by Mark Trainer
Contents
Jeffrey Archer Presents: New Wife
Jeffrey Archer Presents: New Wife
In the cul-de-sac there was a girl on a skateboard. Thirteen, maybe fourteen. She knew what she was doing, banking her turns, popping and pivoting. She should be wearing a helmet, Danny thought, watching her through the glass in the front door. She had the strawberry blond hair of a girl he’d known as an adolescent. Someone he hadn’t thought about in years. He looked at the stairs up which his wife had disappeared, then back to the skateboard girl.
“Wait,” Eve had said, “I’ll come with you.” But the problem was, Danny had already left only enough time to get to school to pick up their son. Now Eve had been upstairs for maybe five minutes—minutes he didn’t have to spare. As a kid he’d waited for what he remembered as eternities on the wall in front of school after some practice or other. Waited for the square grille of his father’s Chrysler LeBaron to turn into the entry. He hated, hated, hated waiting.
“I’m not getting any younger down here,” he called up the stairs, trying to turn it with the right note of cranky sitcom-dad humor so he wouldn’t have a fight on his hands.
“You’ll live. I’m almost ready.” Was she brushing her teeth? Her voice sounded suddenly strange and indistinct. He’d had a lunchtime doctor’s appointment and come home afterward. She didn’t teach on Thursdays. What the hell shoes had she put on? She sounded like a Clydesdale on the hardwood floors up there.
He glanced away to follow the mail truck that started and stopped down the street. The girl was gone. He heard the shoes on the stairs and turned back. He drew a quick breath of surprise.
It wasn’t Eve’s hair, nor her nose. For some reason he was aware of her hands. They weren’t the ones he knew, the ones he still held when they were out on ordinary errands. Not her mouth. This, in short, wasn’t his wife.
“What?” she said. Simple, flat, in a voice he didn’t recognize.
He stared at her meaningfully. It wasn’t that she looked changed in some way, not as if she’d changed the part in her hair, put on weight, or aged suddenly. Not changed, but altogether different. She was just someone else. He started to say a couple of things. One ran the risk of making him look like an idiot who didn’t recognize his wife; the other would make him look like a lunatic if he said it to a stranger who ended up having a perfectly good reason for being in his house. Being in his house in his wife’s clothes.
Instead, he went with “What are you doing?”
She looked at her watch. “Geez, we’ll be a couple minutes late at most. He’s not a toddler anymore. He’ll be fine.” Then this woman reached out to him and touched his face. “Ratchet down the stress, okay?” She pulled open the door, and after a moment he followed her out.
She was about the same age as Eve, he guessed. Maybe not in as good shape, but certainly not unattractive. But not his wife either. Whoever got to the car first generally drove, and he was behind her now. What did it say about him that he was playing along with this? He remembered the story of that woman in New York who was stabbed to death while the neighbors did nothing, how he’d always thought he’d be the one to run into the street and actually do something. Apparently not, he thought as he climbed into the passenger seat beside her.
At the intersection at the end of the block, she leaned forward heavily in her seat to check for cars. Eve never moved like that—so gracelessly.
“I sent you a calendar reminder for the end-of-year-barbecue for Sean’s class,” she said. “I’m done with grading by then; see if you can get the afternoon.”
He nodded. He couldn’t just play along.
“Why so quiet?”
He gave a noncommittal shrug. “Not myself, I guess.”
But seriously, he thought. He was trying to reverse out of the moment and find a sensible way back into it. I’m sitting in a car with someone I’ve never met before, letting her talk to me like I’m her husband. But she knows the way to school. She knew her way around our house. And of course, if this stranger’s here, where’s Eve?
The usual line of cars idled curbside at the school. They both squinted into the tangle of kids and parents. “See,” she said, “right on time.”
She caught sight of Sean first. “Way over there. By the flagpole.”
Not looking back at her, he climbed from the car. He waved to catch Sean’s eye. His son registered nothing but started toward him. And now what? he wondered. What was going to happen when Sean reached the car? His son, so unquestionably his grumpy, awkward, altogether beautiful eleven-year-old son.
“Hey, buddy,” Danny said. He got a nod for his trouble as Sean dragged his leaden backpack past him to the car. He watched the boy climb into the back, pull the door shut. Through the window he could see him drag himself forward on the edge of the seat, holding on to the driver’s side headrest. Who are you and why did Dad let you drive? You might fool him, but you won’t fool me.
Danny paused to watch them for a moment before climbing in.
“Well, I hope he had the sense not to do it,” this woman was saying. “No—he was daring Caleb to do the jump.” Nothing unfamiliar here, the same tone of disbelief that his parents could get such essential facts so wrong—whatever it was they were talking about. Sean was always gentler with his mother, though. He was gentler with this stranger, too.
She turned her head wearily, checking the traffic before pulling out. “But you know how dangerous that kind of thing is. What were you thinking trying to talk him into something like that?”
Had he said this to Sean, the boy would have clammed up instantly. Instead, from this anonymous, middle-aged brunette, Sean thought it was funny. “He was absolutely fine. Nobody got hurt.”
“No thanks to you,” she said. “You’re going to kill yourself on that skateboard.” The boy seemed to have no problem with her. What could he do now, Danny thought, but go along? He buckled himself in. Without Sean seeing her, she smiled to him and rolled her eyes. The gesture was 100 percent Eve, but played across a different set of features, like one of those Saturday Night Live impersonations that’s more observant than it is convincing.
Staci Jensen. That was her name. The strawberry blond girl he was friends with in ninth grade and had seen reconstituted in that skateboarder in the cul-de-sac today. Staci Jensen.
Sean, as had become increasingly usual, retreated to his room as soon as they got home. His new wife answered a phone call as soon as they came through the door. Something from work—a dissertation advisee, it sounded like. What did the person on the other end think? Sounded like whoever it was wasn’t putting up any resistance. And this call led to another. As she talked, he found excuses to leave the room and reenter. Recycling, trash, a new roll of paper towels from the pantry. Each time he waited for a different impression, hoping whatever small mechanism inside him had skipped a gear would correct itself and put everything right.
He was idly wiping the counter when she wrapped up the call. “What’s gotten into you?” she said. “This is more housework than you’ve done in a month.”
“What was that?” he said, indicating the phone.
“That was me refereeing a mini feud.”
He worked at a dried stain with the spray bottle, aware of noise seeping through the ceiling. His son’s music. He could feel her watching him and turned around. She raised her eyes. “What’s that about?” she said.
“Just a kid playing music,” he said.
“I wish we hadn’t given him your old laptop. I don’t like him having a computer in there. Too much trouble he could get up to.”
“I spent a bunch of time holed up in my room when I was a kid.” He looked away from the counter, still expecting, from habit,
to find his wife. Maybe just as well it wasn’t her at this moment. “I’ve been remembering that a lot recently,” he told the woman, “watching him go through it. That fifth-grade stuff can take a lot of working out.”
“You didn’t have the Internet. I just want to be sure he’s safe and that we’re keeping our eyes open.”
Danny didn’t want to argue, even if it was with a stranger. He stepped out onto the back deck. Why couldn’t she remember, Danny wondered, the way he could remember, how much you needed your room at that age. A place to stretch out your sense of yourself without worrying it would run into your parents’ condescension, or the insults of someone like that kid from second grade. Ryan… Ryan Whatever-his-namewas.
The door opened behind him, and she had the phone again, pressed now against her shoulder. “It’s the mortgage company—they say they didn’t get the payment this month.” He looked at her for a moment, bewildered. He never forgot bills, especially the big ones. Again, this would have been more embarrassing had he had to confess the mistake to his actual wife. “I think… I think I forgot.” From the look she answered him with, she was as surprised as he was. And again, she did a great impersonation of the expression Eve’s face wore when she was deciding it was to no one’s benefit to push him further.
His son came down for dinner that evening, cleaned his plate, and disappeared again up the stairs. His wife watched a movie he wasn’t interested in while he tackled the dishes. He leaned into the family room, drying his fingers with a towel. “I’m heading up.”
She looked over at him and extended a hand. “Where have you been all day?”
“I’ve got a head full of junk,” he said, not moving from the doorway. “Sorry about that.” He started for the stairs.
He thought about Sean as he flossed his teeth in the master bath, all the time the boy was spending in his room. He remembered his own parents taking the lock off his bedroom door after the discovery of a pack of cigarettes and a porno tucked into the back of a drawer. He felt, in a way, that he’d spent the thirty intervening years trying to find a place to be alone. He’d be damned if he was going to smother his own son.
She was still there in the morning. And now her clothes didn’t look so familiar anymore. The naked flank he glimpsed while he was brushing his teeth and she pulled the shower curtain aside to remind him he needed to do school drop-off stirred something in him, but in the illicit way a glimpse of an attractive stranger would. He was all but silent during the getting-out-of-the-house bustle. She had a committee meeting at eight thirty, and when she went to kiss him good-bye, she took his face in her hand, turned it to her, and kissed him hard on the lips. He felt as if he were cheating on Eve. It was a hell of a kiss.
“What is up with you?” she said before heading out the door.
In the car, he asked the boy, “Does your mom seem a little different?”
Sean only shrugged and mumbled something at the window.
“What?”
“She asked me the same thing about you.”
At school he stepped out of the car to get the boy’s skateboard from the trunk. He had to catch up to him, already heading to the entrance. “See you soon,” he said, handing off the board. His son mustered a smile and a nod.
He was almost back in the car when he heard his name called out. A teacher coming toward him. The guy had done the preemptive head shave, wore expensive sunglasses, and looked cooler than he remembered his teachers looking. He walked urgently toward the car, a worried look punctuated by a greeting smile.
“Hi,” the teacher said. “We met at parents’ night in the fall.”
“Sure,” Danny said, “sure. How’s everything going?”
The teacher bit his lip and hesitated. “So we’ve been having some trouble with some of the fifth-grade boys,” he started. “Stuff that’s been going on in the classroom and I think out of school some, too.”
Danny squared his shoulders. “What kind of trouble are we talking about?”
The teacher blew out a long breath and, in spite of the sunglasses, squinted into the middle distance. “A bullying situation, I’d have to say.”
Danny felt the air cold and prickly on his face. “What?” he said with a whiff of annoyance—as he might have said it to his son, just looking for a little good sense and clarity.
“Some of the older boys, it seems they’re ganging up on a couple of others. I don’t know whether there’s a physical element to it, but it’s something we, as a school, won’t put up with.”
Danny stepped toward him. “I’ll tell you this:” He realized he was punctuating his words with his index finger. “If he’s got anything to do with that kind of behavior, he’s going to get a hell of a talking-to from us. We don’t put up with that either.”
The teacher glanced at him, then returned to his middle-distance squint. “It’s not like that,” he said. “Your son seems to be on the receiving end of this.”
Danny looked back to the car at the seat his son had occupied. “How long has this been going on?”
“Last couple of weeks, I think. Has he said anything to you guys?”
The question felt like a challenge Danny couldn’t meet. “No,” he said. “Nothing.”
The teacher rubbed the back of his neck. “I guess what we need you to know is that we’re in touch with these other kids’ parents and that we take this incredibly seriously.”
Danny recalled the boy beside him moments ago, the low slump in the seat, the hands uncertain where to settle themselves. After they shook hands, the teacher turned away. “He’s my boy, you know,” Danny called after him.
“You got stuck with school drop-off, didn’t you?” The man had been hovering by Danny’s office door when he arrived.
“Bingo,” Danny said. “Because of some committee meeting.”
“Christ, what’s the point of being an academic if you have to go into work early?”
Danny settled into his desk chair.
“So guess which of our clients called me at seven forty-five this morning about their job descriptions?”
Danny shook his head in disbelief. “That would be the City of Akron. I’ll give them a call. Thanks—” He blanked on the guy’s name. He looked at his computer, then back to the figure receding into the forest of cubicles. “Matt,” he reminded himself aloud.
Danny’s company ran human resources departments for city housing authorities and oversaw HR restructurings for private organizations. He knew he traveled a fair bit. The rest was kind of foggy now because he was still thinking about his son getting picked on at school.
He remembered two guys from when he was nearly out of grade school who had a game where one would tackle him, then as soon as he got up, the other would knock him down again. Sitting there in his office, it made his heart race to remember it. They acted like it was a joke, but he couldn’t get a breath before they’d knock him over again. He’d had to act like it was a joke, too—that or play the role of the kid getting bullied. He superimposed Sean on the memory, and it made him stand up from his desk chair and walk to the window.
The phone rang. He looked at the display, recognizing the rhythm of the number in his head, but not connecting it to anyone in particular. He answered.
“Committee meeting over with,” she said. “Just wanted to check in. How was drop-off?”
Had this been his wife on the other end of the line, he might have said fine, it was fine. But hearing the voice, he was caught between that earlier kiss at the back door and that dizzying humiliation of being knocked down again and again and again. He sank into his chair. “One of the teachers stopped me. He says some kids are picking on Sean.”
“Picking on?”
“You know,” he said. “Bullying.” Once you used that word, you had an issue on your hands.
Silence on the other end. “I had no idea. How long?”
“I don’t—”
“What are they doing about it? Did they say which kids it was?” He could
hear anger rising in her voice.
The guy Danny had been talking to earlier—Matt—crossed his office doorway, looked at him, and tapped the face of his watch. What was he being reminded of?
“They didn’t,” he said. “And as to what they’re doing about it, I guess they’re talking to us. And they said they were talking to the parents of the kids.”
Another long pause. “I just had no idea. He didn’t seem… Are we not spending enough time with him?” He didn’t answer. Then he could tell she was sniffling on the other end. And he was touched that she was taking such an interest in this new son she’d only had since yesterday.
“It’s a hard age,” he told her, “and the last thing you want is the humiliation of anyone else knowing you’re being picked on.” She didn’t jump in with something the way he guessed his last wife would have. And it felt at that moment like he had to fill the silence over the line. “I had some of that when I was his age.”
“Really? You never told me that.”
“It didn’t last all that long.” Again, Matt stood in his doorway and tapped his watch, now looking exasperated. It turned out Danny had forgotten an important meeting. When he got there he was ten minutes late, but doubted he would have understood what was being talked about any better had he been on time.
That afternoon he thought about Sean, and he thought about those two kids who used to push him down. The more he thought about it, the more he realized it hadn’t lasted such a short time. He remembered other guys he went to high school with—guys he saw at the twenty-fifth reunion last year. When he’d traded easy conversation with Michael Wunderlich and Paul Perotti, did they remember sitting behind him for the length of an algebra class making those kissing noises and whispering “pussy, pussy, pussy, pussy?” He hadn’t remembered it. How could he have forgotten that? Or the strict rebuke of the teacher when he turned around and hissed at them to shut up? Certainly they wouldn’t have forgotten. Twenty-five years later, when he rejoined Eve at the appetizer table, did they look at each other and smile? Or did they wait until they were home in bed next to their wives to savor the fact that, no matter what had not turned out the way they wanted, at least good old Danny still knew his place? Was this what Sean would be enduring?