The Pocket Wife (14 page)

“That's actually
not
who you are.” Kyle squirts the mustard on his burger and drops the bun back on top.

“So how're you feeling now?”

“Fine,” Kyle says. “Why?”

“Your cold. Summer colds are a real bitch. Hard to shake, usually.”

“What's your point?”

“Sorry, son, but I don't buy your story. About the Kleenex in the glove compartment. I'm having a little trouble with a teacher telling her student she hardly knows to paw through her glove box looking for a Kleenex she'd probably have in her purse anyway.”

“That's what happened,” Kyle says, but he doesn't meet Jack's eyes. “How's Ann doing these days?”

Jack takes another bite of his burger.

“ 'Cause Margie's not so good. Remember Margie? Your practice wife?”

Jack looks up.

“She was pretty much passed out the last time I went by the house. But no worries, Jack. She's got the TV set. She's got the pictures of the good son draped around. The whole house is a shrine to Joe.”

“I could drop over there,” Jack says.

Kyle laughs. It's an ugly, sound, like a wrong note. “That is
just
what she needs,” he says. “Jesus.”

“You don't know anything about your mother and me, Kyle.”

“You planning to clear things up for me?”

Jack looks at his son across the table, at the longish hair, the big hands, the skinny arms, eyes that can't hide anything—those wide-set brown eyes, the lashes like Margie's. “Naw,” he says. “Let's just say I really didn't want to leave.”

“So why did you?” For a second, Kyle is the boy on a battered front porch, watching him take off down the road.

“She said that was the only way she could be a good mother—if I left. ‘I can't do it with you here,' she told me.”

Kyle nods, smirks.

“I never stopped loving you, though,” Jack says. “I never stopped thinking about you. You or Joey.”

“I'm having a little trouble with that, though, seeing as you've never done anything at all for me. For any of us.”

“You'd be surprised,” Jack says, and he lifts his hand, catches the waitress's eye for the check. “And stay close. I'll need to question you again about your teacher.”

Outside, on the sidewalk, they look off into the sky, the two of them.
Like father, like son,
Ann would say, and Jack knows it's true. Clouds billow up to the west. The air is still and heavy with the threat of rain, and they flounder, voiceless, their shoes crunching on gravel.

“Need a ride?”

Kyle shakes his head. “I'm right near here,” he says. “Me and Maryanne.”

“Your girlfriend?”

Kyle nods.

“What's she like?”

“She's beautiful.”

“I'd like to meet her sometime,” Jack says, “if you—”

Kyle looks down at the sidewalk, kicks at a small stone with the worn-through toe of his shoe. “Thanks for lunch.”

“Anytime.” Jack fumbles in his pocket for a business card. “Here,” he says. “I know you've got me in your cell, but just in case,” and he presses the card into his boy's big hand, drops three twenties into Kyle's pocket as he pulls away. “Hey!” he calls out when the two of them are several yards apart on the sidewalk. “Check your pockets.” And when Kyle looks up, puzzled, he says, “Take care, son.” He stands watching Kyle walk away, this man he last knew as a small child who gripped his hand to cross the street, who sang with him as he played the guitar at Christmas—all the carols he no longer knows—the boy who watched him pack his truck and drive away. There are secrets locked inside his son that he will never know, but the ones about Celia are right there at the surface. They'll all spill out at some point. Jack only has to wait.

He calls the crime scene unit, tells them to go back to the Steinhausers', to take prints from everywhere around Celia's
bed—the headboard, the nightstand, everything. “Put a rush on it,” he tells them. “And send the results directly to me.” If Kyle's prints show up in the bedroom, Jack promises himself, he'll turn the case over to Rob and walk away. That's the line he won't cross, but then he shakes his head because he isn't really sure there is a line. It's killing him, though, hiding the prints from Celia's car, not saying what he knows about his son. The prosecutor's office wants an update every couple of days, a high-profile case like this one—and he's giving them crumbs.
He's your son,
he tells himself.
You owe him.
But Jack has never compromised himself like this before—not on the job. Everything else in his life is shit, but this one part of it he's been careful to keep pure as the driven snow. Until now.

A
s soon as she gets into the car, Dana notices something on the seat. A scrap of white paper, obvious in a car that for once is as neat as a pin, thanks to the cleaning project she devised to keep herself focused. She'd gathered up all the overdue library books and fished out the notebooks filled with scrawls and lists and stacked them neatly on the floor of the backseat. Pads and pencils are now fitted into a plastic box she purchased at Target for odds and ends. She even ran a cleaning rag across the dash and of course St. Christopher.

She reaches down to brush the paper off the seat but thinks better of it. This is how it begins, the mishmash of trash and books and overcoats. It begins with a single piece of paper that stands out, like this one, in a clean front seat. She picks it up and sticks it in her purse.

Something catches her eye just as she's turning the key in the ignition, her attention already moving to the gas-gauge needle, barely budging from its lying-down position on the E. She sees something—a dab of color—and she looks back at the paper, stuck
now to the damp outside of a partly empty bottled water in her bag. She peels it off the plastic and stares at the same tiny writing she saw the day of the brunch.

She takes her reading glasses out of her purse, moving in small, robotic increments, as if a decisive shift might rouse the author of the note from a nearby hedge or send him springing from the trunk of her car. She stares at the scrap of paper in the bright sunlight.
“You will pay for what you did, you crazy, deadly bitch.”
Even with the teensy writing, she can read the message easily. This time the note is clearly a threat. The first one . . . well, bad enough—but this one is much more ominous. She feels her brain sparking, emitting bright flashes that fizzle and die, misfiring like a bad engine. She cringes, slumping down in the seat. The steering wheel stares at her, the Toyota logo a lopsided smile as she struggles to focus.

When she was eight, there was a note inside her desk at school. Nasty. Cruel.
“We hate you”—
a note left by the class bully or a boy with a crush, someone who didn't like the way she looked, who thought she talked too loudly or not loudly enough, who didn't like her mother's car or that her father had died a sudden, violent death—a bevy of girls, she imagined, with perfect hair and blouses tucked neatly into the Catholic plaid of their skirts. She'd folded the note carefully again and again until it was a tiny thing, a square the size of a pea, nearly invisible, and then she'd slipped it back inside her desk. She never told a soul. It terrified her, though, knowing that someone was there, at the back of the room or passing her in the corridor—someone who hated her. Her present fear is heightened by the resurrection of this hastily buried memory, and for a second, in her panic, she wonders if the author has been with her all along, stalking her far into her adult life.

The air conditioner spits out puffs of cool air. The radio news is barely audible. The voices scare her. She turns it off, but she can still hear it, a soft, indecipherable hum.

You will pay.

She takes off her glasses and sticks the note back in her purse— beneath a flap inside her wallet—and edges her car onto Ashby Lane. There is nowhere she really wants to be, but her own house is the place she least wants to be, now that this person has access to her car and, even more frightening, her house. She drives in circles around the neighborhood, gripping the steering wheel until her knuckles are white. Did someone see her with Celia the day she died? Did someone see her leaving the Steinhausers' or watch from the clot of trees in her backyard as she stood at the kitchen sink scrubbing her hands before she fell across her couch in a drunken stupor? Or is it something else she's done, some minor, unintended offense– Christmas lights left up too long or an overlooked potluck invitation? Dana feels a shiver up her spine.
You will pay. You will pay.
Her fingers tremble on the steering wheel. Her heart flutters and skips. She feels light-headed and faint. Paralyzed with fear.

She thinks maybe she'll drive to the police department and hand both notes over to Detective Moss. She even turns around and drives several blocks in his direction before she pulls in to a BP station and stumbles out to pump gas into her now completely empty tank.

Back in the car, she concentrates on a broken neon sign in the parking lot next door, on the thunderclouds that cover everything in gray, and then she pulls out her cell and calls Peter.

“Dana?” He sounds annoyed. “Listen, I'm really . . . we're really slammed in here today. I—”

“Wait,” she says. “This is important. I found another note.”

“Another what?” She pictures his puffy hand around his phone. “I can't really hear you.”

“Well, step outside, then. Go to the john.”
Pretend I'm the Tart or a client for five fucking . . .
“I really need to talk to you.”

“Okay,” he says after a few seconds have gone by. “I'm outside. Now I can hear you.”

“I got another note. Like the one in my book. Like the one the day of the brunch.”

“In the house?”

“No. It was on the front seat of my car.”

He pauses. “It goes without saying, if you locked your car door—”

“Right. So let's
let
it go without saying. Anyway, it was on the front seat of my car when I got in it this morning. That same writing, that weird, teensy—”

“What time?”

“What
time
? What difference does it make what time? I don't know what time. Ten, maybe.”

“What'd it say?”

“‘You will pay for what you did, you crazy, deadly bitch.'”

“What the hell does that mean? What'd you do?”

“I don't know,” Dana says. “I don't know what I did. Maybe I did something horrible.”

“Like what?”

“Like . . . I don't know . . . like something really . . .”

“Look.” Peter's hand makes little ruffly noises on the phone. “Maybe this is just you, Dana—your Catholic stuff. Your overactive guilt.”

“Is making me . . . what? Hire someone to write me scary notes?”

She hears him breathe in deeply. She hears traffic and the sound of smoke drifting in and out of his lungs.

“I'm trying to come up with a way to put this delicately.”

“Because you're always so delicate when it comes to my feelings,” she says.

“Okay, then,” he says, and he takes another toke. At least it sounds like a toke. Dana wonders if they get high at Glynniss, Hudgens and Catrell on their lunch breaks, if Peter and the Tart sneak off to the boardroom together to light up, if maybe she's the daughter of one of the senior lawyers.

“Is she a Glynniss?” Dana says, but Peter's talking, too, so he doesn't hear her. “What?” she says.

“I said maybe
you
wrote the fucking notes.”

“Thanks.” Dana pulls the phone away from her ear. “Thanks for the delicacy.”

“On the note I saw—the one from the brunch—the writing was so tiny,” he says as she fumbles for the
OFF
button, “it could have been anybody's, really. It—”

Dana sticks her phone inside her bag and stares at the sign with the missing letters, but this time she doesn't cry. This time she shivers in the soggy summer heat, remembering her own strange, tiny writing on five hundred sheets of paper drifting over Avenue D decades before.

T
he kitten she rescued from the highway bounces down the hall, barely touching the floor. Dana pats the cushion, and the kitten flies across the room, landing on the couch beside her. He hisses when she tries to pet him. He hurtles through the air and out of sight. He is feral. It will take some time, the vet told her, for him to come around, and he might never make a good house pet. It's ingrained in feral cats, he said, this craziness, this fear. But she's lucky he's so young, this one. She was lucky to have spotted him in the rain, tiny as he is. She calls him Spot, partly for this reason and partly for his markings, like black dots across his fur. At the back of his head, a long, thick splash of black looks like a haircut on an actor from the twenties. She reaches out again to pet him. She understands his ambivalence—approach, avoid, approach, avoid—he cleans her hand with a pink sandpaper tongue.

She leans back, shifting her body so her long legs fall over the arm of the sofa. Maybe she'll close her eyes for a minute, and maybe, just maybe, she'll fall asleep. Her lids feel heavy. The kitten dashes across the living room. She smiles as he skitters underneath the sofa and reemerges with something hanging from his mouth. With
great effort Dana rouses herself, stumbling toward him as he shoots into the dining room. “C'mere, you,” she says, laughing, falling after him, her body nearly horizontal as he leaps and darts. Something tumbles from his mouth, lands on the carpet.

Dana picks it up. An unopened pack of antiseptic wipes. “Silly,” she says, “you are such a silly—” She rips them open. She's had her hands all over the cat—who knows what he's been into?

She stops. The odor wafts up from the plastic wrap and nearly gags her. Oh, my God! She reaches out behind her, finding the blue chair with her hands and backing slowly into it. The odor from Celia's house fills up her brain—her neighbor's fancy living room, her bloody body on the floor, that odor, that poignant, crappy-perfume odor, like these wipes stuck underneath the sofa, these stupid things she carries in her purse. She often buys the scented ones to mask the smell of rubbing alcohol. She remembers buying lemon wipes and, at some point, rose—probably lavender, too. She always carries them with her. Or did until . . . She tries to think back, tries to remember if she had them after the day Celia died, tries to remember if she stuck them there under the sofa in a drunken fog. She drops her head into her hands, covers her eyes with trembling fingers. All along, the odor lingered at the edge of her perception, played with her head, that faint, vague scent. All along, it was familiar. Eventually it would have surfaced—as she walked through Target behind a germ-conscious shopper, watched Wanda wipe the sticky face of one of her sons, or pushed through the turnstile of the train—anywhere at all she could and would eventually identify the scent. But here, under her own sofa in her own living room, the recognition makes her sink into the cushions of the blue chair, terrified because everything she's found so far, everything she has unearthed or stumbled across, points to her being Celia's killer. She closes the pack of wipes, traps the odors back inside, tosses them on the desk in the entryway. Everything is gray around her, all the color sucked out
of the room. She only wants to sleep, only wants the world to fade, to recede, until she figures out what she should do.

It's a quarter after nine, and Peter hasn't come home. In the kitchen the dishes are stacked in a small pile near the sink and a ruined stew is caked to the inside of a large orange Martha Stewart pot. Dana scrolls to Peter's number in her cell.

“Hello,” he says, and traffic rumbles in her ear.

“Where are you?”

“I told you.” Peter sounds annoyed. “I told you this morning I was meeting a client after work.”

“No.” She sighs. “No you didn't.”

“And then when we talked later—when you called about the. . . when you called, I told you we were slammed at the office and I mentioned I'd be late again.”

“Not true.”

“Did you make the appointment yet with Dr. Sing?” he says, lowering his voice. “The appointment you were going to make a week ago!”

“Yes,” she says. “I made it for next Friday,” which is nearly true. After her discovery of the wipes, she did call the office, but she got distracted by something, by Spot climbing up the drapes or by something in the yard, by the disapproving sound of the voice on Dr. Sing's machine. She will, though. She has to.

“I'm on my way home,” he says after a pause. “I'll see you in a few minutes.”

She hits a button, and her phone fades to black. Did he tell her he'd be late? She tries to summon up the tiny bits of talk they exchanged that morning, but she doesn't remember Peter saying anything at all, except would she please move her car—it was blocking the garage. And certainly nothing was mentioned during her call about the note.

She considers going back to the St. Giles. She remembers how easily sleep came to her there when she was sleuthing—or it would have anyway, if she had let herself relax—even in all the tangle of dirty clothes and rumpled covers. She thinks about running into Ronald in the coffee shop next door or a diner up the street—he has to eat somewhere—and engaging him in idle conversation. “We're fumigating our house,” she might tell him, or “Peter's doing some renovating in our kitchen, so I decided to come here. Small world, eh?” She imagines getting chummy enough to ask again about the picture in Celia's phone—if he saw it at some point, if he deleted it. And Dr. Sing is only two train stops up from the hotel.

She keeps her eyes shut, listening to Peter's car purr in the driveway as he opens the garage door and pulls inside. In the end she doesn't leave; she lies horizontally across the bed, hoping he'll sleep in Jamie's room or on the living-room couch. In the end she's afraid that questioning Ronald will only add to her distress, her craziness, her uncertainty—that the photo in Celia's cell was no more real than Bozo greeting her at the hotel or Michael Jackson's voice after she turned off the radio.

She hears the front door squeak open and then the hush of her husband walking in his stocking feet across the living room and into the kitchen. She hears the click of the stove as Peter relights the burner under the pot of stew, the sound of water streaming from the faucet into the caked vegetables. At some point she drifts off, awakening to the odor of cigarette smoke drifting through the half-closed window. She inches off the bed and wanders to the kitchen, where Peter's stacked the dirty pots in the sink, a small and unexpected favor, and then she hears his voice. He's in the backyard. He's moved from under the bedroom window to stand on the brick patio on the other side of the porch door, and she moves closer, lulled by the hum of his words. She hears him say, “I can't guarantee anything at this point.” Dana takes a step away, back toward the darkness of the kitchen. “I understand,” Peter
says, and then he sighs, an exaggerated sigh. “I understand completely. You could. Exactly. Jeopardizing your— . . . Of course. It's— . . . Just keep me on speed dial,” he says, “and I'll— . . . No,” he says. “No. I won't call. I'll wait to hear from you. Just let me know if anything . . . if there's anything— . . . Okay, hon,” he says, and Dana takes another step back, another step away. “Good-bye, then. It's been—” The talking stops. Peter sighs again, but this time it's a relieved-sounding little sigh. She hears the striking of a match, and a small flash of light pops briefly into the blackness over the patio. “Good riddance,” she thinks he says, but she wouldn't swear to it.

She tiptoes back to the bedroom and falls across the bed, wanting to escape, wanting not to be here in this house with notes she's possibly written to herself, with hand wipes reeking of lavender and guilt, with a husband who's chosen the worst moment of her life to have an affair. She closes her eyes against the topsy-turvy world hers has become, and when she opens them again, the clock screams one-fifteen.

She tosses and turns for a few minutes, and then she gets up and walks out to the living room. Peter lies on the couch, his shoes and socks at odd angles to his body, as if he's kicked them off. He's hung his pants over the back of a dining-room chair, and judging from the empty lager bottles on the table, he's had quite a bit to drink. There's something else. An odor that eclipses the beer. She sniffs. Lately her sense of smell is amazing. She walks over to the couch where Peter snores explosively, spectacularly, and she bends over, inhaling flowery, sweet perfume. Lilac. She sniffs again. Yes. Definitely lilac. She knows what Peter would say. She knows he'd look at her, down his own ungifted nose at her, and say it was a client's perfume, or that a co-worker hugged him out of gratitude, or that one of the paralegals in the building is young and untrained in the art of perfume application, so the odor wafts daily up the hall and sticks to all the lawyers. He would remind her to go see
Dr. Sing, but his overheard phone call lets her know that “hon's” perfume now clings to Peter's clothes, reminders of what might have been their final tryst, residuals of a parting hug or a quick greeting in the lobby of a hotel—heavy and cloying.
I hate you. I hate both of you,
she whispers, leaning over him so closely that a small sprout of ear hair tickles her lips.

She glances at the table, at the green bottles lined up along its marble top like short, stout trees. She finishes off the last few swallows of beer in one of them and gets up to take them to the kitchen, knocking Peter's pants off the back of the chair in her haste.

Her fingers feel thick and clumsy as she bends to pick them up, to hang them neatly over the chair. She sticks her hand inside the pockets, one by one. She thinks of packing some clothes in a suitcase and running away from the husband she hates at this moment with a passion and might, for all she knows, kill before the night is out. She can no longer trust her judgment.

Her hands tremble violently. The house is suddenly dreamlike, black and white and gray, as if she's staring at an old photograph, as if she is no longer here. Peter's pants shake between her fingers, and a receipt of some kind falls from one of his back pockets. It flutters to the fake Persian rug that runs the length of the dining room and lands faceup at the plushy edge, in the middle of a rose with a greenish vine looping out from the bottom petals. Dana gathers the squat bottles in her shaking hands and sticks them in the recycling bag beside the garbage in the kitchen. On her way back through the dining room, she picks up the paper from Peter's pants and fiddles with it, folds it into fourths, glaring at him as she walks to the bedroom.

She pulls on a pair of jeans and stuffs the paper into her pocket. She pulls a purple tank top over her head and packs without giving it a great deal of thought. She grabs random items. These days she doesn't have to think about the ordinary things. They just
occur. They are managed by some separate part of her brain that seems to always be operating—a default thinker—as she centers on the more important, pressing aspects of her life. She tucks a dress inside the bag along with a pair of slippers from Bloomingdale's, jeans, and three tops she finds lying on a large, untidy pile on the bedroom floor. She plucks a nightgown off the bedside table and hurries to the bathroom, filling a makeup case with shampoos and mascaras and several jars of face creams.

When she's finished, she slides into her shoes and zips the overnight bag. She scribbles a note for Peter, more lines from Prufrock, a nod to the lilac, clinging like tar to his clothes.
“Is it perfume from a dress that makes me so digress?”
She turns to the door, closing it quietly behind her.

She slings her bag onto the seat and glances at St. Christopher, staring down at her from the visor. He winks. He nods toward her lap.

“What?” she says, and he nods again. Winks again. “There's nothing there,” she says, and turns the key. She can feel him nodding as she backs out to the street. She can feel his eyes in the dark car, and she pushes in an old CD, pats her pocket with her left hand. It makes a crinkling sound, and she reaches inside for the scrap of paper that drifted out of Peter's pants. “This?” she says, and even in the darkness of the front seat she can see St. Christopher nod.

When she gets to the end of the street, she pulls over, letting her tires crunch along the grassy border of the Brinkmeyers' lawn. She opens the car door for light and smooths the paper out on her thigh. “It's only a bill,” she starts to say, but she reads it anyway.
“Days Inn
,
room 156,”
it says.
“August 23. One king. Nonsmoking. $189.99.”

Dana reads it again. She sits for a minute in the glow from the small, glass-plated ceiling light, and then she folds the receipt into fourths again and tucks it back inside her pocket, hooking the
open door with her foot, letting it swing shut, letting the overhead glow sink back inside the ceiling. She sits, still as a statue in the balmy, breezy night until a light goes on in the Brinkmeyers' bedroom, and she edges off their lawn to the sidewalk.

She leans her head in her hands and cries—for the husband that Peter was, for their child who is now a man, for the family they once were. She turns off the ignition and sobs in the dim light from a streetlamp. And when she can focus on the road, on driving to the city, on digging up her innocence if it is there for the digging, she brushes her hair back with her hands and runs her fingers under her eyes, collecting remnants of mascara.

“Well,” she says, glancing up at St. Christopher, even though she can't quite see him in the once-again-dark front seat of the Toyota, “at least he wasn't at the Marriott.” She pulls back onto the road and heads for the highway, reaching over to restart the music—vintage Journey, fiddling through to the song about the boulevards and streetlights, the smoky rooms, and she sings along, almost a whisper at first, but her voice rises in the darkness of the car. She speeds up, rambling down the highway to New York, and then she opens the car window, lets the wind ruin her hair, the cool air, the smallest breath of autumn, and she turns the music up higher, sings louder. The wind flies up from the water, and she feels it all around her, feels it blow through her skin, consuming her. She is the wind.