The Wife's Tale

by Lori Lansens

  Eden set down the broom. “Was it a rat?”

  “No! My God, do you have rats?”

  “Of course we have rats. Everyone has rats. And we do not use God to exclaim. Jack would be so upset if he heard that.”

  “Thank the Lord Jack wasn’t here for what?” Mary asked.

  “The call,” Eden sighed, scouring the yard for the rodent.

  “The call?”

  “They found Heather.”

  Mary pitied the poor women her confusion, then panicked. “You don’t mean they found Gooch? Eden? Who called?”

  “The police called.” Mary’s heart beat wildly. “They found Heather. In a motel room in Niagara Falls.”

  “Heather?”

  “They said it was an accidental overdose.”

  “Heather?”

  “I wanted to laugh when they said they didn’t suspect foul play. It’s all foul. Her whole wasted life.”

  “Overdose?” Mary repeated, sure Eden must be mistaken. She’d just seen Heather, with her beautiful face and her big silver locket and her nicotine chewing gum and her new-found son. “When? When did this happen?”

  “Yesterday.”

  “But I just saw her. I just saw her in Toronto. She was different, Eden. She’d changed. I told you.”

  “I’ve been expecting that call since she was a teenager, Mary. People don’t change.”

  But people did change. Whole countries changed. They were all just the sum of their habits. “She had changed.”

  “They said she was using an alias,” Eden said dryly. “Mary Brody.”

  Mary struggled to breathe. Heather Gooch dead at forty-nine. In a motel room in Niagara Falls. Accidental overdose? No, Mary thought, calculated risk. Dead of calculated risk. The death part had been an accident, but she’d known the risk she was taking. Might have told herself, Just this one last time, as she took that foul journey, led astray by certain old associates, the siren’s lure of the altered state. Having been seduced by the Kenmore for most of her life, Mary understood only too well.

  Foul play. A wasted life. How? Seated on the toilet? Alone? Or had someone been there to hold her hand? Hear her beg forgiveness? Whisper goodbye? Heather. Ah, beauty. A fait accompli. The rule of three. The triangle complete. But Jack soon to begin another, to replenish the fear of the second and the worry over the third. You can group your tragedies in threes or thirties, Mare. Maybe Gooch had been right about that too.

  “Will there be a funeral?”

  Eden shook her head. “She had a will, if you can believe someone as reckless and irresponsible as Heather would go to the trouble of making a will. She wanted to be cremated. No funeral. She left everything to Jimmy. Not that she had anything but debt, I’m sure. Jimmy’ll have to figure out what to do with her ashes when he gets back. I wouldn’t have a clue.”

  “Gooch’ll know what to do,” Mary agreed, moved by Eden’s certainty that he would in fact return.

  “Lord have mercy on her soul,” Eden whispered, casting her eyes heavenward.

  “Amen,” Mary said, surprising herself.

  Eden took another deep breath, casting her eyes over the green pool. “We had a lap pool at our last house. I swam a hundred laps a day.”

  “A hundred laps?” A hundred oaks. A hundred shoes. A hundred Heathers.

  “I was very fit for my age.” Eden had no more to say on the subject of her daughter’s untimely death. No confessions of remorse or regret. No mournful lamentations. No hot tears filling her eyes.

  Returning to the house, noticing the disarray, Mary asked, “Did your helper call in sick again?”

  “It’s her son this time. She has four children and one of them’s always sick. She’s the third girl since we moved.”

  “What time is prayer circle?” Mary asked.

  “Two-thirty.”

  “Do you want to lie down?”

  “Yes, Mary. I do,” Eden answered, shuffling toward the door. She stopped, sighing deeply, and whispered to the hallway, “I wish Jimmy were here.”

  It was no use telling dry-eyed Eden to let it all out. It would let itself out when it was damn good and ready, Mary knew. “Me too,” she said.

  A short time later, as Mary was stretching plastic wrap over the culinary offerings, the front door opened with the sound of clanking metal and quiet voices. She peered down the hallway to see Jack in his motorized wheelchair being assisted into the house by two pleasant-looking men. She waited until the men had settled him into his bedroom before sliding out the back door. As eager as she was to get to the bank to sort out her account, she felt bound to stay until Eden woke, as she believed in saying goodbye.

  She stopped in the backyard to enjoy the warm breeze, sweeping aside the broken branches on the ground, and found a chair to rest in at the green pool’s edge. Looking up into the blue sky, she thought of the shooting star and felt a wash of shame remembering the gratitude in the bleeding man’s eyes. She had done so little for Ernesto. And nada for Heather. She hadn’t done as much for her broken sister-in-law in the past twenty-five years as a half-dozen strangers had done for her in recent days. She imagined Heather’s obituary in the Leaford Mirror. Survived by her mother, Eden Asquith of Golden Hills, California, a brother, James, and sister-in-law, Mary Gooch, of Leaford, Ontario. Son James, a medical student in Toronto.

  She thought of her own left-behinds. A mother, a husband, the bones of a cat. Heather Gooch had left a son who might one day cure cancer. Or save multiple lives. Or just be a contributing member of society. Mary allowed herself a soupçon of bitterness. She would leave no one without a mother, and had made no mark on society. She didn’t even vote.

  She heard a rhythmic ticking, not the clock but a woodpecker in a tall eucalyptus near the fence. She thought of the night clock on the bedside table of her small rural home. The ticking of time. The machinations of denial. But her appetite for denial had been left, along with her appetite for food, in the fluted brown cups of Laura Secord chocolates.

  Watching her wide, rippling reflection in the greasy green pool, she wondered how such a large woman had made so little impact on her little world. Of course, there would be people who missed her, who missed her now. The old folks at St. John’s Nursing Home. A few of the customers at Raymond Russell’s would have asked about her. But what was she really leaving? Like a tribe and a plan, a person needed a legacy. She could see that now, too.

  At two o’clock Mary couldn’t wait any longer, and padded to the back bedroom, rousing Eden with a gentle shake to her shoulders. “I put plastic on everything.”

  Eden nodded, rising from the bed, propelled into the hall by a retching sound from Jack’s room. Mary stood still, unsure what to do as the hacking and gagging continued. In a moment Eden appeared, holding a towel animated by shivering bloody mucus. Mary looked away.

  “Please don’t go in there,” Eden said, by way of goodbye.

  Anxious to leave, Mary made her way to the door.

  “Mary?” Eden called. Mary turned, waiting. “Will you come back tomorrow?” Her voice was small. “I just can’t count on Chita.”

  Mary nodded, hiding her surprise. “I could come back tonight,” she offered hopefully.

  “Come in the morning. He’s awake for a few hours then. Sometimes he cries.”

  Poor Eden, Mary thought. A lost daughter. A departing husband. Mary had never considered that she might one day have so much in common with her mother-in-law.

  DAMAGED ART

  Walking out the front door, Mary could not shake thoughts of Heather Gooch. So lost was she in her contemplation of her sister-in-law’s life and death that she didn’t see the black vehicle pull up in her periphery, and didn’t recognize the voice of Ronni Reeves calling from the driver’s window, “Do you need a ride somewhere?”

  The young mother looked different. No lipstick. Stringy blonde locks leaking from a floral scarf on her head. Blemishes on her forehead that Mary hadn’t noticed before. She decided not to count the woman�
�s appearance as a miracle. Not even a wild coincidence—this town was as small as Leaford, and she lived on the same street, after all. “Thanks,” she said, opening the car door. “I’m just going down to the bank at the plaza.”

  “That’s easy,” Ronni Reeves said, brushing Cheerios from the leather upholstery.

  Looking into the back seat, Mary found the triplets dressed in white karate robes, two of the boys asleep with their heads joined ear to crown. Joshua, the runaway imp, clutched an enormous bag of Cheetos, his lips and fingers and white uniform stained orange as the setting sun. He studied her from his car seat, his face twisting into a grimace.

  “Did your car break down? It was Mary, right?” Ronni Reeves asked, when Mary was arranged in the seat.

  “Mary Gooch. I don’t have a car.”

  “You don’t have a car?”

  “No.”

  “Are you a nurse?”

  “No,” Mary said, glancing down at her damp navy scrubs.

  Throwing a glance at the back seat, Ronni said, “You remember the nice lady, Joshua. The one who found you in the parking lot before? Say, ‘Hi Mrs. Gooch.’”

  The little boy squinted at Mary. “You stink,” he said, hurling an orange Cheeto at her head.

  “Joshua!” his mother shouted, twisting to yank the bag of Cheetos from the boy’s hands. “Say you’re sorry and I’ll give them back,” she told him.

  Mary thought of the English nanny show she had watched on television. And the movie she’d seen with that wonderful British actress whom Mary admired for her graciousness, and always thought looked just right in award-show photographs. Those nannies with the British accents would not return the Cheetos to the naughty boy, even if he did apologize. Mary thought they must raise lovely children on the other side of the ocean.

  “How’s Jack?” Mary shook her head fatally, stung by a tug at the back of her scalp. “Joshua!” Ronni bellowed. “Get your filthy fingers away from her head.” Mary untangled the orange fingers from her hair.

  “My husband left us six weeks ago.” Ronni paused to find her breath, as if the shock of it was upon her again. “The boys have really been acting out.”

  “How was the new babysitter?” Mary asked, when she couldn’t think what else to say.

  Ronni Reeves, the wife left with triplets, shook her head darkly as she raced down the street toward the stop sign, relieved that her son had become distracted by painting the car window with his licked-orange fingers, until he began kicking the back of Mary’s seat. “Stop that,” she hissed. She glanced at Mary, saying, “He should be napping right now. But I had to shift their karate class. Jacob had an eye appointment. And I still have to meet with the lawyer. We were supposed to look at preschools.”

  The list. Mary could see Ronni’s list of things not getting done, and caught the whiff of her abstract malaise. Even her bounty was a burden.

  The young mother’s purse rang. Mary watched the pretty woman drive with one hand, catching the gist of the conversation as she spoke. Ronni was being asked to cover another Lydia Lee home jewellery party tonight, and had to decline because she could not get a babysitter on such short notice.

  “I could babysit for you,” Mary interrupted, uncertain of her impulse.

  “No. I couldn’t ask you to.”

  “You didn’t ask. I’m offering.”

  “Are you good with kids?”

  “I’m good with old people.”

  “I hardly know you, though.”

  “You know Jack,” Mary said, realizing how profoundly she was dreading the long night in the hotel room.

  “That’s true. You’re practically a family friend. And I don’t exactly know the women the agency sends,” she reminded herself. “It would only be for a few hours. Are you sure?”

  Stopped by the curb at the bank, the women exchanged telephone numbers and arranged a time for Mary to be at the house. Six o’clock. Ronni thanked her profusely but Mary just waved her off, watching the big SUV with its licence plate promising RoNTom pull out of sight.

  She headed into the bank with her brown vinyl purse under her arm, the passport safely zipped inside. With the proof of the passport and the help of Cooper and Lucille and the Golden Hills bank manager, the Canadian bank sorted out her situation and promised to send a new access card in care of the Golden Hills bank.

  She made a withdrawal of a few hundred dollars, to see her through until the card arrived, and waited breathlessly to see the bank balance on the receipt that Cooper Ross handed her. It was unchanged from the last time she had checked. So that was that. Whatever that was. Gooch had not taken money from the account. But what if he did? He could, she realized. He could take it all.

  Mary thought of the suspense novels she’d read in her youth, the thrillers she’d enjoyed on television. She wondered if her own mystery would be solved with small puzzle pieces or revealed in a tragic surprise ending. Like Heather’s death.

  After thanking the bank staff and stuffing the bills into the zippered compartment of her purse, she set off across the parking lot toward the shoe store. There was a sale rack outside but nothing to fit her extra-wide feet. Inside the store she found a pair of sneakers in her size, a package of six white socks and, on a display of handbags by the window, a sporty blue canvas tote bag with silver detail. She paid for the items, wearing the sneakers out of the store, and transferred the other things from the old purse to the new one, taking care to remember her passport, before ceremoniously tossing the brown vinyl purse into the trash.

  Mary’s attention was caught by a reflection in the glass of the pool company’s window. A creature inching toward her, frail and stooped, balancing a spun nest of golden hair on her half-cocked head. She reminded Mary of an elderly customer she’d had at Raymond Russell’s, the one who’d cried over the discontinuance of her Elizabeth Arden lipstick. The woman had such severe bone loss that her spine had curled inward to form her body into a lower-case r. This woman had a similar curvature, though not so dramatic. But more striking than her posture and the shuffling gait it imposed was the woman’s face: the skin so stretched that she risked a fissure if she tried to blink or close her mouth; the eyes so wide that she appeared on the threshold of terror. She was wearing snug blue jeans that pinched the loose skin around her waist, and a tight, long-sleeved T-shirt that gave the impression of tattoos. Mary was unaware that she was staring, and didn’t realize she was blocking the path until the woman was upon her, saying, “Excuse me.”

  Stepping back to allow her to pass, Mary saw from the back the old woman’s flat rear end in the snug blue jeans, and a bulge that she recognized as adult wetness protection. When the woman turned and caught her staring she felt ashamed, but she could not stop herself from marvelling at the woman’s body, like a piece of damaged art, wondering what it had once been and what journey had transformed it.

  Turning, she caught sight of a sign in a window that read, Pool’s Gold Cleaning Service. Great Deals for New Customers. Following an impulse, she went inside the shop to make arrangements for the company to attend to her mother-in-law’s neglected swimming pool. Even if Eden could no longer swim a hundred laps, she might be able to swim one or two, she thought, aspiring to lessen the woman’s misery.

  When she emerged from the pool place a short time later, she noticed a man looking at the discount shoe rack outside the shoe store a few doors down. There was something familiar about him, but with the sun in her eyes, she couldn’t tell right off who it was standing there, holding a pair of yellow ladies’ sandals in his big brown hands. Her sight adjusted and she saw that it was Jesús García. She was set to call out his name when he suddenly shoved the yellow sandals under his coat jacket and loped away.

  Mary flashed on a memory of Klik’s Variety Store. She’d purchased so much candy from the couple that they’d never guessed she was stealing it too. Snatching, scoffing, lifting, hiding candy bars deep within her pockets when they were ringing up another sale, trying to appear innocent, await
ing her engorgement.

  Stunned by the swift and strange nature of the theft, she watched Jesús García recede down the mall’s promenade. Eager to know the fate of Ernesto, she started to follow but stopped, worried that he would guess she’d witnessed his crime. She feared that she might embarrass him or, worse, anger him. She would never have taken him for a thief, but there it was. All people had secrets.

  No one was who they appeared to be.

  CUATRO CHICAS

  Walking had become easier in the days since Gooch’s departure, and Mary found further redemption in her new white sneakers. She hardly noticed the distance she’d covered before pressing the traffic button at the intersection. She scanned the dusty lot on the corner, surprised to see diminutive brown-skinned women gathered around the utility pole, and a dozen more wildflower bouquets scattered on the ground. Had the women brought the flowers? She’d never seen women at the lot before.

  She crossed the street, drawn to the flowers, convincing herself that the tribute could not be for Ernesto, since surely Jesús García would not be out stealing shoes if his dear friend had just died. Still, she was curious about the roadside memorial and the women standing beneath it. Not caring about the fine dust on her new sneakers, she walked toward them.

  There was a sign pinned to the pole, decorated with a single wreath of faded plastic flowers. Spanish writing. “What is this for?” she asked.

  They spoke at once, rapidly, in Spanish.

  “Not Ernesto?” she asked, suddenly unsure.

  The women, most of whom appeared to be around her age, did not understand. She pointed to the sign. “Is this about a man called Ernesto?”

  But the women’s attention was caught by a silver van turning into the dusty lot. The driver, a slender man with cropped hair and pockmarked cheeks, pulled to a stop. His eyes fell briefly on Mary as he rolled down the window and called out to the heaviest of the Mexican women, who was also the oldest and the greyest and the weariest, “We gotta move, Rosa. We got one hour.”