A Trick of Light by Karen Blomain

When Hattie awoke the first time, it was still early, around midnight. The house was quiet. Although she had been asleep less than an hour, she felt jittery and restless. She walked into the bathroom and drank a glass of water and started back to the bed. Abruptly, she turned and went down the stairs. Instead of switching on the hall light, she steadied and guided herself down each step by pressing her fingertips against the wall as she had done a thousand times before. Fear was the only thing different in Hattie's life.

The fear, the casket and the knowledge that Ben had been about to tell her something important. At first she was so afraid that she couldn't focus her eyes, but she approached the casket and forced herself to look at him. Ben lay there with his hands folded on his stomach; his left hand on top. He had never worn a wedding ring, and now Hattie wished he had. She thought back over the events of the past two days from her anxious anticipation of Ben's homecoming to their lovemaking, his death, and the crush of people around her. Hattie needed to think. Something nagged at her, preventing her from crying. She felt it like a pressure in her abdomen, a crushing pain holding her back.

A bank of candles in large glass cylinders at either side of the casket threw shadows about the silent room. A car dragged up the highway in the distance. Hattie thought about how she had listened those nights she expected Ben home late, thinking she could tell his car's sound from all the others as he left the interstate and wound through the valley road and started up the drive back to her. For a very long time, she stood there waiting; she wasn't sure for what. Ben would never come home again. And she seemed unable to cry about it. Her body felt icy and separate from her mind. "What was it, Ben?" she whispered. "What did you want to tell me? Why did you leave me? I don't think I can forgive you for this." Lying in the casket with the play of candlelight on his face, Ben's expression seemed to change from the benign confusion his features held earlier in the evening to a look of sinister amusement.

Hattie looked up past the casket to the glistening banner on the floral arrangement Alice had insisted on, DADDY, I LOVE YOU. Hattie's eyes blurred with the pain of her grief for her daughter. When she looked back at Ben, his features had rearranged themselves again into indifference.

Suddenly Hattie touched the ring on her own finger. She reached out to Ben. His skin felt cold, rubbery and stiff, completely different from before. She started at the sound of the refrigerator kicking on in the next room. She shivered and drew back, but then touched him again, this time resolutely. She still didn't know what she intended to do, but her fingers took over. Fearing that someone might come into the room and stop her, she moved quickly as she spun the ring from her finger. Working hard to separate Ben's hands, she thrust her ring between them and out of sight. Absently, she tugged his sleeve into place over his wrist and touched his hand again, feeling the small bristle of hair on his fingers and the turgid skin which was nothing at all like Ben Darling.

Hattie moved back from the casket and stood a long time staring intently at Ben's face as she had throughout the viewing, almost as if she expected him to respond to her actions. Still no tears coursed down her face as she expected and hoped they would. Everything about the house she had spent her whole life in had changed and shifted as it accommodated death. She thought of those other deaths - her parents, Gordie dead in Vietnam, the five Beste generations who had lived and died in the house - summoned to witness how she would grieve. She could not fix her mind on any particular emotion. But she did feel something - a chill coursed through her body so intense that her teeth chattered. Again she moved closer to the casket and bent over as if to listen to Ben whispering. She pressed her cheek against his chest.

The man she loved and had spent her life with was dead. All the ways she had ever thought she might feel in this situation eluded her as she rose. Hattie continued to study Ben's features which seemed to change again and again in the shifting light. She knew suddenly one important thing about her life with Ben. She had lived beside him through the glorious and quotidian days of a long marriage, and yet they each had their individual loneliness. Hattie's body trembled again at the terrible knowledge that she had never really known Ben at all.

When she climbed the stairs again, Hattie felt a weariness so intense that she could hardly lift her feet to clear the treads. At least, she thought, she could rest. But during the night, her first night of widowhood, sleep moved away from her like an elusive lover. Each time she felt herself moving toward it, she'd be pulled back, imagining she heard thick, phlegmy breathing on the pillow next to her. As she tossed and jerked the covers this way and that trying to find a cool space to rest, she struggled to make sense of her own emotions which didn't feel like the grief she felt entitled to. If she had to name her state, she would think, confusion. As though too much was happening at once, too many images crowding in around her, too much for her to process especially with the house full of people all afternoon and evening. She simply couldn't think. Occasionally, she'd imagine herself placing the ring, touching Ben's dead flesh, how strange he looked and felt; then the thought would frighten her and quickly disappear to surface again in images of Ben holding baby Alice on his lap.

Since Alice had moved to Pittsburgh two years before and with Ben on the road, Hattie's life had been solitary and private except for the good friends and neighbors. The day had been too much for her and the viewing and funeral the next day would be even more taxing. She knew she needed sleep, yet how was she to turn off her mind enough to rest. How was she to endure it? When she thought of the numbers of women she knew who had been widowed, she was astonished that they were able to survive the rituals of bereavement.

And Ben. How could she even make herself begin to realize that the central person in her life was gone? Ben. How could she cope with everyone talking to her, trying to comfort her but saying things she didn't want to hear, making her remember this or that good time they had with her and Ben? But what about the other times they had shared, the not so perfect times. Did anyone else remember them? She felt her mind refuse those images.

Still, another thought pulled at the edge of her consciousness, one that she couldn't quite bring into focus. She dozed fitfully until two, then fell into a deep sleep for three hours. She woke up with a start, knowing with certainty what the elusive thing which had been bothering her, was: she still didn't know what Ben had started to tell her. What had he been thinking of in the moments before he died?

She must have slept again for when she woke next, the room was stuffy, much too warm for early May and gray with predawn light. She lay there, willing herself to get up; even imagining herself seated on the edge of the bed ready to stand. The house was completely still; Alice slept down the hall in her childhood bedroom. No traffic passed on the road since the milk truck's four a.m. run. She squinted at the clock: 5:15. She must have dozed again.

When she heard the hall floorboards sigh, a small kernel of happiness bloomed in Hattie's heart. It was a night long ago, before Ben had begun to travel, before Alice and she had begun to misunderstand each other. The covers moved and her daughter's small, sleep-warmed body slid in next to her. For a moment, milky sweet baby breath feathered Hattie's cheek, then the child turned and nestled close, her back curled into Hattie's chest. Greedily, Hattie inhaled Alice's scents and drew a few strands of her daughter's downy blond hair into her mouth. Only partially awake, Hattie adjusted her body around her daughter and Ben moved slightly to make room in the cave of his arms for his wife and child.