The Widow's War by Mary Mackey

Author:Mary Mackey [Mackey, Mary]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

When he hears her voice, he turns around and sees a woman standing on the hotel steps wearing a white dress with a muddy hem. The lantern above her is swaying and shadows are passing over her face like swift, gray birds. Her hair is wound around her head in a braid, but small strands are escaping, shining in the lamplight like a halo. The woman looks so much like Carrie that for an instant he manages to convince himself that it’s really her standing there. But of course it can’t be.

Since she died, he’s dreamed of her repeatedly, run toward her and watched her dissolve, reached for her and seen his hand pass through her body. He’s even touched her hair, but when he buried his face in it, it gave off no scent. That’s how he knew for certain he was dreaming. When the dead visit you in dreams, they never come back whole.

Awake, he has seen her at least two dozen times in the faces of women who looked almost nothing like her and heard her voice in places where there was nothing to hear but wind. A few days before he left for Kansas, he even followed a strange woman because she was swinging her parasol the way Carrie always did when she was feeling happy. He knew the woman wasn’t Carrie; but from the back, he was able to imagine she was. When the woman turned into her own gate and two small children ran out to greet her, he felt ashamed of himself.

Try to forget her, Charlie Howard had advised. Up at Fort Leavenworth, before he came down to settle in abolitionist Lawrence, the advice had been cruder and more practical. Buy yourself a whore, Saylor. Or if you’re too much a prig for that, go back east and court yourself a wife. But he doesn’t want a wife or a whore. He wants Carrie so much that sometimes he thinks he’s not quite sane.

“William,” the woman on the porch says again. He can’t risk responding to his name, not here, not under the circumstances. He needs to turn around and walk away from her, but—

Suddenly, she’s running down the steps, coming toward him with her arms outstretched, repeating his name, and as the lantern light catches her face, he sees—No. Impossible! Carrie’s face, Carrie’s eyes, Carrie’s hair. Carrie taking him in her arms, Carrie pulling him to her and kissing him, Carrie solid and alive. The familiar scent of her skin and hair, a smudge of dirt on her cheek, her body warm against his.

“My God!” he cries, “you’re real!” And all at once, she’s laughing and crying and kissing him again and telling him that, yes, she’s real, that she didn’t die, and his head is spinning and his knees are buckling; and before he knows it, he’s sitting on the hotel steps with his head between his knees the way they taught him to do in medical school; and when he

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