The Wife Between Us

by Greer Hendricks

  Richard had laughed with me. But at dinner that night, he mentioned that he would be working late almost every evening that week.

  Before we got off the phone, Sam told me to pick a time for us to get together. “Let’s drink tequila and go dancing like we used to.”

  I hesitated. “Let me just check Richard’s calendar. It might be easier if I come in when he’s out of town.”

  “You planning to bring a boy home?” Sam joked.

  “Why only one?” I bantered, trying to change the focus, and she laughed.

  I was in the kitchen a few minutes later, chopping tomatoes for a salad, when our burglar alarm began to shriek.

  As promised, Richard had a sophisticated alarm system installed right before we moved into the Westchester home. It was a comfort during the days when he was at work, and especially on the nights when he traveled.

  “Hello?” I called. I went into the hallway, flinching as the high-pitched warning pulsed through the air. But our heavy oak door remained shut.

  Our house had four vulnerable areas, the alarm-company contractor had said, holding up an equal number of fingers to emphasize his point. The front door. The basement entrance. The big bay window in the eat-in kitchen area. And especially the double glass doors off the living room that overlooked our garden.

  All of those entrances were wired. I ran to the double glass doors and glanced out. I couldn’t see anything, but it didn’t mean no one was there, wasn’t hiding in the shadows. If someone was breaking in, I’d never hear the noise over the blaring alarm. Instinctively, I bolted upstairs, still holding the butcher knife I’d been using to cut the tomatoes.

  I grabbed my cell phone from the nightstand, grateful I’d put it back in its charger. As I burrowed into the back of my closet, behind a row of slacks, I dialed Richard.

  “Nellie? What’s wrong?”

  I clutched the phone tightly as I huddled on the floor of my closet. “I think someone’s trying to break in,” I whispered.

  “I can hear the alarm.” Richard’s voice was tense and urgent. “Where are you?”

  “My closet,” I whispered.

  “I’ll call the police. Hang on.”

  I imagined him on the other line giving our address and insisting that they should hurry, that his wife was alone in the house. I knew the alarm company would alert the police, too.

  Our home phone was ringing now, as well. My heart pounded, the frantic throbbing filling my ears. So many sounds—how could I know if someone stood on the other side of the closet door, twisting the knob?

  “The police will be there any second,” Richard said. “And I’m already on the train, at Mount Kisco. I’ll be at the house in fifteen minutes.”

  Those fifteen minutes lasted an eternity. I curled into a tighter ball and began to count, forcing myself to slowly mouth the numbers. Surely the police would come by the time I reached two hundred, I thought, remaining motionless and taking shallow breaths so that if someone came through the closet door, they might not detect my presence.

  Time slowed down. I was acutely aware of every detail of my surroundings, my senses intensely heightened. I saw individual flecks of dust on the baseboards, the slight variation in the hue of the wood floor, and the tiny ripple my exhalations made in the fabric of the black slacks hanging an inch from my face.

  “Hang on, baby,” Richard said as I reached 287. “I’m just getting off the train.”

  That was when the police finally arrived.

  * * *

  The officers searched but found no sign of an intruder—nothing taken, no doors jimmied, no windows broken. I cuddled next to Richard on the sofa, sipping chamomile tea. False alarms weren’t uncommon, the police told us. Faulty wiring, animals triggering a sensor, a glitch in the system—it was probably one of those things, an officer said.

  “I’m sure it was nothing,” Richard agreed. But then he hesitated and looked at the two officers. “This probably isn’t related, but when I left this morning, there was an unfamiliar truck parked at the end of our street. I figured it belonged to a landscaper or something.”

  I felt my heart skip a beat.

  “Did you get the license plate number?” the older officer, the one who did most of the talking, asked.

  “I didn’t, but I’ll keep an eye out for it.” Richard drew me in closer. “Oh, sweetheart, you’re trembling. I promise I will never let anything happen to you, Nellie.”

  “You’re sure you didn’t see anyone, though, right?” the officer asked me again.

  Through the windows I watched the flashing blue and red lights revolve atop the cruisers. I closed my eyes but I could still visualize those frantic colors spinning through the darkness, pulling me back into that long-ago night when I was in senior in college.

  “No. I didn’t see anyone.”

  But that wasn’t completely true.

  I had seen a face, but not in one of our windows. It was visible only in my memory. It belongs to someone I last encountered in Florida, someone who blames me—who wants me punished—for the cataclysmic events of that fall evening.

  I had a new name. A new address. I’d even changed my phone number.

  I’d always feared it wouldn’t be enough.

  * * *

  The tragedy began to unfold during a beautiful day, also in October. I was so young then. I’d just started my senior year in college. The blistering heat of the Florida summer had yielded to a mellow warmth; the girls in my sorority wore light sundresses or tank tops and shorts with CHI OMEGA stamped across the butt. Our house was filled with a happy energy; the new pledges would be initiated after sunset. As social director, I’d planned the Jell-O shots, the blindfolding, the candles, and the surprise plunge into the ocean.

  But I woke up exhausted and feeling queasy. I nibbled on a granola bar as I dragged myself to my early-child-development seminar. When I pulled out my spiral-bound planner to write down the next week’s assignment, a realization stilled my pencil on the page: My period was late. I wasn’t ill. I was pregnant.

  When I looked up again, all the other students had packed up and were leaving the classroom. Shock had stolen minutes from me.

  I cut my next class and walked to a pharmacy on the edge of campus, buying a pack of gum, a People magazine, some pens, and an e.p.t test as if it were just another casual item on my shopping list. A McDonald’s was next door and I huddled in a stall, listening as two preteen girls brushed their hair in the mirror and talked about the Britney Spears concert they were dying to attend. The plus sign confirmed what I already suspected.

  I was only twenty-one, I thought wildly. I hadn’t even finished school. My boyfriend, Daniel, and I had been together for just a few months.

  I stepped out of the stall and went to the row of sinks, running cold water over my wrists. I glanced up and the two girls fell silent when they caught sight of my face.

  Daniel was in a sociology class that let out at twelve-thirty; I’d memorized his schedule. I hurried to his building and paced the stretch of sidewalk in front of it. Some students sat on the steps, smoking, while others sprawled on the green—a few eating lunch, others forming a triangle and throwing a Frisbee. A girl rested with her head on a guy’s lap, her long hair draped over his thigh like a blanket. The Grateful Dead blared from a boom box.

  Two hours earlier, I would’ve been one of them.

  Students began to trickle out the door and I scanned their faces, frantically searching for Daniel. He wouldn’t be the guy wearing flip-flops and a Grant University T-shirt, or the one burdened by a cumbersome saxophone case, or even the one with a backpack shrugged onto a shoulder.

  He didn’t look like any of them.

  After the crowd had thinned, he appeared at the top of the stairs, folding his glasses into the pocket of his oxford shirt, a messenger bag slung crosswise over his chest. I lifted my hand and waved. When he saw me, he faltered, then continued down the steps to where I stood.

  “Professor Barton!” A gir
l intercepted him, probably with a question about his class. Or maybe she was flirting.

  Daniel Barton was in his mid-thirties, and he made the Frisbee-throwing jocks, with their leaps and hoots when they caught the disk, look like puppies. He kept glancing at me while he talked to the other girl. His anxiety was palpable. I’d violated our rule: Don’t acknowledge each other on campus.

  He could be fired, after all. He’d given me an A during my junior year, a few weeks before our affair began. I’d earned it—we’d never shared a personal conversation, let alone a kiss, until I bumped into him after being separated from my friends at a Dave Matthews beach concert—but who would believe us?

  When at long last he drew close to me, he whispered, “Not now. I’ll call you later.”

  “Pick me up at the usual spot in fifteen.”

  He shook his head. “Today won’t work. Tomorrow.” His brusque tone stung me.

  “It’s really important.”

  But he was already moving past me, hands in his jeans pockets, toward the old Alfa Romeo that had taken us to the beach on so many moonlit nights. I watched him go, feeling stunned and deeply betrayed. I’d stuck to our agreement; he should have realized this was urgent. He tossed his bag onto the passenger’s seat—my seat—and sped off.

  I clutched my arms around my stomach and watched as his car turned a corner and disappeared. Then I slowly made my way back to the sorority house, where everybody was busy preparing.

  I just had to get through the rest of the day, I told myself, blinking hard at the tears that filled my eyes. Then I could talk to Daniel. We’d come up with a plan together.

  “Where were you?” asked our chapter’s president as I walked through the door, but she didn’t wait for an answer. Twenty new pledges would officially join our house tonight. The evening would start out with a dinner and rituals: the house song and a sorority trivia game about our founders and important dates. Each girl would then take a candle and repeat sacred vows. I’d stand behind my “little sister,” Maggie, whom I’d been paired with for the year. The hazing would begin around ten P.M. Although it would last several hours, nothing bad would be done to the girls. Nothing dangerous. Certainly no one would be hurt.

  I knew this because I was the one to plan it.

  Bottles of vodka for the Jell-O shots lined the dining room table, along with grain alcohol for the Dirty Hunch Punch. Did we need so much liquor? I wondered. I remember because of everything that happened afterward. Those flashing blue and red police lights. The high-pitched screaming that sounded like an alarm.

  But as I climbed the steps to my room, it was just a fleeting thought, winging past like a moth, quickly replaced by my worry over the pregnancy. The feeling of sickness radiated out from my core, encompassing my entire being.

  Daniel hadn’t even glanced back at me as he’d driven off. I kept remembering the way he’d walked right past me, whispering, “Not now.” He’d treated me with less respect than the student who’d intercepted him before he reached me.

  I slipped into my room and quietly shut the door, then pulled out my cell phone. I lay down on my bed, hugging my knees to my chest, and called him. After four rings, I heard his outgoing message. The second time I dialed, it went directly to voice mail.

  I could see Daniel glancing down at his phone as the code name he’d given me—Victor—flashed. His long, tapered fingers, the ones that caressed my leg whenever I sat beside him, picking up the phone and pressing Decline.

  I’d seen him do the exact same thing to other callers when we were together, never thinking he’d do it to me.

  I dialed his number again, hoping he’d see it and realize how desperately I needed to talk to him. But he ignored me.

  My pain was being overtaken by anger. He must have known something was wrong. He’d said he cared about me, but if you truly cared for someone, wouldn’t you at least answer her fucking call? I’d thought.

  I’d never been to his place because he lived with two other professors in faculty housing. I knew his address, though.

  I’d thought, Tomorrow isn’t good enough.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-TWO

  AFTER AUNT CHARLOTTE comes to get me at the Robertson bar, I take a cool shower, scrubbing off my sweat and makeup. Wishing I could rinse away the day as easily and have a fresh chance with Emma.

  I’d planned my words so carefully; I’d anticipated that Emma would be skeptical at first. I would have been, too—I still remember how I’d bristled when Sam seemed suspicious of Richard, or when my mother expressed concern that I seemed to be losing my identity.

  But I’d assumed Emma would at least listen to me. That I would have the opportunity to plant doubts that might prompt her to take a closer look at the man she was choosing to spend the rest of her life with.

  But clearly she’d already formed a strong opinion of me, one that tells her I’m not to be trusted.

  Now I recognize how foolish I was to think this could end so easily.

  I will have to find another way to make her understand.

  I notice my left arm is red and slightly raw from where I’ve been aggressively scrubbing it. I turn off the shower and smooth lotion on my tender skin.

  Then Aunt Charlotte knocks on my bedroom door. “Up for a walk?”

  “Sure.” I’d rather not, but it’s my inadequate concession to her for the worry I’ve caused.

  So the two of us head over to Riverside Park. Usually Aunt Charlotte sets a brisk pace, but today she strolls slowly. The steady, repetitive movement of my arms and legs and the soft breeze from the Hudson River help me feel more grounded.

  “Do you want to continue our conversation?” Aunt Charlotte asks.

  I think about what she requested: Please stop lying to me.

  I’m not going to lie to her, but before I can tell Aunt Charlotte the truth, I need to figure out what it is for myself.

  “Yes.” I reach for her hand. “But I’m not ready yet.”

  Although at the bar we only dissected a single evening of my marriage, talking with my aunt has released some of the pressure that has built up inside me. The full story is far too tangled and complex to unravel in one afternoon. For the first time, though, I have someone else’s recollections to rely on other than my own. Someone I can trust as I absorb the aftershocks of my life with Richard.

  I take Aunt Charlotte to the Italian restaurant near her apartment, and we order minestrone soup. The waiter brings us warm, crusty bread, and I drink three glasses of ice water, realizing I’m parched. We talk about the biography of Matisse that she is reading, and a movie I pretend to want to see.

  Physically I feel a little better. And the superficial chat with my aunt distracts me. But the moment I’m back in my room, closing my blinds as dusk falls, my replacement returns. She is an uninvited guest I can never turn away.

  I see her at her dress fitting, twirling before a mirror, the new diamond glinting on her finger. I imagine her pouring Richard a drink and bringing it to him, kissing him as he takes it from her hand.

  I am pacing back and forth in the small bedroom, I realize.

  I walk to my desk and locate a yellow legal pad in a drawer. I bring it and a pen back to my bed and stare at the blank page.

  I begin to form her name, my pen lingering over the edges and curves in her letters: Emma.

  I have to get the words exactly right. I must make her understand.

  I realize I am pressing the pen into the paper so deeply that the ink has bled through the page.

  I don’t know what to write next. I don’t know how to start.

  If I could only figure out where my demise began, I might be able to explain it to her. Was it with my mother’s mental illness? My father’s death? My inability to conceive a child?

  I am growing more and more certain the origin lies within that October night in Florida.

  I can’t tell Emma about that, though. The only part of my story she needs to understand is Richard’s role in i
t.

  I tear away the paper and begin again with a clean one.

  This time I write, Dear Emma.

  Then I hear his voice.

  For a moment, I wonder if my mind has conjured it, until I realize he’s in the apartment, and that Aunt Charlotte is calling my name. Summoning me to Richard.

  I leap to my feet and glance in the mirror. The afternoon sun and walk have left me pink cheeked, and my hair is swept into a low ponytail. I’m wearing Lycra shorts and a tank top. Dark circles mark my eyes, but the soft, forgiving light is kind to my body’s sharp angles. Earlier today I dressed up for Emma, but in this moment I look more like the Nellie my husband fell in love with than I have in years.

  I walk barefoot into the living room, and my body reacts instinctively, my vision tunneling until he is all I can see. He is broad shouldered and fit; his runner’s build filled out during the years we were married. Richard is one of those men who grow more attractive with age.

  “Vanessa.” That deep voice. The one I still hear in my dreams all the time. “I’d like to talk.”

  He turns to Aunt Charlotte. “May we have a moment?”

  Aunt Charlotte looks at me and I nod. My mouth is dry. “Of course,” she says, retreating to the kitchen.

  “Emma told me you went to see her today.” Richard is wearing a shirt I don’t recognize, one he must have bought after I left. Or maybe one Emma bought for him. His face is tanned, the way it always gets in the summer because he runs outside in good weather.

  I nod, knowing it’s futile to deny it.

  Unexpectedly, his expression softens and he takes a step toward me. “You look terrified. Don’t you know I’m here because I’m worried about you?”

  I gesture to the sofa. My legs feel shaky. “Can we sit down?”

  Throw pillows are piled at either end of the couch, which means we end up closer to each other than either of us might have expected. I smell lemons. I feel his warmth.

  “I’m marrying Emma. You have to accept this.”

  I don’t have to, I think. I don’t have to accept you marrying anyone. But instead I say, “It all happened so fast. Why the rush?”