How to Talk to a Widower

inevitably must follow aborted sex. I want everything to be okay between us, and I know it might be tomorrow, but nothing we say will make it okay tonight, so, that being the case, there doesn’t seem to be a point to cutting ourselves more deeply. And since I’m not going to talk, there’s nothing left to do but sort out the tangled heap of our clothing at the foot of the bed and drive in silence back to her Brady Bunch house.
    She hugs me at her front door. “You’ll call me?”
    “Of course.”
    “And just to reiterate, this had nothing to do with my telling you that I’d been raped.”
    “Nothing at all.”
    “So why won’t you look at me?”
    I look at her. She looks back at me, and we stay like that for a moment, until I have to look away from the raw emotion in her eyes. I lean forward to kiss her good night, and she kisses me back, but there’s no heat anymore, just the tender acknowledgment of separation.

    Later, as I pull back up my driveway, two dark eyes like polished stones suddenly materialize in the glow of my headlights, then the frantic zigzag of white cotton, and before I can brake there’s a sickening crunch under my wheel, felt more than heard. I step out of the car to find the rabbit, stretched and broken on the crumbling blacktop of the driveway. The rabbit is still alive, lying on its side, its white belly still rising and falling with labored breath, one mangled front paw lightly scraping the driveway, still reflexively trying to run. Its coffee bean eyes are wide open, staring off into nothingness, whiskers vibrating. I stand beside the dying animal at a loss, feeling sick to my stomach and utterly helpless. I should kill it, put it out of its misery, but I don’t have a gun, and I don’t have it in me to bring out a baseball bat and bash its brains in. All I can do is keep it company in its final moments, crouching beside the rabbit in the chilly night and looking into its eyes, apologizing repeatedly in soothing tones. The rabbit doesn’t look terribly traumatized, does not writhe in terror and pain, but simply lies there, accepting and composed, as if dying is just one in a list of things it has to get done today. And there’s nothing for me to do but sit there watching as its breaths become shorter, more like gasps, and then its body starts to tremble, and then its eyes close, and then it dies.
    I grab a heavy gardening shovel from the garage and bury the rabbit in a shallow, unmarked grave at the edge of the backyard. I’m carrying the shovel back to the garage when, without warning, a spasm of sourness rises up in me and I fall to my knees, vomiting prolifically into the hedges, until there’s nothing left in me, until I’m inside out, and then I perform a few wrenching dry heaves that threaten to dislocate vital organs, and then I’m done, feeling light-headed and tasting acid. Inside I rinse my mouth out with whiskey and then head upstairs. The strewn comforter and rumpled linens on my bed are more than I can take right now, so I head into Russ’s room, where Claire lies under the covers reading one of Hailey’s pink novels. Her eyes are bloodshot, either because she was sleeping earlier or because she’s been crying. “Hey,” she says, surprised to see me. “How was your date with Brooke? I’ve got a good feeling about that one.”
    I nod slowly. Sadly. “Oh, shit,” Claire says.
    “Yeah,” I say wearily, pulling back her blanket. She slides over to the wall to make room for me, and I pull off my shoes and slide in beside her.
    “You’re shivering,” she says, and I think of the rabbit in its death throes and wonder if I’ve been cursed, if I’ll never stop shivering. But then Claire throws an arm over me and pulls me into a hug, and she’s warm and smells of Noxzema and tears, and after a few seconds the shivering stops. Claire can be overbearing and intrusive and relentlessly superior, but when I’ve come apart, she’s the only person who knows how to put me back together again.
    “I screwed up,” I say.
    “Of course you did,” she says, not unkindly. “But look at it this way: you actually had something to screw up. Baby steps, Doug. Baby steps.”
    “You look like you’ve been crying.”
    She shrugs. “Hormones.”
    “Yeah,” I say. “Whatever.”
    We take turns crying in the dark and talking each other down, we talk until we’re no longer making any sense, until our tongues are rubber and our mouths have run dry and we’ve