The Widow's Season

by Laura Brodie

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  PART ONE - Spirit

  • 1 •

  • 2 •

  • 3 •

  • 4 •

  • 5 •

  • 6 •

  • 7 •

  • 8 •

  PART TWO - Flesh

  • 9 •

  • 10 •

  • 11 •

  • 12 •

  • 13 •

  • 14 •

  • 15 •

  • 16 •

  • 17 •

  • 18 •

  • 19 •

  • 20 •

  PART THREE - Resurrection

  • 21 •

  • 22 •

  • 23 •

  • 24 •

  • 25 •

  • 26 •

  • 27 •

  • 28 •

  • 29 •

  PART FOUR - Resolutions

  • 30 •

  • 31 •

  • 32 •

  • 33 •

  • 34 •

  • 35 •

  Afterword

  Acknowledgements

  The Widow’s Season

  PRAISE FOR THE WIDOW’S SEASON

  “The Widow’s Season is far more than what it seems to be at first—a straightforward story of a woman getting used to a crushing loss. It’s smarter, slyer, and more unconventional than that. It’s haunting—and haunted, too.”

  —Elizabeth Benedict, author of Almost and The Practice of Deceit

  “Confronts all the twists and turns of grief and loss, love and marriage, and the human heart with honesty, humor, and great intelligence.” —Ann Hood, author of The Knitting Circle

  PRAISE FOR LAURA BRODIE’S

  BREAKING OUT

  “Brodie is an excellent guide. Once you open it, her book is hard to put down.”—Jane Tompkins, author of A Life in School

  “Brodie tells her story with a light touch and an eye for telling detail.” —Jill Ker Conway, author of The Road from Coorain

  “Brodie is a fine writer, sensitive to nuances.”

  —Lois Banner, author of American Beauty

  “A fascinating and highly readable story filled with striking insights into American gender roles and revolutions at the end of the twentieth century. Brodie’s book does a wonderful job of demonstrating the pressures for both continuity and change.”

  —Drew Gilpin Faust, author of Mothers of Invention

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales, is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  An excerpt from this novel was previously published, in slightly different form, in Shenandoah.

  Copyright © 2009 by Laura Brodie Readers Guide copyright © 2009 by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  BERKLEY® is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  The “B” design is a trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Berkley trade paperback edition / June 2009

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Brodie, Laura Fairchild.

  The widow’s season / Laura Brodie.—Berkley trade paperback ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-05734-6

  1. Widows—Fiction. 2. Grief—Fiction. 3. Psychological fiction. I. Title.

  PS3602.R63486W53 2009

  813’.6—dc22

  2009002118

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  For Julia, Rachel, Kathryn

  and especially John,

  may he live to a ripe old age.

  Let her take him for her keeper and spy, not only of her deeds, but also of her conscience . . . And let her not behave herself, so that his soul has cause to be angry with her, and take vengeance on her ungraciousness.

  —On the proper behavior of a widow

  toward her husband.

  Juan Luis Vives,

  De Institutione Feminae Christianae,

  dedicated to Catherine of Aragon in 1523.

  PART ONE

  Spirit

  • 1 •

  Sarah McConnell’s husband had been dead three months when she saw him in the grocery store. He was standing at the end of the seasonal aisle, contemplating a display of plastic pumpkins, when, for one brief moment, he lifted his head and looked into her eyes. There, in his unaltered face, she glimpsed such an odd mixture of longing and indecision that her first instinct was to rush toward him, to fold her body within that unforgettable green flannel shirt. But she was swept by a wave of tingling nerves and pounding blood so cold, her only response was mute paralysis. In the seconds it took to resume her breathing, he had turned the corner at the aisle’s end and was gone.

  She heard the broken cry before she recognized it as her own voice, yelling, “David! Wait!” And then she was running after him, her cart abandoned, her pocketbook banging against her thigh.

  When she reached the end of the aisle and turned left, she saw nothing but a wall of milk and eggs, mingled with the faces of wary strangers. Immediately she began checking aisle after aisle, finding nothing and nothing and again, nothing. She sprinted to the front of the store and searched in the opposite direction, scanning aisles to her left, checkout lines to her right. Never had the rows of paper towels, canned fruit, and cereal boxes seemed so garish, their cartoon logos blurring with her fractured thoughts.

  Rushing out to the parking lot, she yelled David’s name again. But among the handful of people unlocking their cars and loading their trunks, there were no dark-haired, middle-aged men in blue jeans and green flannel.

  By the time she had reentered the store, the manager was coming down from his elevated cubicle. His bland smile seemed to assure that he had seen all this before. A mother obviously panicked over a missing child. With a small team of searchers he would eventually find the errant preschooler gazing at the lobster tank, or hiding behind a helium canister.


  “You’ve lost someone?”

  The words lingered in Sarah’s mind. “Yes.” She had lost someone.

  “What does he look like?”

  Her dark eyes kept scanning the store. She had a vague notion that if she stayed near the door she might block David’s exit.

  “He was wearing his Yankees baseball cap.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “David.”

  “How old is he?”

  “Forty-three.”

  The manager’s smile sagged. “Forty-three?”

  Sarah stopped to examine the man. She noted his solid black tie, his red-white-and-blue name tag, and his fragile patience.

  “He’s my husband.”

  It was almost comical, how quickly the kindness fled from the man’s face. In his eyes she was no longer an endearing young mother, in need of a steady arm. She was just another noisy wacko, a middle-aged woman with a wild expression, whose brown hair was falling from its silver clips.

  “Do you want me to page him?” The words were more dismis sive than curious. Already the manager’s thoughts were returning to his computer screen.

  Sarah imagined herself waiting at the customer service counter while a stranger paged her dead husband, and gradually the hysteria began to seep away. Why had she come here? What did she want from this place?

  “Never mind.” Her only thought was to escape to the quiet safety of her home.

  Stepping again into the parking lot, she noticed how pale the sky had become. The maple leaves, so bright with fire two weeks before, were crumpled and falling like ash. As she crossed the pavement, the October wind bit through the links of her sweater.

  Inside her old Volvo wagon, she shut the door, strapped on her seat belt, and placed the key into the ignition. Then she sat back, closed her eyes, and quietly, very quietly, she wept.

  • 2 •

  “I saw David today.”

  Sarah was sitting in her neighbor’s kitchen, running her fingertip along the rim of an empty coffee mug. Margaret Blake, a tall Englishwoman with short gray hair, leaned over the stove as she dipped a silver straining ball into a blue teapot. Sarah wondered if her words would provoke a flinch in Margaret’s shoulders, or a sudden turn of the head. But she couldn’t detect the slightest hesitation in her friend’s hands as they reached for the quilted tea cozy.

  In the three years since Margaret’s younger daughter had left for college, Friday-afternoon tea had become a ritual for the two women. It was a time to talk about gardens and politics, to berate hapless presidents and ineffectual prime ministers.

  It was also a time to mourn, because Margaret, too, was a widow. Five years had passed since she had found her husband in the backyard, lying among a pile of pruned crab-apple branches. Five springs that same tree had blossomed and faded in a floral anniversary, each time prompting Sarah to wonder what had impelled Ethan Blake, a man with a notoriously temperamental heart, to suddenly take up pruning. Had he sensed that something was to be sheared that day? That an old branch needed to be cut away?

  Until then his yardwork had consisted of an occasional afternoon with the push mower. She could still see him, wire-rimmed glasses sliding down his sweaty nose as he rocked the mower back and forth around the edges of lilac and forsythia.

  From her seat at the kitchen table she had a clear view into the living room, where Margaret had arranged a private memorial on the fireplace mantel. To the right and left stood pictures of her two daughters, ages twenty-one and twenty-four, cheerful testaments to youth and health. Between them, an ebony-framed photograph showed streaks of sunlight pouring through the branches of a crab-apple tree.

  Sarah was one of the few people who understood the picture’s full significance. She knew how Margaret, arriving home that spring afternoon, had found her husband stretched so neatly on his back, lifeless eyes open to the brilliant sun, that she had decided to lie down beside him—to look up through the crab-apple branches and see what he had contemplated in the last minutes of his life. There, with the twigs in her shoulder blades and Ethan’s hand touching her own, Margaret had been so struck with the bright fragments of blue sky, shining like shattered glass through pink petals and black branches, that after going inside and calling 911, she had come back with her camera. And here was the result on the living-room mantel, a triptych monument to life’s beginnings and endings.

  It must be a British thing, Sarah thought, this pragmatism in the face of death. Margaret Blake was not one to be ruffled by the apparition of a dead man in a grocery store.

  “Where did you see him?” Margaret turned and brought the teapot to the table.

  “At the Food Lion.”

  “I thought you shopped at Safeway.”

  Sarah smiled. How typical of Margaret, to transform the morbid into the mundane.

  “I was running some errands on the other side of town.”

  Thank God it hadn’t happened at the Safeway. There were eight thousand people in Jackson, Virginia, and every time she shopped at the local market she ran into English department colleagues, or David’s old patients. Even the baggers had familiar faces—the teenage girl with Down’s syndrome, the man with the black earring. Sarah would have avoided them for weeks had they witnessed what she was now coming to think of as her “episode.”

  Margaret sat down and poured two cups of Earl Grey. She placed the teapot on a folded linen napkin and offered Sarah a small blue pitcher of cream, etched with scenes from Canterbury Cathedral. Friends were always bringing Margaret these mementos from their European vacations, as if an atheist from Manchester was going to be nostalgic for Thomas Becket.

  “I saw Ethan everywhere after he died.” Margaret wrapped both hands around her mug. “In crowds, in traffic. I’d see him in a car that passed and I’d drive like mad to catch up. But it never turned out to be him.”

  Sarah nodded. The early weeks of her widowhood had been filled with false sightings. Each time she passed a man of David’s build and hair color she had felt a brief flash of recognition, invariably broken by the face of another stranger.

  “But this was different. This time I recognized his shirt and his Yankees cap. And he stared right at me.”

  “So what happened?”

  “He disappeared.”

  “Oh.”

  Margaret put down her mug and focused on the sugar bowl, breaking the hard clumps with the tip of her spoon. With each silver tap, Sarah felt her jaw tighten. What did she need to say to gain a legitimating nod? The only words that came to mind were the same predictable refrain she had repeated for the past three months.

  “They still haven’t found his body.”

  And here Margaret did hesitate, just long enough to look into Sarah’s eyes. “They will.”

  In her thirteen years in Jackson, Sarah had witnessed dozens of flash floods like the one that had taken David. Sometimes the water came in the midst of drought, when the land was too parched to absorb a sudden storm. Other days, the downpours capped weeks of steady rain, transforming the area’s usually placid creeks and rivers into muddy, frothing torrents. Locals told stories of entire mountain communities drowned in nighttime floods; water climbed the front stairs of double-wide trailers and seeped around bedposts while families slept. But Sarah knew of only a few isolated deaths—a drunk college student innertubing on Possum Creek, a woman in a Honda Civic who tried to cross a flooded bridge and was swept downriver as she climbed from her window.

  In “David’s flood,” as she had come to call it, there were two other victims, a pair of little sisters. They had been huddled under an umbrella at the edge of their backyard creek, watching the water churn and leap, when the muddy bank on which they stood collapsed into the current. Their mother had witnessed it all from the porch of their farmhouse. She had been yelling through the rain for her girls to come inside when the creek opened its gaping mouth.

  Sarah shuddered each time she envisioned it. That woman’s loss was so much greater than her own. S
he had no children, and could scarcely imagine the cold horror of watching that umbrella bobbing downstream. One girl’s body had been recovered a few days after the flood. The other had been found only recently, tangled among branches and leaves on the banks of the Shannon, into which all streams in the area flowed. The burial had taken place just last week.

  And maybe that was the problem. Maybe it was the child’s burial that had been troubling her thoughts over the past few days, triggering all of these memories and visions. Sarah had read the newspaper’s brief account with a touch of envy, for she, too, had been awaiting a burial. Many nights, alone in bed, she had imagined David’s body resting on a bank beneath a grove of trees, water lapping at his ankles. Other times she saw him float from current to current, past fields and cliffs, pastures and houses, away down the valley, a hundred miles or more. In her mind, his body never decayed. He was the handsomest drowned man in the world, carried from farm to farm in the Shenandoah Valley, tracked by the eyes of quiet deer.

  More and more, her mind was drawn to the river. Each time she drove across the concrete bridge that marked Jackson’s town limit, she saw the ripples and eddies below and inwardly gauged the water level. Lately the river’s slow current seemed to parallel the hypnotic rhythm of her afternoons—hours of unbroken quiet, stretched on her living-room couch while her mind sank deep into the past. She had always been the sort of person who could get lost in her thoughts, wandering their farthest corners while schoolteachers droned on about trigonometry or trilobites. As a child, she had learned early that imagination was preferable to reality, and that books could be a gateway into labyrinthine daydreams. That was why she had become an English professor, because of her love of fictional worlds.