The Wife Between Us

by Greer Hendricks

  Richard won’t indulge my question. “Everyone asked me why I stayed with you all those years. You complained that I left you alone at home too much, but when we socialized, you were … The night of our cocktail party—well, people still talk about it.”

  I don’t realize a tear is rolling down my cheek until he gently wipes it away.

  His touch sets off an explosion of sensation inside me; it has been months since I’ve felt it. My body clenches.

  “I’ve been thinking about this for a while. I never wanted to say it because I knew it would hurt you. But after today … I don’t have any choice. I think you should get help. An inpatient stay somewhere, maybe the place where your mom went. You don’t want to end up like she did.”

  “I’m doing better, Richard.” I feel a flash of my old spirit. “I’ve got a job. I’m getting out more and meeting people.…” My voice trails off. The truth is visible to him. “I’m not like my mother.”

  We’ve had this conversation before. It’s clear he doesn’t believe me.

  “She overdosed on painkillers,” Richard says gently.

  “We don’t know that for sure!” I protest. “It could have been a mistake. She might have gotten her pills mixed up.”

  Richard sighs. “Before she died, she told you and Aunt Charlotte she was doing better. So when you just said that to me … Look, do you have a pen?”

  I freeze, wondering how he senses what I was doing in the moment before he arrived.

  “A pen,” he repeats, furrowing his brow at my reaction. “May I borrow one?”

  I nod, then stand up and return to my bedroom, where the legal pad with Emma’s name sits on my bed. I glance over my shoulder, suddenly gripped by the fear that he has followed me. But the space in my wake is empty. I turn over the pad and pick up the pen, then I notice our wedding album still splayed on the floor. I put it on the floor of my armoire, then go back into the living room.

  My knee gently bumps against Richard’s when I sit back down next to him.

  He tilts toward me on the couch as he reaches for his wallet. He withdraws the single blank check he always carries. I watch as he writes a number and adds several zeros.

  I gape at the amount. “What is this for?”

  “You didn’t get enough in the settlement.” He puts the check on the coffee table. “I liquidated some stock for you and let the bank know there would be a large withdrawal from my checking account. Please use this to get some help. I couldn’t live with myself if something happened to you.”

  “I don’t want your money, Richard.” He fixes his eyes on me. “I never did.”

  I’ve known people with hazel eyes that morph from green to blue to brown based on the light, or what they’re wearing. But Richard is the only person I’ve ever met whose irises shift solely through shades of blue—from denim to Caribbean sea to a beetle’s wing.

  Now they are my favorite shade, a soft indigo.

  “Nellie”—it is the first time he has called me this since I moved out—“I love Emma.”

  A sharp pain bursts in my chest.

  “But I will never love anyone as much as I loved you,” he says.

  I continue to look into his eyes, then I jerk away my gaze. I am stunned by his admission. But the truth is, I feel the same way about him. The silence in the air hangs like an icicle about to crack.

  Then he leans forward again, and shock robs me of the ability to think coherently as his soft lips find mine. His hand cups the back of my head, pulling me in closer. For just a few seconds, I am Nellie again and he is the man I fell in love with.

  Then I’m jolted back to reality. I push him away, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand. “You shouldn’t have done that.”

  He looks at me for a long moment, then stands up and leaves without a word.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-THREE

  SLEEP ELUDES ME AGAIN that night as I recall every detail of my encounter with Richard.

  When I finally drift off, he visits me in my dream, too.

  He approaches me as I lie in bed. His fingertips trace my lips, then he kisses me tenderly, slowly, first on my mouth and then working his way down my neck. He lifts up my nightgown with one hand, then moves his mouth lower. My hips begin to move involuntarily. I choke back a groan as my body betrays me by growing warm and pliant.

  Then he pins me to the mattress, his torso crushing mine, his hands trapping my wrists. I try to push him off, to make him stop, but he’s too strong.

  Suddenly, I realize it isn’t me beneath Richard—it isn’t my hands being held down, or my lips parting.

  It is Emma.

  I jerk awake and sit upright. My breath comes in choppy gasps. I look around my bedroom, desperate to center myself.

  I hurry to the bathroom and splash cold water on my face to erase the sensations that linger from my dream. I grip the hard edges of the sink until my breathing finally slows.

  * * *

  I climb back into bed, thinking of how my heart clattered and my skin tingled when I was dreaming of Richard. I still feel the aftereffects of that treacherous response to him.

  How could I have been aroused by him, even in a dream?

  Then I recall one of my recent psychology podcasts on the part of the brain that processes emotions.

  “The human body often responds in the same way to two overarching emotional states—romantic arousal and fear,” a scientist had explained. I close my eyes and try to recall exactly what the expert said. “Consider the pounding in the chest, the dilating of the pupils, the increase in blood pressure. These are sensations that appear in both terror and arousal.”

  This, I know well.

  The expert had said something else about how our thought processes change during both states. When we are in the throes of romantic love, for example, the neural machinery responsible for making critical assessments of other people can be compromised.

  Is that what Emma is experiencing? I wonder. Is that what I encountered, too?

  I am too shaken to fall back asleep.

  I lie there as images of Richard’s visit batter my mind. It was both vivid and fleeting—like a mirage—and as the long night stretches on, I begin wonder if it actually happened, or if it also was just part of my dream.

  Was anything of the previous evening real? I wonder.

  I walk in the first shimmer of morning gold, as if in a trance, to my armoire. I slide open the top drawer. The check is nestled among my socks.

  As I put it back, I look down and see the white satin cover of our wedding album. This is the only physical documentation of my marriage that I have.

  I can’t imagine I will ever want to view the photographs again after today, but I need to view them a final time. Our other photos are all in the Westchester house, unless Richard has already moved them into the storage unit in the basement of his city apartment’s building or destroyed them. I imagine he has; Richard would have disposed of every trace of me before Emma could stumble upon the unsettling reminders.

  Aunt Charlotte told me a bit of what she’d witnessed during my marriage. Sam also told me what she’d seen during our last conversation—which turned into a worse fight than I could ever have imagined us having. But now I want to look for myself, with fresh eyes.

  I sit cross-legged on my bed and turn to the first page. In the opening shot I’m in the hotel room, fastening the clasp on an antique pearl bracelet—my “something borrowed” from Aunt Charlotte. Beside me she artfully ties my father’s blue handkerchief around my bouquet. I turn another page and glimpse Aunt Charlotte, my mother, and me walking down the aisle together. My fingers are interlaced with my mother’s, while Aunt Charlotte has her arm looped through mine on the other side, since my left hand is grasping the bundle of white roses. Aunt Charlotte’s face is flushed pink and her eyes have a sheen of tears. My mother’s expression is difficult to decipher, although she is smiling for the camera. She is also set a bit apart from me and Aunt Charlotte; had we not been h
olding hands, I could take a pair of scissors and easily crop her out of the photograph.

  If I showed this picture to strangers and asked them to guess which woman was my mother, they would likely choose Aunt Charlotte, even though physically I resemble my mother more strongly.

  I’ve always told myself that I only received superficial traits from my mother, such as her long neck and green eyes. That on the inside, I was my father’s daughter; that I was more like my aunt.

  But now Richard’s words boomerang back.

  During our marriage, whenever he told me I wasn’t acting rationally, that I was being illogical, or, in more heated moments, when he yelled, “You’re crazy!” I denied it.

  “He’s wrong,” I would whisper to myself as I paced the sidewalks in our neighborhood, my body rigid, my footsteps pounding the cement.

  I’d slam down my left foot: He’s—then my right foot—wrong.

  He’s wrong. He’s wrong. He’s wrong. I’d repeat those words dozens, even hundreds, of times. Maybe I’d thought if I said them enough, they would bury the persistent worry worming through my brain: What if he was right?

  I flip to another photo of my mother standing up to give a toast. On a table directly behind her was our three-tiered wedding cake adorned with Richard’s heirloom topper. The porcelain bride’s painted-on smile is serene, but I remember feeling anxious in that moment. Luckily, my mother’s speech at my wedding dinner had been coherent, even if it rambled on too long. Her meds were doing their job that day.

  Perhaps I had inherited more from my mother than I’d allowed myself to believe.

  I grew up with a woman who inhabited a different world from the station-wagon-driving, grilled-cheese-making mothers of my friends. My mom’s feelings were like intense colors—fiery reds and sparkling, soft pinks and the deepest slate grays. Her shell was fierce, yet on the inside, she was fragile. Once, when a manager at the drugstore was berating an elderly cashier for moving too slowly, my mother yelled at the manager, calling him a bully, and earning applause from the other customers in line. Another time, she knelt down suddenly on the sidewalk, soundlessly weeping over a monarch butterfly that could no longer fly because its wing had been torn.

  Had I absorbed some of her skewed vision, her impulsively dramatic reactions? Were the genes that dictated my destiny influenced more by her, or by my steady, patient father’s composition? I desperately wanted to know which invisible attributes I’d inherited from each of them.

  During the life span of my marriage, I became gripped by a growing urgency to capture the truth. I chased it in my dreams. I worried my memories would fade like an old color photograph that’s been bleached by light, so I tried to keep them alive. I began to write everything down in a kind of diary—a black Moleskine notebook that I hid from Richard under the mattress of the bed in our guest room.

  It’s ironic now, because I’ve surrounded myself with lies. Sometimes I am tempted to succumb to them. It might be simpler that way, to quietly sink into the new reality I’ve created as though it were quicksand. To disappear beneath its surface.

  It would be so much easier to just let go, I think.

  But I cannot. Because of her.

  I set aside the album and walk to the small desk in the corner of my room. I retrieve my legal pad and pen and start again.

  Dear Emma,

  I would never have listened to anyone who told me not to marry Richard. So I understand why you’re resisting me. I haven’t been clear because it’s hard to know where to begin.

  I write until I fill the page. I consider adding one final line—Richard visited me last night—but leave it out when I realize she may think I’m trying to make her jealous, to create the wrong kinds of doubts in her.

  So I simply sign the letter and fold it into thirds and tuck it into the top drawer to read one more time before I give it to her.

  * * *

  A little later that morning, I have showered and dressed. I am tracing lipstick over my mouth, covering up the imprint of Richard’s touch, when I hear Aunt Charlotte yell. I run into the kitchen.

  Black smoke curls toward the ceiling. Aunt Charlotte is batting a dish towel at orange flames dancing on the surface of the stove.

  “Baking soda!” she cries.

  I grab a box from the cabinet and toss it on the flames, dousing them. Aunt Charlotte drops the dish towel and turns on the kitchen tap to cold. I see the angry red mark on her forearm as water courses over it.

  I remove the pan of burning bacon from the stove and grab an ice pack from the freezer. “Here.” When she moves her arm away from the water, I turn off the tap. “What happened? Are you okay?”

  “I was pouring the bacon drippings into the old coffee can.” I pull out a stool for her and she sits down heavily. “I missed. Just a little grease fire.”

  “Do you want to go to a doctor?”

  She pulls away the ice pack and peers at her arm. The burn is the width of a finger and about two inches long. Luckily it isn’t blistering. “It’s not that bad,” she says.

  I look at the overturned box of Domino sugar on the counter, grains spilling out onto the stove.

  “I threw sugar on it by accident. Maybe that made it worse.”

  “Let me get you some aloe.” I hurry to her bathroom and find a tube in the medicine cabinet, behind her old tortoiseshell glasses and a bottle of ibuprofen. I bring the painkillers back to the kitchen, too, and shake three tablets into my hand, then pass them to her.

  She sighs as she smooths on some aloe. “That helps.” I pour her a glass of water and she swallows the pills.

  I look at the thick new glasses that sit on the bridge of Aunt Charlotte’s nose, then I sit down heavily on the stool next to hers.

  How could I have missed it?

  I’ve been so fixated on potential clues about Emma and Richard’s relationship that I haven’t caught on to what has been unfolding right in front of me.

  Her clumsiness and headaches. The appointment with D—for “doctor.” The furniture clearing, for easier movement through the apartment. My aunt peering at the menu at the Robertson bar, then ordering a drink that isn’t on it. Her more tentative pace on our walk along the Hudson. And the square box of sugar that doesn’t look anything like the baking soda, but would feel similar to someone in a rush. Someone who is reaching for it through a thin veil of smoke.

  Someone who is losing her eyesight.

  A sob thickens my throat. But I cannot have her be the one to comfort me. I reach for her hand with its papery-thin skin.

  “I’m going blind,” Aunt Charlotte says softly. “I just had a second appointment to confirm it. Macular degeneration. I was going to tell you soon. But maybe not in such a dramatic fashion.”

  I think of how she once spent a week layering hundreds of strokes of paint onto a canvas to replicate the bark of an ancient redwood. How, when she took me to the beach during one of my mother’s lights-out days, we lay on our backs looking up into the sky, and she explained that although we perceive the glow from the sun as white, it is really made up of all the colors of the rainbow.

  “I’m so sorry,” I whisper.

  I am still thinking of that day—of the turkey-and-cheese sandwiches and thermos of lemonade my aunt packed, of the deck of cards she’d brought along in her purse to teach me how to play gin rummy—when she speaks again.

  “Do you remember when we read Little Women together?”

  I nod. “Yes.” I’m already wondering what she can and can’t see.

  “In the book, Amy said, ‘I’m not afraid of storms, for I’m learning how to sail my ship.’ Well, I’ve never feared bad weather, either.”

  Then my aunt does one of the bravest things I have ever seen. She smiles.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-FOUR

  I HATE IT when I can’t see.

  Maggie, the shy seventeen-year-old pledge from Jacksonville, had said those exact words to me the night of our sorority initiation.

 
But I hadn’t listened to her. I was too fixated on how Daniel had brushed me off. Tomorrow isn’t good enough, I’d thought as my anger mounted.

  Somehow I managed to participate in most of the evening’s rituals. I hovered behind Maggie as she stood in the circle of girls in our living room, their faces illuminated by candlelight. When all of the sisters had gathered together to vote after rush week, Maggie hadn’t been on our original list of the twenty selected. The other pledges were pretty, lively, and fun—the sort of girls who would be asked to fraternity formals and enhance the spirit of the house. But Maggie was different. When I’d talked to her during one of our social events, I’d learned that during high school, she had started a volunteer program aimed at helping animals in a shelter near her family’s home.

  “I didn’t have a lot of friends when I was growing up,” Maggie had told me, shrugging. “I was kind of an outsider.” She’d grinned, but I’d seen vulnerability in her eyes. “I guess helping animals kept me from feeling alone.”

  “That’s amazing. Can you explain how you started that program? I want to get our house more involved in service.”

  Her face had lit up as she described the three-legged dachshund named Ike that had sparked her idea. I decided that no matter what the other girls in the house thought, Maggie needed to be one of our pledges.

  But as I stood behind her, listening to the voices of my sorority sisters rise in song, I wondered if I’d made a mistake. Maggie was dressed in a childish white cotton top printed with a pattern of little cherries and matching shorts, and she had barely said a word all night. She’d told me she was looking forward to a fresh start in college, that she wanted to form connections with the other girls here. But she wasn’t putting forth any effort to bond with the sisters. She hadn’t memorized our anthem; I could see her pretending to mouth the words. She’d taken a sip of the Dirty Hunch Punch and spat it back into her cup. “Gross,” she’d said, leaving the cup on the table instead of throwing it out, then reaching for a Jell-O shot.

  It was my job to watch over Maggie, to make sure she was completing her tasks—including the scavenger hunt through the house—and, especially, to track her during the ocean plunge. Even we college kids knew that drinking and swimming in the choppy waves at night could be treacherous.