The Submission Read Free

has no hope and that’s unacceptable,” Claire said, unable to help her sharpness. “You all keep talking about the long view, but the long view includes us. My children, my grandchildren, people with a direct connection to this attack are going to be around for the next hundred years, and maybe that’s a blip when you look back at the Venus of Willendorf, but it certainly seems a long time now. So I don’t see why our interests should count any less. You know, the other night I dreamed about that black pool around theVoid, that my husband’s hand was reaching up from the water to pull me down into it. That’s the effect the Void has. So you can go there and congratulate yourself on what a brilliant artistic statement you made, but I don’t think family members will be lining up to visit.”
    Her anger was no less genuine for her having learned, months back, its power. On a wintry afternoon, as she and the other widows left a meeting with the director of the government’s compensation fund, a reporter in the waiting press pack had shouted, “How do you answer Americans who say they’re tired of your sense of entitlement, that you’re being greedy?” Claire had gripped her purse to keep her hands from shaking, but she didn’t bother to mute the tremble in her voice. “Entitlement? Was that the word you used?” The reporter shrank back. “Was I entitled to lose my husband? Was I entitled to have to explain to my children why they will never know their father, to have to raise them alone? Am I entitled to live knowing the suffering my husband endured? This isn’t about greed. Do your homework: I don’t need a penny of this compensation and don’t plan to keep it. This isn’t about money. It’s about justice, accountability. And yes, I am entitled to that.”
    She claimed, later, to have been unaware the television cameras were rolling, but they captured every word. The clip of the death-pale blonde in the black coat was replayed so often that for days she couldn’t turn on the television without seeing herself. Letters of support poured in, and Claire found herself a star widow. She hadn’t meant to make a political statement. In truth she had been offended by the notion that she was grubbing for money and was seeking to set herself apart from those who were. Instead she emerged as their champion, the Secretary of Sorrow Services. Her leadership, she knew, was the reason the governor had picked her for the jury.
    On the veranda Maria was eyeing her quizzically. Claire met her stare and took a drag so dizzying she had to grip the railing for support. She felt only a little guilty. Everything she said had been true except her certainty that the hand reaching up was Cal’s.
    Maria switched first. “The Garden,” she said bravely. Claire started to mouth “Thank you,” then thought better of it. The critic came next. “The Garden.” This gave slightly less pleasure: Claire, studying his basset-hound face and poodle hair, had the disappointed sense that he had changed his vote because he was tired. Still, the Garden had eight votes now, which meant victory was in sight. But instead of celebrating, Claire began to sink inside. Tomorrow, absent the memorial competition, her life would lose its last bit of temporary form. She had no need of income, given her inheritance from Cal, and no commanding new cause. Her future was gilded blankness.
    Aftermath had filled the two years since Cal’s death, the surge of grief yielding to the slow leak of mourning, the tedium of recovery, bathetic new routines that felt old from the get-go. Forms and more forms. Bulletins from the medical examiner: another fragment of her husband had been found. The cancellation of credit cards, driver’s license, club memberships, magazine subscriptions, contracts to buy works of art; the selling of cars and a sailboat; the scrubbing of his name from trusts and bank accounts and the boards of companies and nonprofits—all of it done