“Jeffrey, I didn’t say anything.”
“No, but you wanted to. So go for it. This is your big chance. Say what you wanted to say.”
“Fine. You want me to say it?” She slaps down the pen, pressing it under her fingers. “Where’s Sabine?”
“I’m the one who called you, remember? Why are you asking me?”
Ingrid rolls her beady snake eyes. “Come on, Jeffrey. My sister and I talk every day. We tell each other everything.”
This isn’t exactly news. On a good day, Ingrid and Sabine will spend hours on the phone, discussing the minutia of everything from the tacos they ate for lunch to their favorite brand of tampons. Last weekend they killed an entire afternoon deliberating on the consistency of their mother’s latest bowel movements, and whether changing her diet might slow down the dementia that’s eating up her brain. I know they talk ten times a day. Most of the time, I’m witness to it.
“Well, clearly she didn’t tell you where she was going tonight.”
“Or maybe she was unable to.”
For a second I don’t understand, a fleeting moment of she thinks something bad happened, too, and then I go completely still. Ingrid thinks something bad happened all right, but she also thinks I had something to do with it.
“Careful.” I say the word like an order, sharp and commanding. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were accusing me of something.”
“Why, do you feel guilty?”
“No.”
“Because I know about your fights. Sabine calls me after every one.”
Of course she does. The two are always on the same page, always, always of the same mind. They use the other both as a sounding board and a tuning fork. As long as the other sister agrees, then their opinions are vindicated. Two like-minded twins can’t be wrong.
And then there’s that weird twin telepathy Sabine and Ingrid share, that creepy ability to know what the other is about to say before they even say it. Last year for Christmas, they bought each other the exact same gift, a hideous beige purse in the shape of a take-out bag. The two of them squealed like they’d both won the lottery. I don’t know how to compete with that.
“So? All couples argue, which you would know if you could ever hold on to a man long enough to be in a relationship. Wherever Sabine is tonight has nothing to do with our arguments.”
She cocks an unplucked brow. “You didn’t even know she had a new boss, and that happened ages ago. When is the last time the two of you actually talked? When is the last time you had sex?”
“None of your fucking business, that’s when. And don’t you ever ask me that again. Not while you’re in my house.”
She folds her hands atop the pad of paper, and I’d think she was calm if it weren’t for her paper-white knuckles. “Really? Because I’m pretty sure this house belongs to Sabine.”
It’s the most hateful thing she could say to me, and as much as I hate her for it, the person I really blame for her words is Sabine. Sabine knows the name listed on the mortgage is like the drunk relative trying to talk politics at a dinner party, better just to ignore. It’s always been a touchy subject between us, but like Ingrid said, Sabine tells her sister everything.
“My wife needs to keep her mouth shut. Our personal business is just that—personal. Sabine shouldn’t be sharing every little thing that happens with you, just like I shouldn’t have to tell you that wherever she is right now, I had nothing to do with it.”
Ingrid goes silent, and I can tell she has more to say. She stares at me, chewing her lip, weighing her options. I see the exact instant the decision is made. Her eyes—Sabine’s eyes—ice over.
“She told me what you did to her.”
She says it just like that, her voice low and deceptively calm, like I’ll know what she’s talking about.
I do know, and the fury that rises in me is as familiar as the woman sitting across the table. Sabine told Ingrid what I did, and I want to leap across the table, wrap my fingers around Ingrid’s throat and squeeze until she wipes those awful, horrible words from her brain.
“Did Sabine tell you what she did?”
“I already told you. Sabine tells me everything.”
“Then you know that she pushed me first.”
“That’s not an excuse! A man should never lay his hands on a woman, Jeffrey. I shouldn’t have to tell you this.”
Ingrid’s condescending tone burrows under my skin like a tick. Sabine told me I was forgiven. She promised we would never speak of it again, and then she went blabbing it to her sister. Of course Ingrid thinks the worst of me now. She only heard one side of the story.
“Sabine accused me of checking out of our marriage. She said I was emotionally and physically disengaged. She kept harping on about her love tank being empty, whatever the hell that means. You know what? I shouldn’t have to explain myself to you. The point is, we had a fight, it was bad, we both apologized and we moved on. That’s what successful couples do—they forgive each other and move on.”
I hear the words coming out of my mouth, and I wonder if they’re true. Not the part about Sabine’s complaints—she’s never been shy about voicing those—but the part about us as a couple. Forgiving each other. Being successful.
Are Sabine and I a successful couple? Once upon a time, we were. For the first few years, we were that couple—the one every other couple wanted to be. Happy. In love and in lust, both of them at the same time. The kind of couple that shoulders major life disappointments together. Her mother’s sudden forgetfulness. My low sperm count, and their decided lack of mobility to reach Sabine’s wonky uterus. “We will get the very best care for your mother,” I would murmur to a sobbing Sabine. “We’ll adopt.” That was back when everything, even the most impossible, felt possible. I was a champion, a supportive husband, a fixer. I could fix everything.
And then something happened that I couldn’t fix: my career stalled out halfway up the ladder at PDK Workforce Solutions. “Account Executive” may sound impressive, but it’s a midlevel slog that entails sucking up to needy, curmudgeonly customers so they’ll buy crap they don’t actually need.
But even more limiting, there’s nowhere for me to go. The next rung is my boss’s job, and he’s blocking the ladder like a king-of-the-hill linebacker, with no plans to retire, change industries, or move to Toledo. I’ve put out some feelers, even talked to a couple of headhunters, but the only companies hiring are all the way in Little Rock, and Sabine wouldn’t hear of moving.
So yes, I may be bitter but I’m not oblivious. I am fully aware how unfair it is to blame Sabine, but her success makes it so easy. I’m forty and washed up, and she’s just getting started. I come home beaten and burning with rejection to find Sabine glowing with the high of yet another sale. Lately, I’ve begun eating dinner alone in the den, mostly because I can’t stomach her hum of satisfaction.
And so, late last year, after a particularly shitty day at work, when I got home and Sabine wouldn’t stop nagging, when she kept pick-pick-picking at every little flaw, when she accused me of checking out of our marriage, of sitting back and letting her do all the hard hitting for our house, our bank account, our sex life, her words filled me with a pure, inarticulate rage. She shoved me, and I hit her. I didn’t plan to. I didn’t mean to. It just happened.
I know how this looks, believe me. I lost my temper with my wife, and now she’s gone. Maybe she’s trying to punish me for what I did, or maybe my earlier hunch is right, maybe something is really, really wrong. Either way, you don’t have to tell me. I am the husband with a history of violence, the man living for free in the house his wife owns, the person with the most to lose or to gain.
This doesn’t look good for me.
BETH
The storm blows north so I point the Buick south, aiming the nose toward Dallas. It’s not the most efficient way to get to the East Coast, but I’m not in any sort of hurry, and it’s an easy, roundabout route that circumvents my home state of Arkansa
s entirely. Even though you are hours, hopefully days behind me. Even though you’ll be on the lookout for a brunette in Marsha Anne’s black sedan, not a blonde in a gas-guzzling Regal, already down to a quarter tank, now is not the time to take any chances. I flip off the air-conditioning and roll down the windows, letting in the humid highway air. One advantage of this stupid new hair, it doesn’t blow into my eyes while I drive.
My eyelids are dangerously heavy, and I stop often. To grab another coffee and some snacks, to splash cold water on my face, to load up on gas and an IHOP breakfast platter. Eggs, biscuits, sausage, the works. It’s not my normal kind of meal—you like me thin and waiflike—but ever since leaving Pine Bluff, I’ve been ravenous. Maybe it’s the relief of finally breaking free, or maybe it’s that I’m no longer my normal self. I’m Beth now, and Beth eats whatever the hell she wants.
I’m nearing Atlanta when the sun comes up, streaking the sky with a spectacular orange and pink, so psychedelic bright that I reach for my sunglasses. My heart skitters in anticipation of my final-for-now destination. A city I visited for the first and only time with you, ages ago, for a college buddy’s booze-fueled wedding. The reception was loud and rowdy and at the rotating restaurant atop the Westin downtown, where you twirled me around the dance floor until we were dizzy—me from the shifting skyline, you from the cheap Russian vodka. When we stumbled downstairs to our room, I asked if you were drunk and your answer was to shove me into a wall. Atlanta was the first time you hurt me that way, and the last place you’ll think to look for me now.
I know I’m close when a giant Delta jet lumbers over my head, its belly white and shiny, its wheels braced for landing. I catch a whiff of jet fuel, brace for the roar of its engines, a sound somewhere between an explosion and a NASCAR race. It rattles the steering wheel, the windows of my car, my teeth. All around me, people slam their brakes, and traffic grinds to a halt. Six lanes of bumper-to-bumper traffic, red taillights as far as I can see.
I’ve studied the map, so I know where I’m going. Merge onto the downtown connector, follow it to I-20 east, then take a left on Boulevard to Cabbagetown. “Eclectic” and “edgy” is how the internet describes the east-Atlanta neighborhood, but what sold me on it is its affordability. Especially the Wylie Street Lodge, where one can rent a small but fully furnished room for a whopping twenty-two dollars a night. I’ll have to share a bathroom and kitchen, but still. I’ve already prepaid for the first week.
An eternity later, I pull to a stop on Wylie Street and climb out. The road under me might as well be on fire, a steaming, sizzling furnace melting my tires and the soles of my sneakers, but it’s the house I’m looking at, my stomach sinking at the sight. The yard is a foul-looking patch of dirt and scraggly branches that has seen neither fertilizer nor lawn mower since sometime last century. Front steps, rickety and rotting, lead to a porch littered with trash and a ripped brown sofa, where three raggedy men drink from paper bags. If it weren’t for them and the hooker advertising her wares from a second-story balcony, I’d think the place was abandoned.
I stand on the sidewalk, thinking through my options.
I could cut my losses and leave.
I could march to the door and demand my money back.
I could suck it up and stay.
The men eye me from the front porch, and I know how they see me. The rusty Buick with Oklahoma plates, the soccer-mom shirt, my fried hair. I’m the naive country girl come to the big city. I’m an easy target.
The hooker calls down to me. “Hey, blondie. You looking for this?” She pulls her tube top down to reveal breasts as enormous as the fat rolls holding them up. She jiggles them back and forth like a bowl of caramel pudding.
“Uh, no thanks,” I say. “I’m good.”
She barks a phlegmy laugh, and she’s not wrong. Beth is going to have to work on her one-liners.
I drop into my car and motor away.
Around the corner, I squeeze my car into a spot at the edge of a crowded parking lot. After the car, the hotels, the food, Nick’s fee and debit card, I have just over two thousand dollars in cash left. Tens and twenties mostly, siphoned from grocery funds, birthday and Christmas money, forgotten bills swiped from your pockets when you were passed out. Saving was a long, laborious process that took me almost a year to do in a way that you wouldn’t notice. I bought things on discount and shopped sales. I switched to cheaper toilet paper, coffee, washing powder. Ironically, I stopped cutting my hair. My stash of money grew slowly, deliberately. Anything else would have gotten me killed.
But two thousand dollars won’t last long, not even with a strict budget. Hotels are expensive, and most require ID. Even if I got a job tomorrow, staying in one would blow through my cash.
For a city of six million souls, Atlanta has an astonishing lack of beds for abused or homeless women, of which I am both. I could sleep in my car, but it doesn’t feel safe, and I probably wouldn’t do much sleeping. A better option would be to find another lodge, one that is cheap and won’t ask for identification. Like the ones I found before settling on Wylie—rooming and boardinghouses, a hostel or two, some seriously sketchy motels—if only I remembered their names.
And no, I didn’t write any of them down. I couldn’t. If you’d found anything even remotely suspicious—the search parameters on my laptop, a new number on my phone log, a faraway address scribbled on the back of a receipt—you would have confronted me. That was the hardest part of this past year, staying one step ahead of you.
I’m reaching for the burner phone to start my new search when I spot a sign at the far end of the lot for a Best Buy. Best Buy means computers, banks and banks of computers. The internet at my fingers, free and with no tracking, unlike the data on this piece-of-crap prepaid phone. I crank the key and head farther up the lot.
The store is packed for a Thursday morning. People everywhere, jamming the aisles and forming lines a dozen people deep at the MacBooks display. I push past them to a lonely, unmanned Dell at the end of the counter.
I navigate to the internet and pause. Stare at the blinking cursor. Check behind me to make sure no one is watching. Old habits are hard to break.
Two seconds later, I’m typing in the address for Pine Bluff’s local news website. I hold my breath and scroll through the headlines. Arkansas man accused of killing wife for changing TV channel. State police investigate Monticello murder. Pine Bluff officer shot in “ambush” attack. Nothing about a missing woman. Nothing about me.
And yet, I’ve been gone for almost twenty-four hours now. Why is there nothing on the internet? Is the police department sitting on the story? Are they holding out on the press? Or has the media just not sniffed it out yet?
The Pine Bluff Police Department website doesn’t make me any wiser. Their home page is as generic as ever, the last item on a long list of to-dos for the department, updated almost as an afterthought. The most recent post on their newsroom page is from 2016.
On a whim, I surf to Facebook, and I’m in luck. Gary Minoff, a middle-aged man from Conyers, Georgia, forgot to sign out. No one will think anything of him nosing around on the Pine Bluff Police Department Facebook page, which is much more current than their website. I scroll down their wall, past posts about robberies, murders, a deadly hit-and-run, and the knot between my shoulder blades tightens. Maybe something happened, and you haven’t yet figured out I’m gone. Maybe I have more of a head start than I think. I can’t decide if the old adage applies here: Is no news really good news?
“Best priced laptop in the place,” a voice says from right behind me, a ginger with facial hair and a Best Buy polo. He gestures to the Dell. “Intel Pentium duel core processor, two megabyte cache, up to 2.3 gigahertz performance. All that and more for only $349.”
I have no idea what any of that means. I give him a smile that is polite but perfunctory. “I’m just looking, thanks.”
“For a few bucks more, you can upgrade. Tack on some more memory, or some cloud-based backup storage.”
“I just want to play around a little more, try things out. Maybe if you come back in ten minutes or so, I’ll be ready to decide.”
Or maybe, by the time you come back, I’ll be gone.
He wanders off to bother another customer, and I exit out of Facebook. Time to get busy.
I Google cheapest boarding houses Atlanta and take a picture of the results with my burner phone, then do the same for area hostels. Just in case, I find five hotels advertising rooms under fifty dollars a night and take a picture of those, as well. The rest of the time I use for poking around on Craigslist.
Most of the housing listings are either too expensive or too creepy. A dollar for a live-in girlfriend? Pass. I click on one of the cheapest listings, a furnished basement bedroom in a house in Collier Heights, then back out of the page when I see the field labeled “driver’s license number.” I click on the next one, “for professional ladies only.”
“My girlfriend got totally shafted on Craigslist.” It’s the ginger salesclerk again, hovering behind me even though it’s been nowhere near ten minutes. “She’d booked a room with what she thought was a nice family, but it was a scam. She gets there and some crazy dude pulls a gun on her and next thing she knows, she’s got no money, no wallet, no car, no nothing.”
“That’s...awful.”
He shoves his hands in his pockets and grins, revealing a row of neat white teeth. “I’ll say. Three months later she’s at the courthouse, declaring herself bankrupt. Bastard stole her identity, then took out all sorts of loans and credit cards in her name. By the time she figured out what was happening, he’d racked up over fifty thousand dollars of debt in her name. It’s going to take her years to get her credit back on track. Anyway, all that goes to say, you might want to be careful.”
His gaze wanders to the picture on the laptop screen, and he’s not wrong. This place is a dump. I click the X to close the screen.
He starts in on his sales pitch again, something about a LED-backlit screen and HD camera, and I’m about to tell him to back off when something occurs to me. His girlfriend’s wallet was stolen. Some asshole took her credit cards, her driver’s license, everything. Even if she went to the DMV that very same day, it would have taken her a couple of days, maybe a week, to get her new plastic.
Dear Wife Page 4