The Young Widower's Handbook

by Tom McAllister

  A NURSE TOLD HUNTER he could see the body if he wanted to. Not only did he not want to, but it seemed like the worst possible thing anyone could do at that moment was to look at Kait’s corpse, and so he said no, but still the nurse hooked him by the elbow and led him through a series of doors and curtains until he was standing over the body, and he swore he could see her breathing, not just the up-down of the chest, but the actual breath, as if they were outdoors in winter. He wanted to capture the breath in a jar and carry it with him, uncap the lid during times of crisis and inhale her essence. He couldn’t force himself to touch her, was afraid to move beyond the doorframe, and the nurse said she understood, it’s very difficult to lose a loved one. Hunter nodded, said, “Please don’t leave me,” and the nurse, thinking he was talking to Kait, left.

  HE WAS THE ONE who had to break the news. To everyone. He hadn’t even told anyone she was feeling sick, his mild form of protest against the tyranny of her family’s constant feed of updates, via every network imaginable: phones, Twitter, Facebook, photo-sharing websites, e-mails, text messages, especially text messages, every time anything allegedly noteworthy happened to anyone in the Dixon family, the definition of noteworthy being broad enough to include updates on a nephew’s suspension from school and a cousin’s recent battle with indigestion, so that every day demanded the filtering of reams of unnecessary information, which is why, when Kait wanted to call her brother to complain about her stomach pains, Hunter said, “Let’s just wait, there’s no need to tell everyone everything all the time.” Not that their knowing about it would likely have changed the end result. But maybe.

  He knew the first call should be to Kait’s mother, Sherry, but didn’t think he could endure that agonizing conversation, and was afraid that when he told her brothers, they would blame him and want to fight him, and so the first person he called upon learning that his wife was dead was Linda, one of Kait’s co-workers at the bank, a casual acquaintance who nonetheless howled with grief, weeping so fiercely that Hunter’s phone became waterlogged with her tears.

  He made twelve phone calls before contacting anyone in the family, by which point he was already so numb from having repeated the story that he was doing it by rote, and expected to be able to break hearts without any hesitation. And yet, when he heard Sherry wailing on the other end of the line, he lost his voice, couldn’t answer any of her questions, and passed the phone off to a nearby nurse.

  THE OFFICIAL CAUSE OF death was listed as massive internal bleeding caused by a ruptured fallopian tube, the result of an ectopic pregnancy, a condition fraught with this reality: they had conceived a child together, and that child had killed her, or, more accurately, Hunter himself was the murder weapon, the one who had implanted the destructive thing inside her. If he had mixed anthrax into her oatmeal, he would be in prison, but now people are commiserating with him, as if he had nothing to do with it. As if it wasn’t his fault.

  THEY ARE ALL AT his house—her extended family, not his, he has no family beyond his parents—by the time he returns from the hospital, the brothers lining up empty beer cans on the window sill in the kitchen, Sherry flopped facedown on the couch, a nephew, obsessed with death like so many little boys, running aimlessly around the kitchen table firing imaginary pistols at everyone. Brutus, the oldest brother, grabs Hunter roughly by the shoulders and engulfs him in a bear hug. Billy, the middle brother, pats Hunter on the back while this is happening. Brutus releases Hunter and wipes a tear off his cheek. “It’s okay to cry,” he says, perhaps to himself. He digs into a cooler and tosses Hunter a can of Bud, which Hunter opens and holds in his lap for the next three hours, sitting on the floor in front of the couch while the brothers tell the same stories about Kait that they’ve told on every holiday and at every family gathering before this, a litany of palliative anecdotes so familiar they could all fill in the details without even listening: when she and her friends in sixth grade had been picked up by the cops for throwing rocks through a rival girl’s bedroom window; when Billy, the middle brother, had paid a friend to hide in Kait’s closet and spy on her, how she didn’t speak to Billy for a week after that; how she had spent a whole summer secretly visiting a speech therapist to lose her Philly accent, but it always resurfaced when she was excited; how eager she had been to help Max, the youngest brother, get dressed for the prom, the way she cried when she saw him in his bow tie and his cummerbund, how angry she’d been when he got drunk and lost the tux after the dance, came stumbling home in his underwear.

  Sherry, still lying on the couch, sometimes seems to vibrate, and they hear her muffled laughter mixed with her tears. She rests her hand on Hunter’s shoulder, as if trying to keep herself from falling. He stays there, leaning into her touch and keeping her afloat, but says nothing all night, has nothing to say.

  WHEN SOMEONE DIES, THE people around the bereaved become dramatically and disconcertingly helpful, to the point that no one will allow Hunter to do anything for himself, not even simple tasks like filling a glass of water or standing under his own power. They answer questions for him. They cook and they clean, and they would chew his food if they could. Hunter spends two full days being ushered about his own home by Kait’s friends and family, carried like an oversized puppet, becoming a prop in a play about his own grief.

  WILLOW, HIS MOTHER, ARRIVES the second morning, yoga mat tucked under her arm, a canvas bag slung over her shoulder, the squealing front door announcing her entrance. Kait’s brothers, sprawled on the couches and the floor, groan and stretch and unleash boozy yawns. Hunter stayed downstairs with them, lay on the floor all night, didn’t want to face his empty bed yet. He barely slept, wishes he hadn’t slept at all; nobody should be able to sink into sleep the night their wife dies, no matter how tired they are.

  Willow flows into the room, unstoppable, and kneels next to Hunter, engulfs him in a hug. “I’m staying here as long as you need me,” she says, and she begins collecting the empty cans, hauling them outside to the recycling bin.

  JUST A COUPLE WEEKS before Kait’s death, she and Hunter were sitting in the living room watching a reality show called Spirit Quest, which chronicled four men who somehow made a living hunting ghosts. They traveled to rural towns with a variety of science-adjacent instruments and tried to communicate with the dead. Most scenes were shot in old mills and abandoned warehouses. The show seemed to posit that ghosts primarily congregate in sites of failed industry, rather than in the more intimate settings of bedrooms and family burial plots. Everything was filmed in a greenish night-vision tint and underscored with an unearned gravity, especially during the moments when they claimed to have made contact with ghosts. Kait liked watching reruns while they ate leftovers for dinner, a mindless entertainment for weekday evenings when they were both too tired to engage in anything intellectually, when all they wanted was noise and lights to distract them. She had looked particularly burned out that evening when she got home, dragging herself through the door.

  One of the ghost hunters strapped a cranial spectrometeressentially a miner’s helmet with flashing lights on the sides—to his head and was lowered into a mineshaft. Kait absentmindedly ran her hand along Hunter’s thigh. “I know this is ridiculous,” she said, “and they’re never going to find anything. But it’s kind of hopeful, isn’t it? The idea that there’s something else waiting for us.” As long as Hunter had known her, Kait hadn’t been interested in heaven or hell, but she had always believed in the existence of ghosts.

  “You do have to admire their earnestness,” Hunter said.

  “Do you think it’s easier when you’re a ghost?” she said. “Like, do you think you just get to be whatever you want, or do you think they still have jobs and bills and everything else?”

  “I’m sure you’re expected to put in a certain number of haunting hours. Thirty a week, maybe,” Hunter said. “Middle managers die and turn into ghosts too. And there’s no way they let you get away with just doing nothing.”

  “And then every six mon
ths there’s a performance evaluation?” Kait transitioned into her Boss Voice, the self-important fat-jowled baritone she used when imitating men in power. “Dixon, your chain clanking and light flickering exceed expectations but your overall spookiness quotient needs some work.”

  “We’d like to send you to a professional development seminar this weekend on how to enhance your Internal Scare Factor,” Hunter added.

  She laughed with him. “What a bunch of assholes,” she said. On TV, a guy named Wyatt looked at his instruments and said the ghostly activity in the room was off the charts. He called for the spirits to show themselves. Kait dropped her fork and it clattered on her plate. “Would it kill them to sometimes just leave the fucking ghosts alone?” Hunter reached over to squeeze her hand. As always, it was ice cold, seemingly bloodless. “Did I tell you I had a meeting with Jefferson today?”

  She had told him that morning, and he’d been waiting to hear how it went, but he’d learned early in their relationship that it was best to let her talk about her work day at her own pace. If he’d started grilling her when she walked in the door, she would have just said it had been fine and left it at that. Jefferson was the regional manager. He had hair like a young Travolta and he kept an acoustic guitar in his office for impromptu jam sessions. He’d been accused of sexual harassment by three different women and gotten transferred to new regions each time. His father was Somebody Important. “So I went in to see him, and of course he was a half hour late to his own office, but I was there on time. But okay, whatever, that’s how it is when you’re the boss.” She stared at the floor and her words came out too fast, like she was afraid of what would happen if she stopped talking. “I handed him everything he asked forcustomer satisfaction surveys, quarterly reports, everything. And he didn’t even look at them. You know what he said to me? He said, ‘I’ve been watching you. You really ought to start smiling more.’ ”

  “Christ.”

  “You’re so pretty but think how much prettier you’d be if you smiled,” he said. “Think how much happier the customers would be.”

  “He didn’t even pretend to care about your work?”

  “You know the worst thing? I smiled at him. I thanked him for his feedback.” She picked up her fork and threw it down, stood up and walked a lap around the coffee table, fussed with the blinds on a window across the room.

  “You have to report him.”

  “What if I don’t want to fucking smile? You know? What if what I want is to be sad? Why isn’t that allowed?”

  “It is,” Hunter said, standing and catching her in the middle of another lap. He pulled her into him and wrapped his arms around her; her shoulders were vibrating with adrenaline. “That guy . . . that motherfucker. He’s not allowed to do that to you. He’s not allowed to—”

  “But he is. That’s the problem. He can do whatever he wants.” She buried her face in his chest and he felt the full weight of her pressing into him. She was right. There was no easy fix, no magic sequence of words that would solve the problem.

  On TV, foreboding music suggested that a ghostly encounter was imminent. Hunter fantasized about marching into Jefferson’s office, grabbing him by the tie, and pulling him close, eye-to-eye, issuing a terse threat about what would happen next time he disrespected a woman—real Clint Eastwood stuff. It wouldn’t happen, he knew, and anyway Kait would be enraged with him if he did something like that. But for a moment, the fantasy made him feel less powerless.

  “Thanks for letting me be crazy,” Kait said.

  “You are not crazy,” he said. “I’m sorry I can’t do anything to help you.”

  She leaned up and kissed him. “Thanks for trying,” she said.

  There is romance and then there is love and although they’re related to each other, they are not the same thing. Romance is temporary, predicated on countless variables working synchronously to create something memorable that vaguely recalls a scene from a familiar movie; it’s perhaps a step on the way to love, or a reaffirmation of love, or maybe it’s just a single beautiful moment with no other meaning beyond itself. Love, it’s this other thing, a thing that manifests itself in the most unremarkable moments. It’s there without having to assert itself. To be able to sit next to Kait in a T-shirt and ragged jeans, watching bad TV and eating leftovers, that was a gift.

  Kait had once confessed to Hunter that before he came along no one in her life had ever accepted her as herself. Her brothers had mocked her for not being quite like them, for being “too fancy,” for acting like she was too good for them and their neighborhood. They loved her, but they didn’t understand her. Her mother had first neglected her and later spent years trying to convince her that the way she felt wasn’t actually the way she felt. Her friends were friends to the extent that they had fun evenings together, but lately they called only when they needed something. The culture at large had exerted the same pressure on her that it exerts on all women, namely to feel insecure about herself regardless of what she was doing, to feel that simply by being a woman in the world she was necessarily doing something wrong and could only correct her wrongness via endless consumerism and an array of contradictory neuroses. She’d been socialized to always apologize, to smile when a man told her to smile, to believe men who told her she was doing something wrong.

  Before Kait, Hunter sometimes worried that through some catastrophic mix-up he’d ended up on the wrong planet, a place where he felt both like and unlike everyone else at the same time. Despite whatever euphemisms Willow used to describe young Hunter—he was independent or eccentric or an old soul—the truth is that he was a weird kid. He was uncomfortable and shy and twitchy, and even though he can’t remember many specific incidents of bullying or rejection, the overriding emotion he associates with adolescence is a loneliness so heavy it pinned him to his bed most mornings and threatened to suffocate him. He’d tried—been forced by his parents to try—to assimilate, attending school events and joining the bowling team and calling girls to ask them on dates. But even when things were ostensibly going well, when he made the guys laugh at the lunch table or danced with a girl at a mixer, he felt that distance between him and his peers, an understanding that although he’d forged a connection, it was only temporary. Mostly he read books and smoked pot and watched endless hours of TV. By the time he met Kait, he’d accepted isolation as his fate, as a punishment for whatever part of him had gone bad at birth. Willow had assured him college would help him to open up and find himself, but he spent most of his time there wondering how everyone else felt so comfortable and confident. Wondering how everyone else knew what to do. It seemed like there was some secret handshake you were taught at birth by the Illuminati or the Freemasons or someone, and some people just weren’t allowed to learn it. So he rejected the world in advance and erected a series of defense mechanisms that would exacerbate his problems. By this point, his every thought and action was a reaction to a perceived or expected slight. He was a prodigy at bitterness and cynicism. But when Kait made eye contact with him, the fear dissipated. When she held his hand, she anchored him to the world. When she spoke, he felt like a stranger in a strange land who finally hears a fellow countryman speaking his own language. For the first time, he felt that his birth hadn’t been a terrible accident.

  He wrote all of this down for her once, the way she’d saved him, because every time he tried to articulate his feelings, he stuttered and fumbled and got too frustrated to continue. He wrote about what a great fortune it is to be able to be in a room with another person who gives you permission to be yourself. He wrote that when they were together he felt the tumblers falling into place as she turned the key in his soul. One night, they were sitting in her car in a movie theater parking lot, and he handed her a letter. “These are a lot of things I’ve been trying to say, but couldn’t figure out how,” he said, only later realizing that her first instinct was to assume this was a breakup letter. While she read he couldn’t tell from her expression whether she was weirded out or t
hrilled or what, and so he let himself out of the car and paced nervous circles around it. A minute later, she lowered the window and said, “I wrote you something too.” She passed the letter to him. On the back, she’d left a single sentence: Loving you is the easiest thing I’ve ever done.

  WILLOW MAKES HIM DRIVE her to Old City Philadelphia, ostensibly so she can see Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell and the nation’s first post office, but also so she can distract him. She says it is a beautiful day, which it is, the kind of day that inspires poetry and folk songs and that, at any other time, Hunter would call life-affirming, but instead it seems mocking and inappropriate. People lounge on every spare patch of grass, sunbathing, sprawled like corpses on a battlefield. Willow leads him to a restaurant that serves farm-fresh organic food and asks the server to seat them outside. While Hunter picks at his salad, she tells him about her college softball team’s trip to Philadelphia for a tournament. The coach had tried to take the team on a tour of the historic sites, but she’d sneaked away to a South Philly bar and got herself kicked off the team. “I was so bad then,” she says, laughing, nudging his leg beneath the table with her foot, until he forces a smile. “This was before your father, of course.”

  “I’m sure Jack would have been a real blast if he’d been there,” Hunter says.

  “He was different then. You’ve seen the pictures.” She’s referring specifically to her favorite photo: his father, Jack, sitting in the grass near a line of train tracks, beard unkempt, denim jacket torn at the elbows, red bandana pulling his hair back from his face, blowing cigarette smoke up at the sky and looking like an extra in Easy Rider. She has showed Hunter photos of college-aged Jack dozens of times, always narrating with comments like you might not believe it but your father was a real free spirit.