The Young Widower's Handbook

by Tom McAllister

  Hunter does not know exactly where he is going, but he moves with a sense of purpose, hoping his confidence rubs off on Zack. “Do you think there’s bears out here?” Zack asks.

  “I don’t think so,” Hunter says.

  “But what if there’s bears?”

  “Did you know bears can’t run downhill? Their legs are too short so they fall.” Hunter knows this is a myth, but it’s important to reassure the boy, and anyway if a bear shows up the truth is that they will be mauled and there’s nothing either of them could do about it.

  “How do you know that?” Zack asks.

  “I’m a pretty smart guy.”

  “Say something else smart then.”

  Hunter repeats some of the facts about the park that he was reading to Kait. Zack seems to accept this recitation as proof of Hunter’s intelligence.

  “Are you here with your family?” Zack asks.

  “I’m by myself.” Zack skips over a fallen branch, does not release Hunter’s hand. “Aren’t you scared to be alone?”

  “Sometimes.” A gust of wind causes tree limbs to creak overhead. They’re so deep in the woods now that Hunter feels like he’s living the opening scenes of one of Grimm’s fairy tales. It’s still midday but the sun will be setting soon and he does not want to imagine the terror of being lost in the dark here.

  “What’s that thing you’re carrying?” Zack asks.

  “It’s kind of a long story,” Hunter says. Zack stops and looks at him, his eyes blank and wanting. He has already placed all of his trust in Hunter and his face seems to say okay, then tell me a story. “I can tell you all about it when we get back.”

  “Can I hold it?”

  Zack’s hand is clammy and his cheeks are red and although he’s doing his best to be stoic, Hunter can see a squall of tears about to be unleashed. “Sure, but you have to hold it with both hands and promise not to drop it. It’s very, very important.” Zack nods solemnly and then squeezes it against his body with the intensity of a secret agent carrying the nuclear launch codes. They walk slowly as Zack maintains a laser focus on protecting the cargo.

  “What’s in here that’s so important?”

  Hunter considers making a game of it by pretending it’s a treasure he found in the woods, but why should he lie? Zack may not have a firm grasp on the mechanics of death and grief, but he’s probably seen a thousand deaths by now in movies and video games. He may have dead grandparents and cousins and—who knows?—parents. It seems like a violation of his trust not to tell him the truth, and maintaining Zack’s trust is essential to making a calm, composed return to civilization. “That’s my wife.”

  Zack laughs. “You can’t marry a box.”

  “Right. Smart kid. You cannot marry a box.” Zack shakes it a little, as if trying to guess the true contents. “What I mean is, I was married. To a person. But she died. Do you know what cremation is?”

  “Everybody knows what cremation is,” Zack says, rolling his eyes. “When my friend Robbie’s dog died they cremated it and they put the ashes out in the park.”

  “Same thing here. Except I didn’t spread the ashes yet.”

  “You have to,” Zack says. “Or she doesn’t get into heaven. That’s what Robbie’s mom said. But she said dogs have a different heaven, but it’s the same rules basically.”

  “Doesn’t it seem like heaven has too many rules?”

  Zack stops. “Was she nice?” He looks down at the cube as if hoping to see her in there. Hunter tries to wave him along, but Zack remains still. The answer to this question seems particularly important to him. Hunter tells him that, yes, she was nice.

  “Is that why you look so sad?”

  “I guess that’s why, yeah.”

  Zack continues to look at the box and Hunter places a hand on his back. The boy’s breathing is shallow and he looks like this news is too much for him to handle right now. If he’s allowed to dwell in Hunter’s grief any longer, he may sink into a panic. Hunter presses gently on his back and they begin walking again. “What about you? Who are you here with?”

  Zack nods. “Me and my dad and my stepmom go here every year. I think it’s boring but my dad and my stepmom like it a lot, and my brother likes it too.”

  “How old is your brother?”

  This question prompts Zack to launch into a monologue in which he details his family’s convoluted web of relations, the parents who divorced and remarried and divorced again a year later before marrying new people, the joint custody and visitation schedules, the brother and stepbrothers and half-sisters, the hyphenated names, the alimony and child support, the bartering over holidays, and with his expert knowledge of the intricacies of divorce law he sounds for a moment like the world’s littlest lawyer. By the time he finishes speaking, the trail is in sight, and Zack begins walking faster. As soon as they emerge from the woods, Zack returns Kait to Hunter and is running a few steps ahead of him.

  Following the park map now, they walk to the nearest ranger’s station. The ranger uses his walkie-talkie to report that the missing boy has been found, and asks that the family come pick him up. The voice on the other end, presumably another ranger, says, “Oh thank god.” It is clear from the ranger’s demeanor that he thought they were possibly searching for a body instead of a boy. Within ten minutes, the family is at the door—father, stepmother, brother, stepsister, and half-sister—and Zack rushes to hug his father, the tears now relentless. The father holds on to him and kisses his head and he cries and laughs at the same time. He looks like a man who just found out his tumor was benign.

  The father shakes Hunter’s hand vigorously. “Listen,” he says, his body seeming to double in size as he regains his composure. “We owe you. Big time.”

  “Anybody would have done the same thing,” Hunter says.

  “Nonsense,” the father says. “They didn’t do it. You did.”

  Standing next to his father, Zack tells him about the cube, about Kait. Then he says, “Can Hunter come eat with us? He doesn’t have anybody to eat with.” The father digests this information, tries to avoid looking at the ashes, smiles apologetically at Hunter. He turns to his children and says, “Kids, do you think he should join us for our pic-a-nic?”

  The kids cheer and the brother high-fives Hunter, and they all seem to take joy in the simple act of hearing their father speak. Zack is the oldest of the children, and all four kids are still young enough that they love their parents unconditionally and would rather be here than any other place. The father is rugged and has a meticulous beard and his wife stands there taunting Hunter with her still-beating heart while the children watch both of them with idolatrous looks in their eyes. They seem very happy and healthy, and there is nothing Hunter wants less than to spend an afternoon with them.

  “No, sorry, no, I can’t,” Hunter says. “I have to get home soon.”

  “We’ve got wine,” the father says. “And sandwiches and all kinds of good stuff. Who doesn’t like wine and sandwiches?”

  “You don’t owe me anything.”

  “You saved my boy’s life,” the father says. He pulls a twenty-dollar bill out of his wallet and adds, “At least take this.” Even as he’s doing it, he seems to realize it’s a ridiculous gesture.

  Given the choices, Hunter thinks the most dignified option is to just join them for their picnic. He stuffs his hands in his pockets and waits for the father to withdraw the twenty. On a hilly clearing behind the station, the father unfolds a large picnic blanket while the mother assigns a variety of small tasks to the children. The family works together efficiently, but not in a militaristic way; they’re like a picnicking pit crew, everyone focused on their jobs and humming through them without even having to communicate. Within minutes, there are seven plates set out with sandwiches, grapes, an apple, and a granola bar. The adults have small plastic cups of wine. Everyone has a bottle of water. The whole family is smiling and talking and listening to one another. Hunter has never seen a family so bizarrely functional
.

  A breeze billows through the father’s plaid hiking shirt while he sips his wine, and he looks like the cover model on a catalog for perfect fathers. He is comfortable being exactly who he is in this moment, surrounded by his loving family, and he has the confidence to sit quietly rather than imposing himself on the conversation. Hunter gulps down his sandwich in a few huge bites, and he finishes his wine before the stepmother has even taken a sip.

  When the kids finish eating, they run off the blanket and roll in the dirt. They dig with their hands, looking for dinosaur bones, or at least interesting rocks. The stepmother slides closer to her husband, and he wraps an arm around her shoulders while she leans into him. Hunter feels a bitter lump forming in his throat. “So,” he says, “You guys are like the perfect family, huh?” He means it as a compliment, but he’s afraid it sounds aggressive.

  The father laughs and says, “You just caught us on a good day.”

  The stepmother adds, “It takes a lot of work to try to look normal.” She glances over her shoulder at the children. “They sure didn’t make it easy on us at first.”

  “Things were ugly for a while,” the father adds. “Between the divorce and their mom’s issues, my job stuff, Zack’s problems at school. I didn’t know sometimes how we were going to get by.”

  It is comforting to hear him talk about his unhappy past, to be reminded that these people were not always like this. There have been crises. There has been doubt. People don’t just spring fully formed like this into the world; they have to grind through an endless process of construction and collapse until they develop into a person they can like.

  Hunter says, “Aren’t you ever afraid sometimes that things are too good now? Like something bad has to happen to kind of balance things out?”

  The father leans forward and refills Hunter’s wine. Hunter can’t tell whether he’s ignoring the question or thinking about it. He realizes this is inappropriate picnic conversation, and his role here is to talk about how nice it is outside, to say something about the birds. But he so rarely sees people who seem uncomplicatedly happy, and he wants to know how they maintain. He needs assurance that there’s a path from his current crisis state to some future in which he has developed into a man he can like and respect.

  “I don’t know,” the father finally says. “Sometimes I think I’ve already hit my quota for bad news. But then today, we almost lose Zack, and, man . . .”

  Both parents go quiet, unwilling to give voice to that alternate reality in which Zack really did disappear.

  “He’s a good kid,” Hunter says.

  They both nod, then glance down the hill to make sure all their kids are accounted for. The father says, “You have any kids?”

  Hunter should have seen this turn in the conversation coming, but he’d let his guard down. Now the only direction it can take is a spiral downward into his depressing story and he doesn’t want to ruin their day. He wants them to be able to enjoy their marriage and their children without the burden of his unhappiness weighing them down. He clutches at his pocket, pretends his phone is buzzing. He pulls it out and checks the display. “Oh, wow, I have to take this call,” he says, and before he even finishes the sentence he is on his feet. “Sorry, I have to run,” he says. He thanks them and then is hustling down the hill with Kait in his arms and the phone pressed to his ear, holding a fake conversation with someone very important. The parents try to call him back to the picnic, but he is too fast and they can’t leave their kids to chase after him.

  Kait loved children, smiled at them in supermarkets and was always the first in line to hold a cousin’s baby and coo at it; Hunter was indifferent toward kids, but he knew Kait would be a great mother, selfless and generous and well-organized, and she had recently gotten in the habit of saying things like “you would be a good dad” and enumerating his dadlike traits (reliability, loyalty, intelligence), often in contrast to her own miserable father, so he knew that one day, sooner rather than later, they would probably have children, and these children would be universally beloved by Dixons and Cadys alike, and Jack and Willow could recoup their losses on Hunter, invest their hopes and dreams into these new little beings. As a couple, though, they chose to wait, wanted to travel first, and they waited too long—the catastrophic accident of the ectopic pregnancy notwithstanding—so now there will never be a child in the world like the one Hunter and Kait could have made together. If they’d had a daughter a year ago, he could be holding a miniature version of Kait in his arms right now, could feel like there was a purpose to his life. Or he could be looking resentfully down at the face of a little burden, a daily reminder that Kait abandoned them, saddled him with the responsibility of having to follow the child everywhere she went because he would be too afraid to lose her, because children are set at birth to self-destruct and most of their energy is spent seeking out new ways to get hurt, and a parent’s job is to scramble behind them with outstretched arms in case they fall. Even when the daughter was forty years old, Hunter would feel compelled to follow her, to save her from the world itself. The daughter would complain about his intrusiveness, but that wouldn’t change anything because he would need to be there and experience every second of her life vicariously because he’d already had his chance to live and wasted it.

  Back near the start of the trail, he is again himself with nature. There is too much space here. That’s one of the ostensible appeals of the park, he knows, of nature walks in general—the solitude. When he read the blurbs online, he considered stowing away here, uniting with nature, becoming a woodsman and living off the land. Self-reliant. At some point, he would scatter her ashes and free her, allow her to return to the earth. The soil enriched by her ashes would blossom into an Edenic oasis, which he would visit every day to pay homage. But about a mile into the forest, he looks around and sees nothing but menacing nature: rows of trees rising out of the earth like teeth, millions of bugs all aiming to drink his blood, whooshing winds that moan like rheumatic joints. If he were to die right now, nobody would find him for days, at least, and it’s possible the only person who would care is now in his arms, voiceless and bodiless, confined to a steel cube. He thought he wanted to be alone, but the loneliness is the most painful thing he has ever felt in his life.

  THIRTEEN

  Some days you simply cannot forget and you cannot remember at the same time. The past is alternately suffocating and liberating. When you go too long without thinking about her, when you realize you’ve spent a whole morning without a single thought of Kait, the guilt threatens to strangle you. It’s your job to remember her, but it’s impossible for anyone to live inside his own memories. You want to move forward with your life, but if you move too quickly, you may lose everything you have left of her.

  Some days, you simply cannot muster the energy to act like a human: to shower, and shake hands with strangers, and have thoughts about the weather, and order an omelet at the diner, and thank the waitress, and leave her a tip, and make small talk with the desk clerk at the hotel. And yet you still find yourself doing these things because some biological impulse drives you to persist. Your white blood cells are slowly manufacturing antibodies to fight back the viral strain of grief that’s been draining you, and some small, hidden part of you perhaps even wants to do all these things, to feel normal again.

  FOURTEEN

  Since arriving in Tulsa, Oklahoma, two days ago, Hunter has seen only the highway from his hotel window and the sliver of carpeted hallway visible when he cracks the door open to accept room service. There are things to do in Tulsa, obviously. There are things to do everywhere. Hunter’s problem is that he doesn’t want to do any of them. Due to a confluence of mechanical issues and a scheduling mix-up, the bus to Austin was delayed, and so he is stuck here for another two days. Until then, he and Kait are under self-imposed quarantine. They are watching TV and they are doing crossword puzzles—they used to do the Sunday crossword together, alternating turns on clues and leaving the newspaper on the
kitchen table for each other throughout the week—and they are playing video games on the Internet. Every night, he struggles to sleep, twisting himself up in his blankets for hours, sweating through the sheets.

  If Jack were here, he would repeat his refrain about how Hunter should appreciate having the luxury of aimlessness. But right now, the aimlessness feels less like luxury than burden. To move without direction is unnatural; even the least sophisticated mammals have instincts to tell them what to do, but his instincts have been eroded by a lifetime of abject safety. He knows that when on vacation Kait would never have considered sitting in a hotel for several days; they would only have used the room for sleep, showers, maybe good-morning sex, and otherwise they would vacation vigorously. At the start of this trip, he was confident the requisite adventures would emerge on their own, but instead he has proven to be woefully inadequate at every aspect of adventuring. Even now, in the throes of this delay, he is losing faith in his plan; what happens if he gets to Austin and finds it even more unlivable than the other places he’s been? Why should he expect Seattle or Victoria or San Francisco to offer him anything he hasn’t seen already? What makes those better destinations than, for example, a dinosaur quarry in Oklahoma or the Texas Prison Museum in Huntsville or the World’s Largest Uncrucified Christ in Arkansas? When one’s choices are limitless, how is it possible to know what is the right thing to do?

  HE AWAKES TO A single sharp knock on his door. Blanket wrapped around his shoulders like a cape, he looks through the peephole and sees Jack checking his watch. Even though the temperature in Tulsa will creep up to three digits before noon, Jack is wearing what he always wears: khakis, blue dress shirt, black tie. He doesn’t cuff his sleeves or loosen his tie. His hair is unmoved by the weather. A bead of sweat trickles past his right ear.