Unremarried Widow (17 page)

In the kitchen I grabbed two beers from the fridge and outside I dragged a white plastic chair close to the grill.

“How are things in Iraq?” I said.

Jimmy took a sip of his beer. “Not too bad. We fly a lot.”

“Is it hot?”

“It's cold this time of year.”

The meat smoked over the fire and he turned the skewers with a pair of tongs.

“How's it feel to be home?”

“It feels weird,” he said. “Hard to relax.”

He took another mouthful of beer.

“Anyway, R & R's only for two weeks.”

When the kebabs finished cooking Jimmy set them on a platter and carried it into the house. We ate at the table in the dining room and Jimmy did most of the talking. He spoke about his family, about people we both knew from flight school, about the deployment. He started to tell me about a mission, a dangerous flight during a night storm, but I stopped him.

“Could we not talk about this, please?” I stared at my plate.

Jimmy looked over at me, surprised, before catching himself.

“Of course,” he said. “Sorry about that.”

After dinner he washed the plates and silverware by hand and I dried and put everything away. When we had finished, he leaned against the sink.

“I guess it's time for bed,” he said.

“I guess it is.”

We stood facing each other but neither of us moved.

“Good night, then.”

I turned as if to go into my room, but slowly.

“Wait.”

I stopped.

“Come here.”

Jimmy put out his arms and I stepped into them. I buried my face in the spot below his shoulder and he stroked my hair. But when he put his hand under my chin and tilted my face to his, I turned away.

“I can't kiss you,” I said.

He stepped back, uncertain. Hadn't everything we'd done led to this point?

I stepped close to him again.

“I mean, not yet,” I said.

He led me into the room that I would think of from then on as Jimmy's room, a place I abandoned after his visit.

“Could we light a candle?” I said.

I listened to Jimmy walk into the guest bathroom, where I had placed two votive candles in round glass holders, leftovers from the wedding. He stepped outside to the grill for the matches and then carried the lit candles back into the room, shutting off the lights in the house behind him. He set one candle on top of the dresser and one at the side window. As I stood beside the bed, he lifted my hair away from my neck then leaned down to kiss the place where my neck joined my shoulder. I let him kiss my collarbone. When he reached
for the hem of my shirt, I raised my hands over my head. He slipped off my blouse, turning the cotton inside out, and the pearl buttons skimmed my nose on the way up. I pulled my hands down quickly to cover my breasts.

“I'm not wearing a bra,” I said.

Jimmy smirked. “I know. I've been trying to get a look all night.”

He rested his hands over mine, cupping the fingers that cupped my breasts. The fine hairs on the underside of his arm brushed my wrist. Already the room felt warmer. I sat on the bed and he sat beside me, kissing my bare shoulders. I dropped my hands, my face red and hot, and then I closed my eyes and let him look at my body. After a time I reached down to unsnap my pants, then rolled onto my back and pulled them off. I wore white underwear, laced, with a gold clasp on the left hip. I reached to him beside me and tugged his shirt over his head. I could feel the heat from his body on the cloth. His skin was light, like mine, and freckles covered his torso. A light patch of hair stretched from his chest to under the waistband of his jeans. He stood up to unbutton them and then let the pants drop to the floor. We were both in our underwear. He climbed back onto the bed and we sat together on the comforter patterned with chrysanthemums in red dye. I hugged myself against the chill and Jimmy pulled back the covers and together we slid into the sheets. From that vantage point the bedspread looked darker, like lips reddened from too much kissing, like the normally pale parts of the body that go flushed and livid from lovemaking. It blushed as if ashamed.

In tennis they talk about muscle memory, about the body learning the moves of the game so that during a match a player can react without thinking because the body already knows what to do. My body remembered the steps but not the partner. He was smoother in places, rougher in others. His frame was all wrong. When I finally leaned down to kiss him, the shape of his lips felt strange against mine and I realized this is what it feels like to betray someone you love.

The candle on top of the dresser burned down to a nub, and the low flame cast shadows against the wall. I thought of Van Gogh's night café at the long end of the evening, the darkness drawing in on itself, the absinthe already drunk, the madness gathered and dissipated, leaving only the taste of burnt sugar on the tongue. The room had been cool when we first stepped in but the air had warmed from our bodies, from hot breath on breath, from fingers on thighs, stomachs, hips. In the heated space, Jimmy's palms smelled like ash. The room filled with the scent of him and soon I smelled like him too. He smudged over me like a handprint on the wall.

The loneliness that followed Jimmy's
visit felt like a physical blow. It left me panting. But over the next several weeks I abruptly ended what had been between us. I stopped writing and I became distant when we spoke on the phone.

“I need—” I searched for the right word. “Time.”

Later I combed through my e-mail archives and deleted every message Jimmy and I had exchanged. I threw away his letters. I told almost no one about his visit and I erased all evidence of him from my life. I was terrified someone might discover what I had done.

In the military certain myths circulate. When men are deployed they rag on each other about “Jody,” the imaginary man back home who's fucking their wives.

“Better watch out,” they say. “Jody's going to get her good.”

Another myth: the widow who sleeps with half her husband's unit. The men talk about it and so do the wives. Mostly the wives. They talk about that poor woman in Charlie Company who slept with her dead husband's commander, and when he left her she slept with one of his stick buddies. He left her too. She moved on to the enlisted guys and slowly worked her way down the ranks. The wives shake their heads at
this part of the story and roll their eyes because everybody knows that's what widows do.

“What, I'm going to date somebody a year and a half, two years after John died?” Teresa said to me much later. “Everybody would call me a whore.”

The knocking came in the
night. The sound pulled me sharply, angrily out of sleep but in the bedroom all was dark. No headlights poured in from outside, no porch light shone from across the way. I pushed back the covers, waited for the blood in my head to settle, and crept first to the kitchen and then to the living room. A nimbus from the orange street lamp glowed behind the curtain as I lifted the edge and peered into the yard. Nothing. I moved through the house and onto the rear porch, irritated, my eyes straining against the night as I peered out every window, searching for some clue in the dark.

A few days later, the microwave started coming on in the night. A sharp
beep!
followed by a volley.
Beep! Beep! Beep!
The interior light glowed and the rotating plate whirled while I stood barefoot in the kitchen, fumbling for the power cord in the dark.

When the landlord phoned to check in, I mentioned the problem.

“Everything okay in the house?”

“Sure,” I said. “Everything except the microwave.”

“The microwave?”

“You know, how it comes on at weird times? By itself?”

“I never had that problem,” he said. “The microwave worked fine when I lived there.”

At the library I checked out books on ghostly visitations that said hauntings often occur in the early hours of the morning, the time when the veil between the living world and the afterlife is thinnest. I shook my head, disbelieving. But also believing a little.

After the Tuesday night hospice meetings, I started having dinner with some of the widows from the group. One night I brought up the knocking.

“Oh, that's happened to me,” Bea said. She waved her manicured nails dismissively, like this was nothing. Like she wasn't surprised.

“I'll hear pans clattering in the night,” Linda said. “Loud banging from my kitchen.”

I toyed with my fork. My pots banged in the night too.

“Or the lights will go dim,” Connie said. “I've heard—I know this sounds crazy, but I read it somewhere—that spirits can tap into electric currents.”

I nodded. My lights also dimmed. I looked around the table at those women, all of them educated, none of them unsophisticated, and yet each of us desperate to believe.

Teresa called on a weekend
afternoon as I stirred a pot of beans in my kitchen.

“How are you doing?” she said.

I turned off the stove and moved the pot to the back burner. “I'm all right.”

“I'm going through the files from the crash investigation,” Teresa said. “None of it is matching up.”

Late afternoon light filtered in through the window over the sink as I held the phone with one shoulder and folded the dish towel on the counter.

“You know how I requested John's audio? From the cockpit? Well, they edited the tape,” Teresa said. “They cut parts of it. What I listened to wasn't the whole thing.”

I picked at the frayed corner of the towel and pulled out threads that I dropped onto the floor.

“If I had Miles's voice recording,” Teresa said, “I could figure out what's going on.”

I stopped with the towel and stared out the window. Leaves had scattered on the roof of the house next door like buckshot. If I requested Miles's voice recording, then I would have to listen to the tape. If I listened, I would hear his voice in the last seconds of the flight. I would know if he had been afraid. Teresa stopped talking and I realized she was waiting for my answer.

“I can't, Teresa,” I said. “You're going to have to do your investigation without it.”

She was quiet as I leaned against the counter and closed my eyes.

“Okay,” she said finally. “Okay.”

Eastern mystics say dreams are
a way of stepping into another realm. They call the space between the material and immaterial worlds the
barzakh,
or isthmus. In the
barzakh
the dead can mingle with the sleeping living. Often they share secrets of the afterlife. Buddhism, too, has an intermediary space between the visible and invisible worlds—the
bardo.
There are six
bardo
s in fact and one, the
milam bardo,
is the dream state. Buddhists say the dream state is like the death state only shorter.

One night Miles flew into my dream in a helicopter. I waited for
him on the tarmac, the thin strip of asphalt that joined this life and the next. After he landed, Miles raised the cockpit door and lifted his visor.

“Hey, babe,” he said.

I shielded my eyes with one hand and stared up into his face.

“Were you scared?” I said, meaning the crash.

“I was so scared,” he said. “But it was over fast.”

“What's it like?” I said, meaning death.

“It's like a dream.”

Already I could feel the moment fading, the threads of the vision slipping through my fingers.

“What's like a dream?” I said. “Where you are now or the life you lived?”

Before he could answer, I woke in the dark.

I started obsessing about Psychic
Suzanna. I convinced myself that she had foreseen Miles's death and deliberately withheld the information. I worried incessantly if it would have made a difference. If Suzanna had looked across the table in the low-lit hotel bar and told me that I would meet a man of loyalty and integrity, handsome and brave and kind, a man like my father—if she had told me then that I would lose this man, that he would die a violent and terrible death, so terrible I would not be allowed to look on his face after his body came home—if she had warned me of the immensity of the suffering to come, would I still have chosen this life? Would I still have chosen Miles?

There was only one way to know: I arranged a phone consultation.

On the night of our appointment, I stayed at my mother's house. I sat on the edge of my old bed as I dialed and looked at the cowboy boots in my closet. Suzanna answered on the second ring.

“How are you doing, honey?” she said.

There was that voice again, all smoke and ash.

“Fine. I—”

“How old are you, honey?”

“I'm twenty-six. But that's not why I'm calling.” I imagined her gearing up her pen, ready to trace out my fortune on scrap paper. “I'm calling about my husband.”

“What do you need to know?”

“He was killed,” I said. “In Iraq.”

There was a long silence on the phone.

“I can tell you what he saw when he crossed over,” Suzanna said. “A white dog. There was a white dog. In a field. And—” She paused, then moved slowly through each detail. “A man on a tractor. In overalls. An old man. That your husband knew. Someone who has already passed over.”

I wrote all of this down as if it offered some clue. But I was irritated that she wasn't giving me what I wanted to hear. Suzanna took in a long breath like an athlete after a hard run.

“Does that mean anything to you?” she said.

“Not really.”

I waited and she steered the conversation to familiar terrain.

“I can tell you that you'll get married again. To a man who also wore a uniform.”

I tucked my legs beneath me and pressed the phone to my ear. This was not why I was calling.