The Wife Between Us

by Greer Hendricks

  “I can’t—just a couple glasses, but—I’m sorry. I’ll switch to water right now.”

  He reached for my half-full goblet of Chardonnay and I quickly relinquished it.

  For the rest of the night, I felt my husband’s glare. I saw his fingers clenching his glass of Scotch. I tried to remember the sympathy mixed with admiration on Emma’s face when he’d smoothed over the scene I’d created; that was what got me through the rest of the party.

  I’d accomplished everything I’d set out to do.

  It was worth it, even though my bruises didn’t heal for two weeks.

  Richard never sent me a new piece of jewelry to make amends for that misunderstanding. This was confirmation he was no longer as invested in us; his focus was shifting.

  * * *

  “I’m in love with Richard,” I say a final time as I peer into the empty hallway. “I am supposed to be here.”

  It wasn’t difficult to get into Richard’s office building. Just a few floors below his firm was an accounting company that handled high-net-worth individuals. I made an appointment, explaining that I was a single woman who had recently come into an inheritance. It wasn’t far from the truth. After all, I still had the receipt from Richard’s check in my wallet. I booked the last appointment of the day, six o’clock, and sailed past the guard’s desk with my visitor sticker attached to my new dress.

  After my appointment, I took the elevator to Richard’s floor and walked quickly to the ladies’ room. The code hadn’t changed, and I slipped into the end stall. I already looked as much like Emma as possible on the outside; my new red lipstick and fitted dress and curled hair completed my physical transformation. I tore my visitor’s pass into a dozen pieces and buried it in the trash can. I spent the next couple of hours practicing her voice, her posture, her mannerisms. A few women came in to use the bathroom, but no one lingered.

  Now it is eight-thirty. I finally see the three-person cleaning crew emerge from the elevator, pushing a cart filled with supplies. I force myself to wait until they reach the door of Richard’s firm.

  I am confident.

  “Hello!” I call as I stride briskly toward them.

  I am poised.

  “Nice to see you again.”

  I belong here.

  Surely this crew must have encountered Emma on nights she worked late with Richard. The man who has just unlocked the double glass doors gives me a hesitant smile.

  “My boss needs me to check something on his desk.” I gesture to the corner office I know so well. “I’ll just be a minute.”

  I hurry past them, taking longer steps than I would normally. One of the cleaning women picks up a duster and follows me, which I expected. I pass Emma’s old cubicle, which now holds a potted African violet and a flowered tea mug. Then I open the door to Richard’s office.

  “It should be right here.” I walk behind the desk and open one of the two heavy lower drawers. But it is empty save for a squeezable stress reliever, a few PowerBars, and an unopened box of Callaway golf balls.

  “Oh, he must’ve moved it,” I say to the cleaner. I can feel her energy heighten; she’s clearly a little nervous now. She moves closer to me. I can read her mental process. She is telling herself I must belong here or I could never have gotten through the guard. And she doesn’t want to offend an office employee. But if she’s wrong, she could be jeopardizing her job.

  My salvation is staring at me: a silver-framed photograph of Emma on the corner of Richard’s desk. I pick it up and show it to the cleaning woman, making sure to hold it a couple of feet away from her. “See? It’s me.” She breaks into a relieved smile, and I’m glad she doesn’t think to ask why my boss keeps a photo of his assistant on his desk.

  I pull open the second drawer and see Richard’s files. Each has a typewritten label.

  I find the one marked AmEx and leaf through his statements until I find the itemized one for February. What I’m searching for is right at the top: Sotheby’s Wine, $3,150 refund.

  The cleaning woman has turned toward the windows to dust the blinds, but I can’t allow myself even the briefest of celebrations. I slip the piece of paper into my purse.

  “All done! Thank you!”

  She nods and I start to exit the office. As I round the edge of the desk, I reach out and touch Emma’s photo again. I can’t resist. I twist it so she faces the wall.

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-THREE

  THE NEXT MORNING, I awaken feeling more refreshed than I have in years. I’ve slept straight through for nine hours without the aid of alcohol or a pill. Another small victory.

  I can hear Aunt Charlotte puttering in the kitchen as I approach. I walk up behind her and envelop her in a hug. Linseed and lavender; her scent is as comforting to me as Richard’s aroma is unsettling.

  “I love you.”

  Her hands cover mine. “I love you, too, honey.” Surprise threads through her voice; it’s as if she can sense the shift within me.

  We have hugged dozens of times since I moved in. Aunt Charlotte embraced me as I sobbed after a cab left me on her building’s doorstep. When I was unable to sleep as the memories of the worst times in my marriage tormented me, I felt her slip onto the bed and wrap me up in her arms. It was as if she wanted to absorb my pain. For every page in my notebook that I filled with descriptions of Richard’s deceit, I could write an equal number recounting times throughout my life when Aunt Charlotte has buoyed me with her steady, undemanding love.

  But today I’m the one reaching out to her. Sharing my strength.

  When I let go, Aunt Charlotte picks up the pot of coffee she has just brewed, and I pull the cream out of the refrigerator and hand it to her. I crave calories—nourishing food to fuel my newfound fortitude. I crack eggs into a pan, scramble in cherry tomatoes and shredded cheddar cheese, and slide two pieces of whole-grain bread into the toaster.

  “I’ve been doing some research.” She looks up at me and I can tell she knows exactly what I’m talking about. “You are never going to be alone in this. I’m here for you. And I’m not going anywhere.”

  She stirs the cream into her coffee. “Absolutely not. You’re young. And you are not spending your life taking care of an old woman.”

  “Too bad,” I say lightly. “Like it or not, you’re stuck with me. I found the best macular degeneration specialist in New York. He’s one of the top guys in the country. We’re seeing him in two weeks.” The office manager has already emailed me the forms that I’ll help Aunt Charlotte fill out.

  Her wrist moves in more rapid circles, and the coffee is in danger of sloshing over the edge of her mug. I can tell she’s uncomfortable. I’m sure that as a self-employed artist, she doesn’t have a great health-care plan.

  “When Richard came by, he gave me a check. I have plenty of money.” And I deserve every cent of it. Before she can protest, I reach for a mug of my own. “I can’t argue about this before I have coffee.” She laughs, and I change the subject. “So, what are you doing today?”

  “I thought I’d go to the cemetery. I want to visit Beau.”

  Usually my aunt makes this trip only on their wedding anniversary, which is in the fall. But I understand she is seeing everything anew now, fixing familiar images into her memory bank to revisit them when her eyesight is gone.

  “If you’re up for company, I would love to join you.” I give the eggs a final stir and add salt and pepper.

  “You don’t have to work?”

  “Not today.” I butter the toast and slide the eggs out of the pan, dividing them between two plates. I serve Aunt Charlotte, then take a sip of coffee to buy some time. I don’t want to worry her, so I come up with a story about storewide layoffs. “I’ll explain it to you over breakfast.”

  * * *

  At the cemetery, we plant geraniums by his headstone—yellow, red, and white—as we trade some of our favorite Beau stories. Aunt Charlotte recounts how the first time they met, he pretended to be the blind date she was meetin
g at a coffee shop. He didn’t reveal the truth until a week later, on their third date. I’ve heard this story many times, but it always makes me laugh when she tells the part about how relieved he was to no longer have to answer to the name David. I share how I loved the little journalist’s notebook he kept in his back pocket with a pencil threaded through the spirals. Whenever I came to New York with my mother to visit, Uncle Beau gave me a duplicate one. We’d pretend to report on a story together. He’d take me to the local pizza parlor, and while we waited for our pie, he’d tell me to record everything I saw—the sights, the smells, what I overheard—just like a real reporter. He didn’t treat me like a little kid. He respected my observations and told me I had a sharp eye for detail.

  The midday sun is high in the sky, but the trees shade us from the heat. Neither of us is in any rush; it feels so good to be sitting in the soft grass, chatting comfortably with Aunt Charlotte. In the distance I see a family approach—a mother, father, and two kids. One of the little girls is riding on her father’s shoulders, and the other is holding a bouquet of flowers.

  “You were both wonderful with children. Did you ever want to have any?” I’d posed the same question to my aunt once before, when I was younger. But now I’m asking as a woman—as an equal.

  “To be honest, no. My life was quite full, with my art and Beau traveling on assignment all the time and me joining him.… Plus, I was lucky enough to get to share you.”

  “I’m the lucky one.” I lean over to briefly rest my head on her shoulder.

  “I know how much you wanted children. I’m sorry it didn’t happen for you.”

  “We tried for a long time.” I think of those slashing blue lines, the Clomid and resulting nausea and exhaustion, the blood tests, the doctor’s visits.… Every single month, I felt like a failure. “But after a while, I wasn’t sure if we were meant to have kids together.”

  “Really? It was that simple?”

  I think, No, of course not, it wasn’t simple at all.

  * * *

  It was Dr. Hoffman who finally suggested to me that Richard should have a second semen analysis. “Didn’t anyone tell him that?” she’d asked as I sat in her immaculate office during one of my annual physicals. “There can be errors in any medical test. It’s standard to repeat the sperm analysis after six months or a year. And it’s just so unusual for a healthy young woman like yourself to be having this much trouble.”

  This was after my mother had died; after Richard had promised things would never get bad again. He’d made an effort to come home by seven o’clock several nights a week; we’d taken a long weekend trip to Bermuda and another to Palm Beach, where we golfed and sunbathed by a pool. I’d recommitted to our marriage, and after about six months, we’d agreed to start trying anew for a baby. The job Paul had suggested never came through, but I continued my volunteer work with the Head Start program. I’d told myself I’d been partly to blame for Richard’s violence. What husband would be happy to learn his wife was sneaking into the city and lying about it? Richard had told me that he’d thought I had a lover; I reasoned he would never have hurt me otherwise. As time passed and my sweet, attentive husband brought me flowers just because and left love notes on my pillow, it became easy to rationalize that all marriages had low points. That he would never do it again.

  Just as my bruises faded, so, too, did the small, insistent voice inside me that cried out for me to leave him.

  “My marriage was kind of … uneven,” I tell my aunt now. “I began to worry about bringing a child into such an unstable environment.”

  “You seemed happy with him at first,” Aunt Charlotte says carefully. “And he clearly adored you.”

  Both statements are true, so I nod. “Sometimes those things aren’t enough.”

  * * *

  When I told Richard what Dr. Hoffman had said, he immediately agreed to get retested. “I’ll make the appointment for Thursday at lunch. Think you can keep your hands off me for that long?” We’d learned the first time that he had to wait two days to build up a good number of mobile sperm.

  At the last minute, I decided to join Richard for this test. I thought back to how he was always beside me at my fertility appointments. Besides, I didn’t have much else to do that day and figured it might be nice to spend the afternoon in the city, then meet him after work for dinner. At least those were the reasons I told myself.

  When I couldn’t immediately reach my husband on his cell phone, I called the clinic. I remembered the name from the first time Richard had gone years earlier—the Waxler Clinic—because Richard had joked that it should really be called the Whack-Off Clinic.

  “He just phoned to cancel a little while ago,” the receptionist said.

  “Oh, something must have come up at work.” I was grateful I hadn’t begun the journey into the city.

  I’d assumed he’d go the following day, and I planned to suggest at dinner that I accompany him.

  That night, when I greeted him at the door, he folded me into a hug. “My Michael Phelps boys are still going strong.”

  I remember time seemed to shudder to a stop. I was so stunned I couldn’t speak.

  I pulled back, but he just hugged me tighter. “Don’t worry, sweetheart. We’re not going to give up. We’ll get to the bottom of this. We’ll figure it out together.”

  It took everything I had to look him in the eye when he released me. “Thank you.”

  He smiled down at me, his expression gentle.

  You’re right, Richard. I will get to the bottom of this. I will figure this out.

  The next day, I bought my black Moleskine notebook.

  * * *

  My aunt has been my confidante for much of my life, but I will not burden her with this. I reach into my purse for the bottles of water I brought along and give one to her, then I take a long sip from mine. After a little while, we stand up. Before we leave, Aunt Charlotte slowly runs her fingertips across the engraved letters of her husband’s name.

  “Does it ever get easier?”

  “Yes and no. I wish we’d had more time. But I’m so grateful I had eighteen wonderful years with him.”

  I link my arm through hers as we walk home, taking a long route.

  I think of what else I can do for her with Richard’s money. My aunt’s favorite city in the world is Venice. I decide that when this is all over—when I’ve saved Emma—I will take my aunt to Italy.

  * * *

  After we arrive home and Aunt Charlotte goes into her studio to work, I am ready to execute my plan to get the AmEx statement to Emma. I know how I’m going to do it, because Emma never changed the cell phone number she used as Richard’s assistant. I will photograph the document and text it to her. But I need to transmit it when Richard won’t be near, so she can absorb the full implications of what she is seeing.

  It was too early when Aunt Charlotte and I left this morning; they might have still been together. But by now he should be at work.

  I take the statement out of my purse and smooth it open. The AmEx is Richard’s business card, the one he keeps for his sole use. Most of the charges on this statement are for lunches, taxis, and costs associated with a trip to Chicago. I also see the fee for the caterers for our party; I signed the contract and specified the details, but since it was primarily a business function at our home, Richard had said to use the AmEx card they had for us on file. The four-hundred-dollar charge from Petals in Westchester covered the cost of our flower arrangements.

  The Sotheby’s wine refund is at the top of the statement, a few lines above the charge for the caterers.

  I use my phone to take a photograph of the entire page, making sure the date, the name of the wine store, and the amount stand out clearly. Then I text it to Emma with a one-line message:

  You placed the order, but who canceled it?

  When I see that it has been delivered, I put down my cell. I didn’t use my burner phone; there’s no longer any need to conceal what I’m doing. I w
onder what Emma’s memory will reveal when she looks back at that night. She thinks I was drunk. She believes Richard covered for me. She is under the impression that I polished off a case of wine in a week.

  If she realizes one of those things is not true, will she question the others?

  I stare at my phone, hoping this will be the thread she begins to worry between her fingertips.

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-FOUR

  EMMA’S RESPONSE ARRIVES the next morning, also in the form of a single-line text message:

  Meet me at my apartment at 6 tonight.

  I stare at the words for a full minute. I cannot believe it; I’ve been trying to reach her for such a long time, and now she is finally welcoming me in. I’ve created the necessary doubts in her mind. I wonder what she already knows, and what she will ask me.

  Exhilaration floods my body. I don’t know how long of an audience she will grant me, so I write down the points I must make: I can bring up Duke, but what proof do I have? Instead I write fertility questions. I want her to ask Richard why we weren’t able to become pregnant. He’ll surely lie, but the pressure will build in him. Maybe she’ll see what he fights to keep hidden. His surprise visits, I write. Has Richard ever shown up unexpectedly, even when she hasn’t told him her schedule for the day? But that won’t be enough; it certainly wasn’t for me. I will need to tell her about the times Richard physically hurt me.

  I have never shared with anyone what I am about to reveal to Emma. I need to harness my emotions so they don’t overwhelm me and reinforce any lingering suspicions she might have that I’m unbalanced.

  If she listens to me with an open mind—if she seems receptive to what I am saying—I must explain to her how I meticulously crafted a plan to free myself. That I set her up, but that I had no idea it would go this far.

  I will beg for her forgiveness. But more important than my absolution is her own. I will tell her she has to leave Richard, immediately, tonight even, before he ensnares her.

  When I last saw Emma, I tried to craft the image I wanted her to see: that we were interchangeable versions of each other. Now I strive for plain honesty. I shower and put on jeans and a cotton T-shirt. I don’t fuss with my makeup or hairstyle. To burn off nervous energy, I plan to walk to her apartment. I decide to leave at five o’clock. I cannot be late.