The bartender looks most like my husband when he: smiles at a college girl, shakes his finger to a song, wipes his wet hands on his jeans. He does not look like my husband when he: dries a beer glass, tells a drunk man No, claps. He looks exactly like my husband when he is upset.
“I have to ask you to leave,” he says.
“Sorry?” It’s my third beer and I feel fantastic.
“You’re making me uncomfortable,” the bartender says. His voice sounds concerned, but he’s smiling. “With your staring.”
“Am I?” I say. It could be flirting. He could be joking. Maybe if I look hard enough, this is how I’ll be able to remember my husband, instead of that day on the street, his glasses broken, blood pooled beneath his cheek.
“What is it?” he says. “Is it the burn?”
“A burn?” The only scar I can make out is my husband’s crescent moon through the eyebrow.
“What the fuck is your problem?” he asks.
I shake my head. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I had this surgery that makes me see things differently.” I squint at his face. A blurry line across his cheek comes into view. “You’re beautiful. You remind me of my husband.”
“You’re kind of sick, you know that?” He walks away.
“Wait!” I say. “I haven’t paid.” I slap a twenty on the bar. He’ll come back, say he’s joking, say he loves me. That’s what my husband would do.
He doesn’t do that. I slide off the barstool and head to the door.
Outside, the mist has cleared, leaving the streets in a mood. The sidewalks are tinted orange from the streetlamps, no cars pass through. I stop at a statue of a goose, thinking about how geese are under-appreciated for their beauty. It’s always the swans that get the attention.
“What’s so great about a swan?” I ask the goose.
“Who are you talking to?”
I turn to see two smiling men standing behind me. Their hands are hidden in their sweatshirt pockets, and their faces are fucking beautiful in the streetlamp, cast in tangerine hues.
“I’m talking to this goose,” I say, laughing at their ridiculous beauty.
“Are you high?” one of them asks.
“No.”
They glance at each other. “Do you want to get high with us?” the other asks.
“Sure,” I say.
The three of us walk half a block. They ask if I live close by and I say I don’t, just because they’re strangers, even though I trust them. How could anyone not trust them? When people say not to trust strangers, what they really mean is don’t trust strangers if they’re not hot; otherwise, a stranger is just a potential date.
The taller man gestures toward an alley, and I wander ahead of them. When I turn, his hand is on my throat, pressing me back against the brick. The glow of the streetlamp falls onto his face, and I see it for the first time; it’s my husband’s face. We’ve played this game before, his eyes worried that it was too much, that he was hurting me, and me afraid to tell him he should squeeze harder.
“You’re pretty stupid for wandering out here by yourself,” my husband says. This is exactly something he would say. I laugh. “You think this is funny?” he says.
The other man is clearing his throat behind my husband. When the light hits him, he’s my husband’s best friend, who wouldn’t give a speech at the funeral because he knew he would cry. I’d felt angry then, but I can forgive him now under the streetlamp.
“What’s in your purse?” my husband asks, groping around my side. “Ty, grab her purse,” he says. I hand my purse to Ty without looking away from my husband’s face. He can take anything from me. If the person you love the most comes back from the dead, you give them anything and everything. At first you might resist, but it doesn’t take long to make a deal with the devil.
My husband squeezes my throat. I lay my hand on top, squeezing harder, a little too tight, how I like it. I press his other hand under my skirt. “Touch me,” I say. “Tell me you’re alive.”
“You want me to touch you?” my husband repeats.
“Please,” I say. “I want it.”
“This is weird,” Ty says. “Are her eyes bleeding?”
My husband loosens his grip, then steps back, releasing me. My thigh burns from his hand’s absence.
“No,” I say, tugging at his shirt. “Wait.”
“Let’s go,” Ty says. “Come on.” He takes off running down the street, my purse tucked under his arm. My husband follows him.
“Wait!” I shout, chasing after them. The beer and wine slow my legs, shove me into a stumble, but this is my husband. Mothers can lift cars to save babies. A widow should be able to sprint to catch a dead husband. I launch at his back, grab his ratty black sweater. “Wait!”
My husband turns. His face in the moonlight. Can I remember it like this instead?
“Fuck off,” he says, and his fist shoots my face into blackness, sends the taste of metal onto my tongue. When I blink back into the street, I’m on my hands and knees on the concrete, watching him run, too far for me to ever catch up.