Your Dead Wife

James’ Dead Wife exists along two axes. The first: shimmering sunlight through an open window, white sheets and morning coffee and a soft smile. 

The second is mostly blood. 

At the intersection of these two axes, James carries on with his life, even though his Wife is Dead. People tell him all day how sorry they are, and how terrible the entire thing was, and how his Dead Wife was so beautiful and so young and how it’s all so very sad. James learns the script of this conversation so well that he starts waking up halfway through it. He’s actually having it in his sleep.

×

James gets home from his respectable job and thinks of the two axes, the white sheets always followed by the red blood. He wonders if he should try to track down his wife’s murderer. If he should start drinking whiskey straight and developing an air of mysterious sadness. If he should go to bars and sit in dark corners and tell strangers, unprompted, about the two lines a Dead Wife draws through your life. 

He tries those things for a while, but finds that criminal investigation is much more tedious than the movies make it look. He also discovers that he does not like whiskey, or even bourbon. He grows tired of telling strangers about the fluttering sheets, and how they glowed in the morning sunlight and how, inevitably, they must be followed by the slick shine of blood and darkness. 

The one good thing that comes out of these endeavors is that women sometimes approach him. “I find your air of mysterious tragedy incredibly intriguing,” they tell him. Their mouths say other things, but that is what they really mean. “You have a sexual draw unmatched by any other man in this bar. Possibly by any other man on Earth.” 

He responds in kind, “It’s probably because my Wife is Dead,” and, every time, they seat themselves automatically beside him at the bar. 

He runs through the rest of the script with them. His mouth tells them how much he loves and misses his Dead Wife. His eyes stare all the while at their young and slim figures. Surely his Dead Wife was never this young or this slim. Then again, maybe she was. James does not remember, anymore, what she looked like. At the end of his lines, they often lean forward to grab his hand and offer a comforting squeeze, their eyes soft with emphatic condolences. James sometimes orders his body to reach forward and touch them back, to press his mouth against theirs, to offer for them to stay the night at his place. His muscles do not respond to such commands. Instead, a painful flash rings through his head, like someone is reaching into his brain to stab the memory forward. The only memory he is allowed to have. White sheets and white sunlight and dark red blood all over his hands and on the knife, too, and the silvery blade glinting in the moonlight and—

No, no. That’s not right. The memory stops at the blood. That’s all that there is. Red, red blood, and righteous white rage. That is James’ life now. That is what James’ Dead Wife is.

×

James goes home alone from the bars and dreams of old-fashioned ghosts. The kind made up of white sheets with holes for eyes. In these dreams, his hands are painted bright crimson as he reaches forward to tear the fabric away. Beneath, he finds a naked figure. The shape of the body is familiar, but where the face should be, there is only a blur.

From far off, an indistinct voice calls to him, asking him why he never helps with the dishes or brings home flowers anymore or takes her on any dates. He opens his mouth to ask why she’s such a nag, such a frigid fucking bitch, why she never puts out anymore or calls him handsome or makes him feel like a good man.

Before he can form the words, though, she flickers and disappears. He’s left holding that stupid white sheet, all his impotent rage bubbling up into something ugly inside him.

When he opens his eyes, his anger has flooded over into the waking world. His bedsheets are fisted in his hands. He’s twisting them hard enough to snap apart the seams. He imagines he can hear, faintly, the sound of a crowd booing in the distance. Once the red-hot film clears from his vision, he realizes that the low hum is actually his phone buzzing on the nightstand. He’s getting a call from an unmarked number. A part of him he is not allowed to access thinks it looks familiar. He picks up.

“James?” a female voice says on the other end of the line. 

James knows this script, too. He thinks this is the part where he is supposed to say his Dead Wife’s name, to assume that the voice is her, haunting him. All women are supposed to be his Dead Wife, to James. 

James can’t say his line, though, because he can’t remember his Dead Wife’s name. 

The woman on the phone says, “James, I’ve been worried about you. I’ve missed you.” The hushed intimacy in her tone sends warm shivers up James’ spine. “Call me back.”

James wants to call her back. He wants to respond, “I’ve missed you, too,” but some outside force holds his jaw shut, keeps his tongue paralyzed in his mouth, rips the thought out of his skull that of course this is not his Dead Wife—that whoever she is, she’s better.

×

At work the next day, a colleague turns to James in the break room and says that his wife is pregnant again. James knows this script, too. He is supposed to say “Congrats,” in a way that’s a little stilted. He’s supposed to turn toward the window and think about his Dead Wife and the family they were supposed to have together. He manages to clamp his jaw closed around the force of the impulse long enough for the colleague to continue.

“Is it bad that I like them better while she’s pregnant?” The colleague must see James’ blank expression because he clarifies, “The kids, I mean.” The colleague’s tone is jovial. He chuckles like he and James are sharing a private joke, even as his eyes remain flat and serious. He’s following the script, too, James realizes. He’s playing his part so well, James can barely tell that it’s a part at all. “It feels wrong to say it, but I think I liked our first one–that’s my daughter Ella–better before she was born.”

“No,” James says. “It’s not bad. You’re not wrong.” The script sings, now. For once, James can say his lines with conviction. For once, James agrees. “The less they exist, the easier they are to love.”

×

At home once again, James pops his wedding tape into the VCR player. It’s on old school film, meant to evoke a sense of that bittersweet nostalgia that James knows he’s supposed to be feeling right now. The camera pans over the gathered crowd, somber in their Sunday best. Then, there’s James, at the end of the aisle, laughing with his buddies. There’s no sound, only some super-imposed romantic piano the editor added in, but James can read his friends’ lips. They tell him that it’s still not too late to make a run for it, that they could be at the strip club in less than an hour, that they left the car running if he wants to bolt. When it cuts back to the bride, the James of the present day is disappointed and relieved to see that she’s filmed exclusively from the back, reduced to long hair beneath a shimmering white veil.

There is, near the end, a single shot of her face as she stands across from James at the altar, but it’s in profile. She’s standing directly in front of the church window. The sunlight is coming through, outlining the edges of her face in brilliant white and yellow light. She looks like an angel. 

It’s impossible to make out any of her features.

×

On a coffee run in the morning, James turns around after placing his order to find a young woman standing there, gaping at him.

“James?” she asks, and James recognizes the voice from the phone. Her eyes are dark and wide, her hair a carefully curated platinum blonde. Beneath her face, her body is slim and toned.

“I’ve been completely worried sick!” She drops her voice into a conspiratorial register and steps in closer to James. He can smell her perfume now. It’s a smooth mix of rose and something spicier, something undeniably enticing. It is as familiar to him as his own face. He has flashes of remembered sensations, of that first secretive, stolen kiss, of his skin pressing against hers, of the thrilling noises that she made in the middle of the night in hotel rooms James was so careful to never put on cards linked to the joint account. “I know we said we should lay low for a while after the funeral, but you never even called, no texts, no anything! Do you have any idea how scared I’ve been?”

Her eyes are pleading with him. He wants, more than anything, to reach out and hold her. He wants to call in sick to work and spend the entire day tangled up with her in bed. 

That painful stab of memory again. The fluttering white sheets, the blurry, backlit face underneath. The way all that blood made his hands so slippery, so that he could just barely keep his grip on the handle of the knife—

James’ body jerks to the side. His feet carry him out the door. His coffee is forgotten. 

He feels the eyes of the woman boring into his back long after she is gone. He feels them the entire walk to the office.

×

James goes into work at his respectable 9 to 5 plagued by the nauseating feeling that he is standing outside himself, staring over his own shoulder as he types endlessly into one meaningless spreadsheet after another. He wants back in, even if what he finds inside himself is wretched, and so he orders his body to stand up in the middle of the office floor. He isn’t expecting it to obey his command, but he finds himself rising, his office chair falling away behind him. The eyes of his coworkers drift away from their own spreadsheets to land on James.

After a long beat of silence, James tells them, completely unscripted, “I think I killed my Dead Wife.” More silence. James’ coworkers blink back at him. 

“Her name was Marisa, and I must have loved her at some point, but she got older and then she gained weight and I guess I was doing the same. She never hated me for that, but I started hating her, and she could tell. She could tell, so she started hating me right back. I was also…I was also cheating on her, I think, and she found out, and she was going to leave. And I didn’t even love her anymore, but I was sort of enraged by the idea that she could leave me. That after everything, she could be the one to decide that I was worthless and pathetic and that she wasn’t going to keep me around anymore when really—” James’ breath is coming in hard and fast, now. He’s in control of his own lungs for the first time in months, and he’s astounded to find it’s a much worse feeling than having them inflate without his permission.  “Really it had been her fucking fault all along.”

James’ breaths intermingle with the soft rustle of paper, the rhythmic clicking of fingers across keyboards. His eyes tear over the cubicles, desperate to find someone, anyone looking up. Someone he can make understand. “I just didn’t want to be the bad guy.” His voice is much softer now, pleading in the blank office air. “I don’t think any of you wanted me to be, either. Maybe, in that way, you kind of killed her, too.”

No one meets James’ eyes. His coworkers have turned back to their computers. 

They all stopped listening sometime after the word “Marisa.”