How She Died

Episode 2 of 3 of My Husband’s First Wife by Helen Abbott

I asked him at breakfast. I made it sound like nothing.

“How did Julie die?”

“Her heart.” He didn’t look up from his phone. “It was fast. I’ve told you this.”

He had told me this. On our second date, in a restaurant with candles, with his hand over mine. Her heart. Fast. Nothing anyone could have done.

“Where is she buried?”

Now he looked up.

“Tess.”

“I just realized I’ve never asked. I’d like to bring something. Flowers. It seems wrong that I haven’t.”

He put the phone face down.

“She was cremated,” he said. “Her family took her. They’re out west. It was what she wanted.”

“Which family? You said she didn’t have anyone.”

“I said she didn’t have anyone close.” He stood and put his mug on the left. “I don’t love talking about this before work, honestly.”

That was fair. He went to work. I stood in the kitchen and noticed that I had said honestly to myself about four times in the last minute, and that I only ever say it when something isn’t.

I want to be clear about what I did next, because it wasn’t brave. I was not a woman uncovering a crime. I was a woman who had turned around in a parking lot to somebody else’s name, and I needed to know why my body had done that.

So I looked her up.

There was no obituary. I tried the paper here, the paper one town over, the funeral homes. Nothing. A woman had died in this town two years ago and nobody had printed a single line about it.

I found one photograph, on the page for a charity run four years back. A row of women in matching shirts. Fourth from the left, laughing at something out of frame.

Short hair. Gray coat over the shirt, even in the photo, even at a run.

I put my hand up to my own hair without deciding to.

His mother came Tuesday. She let herself in, which she does. She found me on the couch with the laptop and she looked at the screen before I could close it, and she didn’t pretend she hadn’t.

“You’re looking at Julie.”

“I wanted to know what she looked like.”

“Now you know.” She sat down across from me, on the edge of the chair, the way she sits when she has decided how long a conversation is going to last. “You look a great deal like her. I assume you’ve noticed.”

“Did he do that on purpose?”

She didn’t answer that. She said, “My son loved her very much.”

“How did she die?”

“In her sleep,” his mother said.

He had said her heart. He had said fast. She said in her sleep. Those can be the same thing. I know they can be the same thing. I sat there telling myself they were the same thing while a woman who had known me for four months looked at me like I was a coat she’d already seen on someone else.

After she left I did something I had been not doing for a week.

I walked next door.

The neighbor is the one who talks. Every street has one. She has lived in that house for thirty years and she waters her plants at the exact hour the school bus comes so she can see who gets off it.

“I wanted to ask you about Julie,” I said, on her porch, with my hands in my coat pockets.

She looked at me for a long time.

“Honey,” she said. “What did he tell you?”

“That she died. Two years ago. Her heart.”

The neighbor put her watering can down on the porch rail very carefully, the way you put something down when your hands have stopped being reliable.

“Julie didn’t die,” she said. “Julie drove off in March, two years ago, with two suitcases in the back and her hair cut short, and she stood right where you’re standing and told me not to tell him where she was going.”

I heard myself laugh. It came out wrong.

“He told everyone she died?” the neighbor said. “He told the whole town?”

“He told me,” I said.

She looked at my coat, and my hair, and then at my face, and she said the thing that I have not been able to stop hearing since.

“She called me last week,” the neighbor said. “She asked if he’d found someone yet.”

My Husband’s First Wife · ← The Wrong Side of the Cupboard · The Diner Off the Highway →