The last time I saw my husband alive, we were touring an apartment. The walls echoed under his knocks, the faucets squealed. He knelt in front of the empty refrigerator, cast pale in the icy light. “What do we think?” he asked me.
“Do we like it?” I returned.
“We’re not sure,” he said, his sneaker scuffing at a dent in the hardwood floor.
We spoke like this when we needed it, clasping onto a plural identity of we when we felt our singular selves cracking. Melding our tastes and desires into a sticky syrup that glued us to each other. In the car, he asked me to steer with him. Together, he said, and I wrapped my hand around the leather wheel just as the driver came barreling into him, severing the me from him, the we, into tinier, singular pieces.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” Sheila asks outside the bar.
I nod.
“I saw you checking out that bartender,” Ivy says, elbowing me.
After rinsing my face, I’d returned to the bar, smile glued over teeth, eager to see the bartender and confirm that he was not my dead husband. That he was, in fact, just a good-looking man. Better-looking than my husband, even, who wasn’t attractive by most standards. Sheila called him a dead-eyed cocker spaniel. But when you love someone, they become the most stunning thing in the world. Their features hold an impossible beauty you can’t unsee, not as long as you love them.
No, the bartender isn’t my husband. But he looks exactly like him. And I know that having your greatest wish granted can be a dangerous thing.
“I don’t ever want to come to this bar again,” I say.
“Why?” Ivy asks, concerned.
“Done,” Sheila says. “This bar is now dead to me.” She spits on the concrete and turns on her heel. My spine tingles with each step I take, leaving my husband/not-husband behind.
A few days later, it happens again. This time, he doesn’t tend bar.
I’m at work when he walks in, carrying a water jug on his shoulders. My husband was not a working man—he got squeamish over blood and wore Ugg boots as slippers. The one time he chopped wood, he struck his toe. But here he is, easing through the room, waving at the receptionist while balancing a water jug on his bicep. My breath limps through my throat.
Ivy, who works at the desk next to mine, runs over with a tissue, her beautiful moon face rising into view. “Your eyes are bleeding,” she hisses.
“It’s okay,” I say. I take the tissue from her hand and hold it to my left eyeball, lean to the right to spot my man. He’s gone.
“Is this normal?” Ivy asks.
“Yes,” I say, grabbing a green Post-it from my desk and holding it to my right eyeball.
“Are you sure?”
“It’s a part of the procedure.”
This isn’t a total lie. Dr. Gray hadn’t mentioned bleeding as a side effect, but Optimize Optical was in its trial stages. Maybe bleeding was a part of the procedure. They just didn’t know yet. Not enough test subjects.
When I step out of work, Sheila’s car is idling in the rain. Of course Ivy would tell her. Sheila rolls down the window.
“I’m fine,” I say.
“Yeah, right, Little Miss Bleed-from-her-eyeballs,” Sheila says.
“I’m taking you back to that clinic.”
“For what?”
“To make sure you’re okay, dummy. You’re like Mom. You never take of yourself.”
We don’t talk about Mom, who lives two towns away with a nameless boyfriend and a colony of cats. I’m not sure she knows I was married, or that I’m now a widow. The use of her name has become an anti-safe word. At the mention of her, I open the door and slide in, afraid I’ll summon her into my life if I don’t.