM. He guessed that Sarah wouldn’t notice; she never balanced her checkbook and maintained only an approximate notion of what the totals should be. Their funds were always sufficient, and when the bank sent its monthly statements she simply glanced at the balance and threw the sheets onto his pile of papers to be filed. Widowhood would probably change her habits, but that would take months, and by then they would have spoken. In the meantime, the money machine would serve as his accomplice.

He was going to need more supplies. Two pairs of underwear were insufficient to start a new life, and the general store offered meager groceries—canned fruit, Wonder Bread, milk cartons with overdue expiration dates. He needed warm clothes, medicines, and hardware. He needed, alas, a Wal-Mart. Sarah almost never visited the one on the outskirts of town. If he went there in the early morning, he could probably avoid anyone he knew.

David planned his shopping for the following Tuesday, and prepared by growing a seven-day beard. When the time came, he wore a baseball cap, his knapsack, and black sunglasses that darkened the sunrise to a midnight glow. He pedaled along side roads as much as possible, averting his face whenever a vehicle passed. The mountains were grueling and his legs were weak; he had to push his bike up some of the hills, so that the forty-minute car ride to Jackson took nearly three hours. It was almost nine o’clock when he arrived at the supercenter, an hour behind schedule, but when he scanned the parking lot for familiar cars, he recognized none.

Inside the door, he angled his face away from the security cameras. Removing his sunglasses, he hurried through the aisles, indiscriminately grabbing fishing line and hooks, underwear and socks, a sweatshirt, blue jeans, a spatula, tape. Each minute was an excruciating exercise in paranoia. He cringed at every possible encounter, maintaining an aisle between himself and all other shoppers, but it was a needless precaution. The strangers remained isolated in their own concerns, more attentive to prices than to people.

The only person who looked him in the eye was the checkout girl, who smiled and asked, “Credit or debit?” He had automatically run his card through the machine—the Exxon Visa that Sarah rarely used. Now he would have to sign his name on a piece of dated paper, the first tangible proof of his life after death.

“I’m sorry. Can I pay with cash instead?”

“Sure. Just press cancel.”

Outside, next to the riding mowers, he emptied his plastic bags into his knapsack, and was surprised at how few of his provisions fit inside. Glancing around, he kicked off his shoes, pulled his new blue jeans over his shorts, and tied the sweatshirt around his waist. He stuffed fishing line into his pockets and tied tube socks around his handlebars, looking like some kind of bike-riding homeless man. But no one stopped, no one stared. Silly, to have imagined himself as a magnet of attention. He could probably ride through town as unnoticed as every other ghost.

Only at the parking lot exit, when a blue Accord pulled up on his left, did he feel his stomach clench. There was Margaret, the ubiquitous woman, concentrating on the red light. Slowly, very slowly, avoiding sudden movements, he turned his handles to the right and coasted into the gas station on the corner. He stood behind a pump and watched until the last trace of blue had disappeared down the road, then he pedaled ferociously away from town.

A mile later, where the fast-food restaurants gave way to farmers’ fields, he stopped by a meadow of Queen Anne’s lace and dropped his bike in the grass. His heart was pounding, his hands sweaty. At the edge of a barbed wire fence, he stared out across the pasture, and wondered if Margaret had noticed him. Surely she would have stopped and stared. He could still see her silhouette, an arm’s length away, and how strange it felt, to be fleeing from neighbors, cringing at all human contact. His exchange with the checkout girl had been his first scrap of conversation in seven days. With no telephone at the cabin, no television or computer, the bedside clock radio was his sole companion, its reception so weak all he could pick up was the local country music station. He preferred the sound of whippoorwills and even the cawing of these crows that now gathered before him, hopping among the goldenrod.

Two weeks later as he sat on the deck, thumbing through a newspaper from the general store, David came across the announcement of his memorial service. Saturday, four P.M., Jefferson Chapel. In lieu of flowers, donations were being accepted at the Rural Development Medical Clinic.

He read the item three times, wondering if he could get away with another trip to town. The service didn’t appeal to him so much as the idea of seeing Sarah, and trying to gauge her feelings. But going to town was risky. His Wal-Mart escapade had left him stu pidly fearful, dreading a knock at the door—Margaret or Sarah or Carver. But as each day had passed in solitude, he had become more convinced of his invisibility. The human brain manipulated visual data into objects that were comprehensible and expected. No one had expected to see him at Wal-Mart, just as no one would be looking for him at his own memorial service.

The next day he packed his knapsack with bottled water, a bag of trail mix, and a paperback novel. He had shaved his beard several days earlier, but his sunglasses and baseball cap made him confident. Most of the people who knew him would be inside the chapel. If he came late and kept his distance, the chances of detection were slim.

At five minutes to four he arrived in the woods at the edge of the college campus. Leaning his bike against a pine tree, he followed a circuitous route, shying away from the busy quad with its imposing perimeter of brick buildings from which a colleague might suddenly emerge. When the stone chapel appeared, he veered to the opposite side of a hedge twenty yards to the left. There he stretched on his side in the grass, pulled the book from his knapsack, and tipped his head toward the pages so that the ball cap shadowed his face. Behind his sunglasses he closed his eyes and listened to the sounds floating through the chapel windows. “Amazing Grace,” “Be Still My Soul,” a collective recitation of the Twenty-first Psalm, then a long stream of speakers, distinguishable only as alto, tenor, and bass. A half hour passed before he heard the young reverend, his volume higher than the others, using words like
Christ, redemption,
and
heaven
. A breathy flute whispered Gounod’s “Ave Maria” and the air was hushed in benediction, broken by the organ’s cry of “Onward Christian Soldiers.”

He turned and looked through the leaves as the human record of his life emerged from the chapel doors. First Sarah and her sister, Anne, arm in arm; then Anne’s husband and two daughters, followed by Nate with his latest blonde. The reverend gathered them into a receiving line as the congregation passed—administrators, faculty members, several student patients. His squash partner, his dentist, the owners of his favorite restaurant. Three cousins, two college roommates, most of Jackson’s medical community. He felt a grim satisfaction at the size of the crowd.

Sarah seemed to be enduring the condolences with admirable patience, accepting a handclasp from the dean she despised, a kiss from Mrs. Foster while her boys kicked at the shrubs. When most of the mourners were gone, she walked alone to a wrought-iron bench, and David followed on the opposite side of the hedge. In her face he saw none of the collapsing misery that had come with her miscarriages, only a drawn, tired expression.

Suddenly he crouched, for she had done something strange. She had stood up and turned in his direction, as if called by a familiar voice. Her eyes scanned the hedge, then stared into the sky, and finally she walked back to the chapel, placed her hand against its exterior, and began tracing around its edge, disappearing from view. He returned to his original vantage of the chapel entrance and watched Sarah appear around the corner. Nate offered her his elbow and escorted her to the car, while his girlfriend followed five paces behind. The three of them climbed into a blue Accord, and for the second time that summer he watched Margaret whisk Sarah away.

Show’s over, he thought. There would be no funeral procession, no headlit drive to the cemetery. There was nothing to bury or burn, no corpse to slather with grisly makeup. He supposed they would all congregate at his house, and he wondered if he should follow.

Behind him, the five-thirty sun leaned toward the Alleghenies. If he didn’t leave soon he would be pedaling through the mountains in complete darkness. Still he hesitated, because in watching Sarah, the dark, addictive pleasure had returned. Shameful as it might be, he wanted to know what was going on inside her head, what secrets she might reveal in her unsuspecting quiet.

Ten minutes later he was headed home, not on the usual roads, but through fields and alleys that led to the woods beside his backyard. On a slope overlooking the eastern side of the house, David rested his bike on the leaves and knelt behind a screen of blackberry bushes. To his left, a row of parked cars revealed the identities of Sarah’s visitors. His accountant drove the silver Audi; the BMW must be Nate’s. The maroon station wagon belonged to his favorite nurse, Anna Marie.

On the patio, mourners circled Sarah while Margaret poured iced tea into crystal-blue glasses. Nate stood farther down the yard, beside the butterfly bushes, running his fingers along his girlfriend’s naked arm. Strange, thought David, how the trees’ shadows formed a boundary between himself and the sunlit world. Although his name kept rising from the crowd, a curtain had fallen between his life and the drama below. When he sat against a white pine and closed his eyes, he felt that his exile was complete.

After two hours all of the cars were gone except for Nate’s. David walked down from the slope, leaned up against the house’s back wall, and glanced into the kitchen. Anne was fixing a pot of tea—good, reliable Anne. She was arranging cups on a tray, filling a purple sugar bowl. He moved to the living room window and watched her carry the tray to the coffee table. She poured a cup for Sarah, who was sitting on the sofa, and two more for Nate and his girlfriend in the wing chairs across the room. David smiled as his brother sipped politely; Nate was no tea drinker.

Around him, the twilight air felt chilly; it would be a cold night sleeping in the woods. To his right, concrete steps led to the basement door, and quietly, very quietly, he walked down the stairs and tried the knob. The door was unlocked; that much hadn’t changed in the past three weeks. He walked across the dark space and stretched out on the couch. A half wall separated the top of the stairs from the main room; if someone came down from the kitchen, he would have a few seconds to hide behind the sofa.

Evening faded into night until the room was completely black, but he did not turn on a light. Instead he lay there listening to the voices above. Occasionally a word emerged—“yesterday,” “ceremony,” “river,” “David.” The rest were a haze of syllables, mixed with footsteps in the kitchen. This, he thought, is what it must be like to be buried—to lie underground, paralyzed in the darkness while the living murmur overhead.

He heard a change in tone, bits and pieces of good-bye. Footsteps crossed the hallway and the front door closed, followed by a car’s gradual departure. The two sisters were left in the kitchen, the lilting alto of their voices punctuated by the clatter of dishes in the sink. Water gurgled through the basement pipes as a toilet flushed, then footsteps moved across the floor and up the stairs.

Another fifteen minutes and the house was silent. Sitting up, David switched on the lamp and waited for his eyes to adjust. They settled on the bookshelves on the opposite wall, filled with old pa perbacks. At the cabin, the only decent book was an anthology of short stories that he had read twice over the past few weeks. The others were house rejects, third-rate novels and college textbooks. David walked to the shelves and touched the books’ spines. Here were the sort he wanted, time-consuming classics:
War and Peace
,
Huckleberry Finn
,
David Copperfield
. Sarah would not need them for her women’s studies classes. He stacked them by the couch, along with a pile of
National Geographic
s, a Penguin edition of Shakespeare’s tragedies, and Fielding’s guide to North American birds.

When he stepped back to assess the books, something was missing. Perhaps it was his brush with death, or the silence of the woods, but for the first time in his adult life he wanted to read the Bible. Upstairs they had a beautiful copy, a gift from his mother on his twelfth birthday. “Required reading,” she had called it, “if only to understand Shakespeare.” After listening for the slightest sound in the house above, David took off his shoes and approached the stairs.