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There’s a new face at the widower’s group tonight.
It’s not unusual. The faces come and go, an endless rotation of mourners. The female group is more popular, of course, because womenfolk are more likely to seek out this sort of help, this sort of community. Men like to take their feelings on the chin and down a beer. Or, at least, that’s how Loraine’s husband always liked to do it. When his mother died, he’d hidden himself away, driven off into the night and come home in the early morning absolutely plastered. They’d never spoken of it. When she’d lost him — car accident, unexpected and sudden — she’d sought out other women, other widows, and that’s how all of this started, really. A lowly nurse in need of support, an empty room in the lonely hospital and a handful of chairs. A women’s group and then, at the urging of the doctors, one for the men, too.
What is unusual is how young this particular man is. Twenty-five at most, but she’ll eat her hat if he’s a day older than twenty-two.
They’re more oftentimes seeing young women at these sorts of things, who married reckless young men who drove too fast or drank too much or said the wrong thing to the wrong person, boys who signed their soul to the road and the State to support their families. The men who attend skew older, men who fought in the war and survived a lifetime of work only to end up lost and alone without their wife when she passed. This man, though, is daisy fresh in the face and strong in the body, with lean muscles visible under the thin fabric of his shirt. He strolls in a few minutes before the meeting starts, when everyone else has settled into their creaky plastic chairs with their lukewarm coffee, with his hands in the pockets of an old denim jacket that can’t be doing much to keep him warm in this weather. He’s handsome in the sort of way that’s hard to ignore, strong jaw and big eyes, dark skin and a slump-shouldered stature that tells of a man who used to walk taller.
It’s a lonely, quiet Christmas Eve, with the beginning of another classic New Hampshire snowstorm greying the clouds outside. As if they don’t already have enough snow and ice to deal with. Most folks are home with their families or taking the short-straw shift at work for a few extra bucks in the bank. Loraine’s the latter. And all the other men, they don’t have no one waiting for them — or mostly no one. And this young man . . . he feels like an omen of some sort. The ghost of Christmas past, present, or future. His dark hair is cropped short and wet with melting snow. His boots track wet across the floor. He walks with a slight limp, like maybe he broke an ankle as a kid that didn’t quite heal right.
Or maybe it’s something else that’s got him unsteady.
Mike watches the young man from behind his glasses. He’s a middle-aged mechanic, with tattoos up and down his dark arms, who lost his wife three years ago. “Alcoholics are meetin’ down the hall.”
Lots of folks meet here. They’ve got two rooms for meetings and two days a week they’re allowed to host them. The hospital is old and underfunded — volunteer run, not State run, but everything has to be approved by the State all the same. The alcoholics meet because dependence on anything other than civic pride to keep you going makes for lazy, unproductive citizens. The mourners meet because sad folks work slower. And somehow, someone’s made the case for these types of groups, that they inspire community engagement and support economic growth. It can’t be the setting, that’s for damn sure. The linoleum floors are scuffed, the walls painted a drab and chipping off-white long ago. The lights flicker every so often. And the coffee they manage to serve is always both a little cold and a little burnt-tasting.
“No, thanks,” the young man says. “I’m right where I’m supposed to be.”
“This is a meetin’ for widowers,” Franklin says from behind his grizzled grey beard.
The young man sits down in one of the six empty chairs. They set out twelve total, every week. They’re never all full. “Yeah.”
An awkward moment of silence follows. The chairs groan under their owners as they shift around, re-planting their feet, adjusting their position to better ease their aching bones. The young man sits with his knees apart and hands folded demurely in his lap. He seems both impossibly tired and impossibly young.
“Well,” Loraine says. “Welcome.”
He inclines his head. Polite, this boy. The corner of his mouth is connected to the corner of his eye by a large scar that crosses his cheek. It makes him look rough and tumble, but doesn’t detract from his handsomeness. It does put her on edge, though. They’d had a man once, one who came to a meeting and told them how he’d hurt his wife. It had been a hard hour to get through. She braces herself for more of that kind of talk. “Thanks.”
“Did you come to talk today or just to listen?” She almost hopes he’s just come to listen. She’s no psychologist; all of those are employed by the State. And she’s no doctor, neither. Just a woman with a nursing license and experience with grief. She can’t really do anything to help these men but sit here and offer them her ear in a space where no one will judge. Sure, she’s supposed to report if anyone says anything outright illegal or openly dissenting or critical of the State, but the hospital can’t exactly afford recording equipment. No one will know what she keeps to herself.
“I don’t— I don’t know. I’m not much of a talker these days.” He has the deer-in-headlights look of an unprepared child unexpectedly called on in class. “What do people usually say?”
An old-timer, Gerald, grunts. “Could start with yer name, boy.”
“Pete,” the young man says.
“No last name?”
The young man hesitates. He’s so unsure, it makes him seem more like a boy. “Garraty.”
Loraine smiles. “Pete Garraty, we’re glad you’re with us tonight. Did you wanna tell us a bit about why you’re here?”
Pete straightens up, rolling his shoulders back. “I lost my . . .” His mouth twists and it pulls the scar on his cheek taut. His sweet, young brow furrows, digging deep grooves into the plain of his forehead. “. . . my ray of sunshine. Last May.”
Oh. Oh, this poor boy. Loraine has heard plenty of sob stories, plenty of tragedies. Men who lost their high school sweethearts and never quite recovered. Men who found love late in life, in a second wife or a third, and lost it just as swiftly. Men who pushed away children and grandchildren, friends and family, because they couldn’t bear the reminder of their lost wife. Men who disappeared into a bottle. She’s heard it all. All the ways men cope, all the ways men love, she thought she knew them intimately. But this — the way this young man talks about his love, his ray of sunshine, the agony in the crack of his voice? That’s real, true love, the kind you can’t undo, the kind you can’t forget or move on from. Her heart aches for him. He’s only a little older than her own son, more than likely, and the motherly instinct to cross the ramshackle half-circle they’ve made to hold him is almost overwhelming.
She’s here to be a mother, essentially. Not a nurse, not a therapist, but a mother. They want to be consoled, to be comforted, to be told what they’re feeling is normal, is okay. Her lost boys and she, their Wendy. But she has to keep a professional distance, all the same. She’s had more than a few men take it the wrong way, walk her to her car and ask her out to dinner, try to follow her home. Grief does funny things to a person. Makes them act in all kind of weird and crazy ways. It’s why she wears a name tag that says Betty tonight and on Thursday she’ll wear one that says Gladys and next week she’ll wear one that says Francine.
Her mouth opens, but nothing comes out.
“Sorry,” Mort grumbles, not unkindly, “for your loss.”
Pete nods. “Thank you. We didn’t get long together.” Surely not, a man so young. How tragic, to lose a wife so soon after finding her. “We weren’t . . . we weren’t supposed to find each other, not the way we did.” Loraine assumes, from the guilty way his eyes dart around, that this girl might’ve been white. It’s not exactly State-sanctioned, the mixing of races. More readily accepted than homosexuals, maybe, but more taboo than being a divorcée. Depends on the area. “And I knew we wouldn’t have long together. People like us never do. But . . . I figured it would be me who went. Sometimes I wish it was me.”
The men who talk like that might be the hardest — the ones who don’t see a reason to keep going.
What could’ve happened to this girl? Loraine hopes for something swift and sudden and painless — an accident or a sickness that moved quickly. But she gets the feeling there was some violence involved. Some horrible, terrible, senseless act of violence.
“I felt the same way,” Mike says, “after I lost my old lady.”
“Like all the light in the world was gone?” Pete asks.
Mike nods. “Would’ve thought the sun went out when my Penny died.”
“That’s how it feels. My ray—“ Here, he chokes. They give him a moment to collect himself. “My sunshine. I used to have that in me. I could see it, you know? Even with all the bad, I could see some light in all this fuckin’ darkness — excuse my language,” he says, with a quick glance in her direction. What a little gentleman. “That’s what — that’s why she loved me, she said. We had big plans. We were gonna change the world. But losing her and — and my brothers, one right after the other? It’s gettin’ harder and harder, to find the moments that make it worthwhile.” He wipes at his mouth, a quick swipe of the back of his hand. “I’d give all of this up, this whole life, just to walk with her again.”
“It’s the little things,” Loraine agrees with an understanding look around the room, “that feel surprising to want in your grief. A walk with a loved one can sound so ordinary but mean so much.”
The young man chuckles — a bittersweet, snotty sound full of mixed emotion. “Would mean everythin’, if I could just do it again. I’d do it right, this time.”
“You’re not from around here, son,” Gerald says, raising a whiskery eyebrow. And that much is obvious from the young man’s accent, something slow and southern, with a cadence they don’t hear much around these parts. “What’re you doin’ up this way?”
Pete swallows. Loraine watches his Adam’s apple bob in this dark throat. “Just passin’ through. Visitin’ hi—her mom,” he says. “Don’t want her alone for the holiday. Didn’t seem right.”
That poor mother. On her own, no child, no husband, only a mourning son-in-law for holiday company. Loraine can’t imagine losing her baby so young, after already losing her husband. Her son Jimmy is curled up safe at home, probably heating up the dinner she left in the icebox for him after a long day of pushing snow around for the neighbors. He’s her only child. Why mess with perfection, she always said. Maybe not the brightest, but he’s hardworking and clear-headed and he’s promised to never put in an application for the Walk, no matter how dire things seem. She’ll get home to him before late and they’ll sit together on the couch until midnight comes and goes.
Pete carries on, gesturing around to the group without lifting his eyes to them. “And I don’t mean to compare it to what you been through. You lost wives. We weren’t — we didn’t—“
Didn’t even make it to their wedding day. How heartbreaking!
“Don’t matter much if you was married or not,” Mort says. “Gone is gone is gone. Hurts all the same. Tell us about ‘er.”
“Only if it doesn’t hurt too bad,” Mike says, with a sharp glare at Mort.
But Pete shakes his head. “I like to talk about it,” he says. “Even if it’s just to myself, most days. Helps me to remember. Makes it so I won’t forget. It’s all moments, you know? Comes to me in bits and pieces.” His dark, sorrowful eyes close. “Stubborn. Snarky. Sour, almost. Always up for an argument, but sweet as a peach if you talked just right. Big ideas about the world, about how it could be better. Smelled like sweat, ‘cause the days were so hot, but I didn’t mind. And those freckles, like constellation kisses from the sun, over the nose and down the neck and the hands. All pale and sunburnt, you know? Redhead.” Franklin mutters something about what redheads are like in the sack, something that gets all the guys chuckling, but Pete doesn’t laugh. Doesn’t even crack a smile. “The way she rested that head on my shoulder to sleep at night, the weight of her against me. One-seventy-eight.”
“Big girl,” Mort mutters.
“Big boy,” Pete says, absently. It’s a pretty reasonable size, male or female. Loraine is a nurse; she should know. “I’m — I mean, I was one-seventy-seven, at the time. I don’t eat as good now, though. Like the missin’ her took my appetite from me.”
“It’s not uncommon,” Loraine interjects, “to lose enjoyment in things like food after the death of a loved one.” And the State-approved reminder: “But it’s important to eat, to keep the body strong and purposeful.”
All her words are empty words, of course, but they’re all she has to offer.
She’s started to put together pieces of his tale like an incomplete puzzle, sliding matching shapes into place and finding that they click together just fine. Pete, maybe twenty-two years old, scarred both physically and emotionally, and beaten down by life already, so sick with grief he can barely eat. His girl — not a wife, but something close enough, a girlfriend or fiancée — pale and freckled and red-headed, outspoken and troublesome, a bit of a thrill-seeker, maybe. Sweet boy, sour girl, big dreams. Maybe an angry ex-boyfriend or an angrier daddy, someone who doesn’t much like the look of a man like Pete. A girl who fights back.
Were they planning to run away together? Is that really why he’s this far north? Is there an almost-mother-in-law to visit or is he trying to get away from something?
That scar — it looks like the kind of thing that could kill a man.
“H—her mama will feed me up,” Pete assures them. “She’s been kind to me. Too kind. Even though I don’t deserve it, after everythin’.”
“Why wouldn’t you deserve her kindness?”
Pete’s hands open, palm-up, in his lap. He stares down at them, like asking in question, like a talk with God. “I took her baby from her. I’m here. And that’s why she’s gone.”
Loraine’s heart leaps. Is this young man, this sweet boy, about to admit to a crime? Unburden himself to a group of strangers? I took her baby from her. She doesn’t have the energy, not tonight, to fill out the paperwork and make the phone call: yes, I run a support group and I’d like to report some illegal activity. Would it even be worth it to call? He’s transient, traveling, and she has no idea what this girl’s name was, let alone where this all went down. Hell, he could’ve given them a fake name; he’d hesitated over it, after all.
Or — she needs to stop jumping to conclusions. Any man would blame himself, if he couldn’t protect his woman. It’s a masculine thing, guilt of that sort. And no man who talks about his love the way Pete does could’ve hurt her.
“I bet,” Gerald says, “she don’t think of it that way.”
Pete shakes his head. “No, she don’t.”
Hal — a gentleman old enough to be Loraine’s grandfather, with a cane lying prone under his chair, who stays quiet just about every meeting — speaks up. His voice is croaky and rough from disuse, and from a lifetime of smoking a pack a day. It’s a surprise to hear. She’d almost believed him to have gone totally mute. “Sometimes, it helps to have someone who lost what you lost. They got the same pain.”
“Grief shared is grief lightened, even if only for a moment,” Loraine says. She holds out her hand and Hal takes it, his crippled, gnarled knuckles stark white when they wrap around hers. “That’s why we come here. To lighten the load. It’s one of the lessons we learn as we grieve.”
“Damn straight,” Mort mutters.
“Lots of lessons,” Franklin agrees. “Never stop fuckin’ comin’. One right after the other.”
“In a real short time, too,” Gerald nods, sage and wizened and a little pink around the cheeks.
“So short. Life is so short,” Pete laments, “and love is so long. It’s so fuckin’ long. It’s been six months and it still feels like the world is endin’ every time I open my eyes.”
“Then why do you keep doing it?” Mike asks.
“Hm?”
“Why keep waking up? Why keep going?” It’s not hopelessness, Loraine can tell; it’s a challenge. He’s challenging this young man to find something to live for, something to keep him going, even if it’s just a dare from an old man. Keep living, I double-dog dare you. “Why not just lay down and give up? If there’s such a thing as souls, hers is probably waiting for you. You could catch up.”
“Because he wanted me to live,” Pete says around sniffle. Loraine’s breath freezes in her lungs, but no one reacts. “To keep goin’, every day. To try to make the world a better place and keep findin’ the light in the dark.”
Loraine studies his face — closely, this time. He doesn’t look like what she’d assumed a homosexual would look like, all effeminate and limp-wristed. No, this is a strong young man with a sharp jaw and broad shoulders, in beaten-down boots and worn jeans and an old jacket a few sizes too big for him. His lover’s jacket, maybe, because she’s realizing now there was never any girl. God, what a pair they must’ve made! No wonder it ended tragically. That’s the only end for people like them. There are no happy endings for people who are different. The world eats up sweet people like him. Suddenly, she realizes his face is familiar, in the way that tells her she’s seen it before. Thinner in the cheeks than he was on the television screen, she thinks, with deeper hollows around the eyes. That white, winning smile and cock-of-the-walk strut is long gone. There had been a boy named Pete on the Walk, wasn’t there? And a boy named Garraty, too, but a different boy than this one in front of her. Pale and freckled and sickly-looking, towards the end. Ray Garraty, she thinks, Maine’s own, who pulled his buddy up off the ground and then stopped walking. To make Peter McVries the last Walker standing.
My ray of sunshine, this young man had said. I lost my ray of sunshine last May.
Last May. May fifth, to be exact. The night the Walk ended. She’d watched the soldiers drag him away from the other boy, the one gut-shot and on his knees, from his reaching hands. Her son had covered his eyes when the Major approached, her sweet boy, and lifted his gun for the final ticket. He couldn’t watch and she hadn’t felt right about it, either. This boy — this man — Pete McVries — he hadn’t been allowed to look away. He’d had to watch it happen. How horrible, to walk the love of your life to their death.
“And is that what you’re gonna do?” Mike asks. “Stay the man she loved and keep looking for the light, even without the sunshine?”
It’s a hell of a thing to ask.
“I don’t know. I’m . . . just one person. I don’t know how to fix the world. But I know what I’m good at.” He lifts his head. His hands close into determined fists. “I’m good at movin’ forward, no matter what. And that’s what she’d want me to do. So I’m gonna keep goin’, keep walkin’, even if it kills me.” A smile wobbles its way across his mouth. “Maybe she’ll do me the favor of waitin’ a while longer for me to catch up.”
A knock on the door tells them that time’s almost up. Everyone grumbles and starts to ease their creaking bones into an upright position — all but the young man. He stares around at them, his watery brown eyes dark like an oil spill, like he’s confused. Time can slip away, Loraine knows, when you’re trying to hold back tears, when you’re trying to learn to live again. Mike starts stacking the chairs, dragging them bodily over to the corner, and it all seems to click for him. He jumps to his feet and tries to help the others, moving chairs and downing the last of the sub-par coffee, but Hal wraps a hand around his shoulder and gives him a little shake. Listen, boy— He walks Pete out to the dinky little tree they have in the lobby, the one with the pine needles mostly on the floor and an old star barely clinging to the top.
The parking lot is mostly empty, more potholes than cars and more snow than potholes, only a handful of cars belonging to staff and visitors scattered around. All the men amble towards their rusted old trucks. Mike helps Hal, makes sure his cane doesn’t slip on the icy ground. She stands in the open entrance, holding the door with one hand and waving with the other as they, one by one, drive away. She has a door to lock and keys to return to the doctor on duty, and then she can go back home to her boy. But when she turns to go back inside, the young man is still standing in the lobby.
He looks just as surprised to see her as she does to see him, all pouting mouth and wide eyes, like he thought they’d all gone. He’s hunched in on himself against the cold blowing in with the wind, hands in his pockets again, and she can see now that one elbow of his denim jacket is patched with plaid, like a boy skinned his elbows a lot while wearing it. She’s between him and the door, him and the rest of the world.
“You got a ride home,” Pete — Pete McVries, winner of the Long Walk — drops his eyes to her chest to read her name tag, “Betty?”
It’s so respectful, not a glance at her cleavage or staring too long. His eyes dart right back up to hers. Even if he weren’t a homosexual, she gets the feeling he’d be just as polite and deferential. A gentleman. It’s good a boy like him won the Walk. Sometimes it’s real mean sons of bitches, boys who look like junkyard dogs, boys who snarl and bark and bite. “Oh, no,” she laughs, “don’t you worry about me. I’ve still got some more closin’ up to do and then I’m on my way. You — you have a holiday to get to and a drive ahead of you. Maine, right?”
“Yeah,” he says, “Freeport.”
She nods and wraps her sweater around herself. It’s cold, this close to the door. “I’ve only ever seen it on TV.” During the Walk, when it makes it that far. Sometimes it doesn’t. “Is it nice?”
He shrugs. “It’s like anywhere else. But it’s — uh — it’s somethin’ like home now, I guess. I bounce around, got these feet that can’t stay in one place. But it’s where . . . my sunshine was from there.”
“It’s not too much farther over the state line. So what made you stop here?”
“This town? Needed gas and somethin’ to eat. This hospital, this group? Saw an ad posted on the notice board at the diner.” He cocks a charming smile her way, the sort of thing that would make any woman’s knees weak. “Figured it might be more restful than the church service down the road.”
“And was it? Restful?”
“I don’t know that I’d call it restful.” They both laugh, hot huffs of air that blur into smoke. “But — enlightenin’, maybe. It’s been dark times. But I think I found a little bit of light here. Thanks to you.”
Her cheeks warm. “I didn’t do much. I just sit and listen.”
Another shrug. He’s got good shoulders for it. “I guess that’s what I needed.”
“And now you need to be on your way.” She steps out of the doorway, back to the wall, to let him pass. “If you want to get where you’re goin’ before morning.”
Part of her feels bad, sending him off like this. She should offer him another coffee, offer him a beer, offer to bring him home and get him a hot meal, let him sleep on the couch. Those damn maternal instincts. Or maybe a nurse’s instinct. Can’t ever let someone so broken down and sad be on their own. His truck — a newer model, but not so new it’s shiny and unused, that Walk prize money is good for something — is parked and waiting on the far side of the lot, in the dark shadows left behind between the streetlights.
He looks out to the parking lot and steps around her. His feet cross the threshold. “Right. Get home safe.”
Two steps out the door. Three. Soon he’ll be gone forever and this night will be nothing more than a blip in both their lives. There and gone.
“I’m sorry,” she calls. He turns, illuminated by the emergency lights reflecting off the snow on the ground. His dark skin is smooth and beautiful, like a painting of an angel, but there’s still something terribly sad about him. Maybe there always will be now. “About your young man.”
Pete blinks at her in surprise. “Oh.”
“He seemed a good boy. Your Ray.”
A laugh bursts out of him — and a smile breaks across his face. He shakes his head at the ground, at his scuffed boots on the cracked walkway. Maybe it’s funny. She remembers that boy yelling a lot, but most of them do. Especially towards the end. “He was. A dear boy.”
“Damn shame. I can tell you loved him a lot.”
“Yeah. I did. I do.” He sighs. “Thank you, again, ma’am.”
And as he walks out into the dreary dark night, the snow turns into rain.