The Widow's House

by Carol Goodman

  “Yes, but I’ve always wanted to write and since I’ve been up here staying at Riven House I have been.”

  “Riven House?”

  “The estate where we’re caretakers,” I said, thinking that for a psychologist he wasn’t a very good listener, “it used to be called River House—but the locals started calling it Riven House after Minnie Montague shot her husband, Bayard. Then they started calling it the widow’s house. . . . In fact, that’s what I’m writing about.”

  I paused to give him a chance to react to that bit of information, but he was scribbling busily now and merely waved his hand for me to go on.

  “You see, it turns out that I’m really the granddaughter of Bayard Montague and the Apple Blossom Queen, Mary Foley.” As I said it out loud I realized how crazy it sounded. I clenched my hands more firmly to keep the laughter from bubbling up my throat. “I realize that sounds improbable, but in fact it’s true. You see, I found out that Monty—Alden Montague—the professor we’re staying with, is really my father and he turns out to really be Mary Foley’s son because his father switched the babies at birth. I know, it sounds like one of those dreadful daytime soap operas that my mother used to watch—my adoptive mother, that is, Trudy . . . but it’s all true. I got my birth certificate from St. Anne’s”—I waved my hand toward the window in the direction of St. Anne’s Services across the parking lot—“and my biological mother named Monty as my father. He hadn’t known because he’d been on sabbatical, but since he’s found out he’s been wonderful. He wrote me into his will even before we had DNA testing, but his lawyer thought it was a good idea in case I ever have children so we came here two days ago to have our blood drawn.” I waved my hand in the other direction, back toward the hospital and, I vaguely thought, the genetics department where Monty and I had gone. I wished I hadn’t started moving my hands around. If I put them back in my lap now it would look like I was trying to rein them in. Why wasn’t he interrupting me now? I hadn’t meant to tell him the story about Minnie and Mary and Bayard and about Monty being my father.

  After a few minutes of consulting his clipboard Dr. Schermer asked, “Did you fantasize about finding your birth parents growing up?”

  I groaned. “This is not a fantasy. Monty has named me in his will.”

  “And how did that make you feel?”

  “Good! I mean, it’s not so much about the money—although God knows we needed it and it’s a huge relief after Jess not writing his second novel and all our financial problems—but really, it’s about the acknowledgment.”

  “You feel you’ve attained your father’s approval?”

  “I guess you could put it like that. It’s not just that he’s my father, he’s also a teacher and writer I’ve always respected. It means a lot to me that he values my writing—” I choked to a halt, my throat tight. To my horror and embarrassment I realized I was on the edge of tears.

  “Do you feel that your husband doesn’t value your writing?” Dr. Schermer nudged a box of Kleenex toward me without looking up.

  “Of course he does! That was part of the reason we came up here—” Only it wasn’t. I’d imagined that. “Or at least, I think he used to, but when I stopped writing I think Jess gave up on me . . .” I plucked a Kleenex from the box and wiped my eyes. “I mean, how can I blame him. If I couldn’t believe in myself why should he? But now that I am writing he seems . . . well, he doesn’t seem happy with that either.” I blew my nose and sat up straighter. “To tell you the truth, I think he’s jealous. That’s what Monty thinks. Monty says I have a stronger imagination than Jess and that’s why Jess doesn’t understand about seeing—”

  I cut myself off before saying ghosts but Dr. Schermer was onto me.

  “Seeing what?” he snapped, scribbling more furiously. “Are you experiencing hallucinations?”

  I almost laughed at the question—one that had struck me as funny in the hospital. If I were really crazy and seeing hallucinations how would I know they were hallucinations?

  “No,” I said firmly. “What I meant was that Jess doesn’t understand that when I’m writing I see what I’m writing about in my mind. John Gardner called it ‘the fictive dream.’”

  “But you don’t see these ‘fictive dream images’ out in the real world?”

  “No, of course not,” I lied.

  “And you’ve never experienced hallucinations?”

  “No,” I said, clasping my hands together.

  “Are you sure?” he asked, flipping a page on his clipboard. “Because according to your records from your hospitalization in May of 2000 you reported aural hallucinations of a baby crying and visual hallucinations of blood and in the records of your hospitalization last winter you reported hallucinations of a woman following you—”

  “Of a woman following my husband. And they weren’t hallucinations . . . wait . . . how do you have those records?” I asked, the blood rushing in a hot wave to my face. “Those are confidential.”

  Dr. Schermer raised his eyes from his clipboard and made eye contact with me for the first time since I’d entered the office.

  “When you made your appointment you faxed a waiver releasing all your previous records to our office—”

  “I did no such thing!” I cried.

  “Here’s the waiver.” Dr. Schermer passed the clipboard to me with what I could have sworn was a smug look. I took it with shaking hands and looked down at the blurry fax. Who faxed anymore? But then I remembered that Monty had a fax machine down in his apartment. The short typed letter gave Hudson River Mental Hospital and Bellevue Hospital permission to release my records to Dr. Schermer. It was signed by me—or by someone who was very good at forging my signature—and the only person I knew who could do that was Jess.

  I LEFT WITH a prescription for Zoloft and Xanax and an appointment for next week with Dr. Schermer. I was lucky I was able to leave at all. I’d maintained that I’d forgotten about faxing the form. Saying that my husband had forged it sounded paranoid and I didn’t need to add paranoid to delusional.

  But was it paranoid? I sat in the parking lot staring at the filthy rutted snow melting under a dreary rain, willing my hands to stop shaking and my heart to stop pounding enough that I could drive home and ask Jess if he’d forged my signature. And what if he said he hadn’t? What if he said I’d done it and didn’t remember? He’d be furious at me for accusing him of forging my signature. As furious as he’d been when I said I’d seen the tattooed barista from Sweetleaf’s hanging around the apartment. That had led to him checking me into Bellevue—the “hospitalization last winter” Dr. Schermer had referred to. Which made it sound much worse than it was. I’d only stayed the weekend—and only to reassure Jess that I was all right. I’d made him promise not to tell anyone. So who else could have typed that release letter?

  I stared out the steamed-over window. White curdled fog was rising from the melting snow like smoke. So much for the clean slate of this morning’s snow, I thought. I turned on the car and put on the defrost, as if clearing the windshield would clear my mind. As the windows defogged I made out a figure in a violet cocoon coat topped with a matching knit pillbox hat trimmed with lime green and muffled in a lavender scarf. She looked like a giant petit four. She looked . . . familiar. I wiped at the windows and peered through the streaky swipes. It was the cat-earring lady from St. Anne’s. Going home, I supposed. I watched her approach a lime green Ford Focus, aiming her key fob at it, but then she turned and looked behind her. Someone had called her name and was approaching from the opposite side of the parking lot—a tall slim woman in a black coat and a lavender scarf identical to the one cat-earring lady was wearing.

  That’s where I’d seen that scarf before. It was the same one Katrine had been wearing when she came to witness Monty’s will. And here was Katrine now waving at cat-earring lady and calling her name—

  I rolled down the window in time to hear Katrine’s voice call out “Aunt Jeanne!”

  “Trina!” Jeanne calle
d back. I watched as the two hugged each other. Katrine presented her aunt with a red and gold gift bag tied with red and green ribbons. Jeanne opened the gift right there in the parking lot, riffling through layers of red tissue paper to pull out what I could tell even from a distance was a candle. Jeanne hugged her niece and then opened the hatchback of her Focus and pulled out a decorative tin—one of many stacked in the back. The whole scene was like a pantomime in a play. The happy townspeople exchange Christmas presents in the town square. So why was my face wet with tears? And why did I feel a mounting queasy unease? So the cat-earring lady who showed me my adoption file was Katrine’s Aunt Jeanne. It was a small town.

  Katrine and her aunt embraced once more and then Katrine walked smartly across the parking lot, her high-heeled patent-leather boots smoothly navigating runnels of water from the melting snow, to her bright yellow Suburban. When I saw her red brake light go on something kindled inside me.

  I pictured myself signing forms in Katrine’s real estate office. “Just a formality,” she’d said. “We’re supposed to have you fill these out before showing you any properties.” I’d signed because Jess had been outside smoking a cigarette. How easy would it be to make a Xerox of my signature and transpose it onto a fax releasing my records? But why?

  Katrine’s Suburban pulled out and headed to the hospital exit and I followed. She turned left onto Route 9 and drove north, back toward Concord. Even if she saw me there was nothing remarkable in me driving that way. Still, I hung back, letting a silver Honda make a right out of the diner parking lot in front of me. It was easy to see Katrine’s bright yellow car up ahead. Obnoxious gas guzzler, Jess had whispered in my ear when we’d gotten in Katrine’s car last summer. And then he’d mocked her all day.

  She made a left onto 9G instead of taking 9 straight into Concord. So she wasn’t going to her office. Maybe she was showing a house—or maybe she was going home. I didn’t know where she lived. I didn’t really know much of anything about her, considering she was a local girl. What had she said that first day?

  You wouldn’t remember me. I was a year behind you and not in honors classes like you were.

  No, I didn’t remember her, but apparently she had remembered me.

  At the intersection of 199 Katrine turned left toward the Kingston-Rhinecliff Bridge. If she was going to Kingston to do her last-minute Christmas shopping at the mall I’d stop following her—

  But she turned right before the bridge onto River Road. The prickle of unease in my stomach bloomed into an acid ache. She was going to Riven House . . . but then she turned right onto Apple Ring Road. I slowed down. There were only two houses on Apple Ring Road—the Corbett farm and the Jackson farm, my old house. If I went up the road she’d know I was following her. But I knew that the road curved around the orchard and came back down to River Road. If I took the next turn I would come around from the opposite direction. If I passed Katrine I could always say I’d been going to see my old house. It was funny, really, that I hadn’t gone back sooner.

  I didn’t pass Katrine driving up the hill, nor did I see her car parked at the Corbett farm. The orchards began at the top of the hill, the now-bare apple trees standing like gaunt sentinels in knee-deep fog. A quarter mile below the top of the hill was a turnoff where we used to park the tractor during picking season. I pulled in here and parked in the rutted grooves between two sycamores, exactly where Dunstan and I used to park when he drove me back home and we wanted a little more time together. Through the leafless trees I could see the back of my old house and Katrine’s yellow Suburban parked in the driveway. She wasn’t inside the car, so I assumed she’d gone inside. She was probably meeting buyers here and had arrived early to better “stage” the house—turn up the heat, switch on lamps, open windows to banish the stale smell old houses got in the winter. On a dreary day like today it would be a challenge to make the old place look cheerful. Even with a new coat of paint and fresh trim on the shutters, the house would look dark on a day like today. People from the city might romanticize these old farmhouses, but they usually had small rooms, low ceilings, and small windows—all to conserve precious heat. The eyebrow window in my second floor bedroom, which I could see now through the trees, was too small for me to squeeze out of and my ceiling was so low that Dunstan hadn’t been able to stand in my room. The barn was a cheerier red than it had been in my day, but I remembered getting up at 5 A.M. to feed our chickens and milk the cows and spending weekends mucking out the soiled hay. I could almost smell the manure now even though the Bailey professors probably used the barn to keep their matching Volvos instead of livestock.

  I can’t wait to get away, I would tell Dunstan when we sat here in his old pickup, huddled together for warmth under his denim jacket.

  It would be different for us, Clary, he’d say. You only hate it because of how your folks treat you. A place is good or bad because of the people in it.

  But I’d been afraid. I’d seen how the mean, cramped space of our house and the unrelenting toil of farmwork had turned Trudy into a bitter, carping shrew—seen how she cringed at the sight of my father’s muddy boots on her clean linoleum floor, seen how she pressed herself against the narrow hallway when he walked past her, heard her muffled complaints when he got too close to her in bed.

  I hadn’t wanted that. I’d wanted to go away, find a different sort of life, a life I thought Jess would take me to. So I’d broken up with Dunstan in my senior year of college and moved to New York with Jess. And for a while it seemed that I’d gotten the life I’d dreamed about in that low-ceilinged room behind the eyebrow window. Jess and I had been good together before the money troubles, but when things got tight even our spacious loft had come to feel claustrophobic—and haunted. I had told the doctor at Bellevue that there was a woman trying to get into the loft to take my husband away from me. I’d said that she was covered with tattoos of Jess’s novels—the parts that described Rachel Bartley, the character based on me. Don’t you see, I had told the doctor at Bellevue, she’s trying to take my place. That was when Jess suggested we move and start over again. That’s why we’d come to Riven House. But maybe Dunstan had been right. A place was only as good as the people in it. And maybe that’s why I’d seen ghosts in Riven House—Jess and I had poisoned it.

  I wiped my eyes. When I opened them I saw that another car had pulled into the drive behind Katrine’s. A small sports car. Her city buyers? But only one man got out, a man who glanced at the mean little farmhouse with such disdain it was hard to believe he’d ever said he’d be willing to live in a shack. Jess turned the collar of his black leather jacket up around his neck, ground a cigarette out in the mud, and went inside as if he owned the place.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  I sat in the car staring at the mute face of my childhood home trying to think of innocent reasons for Jess and Katrine meeting there. Jess had decided we needed to get out of Riven House for my mental health and was planning to rent the Jackson farm for us to live in. He was just checking it out . . .

  But with every minute that passed that likelihood melted just as surely as the snow leached into the gray air. What did I think they were doing in there? Checking to see if the basement was dry? Measuring the windows for curtains? Only a woman naïve enough to believe that her husband moved to the country so they could have a second chance together would believe that. I wasn’t that woman anymore.

  I wasn’t really sure who I was. Was I the girl who had grown up in that cramped room listening to noises in the dark and dreaming of a way out? Or the girl who’d broken Dunstan Corbett’s heart here on this hill? Or the woman who’d married Jess Martin? The woman who had believed he still loved her despite all evidence to the contrary? The woman whose husband was cheating on her with Katrine Vanderberg?

  But he’d made fun of her!

  Of course he had, a voice inside my head replied, so you wouldn’t suspect. Stupid girl!

  It was the voice of Great-Granny Jackson, the voice that had told
me throughout my childhood that I was stupid, ugly, wrong.

  And here it turned out she had been right all along. How exultant she would be to see my husband cheating on me under her own roof.

  Because, really, what else could be happening in there?

  It must have been an hour before they reappeared. The gray afternoon was deepening to dusk by then and the rain had changed to sleet. They were two indistinct shapes in the gloaming, but it was clear enough how they clung together on the slippery path. They didn’t kiss, but then Jess had never been one for good-bye kisses. I waited until both their cars pulled out of the driveway and watched until their taillights were swallowed up by the fog like embers extinguished in ash. Then I started the Subaru. I’d been sitting in the car without heat for so long that my hands were frozen through. They felt like someone else’s hands as I fumbled with the ignition and the gearshift and clutched the steering wheel as though it were a life preserver.

  Where was I even going? Back to Riven House where Jess would be sitting by the fire with Monty, smiling at me as if nothing had changed at all?

  I turned left onto Apple Ring Road, onto the steep decline down to my old house. The sudden dip made my stomach lurch. I was going to be sick. I couldn’t be sick in Monty’s car. I turned the wheel to the right to pull over, but the car kept going down the hill. It doesn’t matter which way you try to turn, Great-Granny Jackson’s voice mocked, the only way you’re going is down.

  “Fuck you, old lady!” I cried aloud, wrenching the wheel again and hitting the brakes. The rear tires fishtailed and the car began to revolve in a slow, lazy pirouette. I was sliding down the hill sideways. Another voice spoke in my head—Dunstan’s. Black ice, he said, but it was too late.

  The Subaru careened into the oak tree at the end of my old driveway. I heard metal crunch, glass shatter, and my own scream. Eyes closed, I braced for the concussion of an air bag—or worse: the steering rod through my heart, windshield glass in my face, head smashed against the ceiling—all the horrors Dunstan had described to me the summer he worked as an EMT, all leading to a bloody, violent death—