Read How to Talk to a Widower for Free Online Page A

there.”

    Claire is my twin sister and the voice inside my head, whether I like it or not. She was the first person I called when Hailey died. Well, that’s not exactly true. I called my mother first, sort of. It was the middle of the night and the airline had just called to tell me about the crash, and I didn’t even remember dialing the phone.
    “Hello?” my mother said, her voice still thick and syrupy with slumber. “Hello?” I could hear the darkness in her bedroom, the heavy silence I had just shattered. “Who is this?”
    I couldn’t speak. To speak would be to grant entry to the angry mob of my reality now protesting at my embassy gates. “Hello?” she said one more time, and then she said, “Creep,” and hung up on me.
    Hailey was dead and my mother thought I was a creep. It’s the little things you know you’ll always remember.
    Somewhere, in a field or a forest, the wreckage was still smoking, with luggage and body parts and charred, twisted sections of fuselage scattered all around. And somewhere, in the midst of that carnage, lay my Hailey, the same woman I had kissed good-bye only a few hours ago, the same cascading mane of blond hair, the same long legs she used to wrap around me, the same wide, knowing eyes, button nose, and thin sensuous lips I could never get enough of, they were all there, in some random place, as inanimate as the crushed and burned debris all around her. It just didn’t seem possible. I understood it to be true, but I wasn’t getting it.
    The guy in the mirror looked like he might be getting it; his face was pale and drawn, and there was something pulsating behind his eyes, some glimmer of horror that had not yet radiated out to twist his expression. But I felt nothing. I ran a quick test on the guy in the mirror. I smiled at him. He flashed back the lopsided smile of the mentally deranged. Then I made us look horrified, and then sad, like I was practicing for some Method acting class, where a bunch of skinny dweebs sit around applauding each other’s exaggerated expressions while some never-been Gloria Swanson type offers meaningless critiques between puffs on her cigarillo. Hailey was dead, and I was fucking around in the mirror. I’d always felt unworthy of her love, and if I ever needed validation of my unworthiness there it was, staring me right in the face.
    “Hailey is dead,” I said aloud, my voice filling the room like an audible fart at a dinner party. Normal people reacted violently to calls like this, didn’t they? They screamed anguished denials and fell to the floor sobbing, or pounded the wall in a blood-red haze until they could no longer tell if the cracking sounds were coming from the dented wall or their broken fists. But all I could do was stand beside the bed, rubbing my neck and wondering what the hell to do. I supposed I was in shock, and that was, at least, a little bit comforting, because Hailey didn’t deserve this pathetic excuse for a reaction.
    My first instinct was to call someone. My first instinct was to call Hailey. I dialed her cell phone, not sure what I was hoping for. Her voice mail picked up instantly.
Hi, this is Hailey. Please leave me a message and I’ll call you back as soon as I can. Thanks, bye.
She’d recorded the outgoing message in the kitchen one night, and in the background, faintly, I could hear Russ and me laughing at the television. I heard the message so many times over the last few years that I had long ago stopped actually hearing it. But now I heard her calm, confident voice, her distracted tone as she hurriedly recorded the message, the faded background noise of her family laughing. She couldn’t be gone. She was right there on the phone, sounding every bit like herself. The dead didn’t have voice mail. The phone beeped and I realized that it was now recording me. “Hey, babe,” I said stupidly, but I couldn’t get any more words out, so I hung up.
    A terrible, selfish thought entered my mind unbidden,