The Widow's Season

by Laura Brodie

  But she hoped that there was more to it, for there was something she hadn’t told Nate back at the Mayflower, a key detail that had nagged at her thoughts all through dinner, and was keeping her awake at this late hour. She had never told Nate, point-blank, that she hadn’t used birth control for the past five years.

  Of course Nate was not some irresponsible teenager, oblivious to consequences. A man in his midthirties must understand that for a woman like her, sexuality and fertility were one and the same. He must know what was at stake, just as he had known about every miscarriage, calling with condolences after each little death, saying how sorry he was, how he wished there was something that he could do. And now he was doing it. With David gone, Nate was performing the biblical function, sleeping with the widowed sister-in-law, so that the family might live on.

  She couldn’t say that out loud. It would sound too crass, too calculating and incestuous. But she viewed it as the unspoken agreement that lay between them in this bed. Nate was playing the role of Kevin Kline in The Big Chill, the handsome sperm donor, sharing his excellent gene pool. Which didn’t mean that he could spare her another miscarriage; that specter always loomed. But so long as she was sexually active there was a glimmer of hope, and that was Nate’s greatest gift to her this Christmas season—more than the bracelet, which winked at her as she rotated it in the moonlight.

  • 27 •

  Daylight had a way of exposing the flaws in Sarah’s reasoning, and by the next afternoon she was torn between self-satisfaction and self-loathing. She knew that she should speak to Nate, to make sure that they were operating on the same plane, but she sensed that their affair relied upon its unspoken, uninterrogated nature. It was as if she were Psyche, sleeping with Cupid, and if she could maintain the secrecy and darkness, their love might result in the birth of Pleasure. But if she exposed it to light, Nate would flee, leaving her trailing behind, clinging to his feet.

  Driving home late Sunday morning, she envisioned the church goers of Jackson, arriving at the houses of worship that lined the town’s main street. Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist, Episcopalian—no synagogues, no mosques, no Unitarians with their ambiguous creeds. How would her secrets ruffle such homogeneous morality? She pictured Margaret, flying over the Atlantic Ocean, then thought of her own crossings from brother to brother, bridging the gap between the living and the dead. She could not sustain this bizarre routine; eventually it would all implode under the weight of her silences. But for now, her secrets were the most compelling part of her life.

  Three days later she was off to see David, driving to the cabin with two poinsettias in her backseat and a devil’s food cake in the front. When she arrived, the fireplace was a pile of ashes and David nowhere to be found. Out on the deck she listened for footsteps in the woods, but heard only the thin whisper of wind in pine needles. Stepping back inside, she hung her coat by the door and took a plastic trash can from underneath the kitchen sink. She knelt beside the hearth and lifted the charred logs with the tips of her fingers, dropping them one by one into the trash before she scooped out the rest of the ashes with a dustpan and poured them on top of the logs, sending up smoky clouds of soot. A wicker basket beside the hearth contained leftover copies of The Washington Post, and she crumpled the news of war and famine and stuffed each ball of misery under the grate.

  Around this she built a lean-to of kindling, topping it off with a small pine log. It wasn’t Boy Scout quality, but it would suffice. She lit the fire in three places, then stared into the spreading flames while her mind tried to summon David back from the river. She imagined that their nervous systems were intertwined, that she could jolt his limbs into motion with the force of her thoughts, just as his unspoken wishes had prompted her to action so many times in their marriage. But twenty minutes passed before she heard his steps on the deck stairs. When she turned toward the French doors he was standing on the other side, his face pale as the sky. It occurred to her that as her own life gained color, his was fading. The two of them seemed to exist in inverse proportions.

  He came inside with an armful of wood and stacked it along the wall, then sat beside her with his coat still on.

  “I’m glad you’ve come,” he said. “I’ve been so bored.”

  He hadn’t shaved in at least a week, and when she raised her hand to his cheek, his skin was even colder than usual.

  “Winter has muted everything.” He spoke toward the fire. “The colors are dull, the birds have flown. It gets dark by five o’clock.”

  “I have something that might help.” She leaned over and kissed him quickly. “Come out to the car.”

  Inside her trunk she showed David an enormous box, wrapped in shiny gold paper. Beside it lay a thinner box that she lifted.

  “I thought we’d have Christmas today. I’ll be leaving for Anne’s at the end of the week.”

  “Good.” David hoisted the larger box into his arms. “I have something for you, too.”

  Inside the cabin, he placed the box on the floor and walked to the bedroom. When he came back he was holding a homemade Christmas wreath, stuffed with branches of fir and cedar, and colored at the top with sprigs of holly berries and two small pinecones.

  “My gosh.” She took it from his hands and admired it at arm’s length. “You made this yourself?”

  He nodded. “I walked through the woods and gathered branches from all of the evergreens that I could find. Some of them were shrubs that we planted years ago. I pulled dried honeysuckle vines from the trees by the river, and curled them into a wreath. The rest was just a matter of experimentation, stuffing in lots of different colors and textures, and tying it all down in the back with wire. I made another one, too.” He opened the hall closet and pulled out a wreath of bare vines twisted into a shamrock, with a bouquet of spruce and elderberries shooting from its center.

  Sarah closed her eyes and inhaled the clean scent of cedar. One way or another, David always managed to outdo her. His Christmas gifts were always a little more thoughtful, his taste in films and wine and furniture a little more sophisticated. She supposed that was why she had sympathized with Nate for so many years, because he knew how it felt to be the lesser half of a pair, locked in competition with a relentless perfectionist. And how would Nate feel now, if he knew that he was still competing with David, that his ring of diamonds had been matched by this circle of greenery?

  “My gift is much less original,” she apologized when David took off the bow.

  “Well, size counts for something.” He tore at the paper. “Wow. A television!”

  “An Ultravision HD flat-screen TV.”

  “But I don’t have a satellite dish.”

  “It’s not for that. Open the other present.”

  Inside the slimmer box David found a DVD player.

  “I’ve got a dozen DVDs in the car,” Sarah said. “Some of them are your favorites from our house, and a few are new ones. I also saw that your general store rents movies.”

  “Yes.” David smiled. “Mostly adult movies.”

  “I thought that the images of other people might help when it gets too quiet out here.”

  He nodded. “I suppose it’s a sign of failure. If I were a better man I would be able to entertain myself all day with books and paint and long walks in the woods. But the truth is, I’ve been dying for a little technology.”

  “Would you like to watch something now?”

  “What have you got?”

  “The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Young Frankenstein, The Truman Show, some recent comedies.”

  For the rest of the day they shared the cabin with hobbits and wizards and elves, watching Tolkien’s characters begin their slow descent into hell. The voices seemed to comfort David; he fed disc after disc into the machine with a zeal almost disturbing. At night, as the two of them walked from lamp to lamp turning out lights, the last glimmer in the room came from the television, which spread blue shadows across the walls. David seemed reluctant to turn it off. When the
screen blacked out, the darkness in the cabin was complete.

  The next afternoon they agreed to decorate a Christmas tree.

  “Not inside,” David insisted. It seemed such a waste to cut one down, while the small cedar at the foot of the deck cried out so pitifully for a makeover. Together they sat in front of the television stringing wreaths of popcorn dotted with cranberries left over from Thanksgiving. Sarah cut stars and crescent moons from the television’s empty cardboard box and covered them in aluminum foil. She poked little holes into their tops with the tip of a steak knife, and looped them with fishing line. Then they went outside and walked through the woods, gathering pinecones to spread with peanut butter and birdseed. When it was time to decorate the tree, they wore gloves to protect their fingers from the cedar’s prickly touch.

  “What shall we put at the top?” Sarah asked as she hung the last thin star.

  David picked up his shamrock wreath, and from a perch high on the deck he leaned over and pushed it down into the top of the tree.

  “Too bad we have no lights,” Sarah said. “Only the sun and moon.”

  That afternoon she agreed to pose again in her robe and nightgown. She had left them at the cabin, thinking David might want to study the weave of the fabric. Now, as she looked out toward the river, her mind traveled across the Blue Ridge, down the meadows and rolling hills of Albemarle County, and into the city limits of Charlottesville. At this hour Nate was probably meeting with a client, or checking stock quotes at his computer. A telephone headset would be poised at his lips, his fingers brushing over a keyboard, hitting return, return, return.

  From the corner of her eye she saw David pause. Could he tell what she was thinking? Could he smell Nate in her hair? So be it. Let him guess. Let him paint her as Emma Bovary, the doomed wife of a country doctor, planning her next escape to her lover’s arms.

  This business of modeling was a tedious annoyance. It reminded her of what had always bothered her about David—his habit of watching. It was a doctor’s job, to look, to peer, to examine other people’s bodies for the slightest of clues. So, too, for the painter, absorbed in observation, trying to see beyond the veil of the average human eye. Dissection, portraiture, what was the difference? David was doubly bound to stare.

  “Let’s stop this,” she said, and he released her.

  As she changed back into her sweater and jeans, she glanced at David’s canvas. Strange, how the edges of her body were not merely softened in his usual way; they seemed to melt into the window, her nightgown merging with the curtains. His other recent paintings showed the same confusion—trees and water and birds in motion, each one growing more amorphous than the last. She wondered if the cabin was getting to his mind—all this isolation, and the darkness of the winter woods.

  “You seem to be entering a new artistic phase.”

  “A new mental phase, maybe. I’m seeing things in a different way.”

  “A blurry way?”

  He shrugged. “The world is not so clear as it seems.”

  The next morning, while she stood in the bedroom packing her bag, David thanked her for the visit. “I’ll miss you over the holidays. You’ve made the place brighter with the decorations, and the movies.”

  “I have one more surprise before I go.” She reached into the bottom of her overnight bag and handed him a manila envelope. When he dipped his fingers inside, they emerged with a handful of one-hundred-dollar bills.

  “It’s the money from the Jackson exhibit.” She hoisted her bag onto her shoulder. “Judith sent me the check last week. Eight thousand dollars. The other half went to the gallery. You’ve also got some money coming from the Washington show. I know Judith sold at least two of your paintings, and the prices she put on those were twice as high as in Jackson.”

  David poured the bills onto the bed and ran his index finger across Benjamin Franklin’s broad forehead.

  “You can give the ATM a rest for a while.” She kissed him on the cheek. “Merry Christmas.”

  • 28 •

  Christmas Eve arrived with Sarah sitting beside Anne in a Presbyterian church, while Nate and Anne’s husband, Ben, bracketed the sisters like a pair of bookends. They had come for the children’s pageant, and the pews were filled with girls and boys decked in red velvet and green corduroy. The littlest girls colored their programs with crayons tucked beside the hymnals, while the boys spied through programs rolled periscope-style.

  “When’s the last time you were at church?” Sarah asked Nate.

  “Does David’s memorial service count?”

  She shook her head.

  “Then probably last Easter. Jenny used to take me to her church sometimes, but I’ve never gone without a woman’s prodding. I’m not a believer.”

  Sarah was a little surprised; she knew few people who would admit to being unbelievers. Most of her friends were fuzzy Deists, with faith in a Creator but not a Christ. Even David had maintained a vague belief in intelligent design, saying that if Albert Einstein believed in God, who were they to doubt? And yet Sarah doubted, though not in the traditional sense. She didn’t doubt the existence of God so much as the ability of human beings to inspire a god’s love.

  But here, in this clean white church, where the minister read from the Gospel of Luke while little girls in angel wings and boys with shepherds’ crooks performed a silent tableau, she could imagine a reason for grace freely given. These children merited divine intervention; before adolescence most children still bore traces of heaven. How did Wordsworth put it? Trailing clouds of glory do we come from God.

  The minister’s brief sermon seemed to recognize as much. Christmas, he said, was a time to treasure children, to remember that each life was sacred, every infant touched with the Holy Spirit. He invited all of the children present to come forward in single file, and gave each one a red carnation, offering words of blessing as he passed the stems to the small, smooth fists.

  This was a communion that Sarah could admire—no wine, no wafer, no savior to be devoured, only a small gift of nature given with a prayer. She felt chastened by its simplicity. For eight days she had been seeking joy in her credit cards, discovering what measure of contentment could be derived from plastic. And there was some consolation in her “flexible friends,” with all their promises of silk suits and luxury hotels. But ultimately her happiness could not stem from a bank account. Looking at the children, she knew that any hope for a new life would have to grow within her.

  She glanced at Nate, wondering if he felt as she did, that children were the only consolation in this world, the only recompense for so much suffering. She still hadn’t talked to him about birth control, trying to gauge the opportune moment. And perhaps now, if Nate would give her a reassuring sign, some remark about how sweet the children looked, or a conspiratorial squeeze of her hand—instead he sat with lowered eyes, staring at his program.

  “It was a lovely pageant,” she said as they were leaving.

  Nate shrugged. “Same show we did when I was a boy.”

  Sarah studied him again on Christmas morning, while her nieces negotiated a hill of presents. Anne and Ben went overboard every year; most of these toys and gadgets would be ignored or broken within a few months. But for one blissful hour, the children were absolutely happy, and she wondered if Nate appreciated the rarity of it.

  He had seemed restless for the past two days, probably, as Margaret predicted, bored by all this domesticity—the eggnog and iced cookies and Anne’s Hummel collection. Even Sarah felt a little embarrassed by her sister’s naive hospitality; Anne appeared oblivious to any change between Sarah and Nate. She had housed Nate in the guest room while Sarah slept upstairs in the bed of her younger niece, the girl lying on the floor in a Little Mermaid sleeping bag, forming a boundary that Nate would never cross. Throughout the entire visit he did not so much as brush Sarah’s hand with his fingers. He seemed at ease only after Christmas dinner, when he went sledding with the two girls just before sunset, helping them t
o drag silver saucers up their subdivision’s undeveloped lots, and spinning down with them to the base of the old fire pond.

  The girls’ laughter filtered through the thermopane windows as Sarah watched from the dining room. When Nate came inside his cheeks were red, just as she remembered them in Vermont.

  “You’re good with kids,” she said as he hung his coat by the door.

  “I like playing games,” he replied.

  “You’ll make a good father, someday.”

  Nate laughed. “I guess.” He dropped his voice to a whisper as he unwrapped his scarf. “If you want to know the truth, I’ve never met a couple who didn’t have ten years taken off their lives by the time their kids were two. It saps the energy right out of you.”

  “I’ve always thought of children as a beginning,” Sarah suggested.

  Nate ran his fingers through his hair. “The beginning of the end.”

  Sarah stood motionless as he walked into the living room and joined Ben in front of a football game.

  “I think I’ll lie down for a while,” she said, and she retreated upstairs to her niece’s lavender room. There, she stared at all the trappings of a child’s life—the Hogwarts posters scotchtaped to the walls, the dresser cluttered with lip gloss and nail polish and snow globes and pictures of Orlando Bloom tucked into the mirror’s frame. She had never expected Nate to care about such things, never imagined that he would want to play house. Nor had she thought that he would marry her, or make child support payments, or hold her hand in a delivery room. But she had envisioned him as a devoted uncle, the sort who would bring lavish gifts on every holiday. And she had assumed, at a minimum, that he would be happy for her, if she could ever make another life take firm hold in her body.