My Lovely Wife

by Samantha Downing

  After I hear her car start, I sit down next to my son. He has Millicent’s red hair, but his green eyes are lighter. Open.

  “Why?”

  He shrugs. “It was just easier.”

  I get it. Sometimes it’s just easier to go along with things. It’s easier than breaking it all up and starting from scratch.

  “You can’t cheat,” I say.

  “But you do.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I hear you sneak out.”

  He is right. I have been sneaking out in the night because I cannot sleep. “Sometimes I go for a drive.”

  Rory snickers. “Do I look like a moron?”

  “No.”

  “Dad, I saw you sneak back into the house wearing a suit. Who puts on a suit to go out for a drive?”

  I haven’t worn a suit since I was with Petra.

  “You know I spend a lot of evenings at the club. Networking is part of the job.”

  “Networking.” He says this with no small amount of irony.

  “I am not cheating on your mother,” I say. And it’s almost true.

  “You’re a liar.”

  I start to tell Rory I’m not, but realize this is useless. I start to deny that I am cheating, but realize it’s also useless. My son is too smart.

  I wish I could explain it to him, but I can’t. So I become the hypocrite.

  “We aren’t talking about me,” I say.

  He rolls his eyes, says nothing.

  “And I never cheated in school. I mean, what if one day the zombie apocalypse arrives and you escape to an island to start a whole new civilization and you have to grow plants? Don’t you think photosynthesis would be a helpful thing to know?”

  “I really appreciate the effort there, Dad. Especially the zombie apocalypse and all. But let me save you some time.” He pulls something out of his pocket and sets it down in front of me.

  The shiny blue glass makes my jaw drop. One of Petra’s earrings.

  “Jenna doesn’t have pierced ears,” he says. “And Mom would never wear something this tacky.”

  He is right. Millicent wears diamond stud earrings. Real diamonds, not glass.

  “Not much to say now, I guess,” Rory says.

  Two for two. I have nothing to say.

  “Don’t worry. Jenna doesn’t know about your side chick.” The smirk is back. “Yet.”

  It takes a second for me to realize my son is trying to blackmail me. With evidence.

  I am impressed, because he is so clever, and petrified, because the last thing I want is for my children, especially my daughter, to grow up with an asshole cheat for a father. This is the kind of thing experts say to avoid. They say it will affect her relationships with men forever. I have seen daytime TV.

  Jenna cannot know, cannot even suspect what Rory believes is true. Anything must be better than that.

  I turn to Rory. “What do you want?”

  “The new Bloody Hell game.”

  “Your mother banned those from the house.”

  “I know.”

  If I disagree, he will tell Jenna I am cheating on their mother. He will do exactly what he threatens.

  If I agree, my fourteen-year-old son will have succeeded in blackmailing me.

  I feel like I should have seen this coming. Should have seen it the day he was born. He was so quiet at first everyone thought he was dead. When he finally did cry, it was so loud it made my ears ring.

  Or maybe I should have seen it the day his sister was born and he made just as much noise, not to announce his arrival but to announce his lack of attention.

  Then there was the time Jenna and Rory went trick-or-treating together, and he convinced her all the mini candy bars had been poisoned by the psycho who worked at our local superstore. The psycho was a big lumberjack of a man, gentle as a hamster, but he scared children without even trying. Jenna believed her brother and dumped out all the allegedly poisoned candy. Neither Millicent nor I knew what happened, not until Jenna had nightmares for a week and we found a pile of mini candy bar wrappers in Rory’s room.

  So now, while I am in the midst of being blackmailed by my son, I can look back and say I should have known he would do this. But before this moment, I didn’t have a clue.

  “Answer me one question,” I say to him.

  “Okay.”

  “How long have you known about this?” I am careful not to use the word cheat. As if it matters.

  “A few months. The first time, I went down to the garage early in the morning to get my soccer ball. Your car wasn’t there. Then I just started paying attention.”

  I nod. “I’ll buy your game tomorrow. Don’t let your mother see it.”

  “I won’t. Don’t let her see you sneaking back in, either.”

  “I won’t be doing that anymore.”

  He smiles as he picks up the earring and puts it back into his pocket. Rory doesn’t believe me but is smart enough to keep his mouth shut when he’s ahead.

  * * *

  • • •

  I SHOULD TELL Millicent about our son. I think about this during dinner while Jenna does her best to make fun of Rory without getting caught. I think about it after dinner, as Millicent takes Rory’s phone away for the night. I even think about it when it’s just my wife and me, in our bedroom, going through our nightly routine. This is when I should tell her what our son is up to, but I don’t.

  I don’t tell her because it will create more questions than I can answer.

  It has been just two weeks since I spent the night with Petra. I think about her only in the middle of the night, when I am already awake and can’t go back to sleep. That’s when I wonder what I did to give myself away. What made her ask if I was really deaf? Did I react to a sound, did I look at her eyes instead of her mouth when she was talking, or did I pay too much attention to the sounds she made in bed? I don’t know. I don’t know if I will ever act deaf again, but this still keeps me up at night. It has become a loose thread I have to pull.

  Rory’s blackmail is the same. Another mistake. Like I’d slipped and should not have let my son figure out I was sneaking out at night. Millicent would not like that.

  So I don’t say anything. Rory and Petra are both secrets that I do not tell my wife. Maybe because she has her own, more than I thought she did. Rory and Petra are also both risks, each in their own way, and still my mouth stays shut.

  I do not want her to know how badly I’ve screwed up.

  Nine

  IT DIDN’T START out as something bad. I still believe that.

  Three years ago, late one Saturday afternoon in October, I was in the front yard with Rory and Jenna. They were still young enough to be around me without getting embarrassed, and the three of us were putting up Halloween decorations. The holiday was almost their favorite, second only to Christmas, and every year we blanketed the house in cobwebs, spiders, skeletons, and witches. If we could have afforded animatronics, we would have used those as well.

  Millicent came home from showing a house. Dressed in her work clothes, she stood on the front walk and smiled, admiring our work. The kids said they were hungry. With a big, overdramatic roll of her eyes, Millicent said she would go put some sandwiches together. She was smiling when she said that. I think we all were.

  Things weren’t perfect, however. The house we were decorating was new to us—we had been living there only six months—and the mortgage was huge. Millicent was under a lot of pressure to sell more houses. I was under the same pressure; at times, I even thought about getting a second job.

  We also had ongoing issues with Millicent’s mother. Her father had passed away two years earlier. Then her mother had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and had begun the long, slow decline that came with it. We had spent a long time looking for a live-in nurse. The first
two didn’t work out, because neither met Millicent’s standards. The third one was working out, at least so far.

  Our family had its problems—lots of them—but on that day, we were all smiling, right up until Millicent screamed.

  I ran inside, the kids right at my heels. I made it to the kitchen just in time to see Millicent throw her phone across the room. It crashed against the wall, breaking into pieces, making a mark. She buried her face in her hands and started to cry.

  Jenna screamed.

  Rory picked up the pieces of the broken phone.

  I put my arms around Millicent as her body shook with sobs.

  The two most horrific things went through my mind.

  Someone was dead. Maybe her mother. Maybe a friend.

  Or someone was dying. A terminal disease. Maybe it was one of the kids. Maybe it was my wife.

  It had to be one of the two. Nothing else warranted this kind of response. Not money or a job or even the loss of a pet we didn’t even have. Someone had to be dead or soon would be.

  It came as a shock to learn it was neither. No one was dead, no one was dying. In fact, it was the opposite.

  * * *

  • • •

  A FEW MONTHS after we started dating, Millicent and I had what we called Trivia Night. We bought pizza and wine and brought it to her tiny apartment. The living room was so small she just had a love seat and a coffee table, so we sat on the floor. She lit some candles, arranged the pepperoni slices on real dishes, and poured the wine into champagne glasses, because that was all she had.

  We spent the whole night asking questions. No boundaries, nothing was off-limits—we’d planned it that way. The first questions were pretty tame; we were still too sober to talk about sex, so we talked about everything else. Movies, music, favorite foods, favorite colors. I even asked if she had any allergies. She does. Eye drops.

  “Eye drops?” I said.

  She nodded, taking another sip of wine. “The kind that get rid of the redness. They make my eyes swell up until I can hardly see.”

  “Like Rocky.”

  “Exactly like Rocky. I figured it out when I was sixteen and got stoned. Tried to hide it from my parents and ended up at the hospital.”

  “Aha,” I said. “So you were a bad girl?”

  She shrugged. “What about you? Any allergies?”

  “Only to women not named Millicent.”

  I winked to show her I was kidding. She kicked my foot and rolled her eyes. Eventually, we became intoxicated enough to ask the good questions. Most revolved around sex and old relationships.

  I grew tired of hearing about her ex-boyfriend, so I asked about her family. I knew where she was from and that her parents were still married, but that was about it. She had never mentioned siblings.

  “Do you have any brothers or sisters?”

  We were pretty intoxicated by then, or at least I was, and I kept playing with the wax that had dripped off the candle in front of us. It had pooled onto the little dish below, and I squished it between my fingers, rolling it into a ball and then flattening it out again. Millicent watched me instead of answering my question.

  “Hello?” I said.

  She took a sip of wine. “A sister. Holly.”

  “Older or younger?”

  “She was older. Now she’s gone.”

  I dropped the wax and reached over, placing my hand on hers, clasping it against her champagne glass. “I’m so sorry,” I said.

  “It’s okay.”

  I waited to see if she would say anything else. When she didn’t, I asked, “How did it happen?”

  She leaned back against the wall behind her. The alcohol and candlelight made everything flicker, including her red hair. For a split second, it looked like hot embers were falling away from it.

  She turned away as she spoke. “She was fifteen, two years older than me. Holly wanted to drive more than anything else in the world. Couldn’t wait to get her license. Then one day our parents were out. They had used Dad’s car and left Mom’s. Holly said we should take it out. Just around the block—she said she’d go real slow.” Millicent turned to me and shrugged. “She didn’t. And she died.”

  “Oh my god. I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s okay. Holly was my sister, but she was . . . not a nice person. She never was.”

  I wanted to ask more, and I could have, because it was Trivia Night, but I didn’t. Instead, I asked about the first time she got drunk.

  Holly didn’t come up again until I went to dinner at their parents’ house. I had met them once before, at a restaurant when they were in town, but this time we drove the three hours to their house. Millicent’s parents lived in a large house up north, near the Georgia border, in the middle of nothing. Her father, Stan, had invented a fishing lure, had it patented, and then sold it to a sporting goods company. They weren’t rich, but they also didn’t have to work. Stan now spent his time bird-watching, fly-fishing, and carving wooden birdhouses. Millicent’s mother, Abby, used to be a teacher, and when she wasn’t tending to the herb garden, she wrote an educational blog. They were a bit like hippies except they grew cilantro instead of weed.

  Millicent looked like her father, right down to the multihued eyes, but her personality was like her mother’s. Abby was even more organized than Millicent.

  I didn’t see the picture until dinner was over. I helped clear the table and carried my dishes into the kitchen. The picture was on the windowsill above the sink; it was just a tiny thing half-hidden behind a plant. The red hair in the photo caught my eye. When I picked it up to look at it, I realized it was Millicent and her sister, Holly. Up until that moment, I hadn’t noticed the lack of photos throughout the house. There were pictures of Millicent’s parents, and of Millicent, but this was the only one of Holly.

  “Don’t let her see that.”

  I looked up. Millicent’s mother stood in front of me. Her warm brown eyes almost looked as if they were pleading.

  “Do you know what happened to Holly?”

  “Yes. Millicent told me.”

  “Then you know it upsets her.” She took the picture out of my hand and put it back behind the plant. “We take the pictures down when she comes over. Millicent doesn’t like to be reminded of her.”

  “The accident upsets her. Losing Holly like that must have been difficult.”

  She gave me an odd look.

  I didn’t understand that look until the day the phone rang and Millicent screamed.

  Ten

  THE BOX FOR Bloody Hell VII is so graphic it is covered with a big yellow warning sticker. On the back, there is a red warning sticker about the game itself.

  I am not sure this is something that should be in my house.

  I buy it anyway.

  Rory, still on his three-day suspension from school, is at home. His mother took Rory’s computer, changed the Internet password, and tried to disconnect the cable TV but gave up halfway through. Rory is on the couch in the living room, channel surfing.

  I throw the game on the couch next to him.

  “Thanks,” he says. “But your attitude could use an adjustment.”

  “Don’t.”

  He smirks and grabs the game, peeling the yellow warning sticker off the front. The picture underneath shows dozens of bodies piled up on top of one another. An ugly horned creature, presumably the devil, stands on top of them.

  Rory looks up at me, his green eyes lit up. He asks where the game system is. I hesitate, then point to the glass hutch in the dining room. “Behind the silver tray. Don’t break anything.”

  “I won’t.”

  “And put it back.”

  “I will.”

  “You aren’t going to cheat again, are you?” I say.

  He rolls his eyes. “Like father, like son.”

  We are inter
rupted by the TV. A breaking-news announcement interrupts a daytime talk show.

  The local news logo appears. It is followed by that young, earnest reporter following Lindsay’s story. His name is Josh, and I have been watching him every day since Lindsay’s body was found. Today, he looks a little tired, but his eyes are wild.

  The police department has finally revealed how Lindsay was killed.

  “We’re here tonight with Dr. Johannes Rollins, the former medical examiner of DeKalb County, Georgia,” Josh says. “Thanks for joining us, Dr. Rollins.”

  “Of course.” Dr. Rollins looks older than everyone I know put together and reminds me of Santa Claus, except the clothes are wrong. He is wearing a plaid button-up with a plain blue tie.

  “Dr. Rollins, you’ve seen today’s police statement. Given your expertise, what can you tell us about it?”

  “She was strangled.”

  “Yes, yes. It says that right here. Asphyxia due to ligature strangulation.”

  Dr. Rollins nods. “That’s what I said. She was strangled.”

  “Anything else you can tell us?”

  “She lost consciousness in seconds and died in minutes.”

  Josh waits to see if Dr. Rollins has anything else to say. He does not. “Okay then. Thank you very much, Dr. Rollins. We really appreciate your time.” The camera zooms in on Josh, and he takes a breath. His official report is always followed by an unofficial report, because Josh is ambitious and seems to have sources everywhere.

  “That isn’t all we have. As always, News 9 has more information than anyone else, and you won’t find it in the police statement or on any other station. My sources tell me that the marks on Lindsay’s neck indicate she was probably strangled with a chain. The killer stood behind her and held the chain against her windpipe until she was dead.”

  “Cool,” Rory says.

  I feel too sick to admonish him, because I am imagining his mother, my wife, as the murderer Josh is describing.

  It’s all very clear in my mind, in part because I know, or knew, both women. I can see the look of horror on Lindsay’s face. I can also see Millicent’s face, although the expression keeps changing. She is horrified, she is relieved, she is orgasmic. She is smiling.