The Prize by Jill Bialosky

got his feet back on the ground but he couldn’t face the funeral. He took long subway rides to parts of the city he’d never been to before. There was something about the motion and anonymity of the train that seemed to settle him, or allow his thoughts to wander. He ended up in Queens or somewhere in the Bronx and then got back on a train and went home. He found their wedding license in the utensil drawer in an envelope and stared at it. At twenty-three he was technically a widower. He put the ring in its neat velvet box alongside it in the drawer. He kept making plane reservations for a trip to Michigan to see Mr. Thompson and then at the last minute canceled them. He began work on an intricate collage from bits and pieces of Tess’s possessions—letters and little notes she’d written to him, photos of the two of them, materials like buttons and trim from some of her clothes. He made one collage after the other, the smell of the shellac made him a little high and while he worked it was as if Tess was with him. He sent one of the collages to Mr. Thompson as a gift along with the boxes he had packed of Tess’s things.
    Weekends alone on the couch in front of the TV for hours, he popped sleeves of Fig Newtons. Monday mornings he found it challenging to get out of bed. Once he called in sick for a week. What difference did it make? He lay in bed and conjured her, not wanting to get up, or let her go. He thought about days they spent together, and if he closed his eyes and shut the blinds it was as if she were stillin bed next to him. Days passed, weeks during which he seemed to be sleepwalking. Everything in life seemed random and without meaning. His life had been reordered in a way he didn’t understand. Outside it was so hot he could barely breathe. August in New York. Everything was suffocating. Things she’d said— he didn’t make her feel special —haunted him. He replayed their last few arguments wishing he could change the outcome. On the street he thought he saw her from a distance, the way we do when someone is on our minds, her ponytail bouncing when she walked, and his heart quickened before he realized it wasn’t her. In a lull at work he thought of calling her, forgetting. Memories of her twisted inside him like a strange root, sprouting their own inexorable branches and fibers. He missed her so much his lungs hurt. Her memory, along with the force of his longing, became a dark icy lake in his consciousness where he submerged his emotions, frozen and safe.

8 CONNECTICUT
    O N THE PLANE Berlin was fading behind him, but still he carried the wide, beautiful streets and buildings, the walk by the river in Hamburg, the opulent hotels. He thought of the fragrance that came off Julia’s clothes, her heavily lashed blue eyes, and the way she took off her glasses once they sat down for drinks, as if she needed him to see her more closely.
    After landing, clearing immigration, and collecting his luggage, he found himself in the backseat of a town car with yet another stranger, this one a very friendly and elegant man wearing a business suit. His anxieties rushed him. He thought about Holly and Annabel at home.
    It was after five by then, dark when the driver pulled up his driveway. The sun had tucked itself away so that all he could make out was wet piles of leaves and the skeletal shape of branches in the headlights. It was still cool, not quite cold, and, though it wasn’t winter yet, the autumn left him with a sensation of sadness and regret. There were no lights on in the house. Why? He was sure he’d told Holly what time he was getting in. He signed the voucher and waited for the driver to deposit his roll-on luggage on the wet drive.
    â€œI’ll take it from here,” Edward said to the driver. Twenty years of taking the train back and forth from Manhattan to Westport, so he could own the white farmhouse for which he still paid monthlymortgage