As Husbands Go (14 page)

“Layne.” Not that I would actually tell her to save it for the funeral home and the shiva, but one of the reasons everyone said “Oh, Dr. Jiménez is such a fine, fine person” was that Layne didn’t stint on kindness. She was never too busy for a good word—or, more to the point, words linked into paragraphs. “Gilbert John sounded so shaken up that I didn’t want to go into detail,” I began.

“And if you can’t handle it, you don’t have to with me, Susie. Whenever you’re ready . . .”

“You both need to know something now, before you hear it on the news or anywhere else.”

“What is it?” she asked cautiously.

“Jonah was killed in a call girl’s apartment.”

“No!” Her “no” came out so spontaneously that a huge sigh of relief escaped me. Thank God for that reaction. Clearly, I’d been dreading the overlong silence I’d be forced to translate into “Oh, you found out about his whore habit.” Maybe I was misinterpreting. The “no” could have been pure reflex on Layne’s part. But I grabbed on to it as if she were saying “He was too much in love with you to even consider any other woman, much less a call girl.”

That was all the reassurance I was going to get, although I didn’t realize it for another twelve hours. Andrea got a little pushy—in a good way, I guess, urging me to go up and get a couple of hours’ sleep, or at least rest, before the boys woke up. If she hadn’t been there, I probably would have spent the night on the couch.

I didn’t want to go upstairs. I was afraid. Climbing the steps (right foot, left, right, as if I were on a Level 4 hike instead of walking up to the next floor) was too much effort. I was terrified. Spooked. I stood before the black rectangle of the door frame, staring into the unlit bedroom. I was sure I’d take one step onto the carpet, reach for the light switch, and suddenly—a gut-ripping noise, half howl, half shriek—and the enraged ghost of Jonah would boil the air an inch from my face. I didn’t know why I was so crazy, or why, even if I didn’t believe in ghosts, which I didn’t, except
maybe the week after I saw
The Sixth Sense,
Jonah’s spirit would be anything but benevolent toward me.

Yet I had to force myself to lie down in our bed. My heart fluttered, then slammed against my chest in panic at the sudden, jarring silence when the heating system turned off. A second later, a current of warm air puffed across my ear and blew a strand of my hair onto my cheek. I suppressed a scream. Maybe that strand had been there all along. Yet the air above the bed felt agitated by invisible goings-on in some parallel sphere.

At times during the night, the fear vanished. I was in the bedroom I had once shared with my husband, although now I was a widow. I censored that line of thought not because of what it represented but because I’d always hated the word. It conjured up old ladies in shapeless black dresses gray with lint. Or those black spiders with gross hairy legs.

But I forced myself to stay where I was. I mumbled aloud what I knew of the Twenty-third Psalm—not much—again and again. If I couldn’t whip it up for the Lord being my shepherd in the Valley of Death and getting me through this night of grief and hysteria, it would be the start of big-time bedroom phobia, a truly embarrassing fear. Because truthfully, how could I tell my therapist, Francine Twersky, that my dead husband’s vengeful soul was whirling around the Regency bergère chair and that the very air of the bedroom stank of sulfurous fury? I could tell her—and doom myself to session after boring session of her getting me to understand that what was haunting the bedroom was coming from my head.

Speaking of heads, I covered mine with the duvet, then started worrying that if I suffocated, the boys would go to Theo, Jonah’s brother. Jonah once said, “Even though my folks are hip enough to appreciate one sciencey kid and one arty one, they know I’m the winner and Theo is . . . They always try to act like he’s my equal or a close second with the silver medal. But deep down? All four of us know he’s the loser.”

If something happened to me and Theo got the boys? Within weeks, one of his friends would convince him to coproduce a real
ity show—giving him the excuse it would be a public service.
TV Guide
would write,
Sparks fly in
SINGLE WITH TRIPLETS
when a young Maserati-driving Manhattan casting director gets surprise custody of his four-year-old nephews
. I rearranged the duvet so my nose and mouth were out in the air.

At five-thirty, the boys startled me awake, so I must have gotten a little sleep. “Come up on the bed,” I said, patting the mattress. My chest ached from holding back sobs, though I didn’t completely rule out a heart attack. “I want to talk with you.” I had to wait while Dashiell used the bathroom. I made the mistake of telling him to use ours. Within a second, the other two were demanding the privilege. I got all choked up, so I nodded. They ran in, and even before the giggling became wild laughter, I could visualize the puddles of pee I’d have to wipe up. Jonah wouldn’t be calling on his cell, bored in bridge traffic, and my “They’re the Jackson Pollocks of urine” would forever stay unsaid.

When they returned, they were so high from the excitement of a triple toilet experience that I had to get up and grab them as they raced around the room. I plopped them hard onto the bed. By the time I finally caught Mason, I was screeching like the Wicked Witch of the West, “Shut up! For God’s sake, shut up and listen to me!” over and over again. Naturally, I spent the next few minutes weeping and apologizing—“I’m so, so sorry, sweeties. Oh God, I’m so sorry”—and calming them down, especially Evan. His bony shoulders jerked with each of his sobs. Mason’s eyes were still wide with fright at my rage while Dash stared at me with concern mixed with contempt.

I pulled them close, for the thousandth time envying mothers of twins, who had an arm for each kid. It was only then, as I was kissing one of their heads and trying to banish non-mournful thoughts like
He needs a shampoo
that I realized I had no idea what to tell them. During the days of waiting, imagining every terrible outcome except the one that had happened, why hadn’t I turned on the computer and Googled “explain child death parent”? My eyes grew heavy. I so longed to go back to sleep with them, bony shoulders
and smelly heads snuggling against me, even though their wakefulness and squiggliness were proof of what an idiot fantasy that was.

“I have something very sad to tell you,” I said. All three of them looked downcast, but it struck me that they didn’t understand that “very sad” had to do with Jonah’s not being around. Their “sad” was more “Carvel has run out of rainbow sprinkles.” “You know Daddy hasn’t been home for a couple of days.” I guess I expected children-as-seen-on-TV behavior: nodding, gazing up at me curiously. But all three of them talked at once.

“Where is he?”

“When’s he coming home?”

“Where’s Daddy?”

“Is he bringing us presents?”

“Can I—”

I said, “Shhh!” loud enough to drown them out. “Evan, Dash, Mason! Let Mommy finish. Okay? This is very important.” I took a deep breath. I knew I had to say something fast, before they started babbling again. “Daddy . . . Something very sad happened to Daddy. He got hurt, really hurt. He died. You know what that means, don’t you? It means—”

“He’s dead!” Mason said, triumphant at having beaten out his brothers. “When somebody dies, he gets dead!”

“Yes. Very good. That’s right. But it’s also very sad because it means he’s not coming back anymore.”

“Jake’s grandpa isn’t coming back,” Evan said. “He died. He got too old.” Then he added hopefully, “Daddy’s not too old.”

“Daddy can go to the hospital,” Dash said. “They’ll get him all fixed. Then he can come home.”

“I wish more than anything that could happen. But Daddy didn’t die because he was old or sick. He got hurt so bad that . . .” I started to cry, which maybe wasn’t so terrible; all the articles say that kids feel the passions that are swirling around them, even if they don’t comprehend. So if they remembered this, at least they’d know I was talking from my heart. I did try to calm down a little, so I could keep talking. “When someone dies, it means their body got hurt—or
sick—so bad that nobody could fix it. Not even the best doctors.”

“Daddy’s the best doctor,” one of them said.

“I know that. He was the best doctor in the world. Except even Daddy couldn’t get someone who is dead to come back . . . to be not dead.”

I had to stop not because I was still crying, though I was, but because I couldn’t think of what to say next. They hadn’t asked me how he’d gotten hurt, and I didn’t want to tell them it was an accident, because they might soon be hearing words like “killed” or—I prayed not, but I had no reason to believe that at some point they wouldn’t run into a neighbor or relative who would be stupid or cruel enough to say something like “stabbed with scissors.”

It definitely wasn’t the time to explain that a very bad person had killed Daddy. Or a sick person, a crazy person. Instinct, along with four years as their mother, told me that right then the boys could deal with only one basic fact: Their father was dead. That was all the horror they could take.

Usually, they had the normal fears that came, went, and sometimes traveled from triplet to triplet: alligators under the bed; automatic flush toilets in restrooms; being the first belted into his car seat, at which point the minivan would slide shut its doors and, driverless, zoom off; Goofy Goober from
SpongeBob Squarepants
hiding in our basement. They didn’t have to deal with the concept of bad/sick/crazy people who kill daddies.

“But we have to remember one thing,” I said. “Daddy loved all of us more than anything. Do you know what he called you? ‘Our miracle boys.’ We wanted so much to have a baby, and Daddy said, ‘God gave us a very special present. Not one baby—’”

“Three babies!” they sang out. We’d been through this story too
many times to count, but they loved it.

“Three wonderful, gorgeous baby boys. And when Daddy looked at all three of you right after you were born, he said, ‘I am the happiest, luckiest man in the world, because I am the daddy of these perfect babies!’” Actually, right after they were born, I’d been fixating on my episiotomy incision and whether the OB had been as careful as she’d sworn she would, so I hadn’t been paying attention to whatever Jonah had been going on about. But this sounded good enough, although way too flowery for Jonah. “So even though Daddy won’t be here to tell you how much he loves you, you know he did. Right? He always said ‘I love you’ when he kissed you good night.”

“He said ‘Go to sleep,’” Mason piped up.

“He said—” Dash began.

I cut him off. “But mostly, he said ‘I love you.’ So even though we won’t see him again, we know how much he loved us. And every night before each of us goes to sleep, we’ll think about Daddy, about saying ‘I love you.’” If I’d expected tears from them, I would have been let down. But Dashiell said he was hungry as a bear, and Evan wanted to know if Jonah would come back when they were five.

Let me go back to sleep,
I thought, wishing there was some way the boys could knock on Ida and Ingvild’s door and say, “Mommy asked us to tell you that Daddy’s dead and not coming back, and could you give us breakfast and take the phone, and she’ll definitely be up by ten-thirty or eleven.”

As I followed them downstairs, I felt overwhelmed by two warring emotions, grief and anger. Grief that Jonah would not see the boys grow up. Anger at Dorinda Dillon. What had happened in that apartment? It made no sense. What could have made anyone, even a crazy whore, want to kill a wonderful man like Jonah Gersten?

Chapter Eleven

Jonah had been wowed by our house before he saw it. Just as the real estate agent announced, “Here it is!” he realized he couldn’t see anything except an old-fashioned green mailbox on a white post, two weeping cherries, and a row of rounded boxwoods, beautifully pruned, standing guard on either side of the driveway. Imposing yet inviting. Tasteful, too. Proof to his Manhattan parents that moving to Long Island didn’t mean he’d chosen a life of
LICENSED TO GRILL
barbecue aprons.

When we curved around to the front of the house, Jonah, who’d been sitting in front next to the broker, leaped out to open the car door for me, mainly so he could whisper, “You can’t see the house from the street!” I’d nodded but didn’t really get into picturing his parents’ dropped jaws. I was too hard at work being what I’d set out (and failed) to be, a landscape architect. Already my mind was sketching in . . . what? Oh, perfect! Lavender shrubs. That would soften the tight-ass formality of all that boxwood. It registered, though barely, that Jonah was being cool for the broker—giving the slate roof a critical eye, dilating his nostrils with displeasure at the perfectly fine lunette window over the door, even though his knowledge of construction was limited to the difference between a shingle and a brick.

Still, both of us must have been throwing off rays of excitement. From that second on, even before we walked between the white columns and stood on the grand front portico, the broker went from nervously chirping, “You okay?” every three seconds to acting so relaxed it looked like she’d been popping Valium instead of Vela
mints. She knew she’d made the sale.