A week before they were scheduled to go, Denny got cold feet. He couldn’t explain it, exactly. It was something about the hold Anna had always had over him, something about the way her eyes shone in the dim light of restaurants, the way her witchcraft had always worked on him. He couldn’t just pick up and go to Vietnam, visa or no visa. He had work to do. He had obligations. He wanted the best of it all—the ability to stay with her without the commitment.
“I have bad news,” he told her. They were at dinner again, this time at Little Park at the Smyth Hotel. One of those restaurants that they used to go to all the time back when it was just the two of them, one of those restaurants that they would find insufferable once they had kids: Everything was small and expensive and kind of forgettable, beetroot everything, dry-aged duck when it would have been just fine without the aging.
She seemed to know before he told her. She was a witch; he wasn’t kidding. He could see her face fall before the words even came out, and she stopped him.
“You aren’t coming,” she said.
“It’s just work,” he lied. “I just can’t do the trip for that long.”
“I see,” she said. Beetroot tartare, that was what it was. He watched her push it around her plate, fumble for a bite, turn it up toward her mouth. No satisfaction in the bite, no payoff. What could you expect from a vegetable masquerading as something else, anyway?
“I expect you to keep me in the loop,” he said, reaching for her hand across the table. She recoiled, as if stung. One thing he would come to learn about Anna, right from the beginning: You could only violate her trust once, and this was the only time he would push his luck. On the street that night, he hailed her a cab, pushed the hair out of her damp face, and kissed her underneath a streetlamp and told her that he didn’t want this to ruin things, knowing that it would still leave a delicate scar. Every day that she was in Vietnam, riding a train up the country’s spine with a friend who took his place at the last minute, he thought of how stupid he had been, and vowed never to make the same mistake again.
The longer she was away, the softer her tone became over text. She sent photos of the things she saw at the markets: cobras and starfish tucked into glass bottles of so-called snake wine that she threatened to bring back with her, green-rinded oranges, parasols made from silk. The karst cliffs in Phong Nha looked incredible, he had to admit.
We waded through mud today, a text read, in the middle of the night.At the farm stay, they served pizza. It’s a village of mostly locals.
She was supposed to come home to her own apartment in Astoria, but he drove all the way out to JFK to pick her up when the month was over; she came back in late January, just as Tet was about to begin. Her absence had opened up a space in him,something large and unhealed, and he realized that he needed her, that she was a part of him, her fierceness, her assuredness. She had known they were right from the beginning, and it had been him. He was the one who had lacked the trust and foresight. Always him making the wrong choices, failing to see what was right in front of him, in its sweetness, its simplicity, its perfection. He had been so stupid. He opened his phone, searched for a photo of the caves. There it was: a photo of Anna from a trip he had never taken, covered in mud, smiling like she had never experienced life so fully. He was twisted by it now, doubled over with grief, racked by pain so acute that he thought for a moment that one of his organs was set to explode. But no, he reminded himself. This is just what it feels like to lose a part of yourself. This is what it feels like to die without dying.
Mary, Denny learned, lived in South Hamilton. She was so easy to find, right beneath his nose the entire time. He drove to her house in the afternoon, past the rolling equestrian farms, where the hedges were now winter-anemic; you could see right through to their sprawling estates. Mary’s house was small and pretty. Denny could imagine Anna at the picket fence gates, taking stock of a summer garden, memorizing the things she would do to their own house: the lattice arch with the vines crawling up, the sunroom on the side that almost looked as if it was leaning into a snowbank, the brass whale above the portico on the front door. He took a breath and walked up the path, which no one had cleared of the inch or two of snow that had recently fallen. Blue snow, like the night that Sticks had come to his own house, crisp, crunchy, fresh, and also filled with omens. Ophelia in a frozen river. Denny had never asked if her eyes were open or closed, but he had imagined her with a halo of flowers around her head, even though he knew that dead people never really looked, in real life, the way they did in the movies.
Denny took the skinny, aged bronze knocker in his hand. How many times, he wondered, had Anna stood at this exact same door without his knowledge? A thin woman with auburn hair, slightly gray at the temples, came to the door. She looked confused, as if she knew him, as if she had always known him.
“You’re Denny?” she said, opening the door wide. It was a question, or it wasn’t a question. “Come in, of course, come in.” She swung the door wide, but he didn’t really know why he had come, or who she was. The house was disorienting. He could smell reed diffusers, like the ones that Anna put out from Farm + Sea. “I’m sorry I didn’t introduce myself at the funeral,” she was saying. “Everything was just so . . .”
He remembered almost nothing from those days. Wearing a black suit, he had stumbled into the funeral home and made decisions as a woman with pursed lips and a tight-clipped bun asked him questions about his wife’s preferences. Did she prefer roses to calla lilies? (Yes, he said, this he knew; she hated the smell of lilies.) Did he know how many people would be in attendance? Would he be driving in the processional, or would someone else be assisting? Who would be speaking on his wife’s behalf? During those soft and blurry first days, when he felt like the air had been sucked out of every room he walked into, the funeral home was another dark corner where his mind would wander, another place where ghosts followed him. Even if Mary had come up to him at the receiving line, he probably wouldn’t have remembered her. He was, himself, a corpse, leaning against the fabric wallpaper just to survive. Di brought him ceramic mugs filled with lukewarm water, which he sipped until he could feel his cheeks come back to life. He was crepuscular, an animal alive only at the edges of dawn and dusk. All other times, he was in a trance, skirting the mortal world and looking for the spaces where the dead and the living danced. He couldn’t find it. No one ever could, not even in those first days when death and life were at their nearest.
“I wouldn’t have been in a position to talk then anyway,” he told Mary. It was a miracle that he had survived, that he had been able to get through the year. “Sometimes, I’m not sure I can talk now. I go up to people sometimes and say crazy things, you know.”
“That’s an interesting quality,” she said.
“Is it?”
“I think so. I like people who say crazy things.”
“So did Anna,” he said. “She always enjoyed it when I broke loose, even though it didn’t happen very often.”
Mary’s house was a jumble of things: an old credenza overflowing with books, vases of flowers that had dried and were long overdue for the trash, various antiques in different stages of disrepair.
“This way,” she called, already a step or two ahead. Before he knew it, he was following her into the bright sunroom, where she had somehow grabbed two teacups and an electric kettle. How had she gotten them so fast? She pointed at the cup, asking a question without saying anything at all.
“Why not?” he said. Without asking, he took a seat on a Barcelona chair. It sank disproportionately low to the ground, forcing his knees up toward his chin.
He could hear noise from the other room. “One of my kids is home today,” Mary said, by way of explanation. “I thought it was strep, but the test was negative.” Something from the kitchen crashed.
“Fuck! Excuse me just a sec?” Mary disappeared back into the hall, leaving Denny in a stranger’s sunroom, admiring the snow from the Barcelona chair.
What he wanted was to look around. A secretary in the corner could hide secrets, he figured, but whatever had crashed would likely only take a few minutes to resolve—not enough time to leaf through a stranger’s belongings and sink back into the deepest chair on planet earth. Instead, he concentrated on the items on the table before him. The table was actually a trunk: red leather withbrass buckles, topped with a few crystal pieces, Murano perhaps. One was curved and blue, an ashtray from the 1960s, he thought. In it was something he thought he recognized—a small brass button, the size of a pinkie nail. Anna had worn a cardigan with buttons like that, he remembered now, black cashmere, five buttons down the center.
Mary was soon back. She held a rag against her hand, where, Denny guessed, she had cut it in the kitchen.
“Kids,” she said, and rolled her eyes a little. Denny nodded.
“Well, I don’t have to tell you,” she said. She lowered herself onto a settee across from him but didn’t make eye contact. Instead, she looked out the window at the snowy yard.
“I live in a jungle gym,” he said, trying to keep the conversation going. “Anna was the person who kept my life together.”
“I assume you came to ask me about her,” Mary said absently. “There isn’t much I can tell you. Well, maybe a few things that would be helpful. Honestly, I thought you’d come sooner.”
