I know. I know. I miss him too. What more can I say to you.
Above all she did not want people to misinterpret her bouts of panic, despair, nausea. Her life had collapsed when Gus had died as abruptly as if she’d been stricken by a virulent illness. She could summon strength when required, but she could not sustain strength for very long. Like a blown-up balloon that gradually leaks air, and has to be replenished. And when she was totally deflated, defeated, lying near-comatose on a hotel bed, teeth chattering with cold, she did not want another person to observe her, and be concerned for her; she did not want a well-intentioned friend to insist upon taking her to a doctor, still less calling an ambulance. That was all she needed, to be forcibly hospitalized in Muskegee Falls, Ohio! Like all the doctors they knew Gus had horror stories of the quality of medical care in “outpost” hospitals. It was another fact of widowhood (which perhaps only a widow could know) that such attacks always subsided within an hour or so. If she didn’t develop tachycardia, or a migraine headache, or acute nausea, in which case she would do well to stay away from other people overnight.
You’re just upset, darling. You’ll be fine. Breathe deeply.
The only remedy was waiting, solitude. Feeling Gus’s presence, consoling her.
Almost, if she drifted into sleep, she could grasp his hand. Or, rather—Gus would grasp her hand.
You’ve gotten through this in the past. You will again now. Try to sleep for a while.
She’d had to hide such weakness from the children of course. If she could not be strong for the children she did not want them to see her at all.
In the past several months the grief-attacks had been coming with lessening frequency but now, in Muskegee Falls, where the total focus of her attention, her concentration, was on the trial, and she was forced to hear the most devastating accounts of her husband’s death, and to listen to the reports of law enforcement officers, emergency medical technicians, the county medical examiner, she was as vulnerable as she’d been a year ago.
The realization that Gus was dead, and had vanished from the earth while his murderer remained alive, untouched, in his stubborn, insular trance, that no one could enter—this swept over her at least once a day, when she returned to the hotel, and left her shattered.
She felt the need to explain to Gus: “No matter where I go, you aren’t here. You are—nowhere.”
Or, rather—“Reduced to ashes.”
She had not brought Gus’s ashes to the cemetery where she’d purchased a plot. (Only just a single plot because as she reasoned her body too would be cremated, eventually; a double plot is not required when husband and wife have been reduced to ashes.) She had had too much to think about though she had not (yet) given in to Darren, that Gus’s ashes should be scattered at Katechay Island.
One thing she’d have wished to keep from Gus—(though surely Gus wouldn’t have been surprised)—was the fact that many individuals attending the trial, as elsewhere in the country, supported the man who had murdered him. This was painful to realize, though it should not have been surprising.
Since the arrest of Luther Dunphy there had been much publicity about the case. And now with the onset of the trial, yet more publicity.
A wealthy Midwestern manufacturer named Baer, associated with right-wing politics, had taken out TV advertisements extolling Dunphy as a “martyr” for the Right-to-Life movement. An evangelical preacher was exhorting his millions of viewers on cable TV to pray for Luther Dunphy’s release. On Fox News, which was covering the trial as “breaking news,” a popular commentator named Tom McCarthy whom Jenna had never seen, or wished to see, frequently praised Dunphy as a “soldier of God” and excoriated Gus Voorhees and the pro-choice movement as a “pack of atheist-socialist baby killers.”
Of course, Tom McCarthy always paused to make it “abundantly clear” that he did not believe in, condone, or in any way encourage violence.
The single time that Jenna had forced herself to watch the terrifying Tom McCarthy Hour she’d had the impression that, as Tom McCarthy said these words, he’d all but winked at the television audience.
Violence? Noooo. Not me!