The Dead Husband Project Read online

  All around her people are buzzing.

  Oh, Maureen! You must be so happy! This is incredible!

  Come here, let me give you a hug! Oooooh—ooooooh!

  Oh my gosh! Aren’t you, like, his wife or something? This must be such a crazy mindfuck for you. Anyway, cheers!

  People she knows and people she’s never met squeeze her tight, her coffee sloshing over the rim of her mug. The house pulses with bass. Bernie appears at the front door, a small wonder of a girl trailing behind him. Vivi. Some of the people waiting to talk to Joe break away and swarm her. She’s shaved her head and rimmed her eyes in purple. Bernie, beaming, steps out of the way to witness her coronation from a proud and happy distance.

  Maureen has an idea. She presses through the partiers to get her camera from the safe in the garage. She affixes a large flash, wraps the strap around her hand and wrist like a tensor bandage and makes her way back into the house. She starts in the dark kitchen.

  The glow stick dancers are caught off guard. The cupboards brightening to a blinding white each time she shoots.

  “Hey! What the fuck?”

  The dancers cover their faces to block out the light or hold up their hands to get her to stop. She pushes her way into the hall, aiming the camera at face after flinching face, a contrail of blinking eyes in her wake. Vivi looks right at her with a tranquil smile.

  “For the society pages!” Maureen shouts, laughing, shooting now like the paparazzi.

  She elbows through the crowd in front of Joe and stops a few feet in front of him.

  Flash.

  Flash. Flash.

  He raises his hands to shield his face. “Mo, what are you doing?”

  Flash. Flash flash. Flash.

  Still shooting, she holds the camera out in front of her. Her face blank.

  “Maureen?”

  He drops his hands and looks at her. He looks tired. He looks thin. He looks sick. He tries to communicate something to her with his eyes in the way married people do.

  Flash. Flash. Flash flash.

  She has no idea what he’s trying to tell her. They never did have that ability.

  Flash.

  —

  It’s hard to know how long she’s been at her laptop in the garage, or how long he’s been leaning against the doorframe waiting for her to notice. The ashtray beside her a mass grave for the pack of Belmonts she’s smoked. She extinguishes another, its remains tumbling on top of its fallen kin.

  “That’s a good one,” he says. “Good light.”

  She turns from the photo she’s uploaded, a picture of a shirtless guy with big, shocked eyes, people dancing with glow sticks behind him. He looks naked.

  Joe’s shadow falls long from the doorway, reaching almost all the way to the garage door. It’s getting late. She goes back to her computer, marks the image as one to return to, and continues clicking through the photos.

  “They’re still going in there,” he says, nodding back at the throbbing house. “Unreal.”

  Click. Click. Click.

  He takes a breath. “I’m really tired.”

  Click. Click.

  She stops on a picture of Joe. His frozen eyes wide and questioning, the harsh flash cutting deep shadows in the pits of his cheeks.

  “Jesus,” he says, taking a step closer behind her.

  She crops the shot tight around his face and hits Return. Hollows fill the screen.

  “Okay, I can see you’re busy.”

  She can tell from his voice that he’s turned away.

  His cane clacks against the concrete floor as he goes to leave. She closes her laptop. Some part of her wants to get up, to hold him, to rock together with him in their untended yard, but that part of her thumps from behind a wall built too long ago. She doesn’t move from the stool.

  He laughs suddenly. “You know, we talked about it a million times but I just couldn’t get my head around it. The gone part. The utter obliteration of it. The moonlessness of that kind of night.”

  “That’s very poetic.”

  He sighs, tapping his cane on the ground. “When did you become such a bitch?”

  She lights another cigarette, relieved to feel something, even if it is rage. It dissipates only slightly when she hears his halting gait swishing through the grass back to the party.

  —

  “Mom? Mom, relax. It’s okay. It’s just me. Come to bed.”

  Maureen’s neck is stiff and sore. Her arm numb. She has no idea where she is.

  “You fell asleep in here.” Lilah brushes hair out of her mother’s eyes. “You missed a hell of a party. But it looks like you had a pretty good one in here on your own.”

  An empty bottle of expensive Napa cab sauvignon beside her. A full glass poured, untouched. She lifts her head, heavy with disappointment. She’d been saving it for a night when she had something to celebrate. Her lungs feel raw and scorched. On the laptop, the image of Joe she’d been digitally manipulating is pixellated beyond all humanity.

  “Glad to see you’re working on something new,” Lilah says. “Looks pretty cool, actually.”

  There is that, at least.

  The arm on which she’d been sleeping tingles as blood flows back to her fingers. She lets Lilah help her back to the house, where the stragglers are passing a joint on the front porch and flipping through her wedding album, their hooded eyes through the living room window only faintly curious as Lilah leads her mother down the hall and up the stairs. Maureen is still in her robe, and doesn’t even have any socks to take off before she curls up like a shell on the bed.

  —

  There are more people here than she expected to see. Bernie smiles at her over the shoulder of a collector who’s been hovering territorially by the hyper-pixellated photo of the stunned dancers with glow sticks.

  “It’s so meta,” she overhears someone say, “the way she managed to capture the whole art scene like that? And just, like, totally deconstruct it.”

  The Resurrection of Joe McGovern, the show is called. Joe is leaning on his cane by the back wall, holding a glass of what must be now warm white wine as he nods politely and listens to a gesticulating critic in a felt fedora. She watches people pass him, look at him, uncertain of where he fits in all of this. He’s standing by an image of himself that no one would know is him.

  “So glad you went in this direction, Mo,” Phil says. He still towers over her, even without his stilettos. He snatches a piece of sushi off the tray of a passing white-shirted server and pops it in his mouth. “Of course, you couldn’t have done it without me.” He winks. “Without me, without my party, there’s no you.” He blows her a kiss as he bows, retreating into the rest of the crowd.

  Maureen doesn’t have a chance to tell him to go fuck himself because he’s already gone and there, beside her, is Vivi, who’s saying she’s been waiting for a chance to talk to her, and that she’s always been a huge fan, and that she’d heard about her Woman Burning series, and that it’d been something of a legend among her peers.

  “And honestly?” she gushes, gesturing at the walls around them with her wineglass. “Just coming up with this idea on the spot like that? With all you’d been through, with what must have been going through your mind that day? I mean, it’s genius. Just brilliant. I’d love to talk to you about your process. Just, like, pick your brain.”

  Maureen nods, smiling faintly. She can’t look her in the eye. This feels too easy. She looks around, bracing for someone to point it out, to call her a fake. If it had been Joe who’d done this he would have shrugged and called it “inspiration” and moved on to the next thing, the next piece, the next project, the next conversation without overthinking its genesis, without doubting himself, without looking back.

  Was that was this was? Inspiration?

  She sips her wine, scanning the room. The gallery assistant is putting yet another red dot beside a piece. They’re almost all sold. People buying messed-up pictures of themselves.

  “Can I get a
shot of the happy couple?” asks a photographer from the Globe, ushering Joe over with a wave.

  “Here, why don’t I go over there,” Maureen says. She puts her glass down and hurries over to her husband so Joe won’t have to make the effort. She can’t help feeling bad for him. She’s not used to being the one in the spotlight. Maureen puts her arm around his waist. He keeps his hands on his cane. They smile.

  Flash. Flash flash.

  The photographer checks the image on the back of his camera, nods his thanks and turns away, candidly shooting the crowd.

  “Well,” Joe says. “Nice turnout.”

  “Yeah. I guess you never know with these things.” She folds her arms over her chest, rubbing her bare biceps.

  “Just glad I’m here to see it.”

  They laugh, together, but differently.

  “I think I need to get some air,” Maureen says after a moment.

  He nods his head to the side, indicating she go without him. His smile means: I’m good, I’m okay. But he looks vulnerable.

  “Go,” he says when she hesitates, waving her off with his cane.

  She manages to sneak out without being seen and finds a quiet patch of sidewalk in a shadow, the toes of her red Mary Janes poking over the edge of the curb. She tucks her lighter back into her cigarette pack and exhales into the warm night air, closing her eyes. The sounds of nighttime traffic wash over her. Baptismal.

  “Mom?”

  She turns. Lilah is jogging over. By the glint in her eyes it looks like she has good news. She looks so pretty with her hair down like that, bouncing off her shoulders in waves. Such light in her eyes.

  “Mom—”

  But Maureen doesn’t hear what her daughter has to say. A cab swerves to avoid two guys who tumble, play-fighting, onto the street. The driver hops the curb, mowing Maureen down like a dandelion.

  —

  “Maureen,” Joe says in a delicate whisper, just audible, as though she’s made of the thinnest glass and anything louder would shatter her to sand. He’s holding her hand. “Maureen, honey, it’s me.”

  His eyes are bloodshot, lids heavy. She feels nauseated and tired and her head is splitting. There’s an ache in her back that radiates along her ribs, making it hurt to breathe. Above her the lights glare an unblinking blue-whiteness at the walls, at the floor, in her eyes.

  “Li—” she says. It’s hard to make words. Her throat sore, her mouth dry as wool.

  “Shh, no. Don’t try to talk.” He’s leaning closer, stroking her head. He kisses her hairline. “I’m just so glad you’re here.”

  She goes to move her arm but can’t bend it. It’s in a cast. She tries to move other limbs and digits: her left leg is encased in rigid plaster too, as are her left hand and wrist, her torso immobilized by some kind of brace. She wiggles her toes. The scratch of bedsheets.

  Someone coughs.

  Shhhhh! A reprimand.

  Slowly, slowly she turns her head. Beyond Joe, who’s sitting on a wooden chair at her bedside, beyond the Plexiglas walls that surround them to make a room within a room, dozens of people are holding up their phones, recording her. A woman wipes away tears.

  “I can’t believe we’re here for this!” someone hisses. “I can’t believe she just happened to come out of it now—when we’re here! This is awesome.”

  The people start clapping. Some are reluctant to put their phones away, they don’t want to miss a second, so they slap the side of their legs with one hand while filming with the other. The applause picks up like rain hammering a tin roof, rattling across the room and out through the open door.

  “She’s awake—she just woke up!” people call to the lineup outside. Faces press against the front window of the gallery above a sign that says

  THE VIGIL | JOE McGOVERN

  Joe kisses her again. Whistles ripple through the crowd. Flashes now from cameras. She winces at the pain in her head and feels something cold on her chest. A woman in scrubs with a stethoscope smiles down at her, then checks the monitor beside them. The three of them enclosed in the Plexiglas room.

  Maureen scans the walls. Her pieces are gone, replaced by sketches and paintings of a figure, sleeping or unconscious, hovering in space. In some drawings it’s barely there at all, a faint outline only visible if you know where to look. Joe leans over her and closes his eyes as he touches his forehead to hers. She feels the pressure as he lets go, dozing, his head lolling to the side then jerking upright as he fights to stay awake.

  “Welcome back, Maureen. I’m Dr. Fisher,” the woman in scrubs says over the applause. She says Maureen had been in a coma for weeks. They didn’t know if she’d ever recover. “But your vitals look great. Everything looks great.”

  Maureen wants to get up. She wants to get out of here. But she can’t move, she can barely talk. She shuts her eyes against the cameras and the noise as the people shuffle their way around the room and back out the door, their time up. The next group presses in.

  “Mom!”

  She lifts her head as high as she can, an inch off the pillow. “Lilah?” she rasps.

  “Mom?” Lilah kicks at the Plexiglas, nearly hysterical. It can’t be opened from the outside, and Joe’s fallen asleep, his head on the bed. Dr. Fisher squeezes around to let her inside.

  “Mom—Mom.” Lilah bursts in to a fresh round of applause and tearfully wraps her arms around her mother. “I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”

  “Shh, shh,” Maureen murmurs. “It’s okay. It’s okay.”

  “No,” Lilah says, hoarsely. “No, it’s not okay. Is this art? This is fucking art?”

  Maureen doesn’t have the energy to respond. No, it’s not okay, she thinks, wishing she could kick Joe’s sleeping head off her bed.

  But, yes, she concedes, flinching at the truth of it, yes, all this, all this horror, is art.

  She kisses her daughter, smelling the city in her hair, desperate to shed the casts and hold her close.

  She tries to block out the next ovation that rises up as a new group pushes in, concentrating instead on maintaining some dignity, and on the sound of Lilah’s breath.

  OZK

  I’ll always think of my mother when it snows. When it falls from the clouds wet and heavy, when it drifts down indifferent to gravity on its long, silent journey, when it reaches the earth on a diagonal, each flake tracing the same angle from sky to street, 80°, 80°, 80°; whether it melts upon touching down on rooftops or piles soundlessly on the lawn, when it snows I think of her.

  I remember her, years ago, watching it through our living room window. Just standing there, still and staring, short curls framing her ivory cheeks. I took a chance and stood beside her, thinking this might be the time she would put her arm around my shoulders and pull me close to whisper through my hair, “So beautiful, isn’t it, Margaret?”

  She didn’t, of course. She didn’t move, her arms stayed where they were, hanging by her sides. She couldn’t be expected to do the sorts of things that mothers of daughters did, so instead I whispered it for us both as I was then still learning to do: “Beautiful,” I said, and looked at her.

  Still staring out into the white, the drifting flakes mirrored in her large round glasses, she repeated the syllables of the word. From her lips, though, they were only that. Syllables. Three sounds rubbed clean of connection to each other, to her, to what they were supposed to mean. After a moment she said, with certainty, “Falling thirteen degrees to the perpendicular. With few exceptions. Remarkable if you think of it,” then retreated to her study off the kitchen and closed the door.

  I pulled a vase off the top of the bookshelf and watched it shatter on the floor. She did not come out. Not a sound from her study. I stomped up the stairs to my bedroom, nearly twisting my ankle as I slapped my stockinged feet against the wood that edged the worn runner, and slammed my door shut. It got stuck in its swollen frame.

  Hours later, I heard her downstairs as she swept up the shards with speed and precision.

  —<
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  Once, as a young girl, I was in the back seat of our car drawing pictures with my finger on the steamed-up glass, when she pulled over on the side of the road. She lowered her window and called out, “You’re wet! I can drive you.”

  Through the picture of the sun I’d traced, I saw an old man on an electric scooter, its wheels spinning in the slush. He wore a long grey coat and had a very red nose that stuck out from beneath his snow-piled cap. One of his hands rested limply on his lap while the other gripped the handlebar with fingers white from the cold. I worried that the groceries in the bags tucked under his seat were ruined by the heavy chunks of falling snow and the grey-brown slush that had splattered everywhere.

  She didn’t give him time to respond. In an instant, she’d yanked up the emergency brake, popped open the trunk and was bent over beside him. She spoke to him briefly before taking his bags and dropping them on the seat beside me, opening and slamming the door in quick succession. The man shrunk into his coat and let the collar ride up over his cheeks. He looked to me like an old and tired turtle. She returned to him with a wool blanket from the trunk and wrapped it around him as he stood up. Together, slowly, they shuffled to the passenger door. The car bounced gently as he let himself fall back into the seat.

  She then set to work on the scooter, folding back bars, reducing its proportions by half in seconds before dragging it through the snow to the trunk.

  “It took my son three days to figure that out,” the man said, watching her through the window. When she disappeared behind the car to heave the scooter in, we turned to look at the snow accumulating on the windshield.