“A man like your father,” Willow says, “he doesn’t do well with this sort of thing.”
“Your whole life you’ve been making excuses for him.”
“Don’t tell me what I’ve been doing my whole life,” Willow says. “I’ve known your father since I was twenty years old. You want to think you two are so different but you have no idea.”
Hunter flicks a crouton off his plate and into the street. He watches and listens for the crunch of a car tire destroying it. Willow swipes a finger through the condensation on her water glass and leans across the table. With her damp finger, she draws a cross on his forehead as if anointing him. “I hoped you would learn to practice forgiveness by now.”
HIS HOUSE IS INFESTED: there are co-workers and college friends, neighbors and ex-boyfriends, and there are so many Dixons, many of whom he has not seen since the wedding. They are streaming through his house, eating the sandwiches and fruit platters that seem to be delivered hourly, as if people think the problem isn’t that Kait is dead, but simply that she is hungry. The doorbell never stops ringing, because there are always more sandwiches and flowers to be delivered, and he feels obligated to tip every deliveryman, and by the way, how are flowers supposed to make him feel better in any way? Hunter sits on the end of the couch while little nieces and nephews and cousins scramble underfoot and throw chunks of fruit at one another. Kait’s aunts are sorting her belongings into various boxes, some marked DONATE and some marked KEEPERS, and even though they are helping him, even though they are tying up loose ends, he is disturbed to see how easily a life can be categorized and boxed and bagged and disposed of, all of its loose ends tied up and all of its meaning suddenly stripped away. Everyone in the room fights encroaching silences, filling the gaps with jokes and loud laughter, no matter how unfunny the joke, as if volume alone can drown out the unhappiness. In the kitchen, a committee of Dixons has taken on the responsibility of planning the memorial service—which he is certain she would not have wanted—and others are calling credit card companies and utilities and cell phone providers to report the death. It’s helpful, sure, but he does not want to be helped, he wants to be allowed to wallow, to let the bills pile up around him, to allow the food to rot, be allowed to stay motionless until he atrophies and develops legendary pressure sores, while his neglected house is swallowed by the earth itself.
“Where’s your compost pile, Hun?” Willow calls from the kitchen, as if that has any relevance to his current life.
THE NEXT TIME THE doorbell rings, Hunter announces, “Good news guys! More fucking sandwiches!” But it isn’t sandwiches; what it is is the ashes, inside the container he must have chosen at some point but cannot remember choosing—blue-gray, like a cloudy fall day, her full name etched in gold on top of the cube. The cube is cinched inside a velvet sack and is accompanied by simple instructions for opening, for when the time is right. After Hunter tips him five dollars, the courier returns to his car and rumbles away, his trunk presumably full of similar containers, ferrying souls across the Greater Philadelphia area. Everyone behind Hunter stops talking and moving, closing in on him while he holds Kait’s remains; many of them seem unaware that she was to be cremated, even though he had told them all before that she would be cremated, and so now they’re coming to terms with the fact that they will not be able to view the body one last time. He feels like he should be making a speech, but what is there to say, besides here she is!? Thinks about, maybe, Kait’s Home!—the kind of thing that would have made her laugh (the sound of her laughter already difficult to remember), but also the kind of thing that would probably get him punched by Brutus, who doesn’t appreciate humor that is subtler than a fart.
He passes her around the room, the way one would share a newborn baby.
ON THE THIRD NIGHT, he finally enters his bedroom, lies on the floor, can’t bring himself to touch the bed, doesn’t want to disturb the physical impression she left in the sheets. The Dixons are all sleeping in their own homes now, and so it is just him and Willow and not Kait. Willow knocks on his door in the middle of the night—Hunter still lying awake, tracking his heart beats and treating them as a countdown to his own expiration—and lets herself in. She sits on the floor beneath his window and removes a joint from her pocket. She lights it and summons him to join her. They sit together, blowing the smoke through the open window like teenagers hiding from their parents. “This is not going to work,” she says. She takes a deep drag and then exhales slowly, the smoke framing her face so that she looks like an apparition. “This stoic thing you’re doing, just swallowing all the sadness and hoping it disappears. You don’t have the constitution for it.”
“This isn’t a thing I’m doing,” he says.
While Hunter works on the joint, she pulls out a small baggie of pot and some rolling papers, begins expertly rolling another. “When your grandfather died, your father completely broke down. For months, he’d just start crying spontaneously. Once, we were on the highway and he had to pull over because he couldn’t see through the tears. He lost twenty pounds. He stopped reading, and every night he would lie on the couch listening to the same Elvis Costello record over and over. He sometimes didn’t shower for a week.” She runs her tongue over the joint and seals it, takes the lighter from Hunter. “I’d been with him for four years, and I thought I knew everything about him. But he became a new person.”
“I thought Jack didn’t even like his dad.”
“His version of the story is very practiced. He needs to insulate himself.”
“So you’re saying I should have some kind of breakdown like he did? Then I can turn myself into him?”
“I tried to help him, but I didn’t know what to do. I was too young. I’d lived a safe life. I’d never even had anyone die.” She lights the joint and studies it in her hand before pressing it to her lips. “This is terrible, but I thought about leaving him. I couldn’t handle it anymore.”
“What stopped you?”
“I don’t know. I had bags packed, I was going to move in with some college friends in Boston. They’d found a job for me. But something kept me there.” She looks out the window somewhere beyond the clouds and the moon, toward some version of her unlived past. “It took him six months to come back to life, and then it was because he had no choice. I got pregnant and we had to start planning.”
“So maybe I should get someone pregnant, is what you’re saying?”
“After that he was a different man. He’s been afraid of his own emotions for three decades.”
Hunter rests the back of his head against the windowsill and stares up at the ceiling, tries to focus on a small spot of water damage to keep himself grounded. He imagines the edges of the stain rippling and expanding until the entire ceiling is swallowed by decay. “I know there’s some other way I’m supposed to be right now, but I don’t know how to start being it.”
“The deeper you retreat into yourself, the more it’s going to damage you.”
He sees in her glassy, bloodshot gaze that she is trying to save him, but she looks so far away, like he’s looking up at her from the bottom of the ocean. “The only time in my life when I felt like the world made any sense was when I was with her,” he says.
Willow finishes this joint and then opens the baggie to begin rolling another one. Hunter waves her off. She repeatedly zips and unzips the bag in the silence, and then says, “If you need to speak to her, maybe we should try a séance? I’ve only done it once, but—”
“No. Absolutely not.” He rubs his eyes as if trying to dig them out of his skull. “Man, I am really fucking high,” he says and they both laugh long enough that by the time they catch their breath and the room is quiet they’ve forgotten why they started laughing.
“Do you want to know the hardest part about being a parent?” Willow says. “ It’s not the diapers, the late nights, the parent-teacher conferences. It’s knowing that no matter what advice you give your son, he’s not going to understand it until it’s too la
te. You have to watch while he makes the exact mistakes you’re worried about and then hope he comes out okay on the other side.”
Hunter buries his head in his hands and takes several deep breaths, trying to summon the courage to continue living. He tries to swallow, but his throat is so dry, it hurts to even think about swallowing. “How are you supposed to survive?” he says. “How does anybody get through life?” Willow wraps her arm around his shoulder and holds on to him until he falls asleep.
HUNTER TELLS WILLOW HE does not want to attend the memorial service. What good does it do him to put himself on display just to offer some closure to the community? He does not want to perform for them so they can say oh, I feel so bad for Hunter, but he looks like he’s handling it well or I’m glad I get to at least pass my respects on to her husband. They want him there so they can ask are you okay? because they want him to say yes, and then they can all pat themselves on the back for being so compassionate, then move on, pretend this chapter of his life is over. Since when does he owe it to anyone to go out and pretend everything is okay, particularly when everything is decidedly, starkly, and painfully not okay?
But still he goes. Because Willow says, “It may not feel like it, but this is not all about you.” Because Kait would have demanded that he go for her family’s sake. Because Sherry—frail and very clearly not eating or sleeping—shows up at his door the morning of the service and says, “We all need to be in this together.”
A WEEK AFTER KAIT’S death, Hunter’s boss at the rental car agency calls and tells him it’s time to come back. According to corporate policy, grievance leave only lasts four business days, so they’d done him a favor by allowing him a fifth day without officially writing him up. Hunter hangs up, tells Willow he has to go to work, and then spends the next six hours sitting with Kait’s cube in his car in a strip-mall parking lot. The cube is easy to open; a simple snap lock on the top panel. At first, he only clicks it open just to see how it works, then closes it. But then he continues practicing, pushing down, unlatching, twisting, the sound unlike the vacuum-sealed pop he anticipated. It’s a mechanical click, a quiet scraping of metal on metal upon the turn. Inside, she’s like fine soil, like silt washed up on shore. He looks down at her, tries to picture her face within the urn, but cannot. Dipping his index finger down to the second knuckle, he feels her cool against his skin, but she does not feel like herself. After wiping his finger clean, pushing every grain of her back into the cube, he seals it shut. Over the next six hours, he becomes an expert at opening and closing, compulsively twisting and clicking and opening, but he does not look inside again.
When he returns home, Willow has her bags packed. She tells him she’s glad he went back to work; he has to stay busy or he might crack up. She says, “Looks like you’re getting back on track, and I have to get home.” She says Jack is lost without her, and besides, people need her back home too. “Your father and I are planning to come down and check on you in a couple weeks,” she adds. She says she loves him. Ten minutes later she leaves, and the house feels cavernous.
THAT EVENING, LYING IN bed with the urn on the nightstand next to him, he thinks about Willow’s suggestion of a séance and even though he does not understand the mechanics of séancing nor does he believe in the general practice, he also thinks: maybe? He arranges candles around the perimeter of the room, watches their flickering shadows dance on the wall. He’s not stoned now, because Willow didn’t leave any pot behind and anyway he suspects that being stoned probably results in false positives vis-à-vis communications with the spirit world. He sits on the carpet in the middle of the room, holding the urn in his lap and trying to will Kait to emerge from within. A proper call to the spirt world almost certainly requires a soundtrack, so he sets Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day” on a loop and sings along with it, telling Kait she made him forget himself, made him think he was someone else, someone good. By the fifth cycle through the song, the singing has taken on the tone of a chant. He pauses and follows the lead of the Spirit Quest ghost hunters, calling on Kait to show herself. He awaits some cosmic sign, the rattling of the house, the opening of a portal, the whooshing of a spirit through the room, but nothing happens. “I promise I’ll leave you alone,” he says, “but I just need to see you one more time.” He closes his eyes and lies back on the carpet, hoping that if he concentrates hard enough, she will be there again.
When he opens his eyes, he sees thousands of ghosts in his home, each one a vision of Kait at a different stage of their shared life; they crowd into the house shoulder-to-shoulder and some are cooking and some are sleeping and some are dancing and some are hanging pictures and everywhere around him there are Kaits. Kait in motion. Kait in the wallpaper and bubbling in the water supply and buzzing in the wiring in the walls. He calls out to her but she doesn’t respond. His voice sounds like it is underwater. He reaches out to touch her, but his arms feel like they’ve been tied down. His legs have grown roots and he is stuck to the floor, watching as she swirls around him. This is a dream, it must be, and he is torn between the desire to escape and the temptation to live in it forever. Floating just above him, she stops, looks down, and her lips move, but no sounds emerge. She dissolves, all manifestations of her dissolve, and the condensation from her spirit rests on his skin like dew.
In the morning, he is still on the carpet. The candles have burned out, but the song is still playing. Again and again, Lou Reed tells Hunter he’s going to reap just what he sows.
THREE
You spend a week after her death so busy and overwhelmed that you don’t even have time to grieve properly. Once everyone else has disappeared, you find yourself rooted to the couch and considering the feasibility of surviving if you never move again.
Everybody seems to think the best thing for you is getting out of the house, keeping busy. Keeping busy will distract you, they tell you via phone and text message and e-mail, it will make you feel productive and boost your self-esteem, it will keep you busy, which is good because when you’re busy it means you’re busy, but what they’re forgetting is that even when Kait was alive you didn’t like being busy, and so it’s hardly a salve to do something you dislike in order to overcome a calamitous loss. As if, what, you’ll go outside and chop some firewood, and you’ll forget? You’ll take a pottery class and learn how to paint ceramics, and someday wake up and think, oh, right, I’m a widower, no big deal anymore, I’ve always got my Hummels.
The thing you don’t want to admit is that they’re right, at least partly, because there is no worse place for you at the moment than in this house, wherein literally everything is a nagging reminder that she’s still almost there, a psychic indent on your life: the afghan crumpled at the foot of the couch, awaiting her return; the clocks all nine minutes fast because if she wasn’t early for work then she thought she was late; tomorrow morning’s work outfitpinstriped slacks, a black cardigan, and a ruffled blouse—piled on top of her dresser, waiting for her to fill and bring to life; her scrubby slippers tucked beneath the bed, the heels peeking out at you; the stray ink slashes she made on the comforter while she sat up in bed scrawling on documents for work, wielding the pen like a composer’s baton; the chocolates she stashed throughout the house like a squirrel does nuts, just in case of a chocolate emergency; the DVR choked with episodes of TV shows she’d been saving to watch on a rainy day; the leftover chicken noodle soup in the refrigerator, poured into a container the night her stomach pains struck, the night you should have realized something was seriously wrong, rather than telling her to “stop faking it” (you’d meant it as a joke, but what if those were actually your last words to her? The last ones she heard?).
The day after Kait died, Brutus said, “You must feel pretty bad about this, huh?” but since then no one else has voiced what they’ve all been thinking: this is your fault. In public, people whisper your story to one another when you pass, afraid to look you in the eyes, and although Kait’s death is a clear testament to the randomness of catastrophe, ev
eryone wants to ascribe some meaning to it, so despite no one having said it to you, you know they’ve all been trying to determine exactly what you did to deserve losing your wife in this way. But what sort of transgressions can one commit for which the fair and reasonable punishment is the immediate death of one’s wife? The primary characteristic of this situation is that it doesn’t make sense and has no cause, aside from the fact that this is what happens to the living—they die—but everyone else needs to try to make it make sense in order to cope with their own mortality. Randomness is terrifying; the need for assigning blame is universal. That’s the key to this whole ordeal—your culpability—the ensuing guilt that makes the atmosphere in the house toxic, clogs your drains, streaks your foggy mirror when you step out of the shower, drips from your walls like sweat.
YOU SIFT THROUGH NEGLECTED e-mails, texts, and Facebook messages, nearly two hundred of them, from acquaintances and college friends. Nobody is willing or able to use the word death or any variation of it; to all of these distant well-wishers, Kait is not dead, but rather she has passed on, or is no longer with us, or has reached her final resting place, or is at peace, or is at the pearly gates and is reuniting with the Lord. Many of these people haven’t spoken to you in months, even years, and so you find little comfort in their promises to keep you in their thoughts or to pray for you, because it has become abundantly clear that they do not have space reserved for you in their thoughts and prayers, just like you haven’t made time or mental space for them. A few extend vague offers of help, telling you to call if you need anything, saying just tell me what I can do for you. So you call them, but they do not answer; they look at their phones and turn to their living spouses and say something like I don’t think I can talk to him right now, too depressing, and their spouse gives them tacit permission to ignore your call.
Brutus calls you a week after the memorial. The brothers propose a weekly barbecue, a new tradition, a way to keep everyone together and in touch. They feel obligated to be cordial now, might even feel guilty about never having been nice to you when Kait was alive, but you know it’s not going to work, and you tell Brutus there’s no point in trying. “Neither of us wants to do this,” you say, and Brutus says they need to do it for Sherry. She’s falling apart, and you all have to come together as a family. “Kait would have wanted us to take care of each other,” Brutus says.
The Young Widower's Handbook Page 3
