Kyle had suggested her getting a job on a few occasions, partly to help her get out of the house, but more to help with the piddly income they lived on. “But I’d feel like I was failing at being a wife,” she’d counter. “I failed at being a mother, I don’t want to fail as a wife, too.”
Fuck it; he ate his fajita, looked out the window at the people passing by, and tapped his foot lightly. There were so many people out. They moved in clusters, swarmed like flies, while some stood frozen, looking at watches or drinking coffee or searching the depths of their pockets or purses.
He sucked on his soda until he created a gargling frog-like sound, then set the cup aside as Cassandra sat down next to him. Kyle was thirty-three. Cassandra was twenty-four, small and delicate, with subtle blonde hair that bordered on brown and the kind of looks that make cynic sons of bitches say, “Eh, just another pretty girl, a dime a dozen.” There certainly were prettier girls in the world, but to Kyle there was no one lovelier. Really, she could be quite exquisite when she wanted to. She reached beneath the table and squeezed his leg.
“How you doing, Taquito?”
Kyle shrugged. “Up and down, you know, the usual.”
She squeezed his leg again, then returned her hand to the tabletop. “Nice night out,” she said. “You know what you need to do?”
“What’s that?”
“Walk down to Haagen-Dazs with me and let me buy you some ice cream.” She stood up and held out her hand. Kyle took her hand and rose out of his seat, then he let go and crossed to the trashcan and dumped the contents of his tray into it. He took her hand again, and together they left the Taco Cabana.
They floated among the swarm of people. The downtown area was like a circus without acrobats or a trapeze or safety nets. People meandered like lost lambs all over the area’s little map. The whole scene created a mesmerizing narcotic. There was more trash than usual on the sidewalk and street and in the gutter. Kyle only just remembered that it was Friday night. That meant no work tomorrow. That meant more awkward idle time with his wife.
Cassandra broke the mesmeric spell. “How’s Sylvia?”
He looked at her briefly, then looked at the sidewalk. “Same as always.”
For just a second there was an emphatic lack of sound, but nevertheless there was sound all around them. Together, the silence and the sound formed a thick, nauseous gas, which became a fleeting mosaic of thoughts and emotions before it all quickly scattered and dissipated.
They stopped at the ice cream place, and Cassandra was true to her word. She bought him a cup of strawberry, and got herself a cone of chocolate chip. All of the tables were occupied, so they took their ice cream outside and found an empty bench.
After a time Cassandra said, “Know what I think?”
“What?”
“I think you just need to leave her.”
“Yeah, I know I should, but…”
“But what?” Cassandra knew all about the situation, everything from the miscarriage to the loathsome marriage to Sylvia’s demented grandmother. “You’re still holding out for the money, that’s the only reason you’re still with her.”
“Sylvia’s not a bad woman.”
Cassandra licked her ice cream. “Maybe not,” she said. “I’ve never met her. Maybe she’s a wonderful woman. But that doesn’t change the fact that she makes you miserable.”
There were no words in Kyle’s arsenal to form a response.
“Holding out for money that may or may not come, that’s a bit of a fool’s paradise. I mean, what if all the money is gone by the time the woman dies? And who knows, some people just go on living. They keep going and going, like the Grim Reaper accidentally deleted them from his list. You’re miserable and living a miserable life and it’s all in hopes of something that might not even exist in the end.” She took his hand. “You did the honorable thing when she got pregnant. But that’s over and done with and nothing can change that. You don’t love her and you never did, so the only reason you’re still there is out of stupid selfishness that might not even pay out in the end.” She sighed. “We could forget all this stupidity. Leave Sylvia, for her sake as well as your own. Divorce her. Then we could shack up, and at some point down the line, you and I could get hitched.”
He looked into her green eyes, muted by shadows and night. A slow little smile curved her lips, and Kyle couldn’t help giving a slow little smile back.
“What program do you think the Grim Reaper uses?”
“I dunno, maybe Excel.”
They finished their ice cream, then walked hand in hand, separating when it came time to return to their respective automobiles. The separation wouldn’t be long. Ten minutes later they were at Cassandra’s apartment complex.
An hour later Cassandra was asleep beside him. Kyle, hands clasped behind his head, stared at the ceiling of darkness above. He liked her bedroom, liked it more than the bedroom he shared with Sylvia, which was drab at best. Cassandra’s bedroom, even in the dark, had life to it. It was all around. Life itself may in fact be the hardest thing in the world to accurately describe. Maybe one can’t really tell what it is, but usually one knows where it is, and it was here, in this room, with this woman.
This was life.
More life than he’d known, not just since his unfortunate shenanigans with Sylvia, but it was probably more life than he’d ever known in all his thirty-three years.
Sylvia. Poor girl. Twenty-eight years old, she had come from money. Her grandfather had made a lot of money in silver mining, way back before the invention of the wheel. He’d invested wisely, and the result was money for the entire family. Trust funds, though the man had died before Sylvia was ever even conceived, and her parents were good at pissing it away, leaving Sylvia, when they died, with a grand total of somewhere around two thousand dollars.
She had worked for a time. Kyle always tried to convince himself that she’d never worked a day in her life, but that was untrue. She’d worked in a department store, apparently in cosmetics. Kyle didn’t know which department store. Whether she had been working or not when he’d knocked her up, he didn’t know, but she wasn’t working a few weeks later when she contacted him to say she was pregnant. She had been sleeping on a friend’s couch and making sure that Grandma’s money was taking care of Grandma. Quite a trooper, really, when he thought about it that way. Single and pregnant and couch surfing, having access to all of this money but never taking any for herself. Damn commendable, when you got down to it.
He sat up, looked through the darkness at Cassandra, sleeping peacefully. She looked like a delicate little angel. Just a kid, really, a kid who worked at Taco Cabana and who hoped to go back to school and one day become a veterinarian.
A voice that sounded like his, but as though it were coming through a long cardboard tube, said, And what do you hope to be?
He slid out from under the sheets and into his clothes. It was time to get home. He looked down at Cassandra again. So lovely. Covered in blankets and shrouded in shadows, she was still an indescribable light to him. Maybe he didn’t know what he hoped to be, but there was hope for him there, sleeping on the bed. He turned to head out of the bedroom.
“You leaving?” Her voice was sleepy, dreamy.
“I should be getting home,” he said.
“There are some miniatures of whiskey in the cupboard next to the fridge. Take a couple and drink them when you get home.” Then a yawn laced her words. “Better it seems like you were out drinking than having an affair.”
They said goodnight, and he went to the cupboard, took down two miniatures of whiskey and stuffed them into his pocket. Sylvia would be out like a light. That wasn’t a concern. But, hell, he felt like he could use a drink, anyway.
He left the apartment, went to his car, and made his way home. He drove slowly, trying to delay the inevitable scenario of returning to the house, of the oppression that would smack him as soon as he walked through the front door, of finding Sylvia in bed, reading lamp likel
y on, romance novel likely beside her, the sight slamming home the realization that he was miserable, and that he was allowing himself to be miserable, and that he should leave. But it wasn’t just the possibility of money keeping him around.
So, then, what is it?
He didn’t know.
He pulled up to the house and switched off the engine and sat there a while. For a time he sought an answer but kept coming up with question marks, and any time he thought he was on to something, the question mark cracked open and a bunch of little question marks came scampering out. He reached into his pocket and pulled out one of the little bottles of whiskey, twisted off the cap. He took a small sip, swished it around in his mouth, swallowed, then downed the rest of it in one shot. He left the second bottle in his pocket, climbed out of his car and locked it. He threw the empty bottle into the darkness, where it presumably landed in somebody’s yard, then made his way to the porch, then the front door, then through the front door and into the living room.
The light was on. She always left the light on for him when he went out. The bedroom door was ajar and the light was on in there, too.
He crossed to the kitchen and filled a glass with water, drank it, went into the bathroom, brushed his teeth, took a leak. Then he stretched his back and yawned and then went into the bedroom, where the bed was empty. The bedside lamp was on and a romance novel sat on the nightstand, but Sylvia was not in bed. The bed was still made. Kyle searched, but she wasn’t in the house at all.
For a while he stood there, not knowing what to think. Had she finally had enough? He didn’t really know what lurked under that wannabe housewife exterior of hers. Had she decided that tonight was the last straw, packed up some things and left?
No, it wasn’t as simple as that. For one thing, her car was parked outside. He checked the closet and her luggage was still there, her dresser drawers were full, her make-up and toothbrush and so on were still in the bathroom. So if she’d decided to just up and leave him, she had been in such a hurry that she didn’t bother to pack. Had raced away so fast that she even forgot her car. No. That just didn’t add up.
As far as he could tell, there were no signs of a struggle, no obvious signs of forced entry. Sylvia just plain wasn’t here.
He took out his cell phone and called her. It went directly to her voicemail, which meant she had the phone turned off. He left a brief message, just wondering where she was, and said he was sorry he’d upset her earlier. Then he checked the time. Almost one o’clock. Too late to check in with any of her friends…
Maybe that was it. A friend came and picked her up and she was staying the night with them.
He took the other miniature from his pocket and drank it down, tossed the bottle into the wastebasket in the kitchen.
She hadn’t left him a note.
Then the question hit him. Should he be relieved or worried? If she’d gone to a friend’s house, wouldn’t she have at least taken her toothbrush? Maybe, maybe not.
Any which way, what it amounted to was that his wife was not here. All of her things were here, her car was here, but she had seemingly vanished into thin air. And her phone was off. Maybe she was just trying to scare him. Tired of his shit and wanting to teach him a lesson. Disappear, make him worry, then show up tomorrow or the next day with an internal bag of secrets. To make him sweat. To make him wonder. Maybe that’s what it was. She didn’t seem the type of person to do such a thing, but like he’d already concluded, he didn’t know what lurked beneath that housewife exterior.
An emergency? Maybe she received a call from the assisted living place. Something about her grandmother. Maybe the crazy bitch had finally bid farewell. But that still didn’t explain why her car was parked outside. Unless…
A swanky place like that, maybe they sent someone over in person to give her the news. That was possible, wasn’t it? And she went with them to the rest home or the hospital or wherever. It was possible. Certainly didn’t seem impossible.
He went to the phone and took out the phone book. What was the name of the place again? Sunrise Senior Living. He found it in the book and then dialed the number. It rang twice, then a woman’s voice greeted him.
Kyle explained who he was, who his wife was, then asked a few questions.
No, his wife was not there and had not been there. No, there was no problem; her grandmother was just fine. He thanked her and hung up.
For a time he paced, a shadow with no one to cast him, as though he was gone, too, vanished from the house with only a trace of his essence lingering like a shred of ethereal ruin. Sylvia had never done anything like this before. She was always so predictable. She was always here. She was always asleep at this time. But broken predictability can apparently throw one for a loop, and a surge of pent-up anger got his attention. An anger that told him it had been smoldering for a while now. And then he flip-flopped and found himself in the anomalous situation of praying, pleading with fervor, begging for the arrival, the materialization of the wife he so wanted to be rid of.
No signs of struggle, no signs of forced entry. Did that, in fact, mean that nothing bad had happened? It meant nothing of the sort. She could have easily opened the door to someone; maybe it was someone she knew. That would immediately remove forced entry, or signs of it.
He went to the front door, opened it, studied the doorknob and the latch and the areas of wood surrounding them. No scuffs, no marks, no splinters—nothing. It was the same damn door in the same damn shape it was always in. He closed and locked it, ran fingers through his hair.
If she went out for a little while, if she went to stay with a friend for the night, that was one thing. On the other hand, if something horrible had happened, an abduction or something like that, and he didn’t report it to the police, he would quickly find himself in a world of shit. Not to mention the guilt that he’d left her, and left her the way he did, crying on the couch, so he could go off and be with Cassandra. To have your husband reduce you to tears and then walk out and desert you, only to then have someone snatch you up and take you God-knows-where.
Kidnappers. Who would kidnap her? Who would wanna kidnap her? What could possibly be gained from such a bastardly dastardly deed?
“Okay,” he said aloud. Then without sound said, Screw your head on, man. Get straight. If you’re really worried then call the police… But, well, maybe before you do that, you should call her friends. The few friends she has, anyway. To hell with what time it is. To hell with waking someone up. It’s okay to wake someone up when it’s a possible emergency, right? Right.
He took out his cell phone again, scrolled through the computerized phone book, but found he didn’t have any of Sylvia’s friends stored in it. Why not? Seemed that he would. Of course, chances were Sylvia didn’t have many, or any, of his friends stored in her phone, either. Privacy and respect, maybe—something like that. Thinking on it, he’d certainly taken advantage of that amenity.
Cassandra, he thought. Call Cassandra; tell her what was going on. She’d listen. She’d be sympathetic. She was nine years younger, but she was a smart cookie; typically had more logic in her fingernail than Kyle had in his entire brain.
He scrolled through his cell phone’s contact list again.
It rang. It rang again. Then again. Then again, and he was greeted by her voicemail message. He hung up and called again, trying to wake her up. Again, he got four rings then her voicemail. He paused, then tried calling Sylvia again, but got the same result as before. He beeped off and put the phone away.
“Shit,” he said, lacking the capacity to conjure any other word. There was bound to be a simple explanation. Something tomorrow or the next day he’d be laughing about. But neither tomorrow nor the next day was here.
He went into a kitchen cupboard and took down a bottle of whiskey, had a shot, just enough to help relax him, enough so he could think straight.
Given the state of the house, it seemed one of two things had happened. She had either left of her own accord, or
had been coaxed out, or someone coaxed their way in and took her out. There were no other logical explanations.
Then he thought of something. Her car was parked outside. He’d only noticed it was there, nothing more. He unlocked the front door, crossed the porch to the sidewalk, and went to her car. It was empty. Locked and empty.
The whole thing was really getting to him now. Where the hell was his wife? What had happened to her? He grew dizzy standing there outside her empty car, fear swinging too far one way, nausea swinging too far the other. His head weaved all variations of turmoil around a crooked transom in his brain, and the summation of it all was that he didn’t understand. He just didn’t understand. He took out a cigarette and didn’t understand. He got it alight and didn’t understand. He stood outside smoking. He paced the sidewalk, the sides of the house, the meager backyard where nothing grew, and still he couldn’t make heads or tails of what had happened.
He finished his cigarette, dropped the butt and stamped it into the ground, then went back inside to his empty house, trying to untangle his brain. He went to the cupboard and had another shot of whiskey, and as he exhaled a sigh, an insect of a thought burrowed its way out of the disoriented sand packed in his skull.
She was two-timing him. Turnabout is fair play, or whatever it was. It would make sense. She didn’t work. She spent most of her time at home. Alone. She must get lonely while he was off at work, or when he was out with… Cassandra. Sweet Cassandra. He should’ve listened to her months ago. He should have broken it off with Sylvia, for her sake as well as his own. Well, if his wife was two-timing him, she had every right to. There was no fault in that, as far as he could see, if she’d found the right suitor. Hell, he’d done it. Only fair she did it, too, right?
Evil Jester Digest, Volume 2 Page 8