The Widow's Season (3 page)

In truth, this wasn’t the first time it had happened. David’s ghost had first appeared back in August, on the day of his memorial service. It had been a strange affair, a ceremony without a body or clear date of death. Three weeks had passed since the flood, and although the rescue teams had found David’s kayak, paddle, and cell phone, his corpse remained the sunken gold no diver could recover. Still, Sarah clung to a small hope of his return, and when his relatives and friends suggested a memorial service, she had inwardly deplored their need for tidy endings.

That afternoon Sarah’s sister had brought a poem, her niece had brought a flute, and David’s friends and colleagues had brought memories that they shared in an open-mike ceremony interspersed with nondenominational hymns. The event was held at the college chapel and led by the campus minister, a young man who had no qualms about ushering David’s Unitarian soul into his own vision of a Presbyterian heaven. In the minister’s eyes, David’s career as a college physician, battling daily cases of bulimia, chlamydia, and alcohol poisoning, merited a divine reward.

Listening to the man’s impression of her husband’s work, Sarah was reminded of how far David’s life had wandered from his Peace Corps days. When they had first met in New York, he had been eager to take arms in the endless battle against infant mortality. The rural clinic outside of Jackson had provided him with a front line, and for five years he had come home with tales of tooth decay that rivaled the parasitic horrors of his time in Mali.

The misery of Appalachia had both depressed and exhilarated him. Breast-feeding was his mission, home repairs his necessary pastime. And so it must have seemed like a silent rebuke, each night that she lay in bed reading real estate guides, admiring crown molding, ceramic tiles, and finished basements. She was not the fisherman’s wife, insistent on steady progress from cottage to mansion to palace, but she did ask for that initial leap beyond the thin carpet of their two-bedroom starter home, and David shared her dreams enough to take note of the college physician’s impending retirement. When old Dr. Malone finally moved to Florida, the decision to apply for the job had been David’s own. Once the contract was signed, the two of them had been rewarded with invitations to faculty cocktail parties, a 401(k), and a mortgage supplementation plan, but unspoken between them lay the knowledge that David’s youth was gone. He had traded the children of the poor for the children of the wealthy, and the hours he spent volunteering on the hospital board were slim penitence.

 

 

 

The pearls around Sarah’s neck felt especially tight that August afternoon as she stood in the broiling heat outside the chapel doors, receiving a line of kisses as if she were the hostess of a grim party. Each cheek that pressed her own seemed to siphon a little more air out of her lungs, and when the crowd began to dwindle she retreated to a wooden bench on the opposite side of the building. There, in the shade of an ash tree, a breeze offered its own whispering condolence, carrying with it an odd sensation.

She felt an unexplainable conviction that David was nearby. The impression was so strong that she began to look around, beyond the chapel’s hedges, down the wooded walkway toward the white-columned library. She didn’t know what to expect—a smiling ghost underneath a tree, or a sad, translucent face framed in a classroom window? For a moment she even stared into the sky, where each strangely shaped cloud seemed to harbor a secret. When nothing revealed itself, she walked to the corner of the chapel and pressed her hand against its cool limestone. She began to trace its perimeter, imagining David fifty feet ahead, turning each corner just as she approached, until, at the front entrance, she did encounter a handsome dark-haired man—David’s brother, Nate, who placed her hand in the crook of his elbow and said that it was time to go.

Later that night, after her friends had exited the house, leaving the refrigerator filled with salads and casseroles, Sarah gathered a stack of towels and washcloths and took them upstairs to the guest room. There, her younger sister, Anne, had settled under the covers.

Anne was a blessing—a public librarian with a summer schedule flexible enough to allow her to stay for a few days. Her husband had driven their two girls back to Maryland after the service, leaving the sisters to ply their work of memory and consolation. They had survived funerals before; a cemetery in South Carolina provided the backdrop for their lives. In response, they had learned to be mutually protective. Sarah had been present for the birth of Anne’s daughters. Now Anne was present for the death of her husband.

That evening Sarah had kissed Anne good night as if she were her own child. She had pulled the white comforter, sprinkled with violets, around her sister’s shoulders and brushed her fingers through Anne’s hair. What was it that created the aura of progress in her sister’s life? Was it only the children with their annual rituals—birthdays, school pictures, and dental appointments? More than anything else from her youth, Sarah missed that sense of growth, the idea of life moving forward in a steady procession—first grade, second grade, third grade, fourth. Why else had she gotten a doctorate, except to perpetuate the illusion of advancement?

As a child, she had measured life according to her latest report card, viewing those slim pieces of paper as a social contract, each A a promissory note for a season of happiness. She had been such a diligent student, ever willing to follow the path laid out by the public schools, grateful to be given a path at all, naively assuming that the world was obliged to reward so many years of obedient effort. It was only in high school that she had begun to grasp the truth, that there was no guarantee of happiness at the end of her slow march, and that graduation was a precipice from which most of her classmates would drop like lemmings into the labor market. But she was off to college and eventually graduate school, deferring reality with degree after degree, each one a higher precipice from which to fall.

Sarah patted her sister’s comforter, then walked downstairs to her bedroom, leaving the door open while she sat down at her vanity. The face that stared back from the mirror was tired, but still pretty. At a distance, she flattered herself, she might pass for a woman in her twenties, except that in her twenties she had not twined gray strands of hair around her index finger. She yanked one out and stretched it before her eyes, silver and glinting.

In college her hair had hung halfway down her back, a dark barometer that curled into turbulent waves on humid summer afternoons. Her hair had been a source of power, the altar at which half a dozen boys worshipped with penitent fingers. But now, as she released her tortoiseshell barrette, her sensible cut barely brushed her shoulders.
I am like Samson,
she told herself—shorn and blind and angry enough on some days to pull the temple walls down on her own head. Except that there was nothing especially heroic about her life. What could be extraordinary in the life of a woman like her?

She pulled her bangs up to survey the thin lines that spread from the corners of her eyes up toward her brow, like the rays emanating from a child’s sun. Lifting a jar of eye cream, she dipped her pinkie inside and began dabbing greasy white polka dots around her eyes, rubbing them into invisible swirls. What did it mean, she wondered, to be thirty-nine, childless, and widowed? What did it mean to be alone for the first time in her life?

It was then, caught in a moment of self-pity, that she saw him. In the back of the mirror’s reflection David passed through the house behind her, quiet as a shadow.

The vanity stood opposite the bedroom door, so that it reflected down the hallway, toward the living room. There, David had come and gone in an instant, headed across the hall toward the kitchen.

For a moment Sarah remained frozen in her chair. She had an instinctive sense that she should not move or look behind her. She knew the fate of Orpheus, who turned too soon. Instead, she began to examine the mirror, touching the spot where David’s image had appeared, as if his spirit were somehow trapped inside the glass. When at last she did turn and look down the hallway, no one was there. Tying her bathrobe around her waist, she rose and walked slowly down the Oriental runner, into the kitchen.

The light above the stove emitted a small glow, revealing familiar objects in familiar places: the refrigerator, the clock, the glass table, the ceramic tiles painted with wildflowers, arranged in intermittent diagonals above the granite countertop. Her eyes settled on the French doors that led to the patio. They were closed, but not locked. She never locked them. Never before had she worried about what might be outside.

But on that night, walking across the linoleum and reaching for the knob, she had stopped short. Did she really want to see what was outside? To look upon her husband, back from three weeks in the cold river? She thought of “The Monkey’s Paw,” a story she sometimes taught her freshmen. She remembered the mutilated son knocking at the door, and slowly, slowly, she drew her fingers back.

The kitchen’s light blinded her to what was outside; across the door, her face was multiplied in a dozen dark rectangles. She cupped her hands around her eyes and leaned forward, her nose almost touching the glass before the shadows outside began to assume recognizable shapes. A dogwood tree, a juniper bush, a wrought-iron table, a bird feeder. She jerked away, suddenly chilled. The problem wasn’t what she had just seen, but all that she had seen before. Her mind was littered with television scenes of bloody hands slapped against windows, or frantic eyeballs meeting a looker’s gaze.
Ridiculous,
she told herself, but she couldn’t shake the fear.

Another minute passed as she debated her options. Her glimpse of David probably wasn’t real; it was probably a mirage concocted by a sleepless brain. But why was her mind chanting:
Let him in, let him in
? When she looked down she saw her hand move like a foreign object, reaching for the knob. Her fingers touched the brass, felt its cold metal, and with a swift twitch, they turned the lock.

And then she ran—down the hallway, up the stairs, and into the guest room. She climbed into bed next to Anne, pulled the covers to her chin, and tucked her knees to her chest.

Sarah never told Anne what had happened that night. Four days later, when it was time for her sister to take a train back to Maryland, Sarah stood resolute. Everything was all right. Not to worry. She would take some time to organize things, then drive to Maryland for a long visit. Give her love to the girls.

After waving the train off, Sarah drove back to her house, intent upon one thought. Heading straight for the linen closet, she gathered the bedsheets and began to move from room to room, covering every mirror. She had read somewhere that in previous centuries mirrors were turned toward the wall after a death, for fear that they would reflect evil spirits. In Victorian England, mourners wore their jet jewelry with a matte finish, to avoid the unfortunate faux pas of discovering a dead man’s face in a woman’s brooch.

Now she understood the superstitions of ancient cultures, the impetus for séances and Ouija boards, and the necessity of burial, so that the dead might sleep in peace. She couldn’t say which was more troubling—the state of her husband’s soul or the state of her own mind, for she suspected that all those mourners with their mirrors reversed did not dread spirits so much as the look of their own haunted faces.

Anyway, the sheets were a bad idea; the covered mirrors resembled ghosts tacked on the walls. After two days she took all of the mirrors down, dismantling her vanity with a Phillips-head screwdriver. She lay them on the guest-room bed, where they stared vacantly at the ceiling. That left only the mirror in her bathroom, which was screwed into the wall. She decided to leave it up, but to look into its reflection only in the brightest light of day, with the television set blaring in the background. If David wished to appear beside the toilet or in the bathtub while Regis Philbin commented on the morning news, so be it. She would reduce his ghost to something domestic. She would not be afraid.

 

 

 

She thought of the mirrors now as she stood in front of her house, the last structure before the street dead-ended in a wooded cul-de-sac. Two months had passed since the night of the memorial service, and although in that time she had often felt the sense of being watched, she had never again seen a full-bodied apparition inside her home. Her precautions had either been highly effective or completely unnecessary.

Sarah leaned her head back as she assessed her house: a two-story beige Victorian with white trim, pine-green shutters, and wraparound porches. She could describe it with a Realtor’s precision, having spent two years researching the local housing market. Once David had signed his contract with the college, she had begun to examine properties in town and in the country—ranch houses, farmhouses, Cape Cod cottages. Colonial, Victorian, Georgian, contemporary. She had studied the merits of heat pumps and copper pipes, wells vs. springs, thermal windows and shingled roofs.

This house had not been her first choice. She had fallen in love with a three-bedroom contemporary in the style of Frank Lloyd Wright—a stone-and-cedar jewel on a private hill a few miles from town, with a backyard terraced south in raised flower beds. She’d felt almost giddy, showing David the solar heating, the picture windows, the granite countertops. But when they stepped onto the back patio, he had laughed. “A swimming pool? Who’s going to take care of a swimming pool? Oh, Sarah.” He rolled his eyes. “You can’t be serious?”

“It’s only a lap pool.” Her volume had dropped to a murmur.

“And what about all those flower beds?” His arm swept south. “Who’s going to take care of them?”

“I will,” Sarah replied, but already the coneflowers seemed to wilt beneath David’s critical eyes.

“Sure, you’ll take care of them for a few months, until the novelty wears off. After that, the beds will be full of weeds, and we’ll be stuck paying a pool guy.”