My husband had a wife before me. Sometimes it feels like I’m living with her ghost
The first time I visited Peter’s weekend house in Sag Harbor, a seaside village on Long Island, I thought his wife, Ruth, was trying to kill me. She had been dead for nearly six years by then. She had died of breast cancer. I knew her only as a ghost.
Peter’s son, who I’ll call A for privacy reasons, was staying over at a friend’s house, and I was excited for our first road trip out of the city. A weekend together with nothing planned except preparing meals, making puzzles and reading books.
We turned down a long gravel driveway bordered by woods on one side and a fence on the other. It was a late October night, dark and crisp. We crossed over metal bars spanning a ditch at the end of the drive. A deer grate, he told me.
As the motion detector lights clicked on, I saw the house for the first time. Imposing, with dark shingle siding, white trim and a gabled roof. Peter and Ruth had spent years renovating this house. Tiling the kitchen by hand, weeding the overgrown yard, painting A’s bedroom cerulean blue when he was still a little boy. They’d purchased it as a small ranch house decades before with their pooled savings. Their shared endeavor, a family home for their future together.
Ruth never got to see and enjoy the finished product. Peter hadn’t either, really. Too loaded with memories. So, it sat mostly empty after she died as the years passed.
He unlocked the front door into the dim foyer, and I stepped onto a beautiful red and blue Turkish rug. Several of the overhead lights were burnt out. I took in a deep breath, expecting to smell the fresh country air. Instead, the air tasted stale and sharp, like poison. I stifled a cough and tried not to breathe through my nose. I smiled and didn’t mention it; I was a guest.
In my dream that night Ruth was still alive. She hadn’t died; she had been in a coma and had awoken. She was back and looking for her family. I was hiding in the bedroom, trying to stay small and quiet so she wouldn’t find me. I didn’t belong there. I woke up gasping for air. “I’m so sorry,” Peter said when I told him about the dream. “I was wondering when that would happen. I have different versions of that dream all the time.”
In the morning we both woke up with headaches. Stale air, years of the house just sitting there waiting for its owners to return. I felt like I was suffocating. Peter didn’t look well either. We opened the windows and let the cross breeze do its job. I took some Advil.
I guess that was her first attempt.
Ruth was beautiful: chic and petite. She had dark wavy hair and a personal shopper at Bergdorf’s. There was a picture of her hanging behind Peter’s suits in the closet. Sometimes when I was alone, I would push aside his sports coats and stare at her. She majored in art history but went to law school and worked in finance. She “closed deals,” which was a phrase I still comprehended with the mind of a 12-year-old who plays office. She made a lot of money. I still feel like I am making money when I make a big return to TheRealReal. She was fluent in five languages and hosted elaborate dinner parties. I do Duolingo three nights a week. She was a sophisticated adult. At 37, I somehow still felt like a kid.
It didn’t help that in conversation Peter still referred to Ruth as his wife. How could we ever take our relationship to the next level if in his mind he was still married? My friends said to look on the bright side: At least I didn’t have to deal with his ex. But actually, I did.
She was his wife of 14 years, and I was someone he met on an app.
Hinge suggested Peter was “someone I might like.” From our initial messages to each other we both knew the algorithm was on to something.
The next time we went out to Sag Harbor a massive tree had fallen across the driveway, pulled up by its roots by the wind. “Stop. You’re not welcome here,” it seemed to say. Peter and I took our bags out of the trunk and walked the rest of the way, the flashlights from our phones cutting through the inky black night. We walked in the dirt to avoid getting our ankles trapped in the deer grate.
It’s not that something ominous happened every time we went to Sag Harbor, but often something did. One weekend there were unexplained noises from the attic, the next there were dead flying squirrels buried in the laundry basket. One time the whole house was crying. Streams of water seeping through the shingles. You could trace your name on the window panes. The basement was full of steam, which had destroyed the one thing I had left there: a poster from one of my book launches that I had brought out for safekeeping. Ruth wasn’t having any of that.
On another Saturday we found water pouring down from a gaping hole in the ceiling. The radiator had sprung a leak. Water was 2 inches deep; curtains of sheetrock hung from the hole in the ceiling.
“Nothing like this ever happened before. I’m starting to think this house doesn’t like you,” Peter joked as he ran down to the basement to shut off the water and retrieve the Shop-Vac. He was calm. He still had his sense of humor. That’s when I knew I wanted to marry him.
After a few months, I found myself talking to Ruth in my head during my morning runs. Reassuring her that I would take care of her family while at the same time trying to convince myself that I was up for the task. She never replied, much like the first therapist I had when I moved to New York City — a Freudian analyst who only responded to me to tell me that our time was up.
When Covid-19 hit, Peter, A and I moved into the house full time. For months it was filled with Zoom meetings and virtual school and the smell of no-knead bread baking in the oven. We binged “Ozark” and played endless rounds of Hearts and Rummy 500. Peter and I took turns cooking. We went sledding the one evening there was snow on the ground. I taught A how to shuffle cards. He taught me why “Breaking Bad” was the perfect show. We did the “Hot Ones” challenge. Somewhere along the way, with an actual deadly threat at our door, we had become a family. I stopped acting like a guest. The house felt like it could be my home too. Right about then Peter proposed.
One year later Peter and I walked together toward the chuppah. Patti — Ruth’s best friend, the maid of honor at Peter’s first wedding, now our officiant — stood waiting for us. Her radiant smile aimed right at me. Ruth’s cousin Franco stood holding one of the canopy’s near corners, catty-corner from Joe, Peter’s college friend, who had stood there for Peter and Ruth too.
At dinner that night I mentioned Ruth in my toast. I wanted her there with us, for Peter and A. Their love was the foundation on which our relationship was built. She wasn’t my enemy or my competitor; she was A’s mom, Peter’s first love, and the reason he knew how to pack a suitcase and make a perfect chocolate souffle. Peter sat listening, fiddling with the platinum ring he had taken off when Ruth died, but now has both wedding dates etched into.
The photograph from Peter’s closet has moved out into the open. It hangs in A’s bedroom. Ruth is wearing big Jackie O sunglasses, standing on the shore of a lake in Zimbabwe, a post-college trip from long ago. She is eternally young, beautiful, and watching out over her son with a bemused smile.
“What do you think the house has in store for us this time?” I joke as we turn down the driveway one day in May about eight months after the wedding. It’s been a few weeks since we were last here. We’ve been married for several months now. A is away at his first year of college.
Peter unlocks the door and I have a horrible sense of deja vu. The house welcomes us with a rank smell. The plagues are back.
I go upstairs to look around, but Peter calls me back. He's found the problem. I walk into the guest bedroom and put my hand on the bed. The quilt is soaked. I look up and see a drip. And right then, just like in the movies, the ceiling caves in.
“Maybe the house missed us,” Peter says, staying calm, just like the first time.
This time I don't feel like the ghost of Ruth is out to get me. Sometimes a broken pipe is just a broken pipe. I go downstairs to get the Shop-Vac from the basement. At this point I know where it is kept, after all.
Peter shuts off the water, and we pack the car up and head back home. The plumber tells me that he will come on Monday, in time for next weekend. I think I will always feel Ruth’s presence in this house, and in our marriage, but I wouldn’t want it any other way.
This article was originally published on TODAY.com